The Phantom Chasm

April 5, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston
An article by David Sirota in In These Times (a solidly southpaw monthly) has been getting a lot of attention lately, mostly for this graph.

Sirota says, “when you chart Obama’s margin of victory or defeat against the percentage of African-Americans living in that state, a striking U trend emerges.” Sirota calls it “the race chasm.”

Now Brendan Nyhan has offered a much more detailed look at this question using more refined data. His blog offers a critique that might serve as a unit in a methods course. For one thing, if you look closely, you’ll see that the X-axis plots the states according to rank order on percent-black. If you use the actual percentage, the U-shape becomes much less U-ish.

Second, Sirota’s graph makes it tempting to talk about “white voters” in these states. But as I hope my students remember, to use state-level data to draw conclusions about individuals is to commit the ecological fallacy. So Nyhan uses exit polls to estimate the percentages in each state of whites voting for Obama. The scatterplot is not U-shaped at all. In fact, a straight regression line yields a correlation of -.53.

Not a U-shape at all, but a straight line: the greater the percentage of blacks in a state, the less support Obama gets from that state’s white voters. Nyhan has much more analysis and more graphs. You can find them all here.

Why Don't You Go Play Outside?

April 2, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Teenager-in-Residence assures me that everyone already knows about this game. Everyone, obviously, did not include me. I found it today at Orbital Teapot, who in turn found it someplace else, so maybe Teenager is right.

Ethnocentrism of the Relativists

April 2, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Other sociologist bloggers have offered their take on Stuff White People Like and why it’s so popular. kristina b picks up on its message not to take ourselves too seriously. Whole Foods, for example, risks becoming not just a place to shop but an “attitude and style . . .that’s just… um… annoying. dogmatic. preachy.”

A word of clarification. By “white people,” clander (the Stuff White blogger) doesn’t mean all white people. He doesn’t even mean most white people. He does not, for example, mean the people who subscribe to Field and Stream (and certainly not to Guns & Ammo). His list will never include line dancing or NASCAR, probably not even bowling. No he’s referring to us – educated, mostly urban, cosmopolitan rather than local, politically liberal. In many ways, he’s just expanding on the “chablis-sipping, brie-eating, Volvo-driving” stereotype that Republicans have been using for years to denigrate liberals and even Democrats in general.

Stuff White, when it’s on target (or on Target), exposes our ethnocentrism. That’s an odd tag to hang on liberals; usually, liberals get taken to task for their cultural and moral relativism. But I think that ethnocentrism is similar to what kristina means by “dogmatic”: we think our own preferences are objectively right even when they are merely preferences. We like to think that the stuff we choose to spend our money on is good – better than other stuff – and that this inherent quality is why we choose it. But Stuff White reminds us that there’s nothing inherently better about sushi or snowboarding. We’d like to think that Michel Gondry films are better than Sylvester Stallone movies, but there’s no objective way of converting that preference into a fact.

The trouble with ethnocentrism is not just that you can’t prove that one taste is superior to another, and it’s not just that making such a claim pisses people off. But if you’re a social scientist, ethnocentrism gets in the way of understanding. Sure, it’s tempting to dismiss line dancing as an inferior and ridiculous form of movement for the rhythmically challenged. But that’s not going to help you understand what’s in it for the line dancers or anyone else.

But there are times when you stop being a social scientist, when you have to make judgments or choose policies. And when you do that, you do have to impose your values and say that one thing is right and the other wrong or that some goals are better or more worthwhile than others. Goals like keeping the planet livable and the air breathable.

The preference for recycling (#64 on Stuff White’s list) is different from the preference for Sarah Silverman (#52) or giving dinner parties (#90).

SocioBlog - the Book?

March 30, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Stuff White People Like opened shop on January 18th of this year. On March 20th, it had a book contract for a reported $300,000.

The story in today’s Times uses words like “shock” and “outcry” (why not “awe”?) to describe the reaction in the publication biz and perhaps in blogland. One book person quoted notes, correctly, that Martin Mull did this decades ago with “The History of White People in America.”

But that’s like complaining that someone has already written a book about French cooking or a biography of Lincoln. The accusation of non-originality is a thin veneer and doesn’t do much to hide the underlying envy. (No envy here at the SocioBlog, of course. Those 19.3 million hits, and counting, at Stuff White are meaningless ephemera.)

Now we can add blogosphere to the non-literary worlds – movies, TV, sports, politics – that have long provided paths to the best seller lists. On the Times non-fiction list today, a third of the titles are by “writers” who are, as they say at the Oscars, adapted from another medium – wordsmiths like Newt Gingrich and Nikki Sixx. At the top of the list is that literary lioness Valerie Bertinelli, whose Losing It “focuses on depression and her effort to lose weight.” The publisher is Free Press, a familiar trademark for sociologists. Nice to know that Valerie is hanging out in the editorial offices with Talcott Parsons and the Becker boys (Ernest and Howard), among others.

Celebrity seems to have become a kind of universal currency. If you have enough of it, you can circulate among elites and move from the high level of one world to a high level in another. Celebrity politicians become best-selling authors; celebrity body-builders become actors and then governors; celebrity real estate developers become TV stars; celebrity call girls become million-download singers. And now celebrity bloggers.

But where are the celebrity sociologists?