Confidence Games

March 10, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Conservatives have been whining about universities for quite a while now, complaining about political correctness and liberal bias. They do seem awfully greedy, those conservatives. They control just about everything, and they're still not happy. As Rick Hertzberg (or was it Todd Gitlin?) said a few years ago, the conservatives get both houses of Congress, the Presidency, the Supreme Court . . . and we get a handful of campuses.

The public apparently did not share the conservatives’ dismay about academia. Each year the Harris Poll asks people how much confidence they have in the people who run the major institutions in the country. Here are some of the results.

The Presidency and the Court, much beloved of conservatives in the Bush years, suffered a steep decline in that period. Even the military lost a third of its very confident supporters in a 5-year period (Iraq? Gitmo? Abu Gharaib?).

Meanwhile, we politically correct academics have held our own. We are now looked upon more with more confidence than the White House, the Court, organized religion, and big business (along with several obvious also-rans not shown here, like Congress, Wall Street, TV news, etc.)

Does This Mean My Drug Co-pay Will Go Up?

March 6, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Placebos work better if they cost more. That’s the finding reported in the New York Times and surprisingly few other papers.

Dan Ariely asked subjects to estimate the degree of pain relief they got from a pill. Some were told that the pill cost a dime, others that the pill cost $2.50. All the pills were placebos, and a majority of people in both groups reported “significant pain relief.” But that number was higher among those who got the expensive pill (85%) than among those who got the ten-cent version (61%).

Ariely is an economist – his new book Predictably Irrational is on the business best-seller lists – but his explanation is physiological: “Sick humans secrete substances you just can't buy over the counter.”

Maybe so. But what makes the brains of the $2.50 people secrete more of whatever that substance is? Anyone who has taken the intro social psych course should recognize this as our old friend Cognitive Dissonance. If we’re paying this much for it, it must be good. Otherwise, the cognition that we are paying dearly for the pill conflicts with the cognition that it’s not working.

We can’t very easily adjust our estimate of the cost. But pain is more subjective, so we reduce the dissonance by changing our estimate of pain relief. You get what you pay for, as my mother says. And even if you don’t, you’ll think you did.

In one of the classic experiments conducted by the early Dissonators (Aronson and Mills, 1959), women who wanted to join some group had to go through a sort of initiation. Those who had a tougher initiation (I think they had to read aloud some slightly off-color passage – this was the fifties, remember) rated the group as more worthwhile. Those who were admitted easily, on the other hand, didn’t think so highly of the group once they were in.

Or as Marx said, “I wouldn’t join any club that would have someone like me as a member.” (You knew which Marx it was going to be, didn’t you?)

Not So Fast

March 4, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Old joke: A turtle mugs a snail. The police finally arrive and ask the snail about the crime. “I don't know,” says the snail, “It all happened so fast.”

I missed this post by Jessica at Scatterplot last week. Two hundred people (is it really that many?) go to Grand Central Station and all freeze in place at the same time for five minutes. Jessica sees it as a large-scale “breaching experiment.”

Me, I’m not so big on breaching experiments (“Let’s do some weird shit and see how people react,”). I don't find it ennobling to think that the chief intellectual forebear of social psychology is Allen Funt. And as with Candid Camera, I usually find the gag itself more interesting than the reactions of the naive victims. So to my eye, the Grand Central video is worth watching not so much as sociology and more as art (broadly defined). Which is what its creators – Improv Everywhere – intended.

Here’s another of their gags – Slo-Mo at Home Depot. They do the freeze thing here too, but pay attention to the slow motion early in this excerpt.




Getting back to the turtle and snail. The video is really a demonstration of relativity. Look at this speeded-up version of some of the early scenes.



The Improv Everywhere “agents” who were in slo-mo now look like they are going at a normal pace, and the regular customers are running around frantically.

Everything is relative.

You can find a full account and more video at the Imrprov Everywhere site.

The Art of Imprisonment

March 2, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

When it comes to putting people in prison, we’re number one. We lock ’em up at a rate five to ten times that of other industrialized democracies (France, UK, Australia, etc.). We've been number one for decades, but the proportion of the US adult population in jail or prison has now risen to one in 100. That’s the finding published in the new Pew report . And Chris Uggen, who knows about such things, says that the 1% figure is an undercount.

Here’s a graph based on BJS figures.


Only a few days earlier – one of those coincidences of the Zeitgeist – the Museum of Modern Art opened an exhibit that included “Million Dollar Blocks.” These are blocks in New York City that the state is spending at least one million dollars on. Not for housing, not for medical care, not for welfare, but to put the residents of that block in prison. The researchers, Eric Cadora and Charles Swartz, took the minimum sentence of each person sent to prison in 2003 and multiplied by $30,000 per year (another lowball estimate). Using the home addresses of these prisoners, they calculated the cost per block.

They teamed up with Laura Kurgan of Columbia University’s Spatial Information Design Lab to produce the graphics. This is Brooklyn, whose million-dollar blocks (35 in all) are in red.


Here’s a close-up of one area.


(It’s in the museum, so it must be art. Anyway, I’m sure these are visually much better in the MOMA exhibit.)

Remember, that’s just for people sentenced in a single year.

I know $1,000,000 isn’t much these days. Still, it seems like a lot of money for a single block.

Nine years ago, in an article for The Atlantic, Eric Schlosser wrote of the “prison-industrial complex.” Like the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned of, it was a way to turn fear into profit.

The United States has developed a prison-industrial complex—a set of bureaucratic, political, and economic interests that encourage increased spending on imprisonment, regardless of the actual need. The prison-industrial complex is not a conspiracy, guiding the nation's criminal-justice policy behind closed doors. It is a confluence of special interests that has given prison construction in the United States a seemingly unstoppable momentum. It is composed of politicians, both liberal and conservative, who have used the fear of crime to gain votes; impoverished rural areas where prisons have become a cornerstone of economic development; private companies that regard the roughly $35 billion spent each year on corrections not as a burden on American taxpayers but as a lucrative market; and government officials whose fiefdoms have expanded along with the inmate population.

Schlosser’s warning, like Ike’s, had little effect.

Hat tip to Henry Tischler, who told me about this. His wife Linda actually saw the exhibit at MOMA.