Childhood - Purity or Danger

June 23, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

In American movies, children are usually good. They are uncorrupted by adult motivations like greed, lust, anger, pride, etc. The adults in their lives, especially the men, are either well-meaning but ineffectual, even foolish, or downright vindictive.

Children are not just morally superior, they are more competent and more resourceful. In “Home Alone” and “Ferris Bueller,” the child left is left behind by the nice but foolish adults and outwits the mean adults. Kids don’t really need their parents, but parents often need their kids. In movies like “The Parent Trap” and “Sleepless in Seattle,” the grown-ups, though obviously intended for each other, are so encumbered by adult doubts, fears and ignorance that they can’t get together. A child has to engineer the romance.

Some British fictions give us a far different view. Children left to their own devices, without adults to rein in their imaginations, become cruel, dangerous, perverse. Think Lord of the Flies. I was reminded of this recently when I watched the DVD of “Atonement.” In the central incident, the mainspring for the entire plot, Briony, a girl of twelve or thirteen, tells a lie, and she coerces an older but weaker girl into going along with the lie. Her sin has disastrous consequences for two adults – her older sister and the man she loves. Briony looks up to them, but she is also jealous, selfish, and ignorant. She doesn’t yet understand what adult love is all about. Her vindictive act nearly destroys these two good people. The atonement the title refers to is Briony’s atonement for this lie, a process that the becomes the core of her life and work, first as a nurse, then as a writer. The message of the film and book is one we rarely find in American fictions: growing up – becoming mature, an adult – means realizing how terrible one was as a child.

(The movie begins in the 1930s, when girls of thirteen were less sexual. Developmentally, Briony seems more like an eleven-year-old of today. The movie also has plenty of material for an essay on social class – I was reminded again of what my friend Melissa said long ago: “All British films are about the class system”– but I leave that to others, perhaps Phil.)

Internet Style

June 21, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

“No one, my hit counter tells me, reads blogs on the weekend.” That’s from an essay, “How is the Internet Changing Literary Style?” at a blog called Steamboats Are Ruining Everything. I think the author is Caleb Crain, but you have to do some detective work to figure that out. Anyway, I’m posting this on a Saturday.

Crain’s essay is a medium-is-the-message piece with a lot of Goffman. The Internet, Crain argues, shifts or blurs the boundary between “front” and “backstage.” It also limits “audience segregation,” and not just on MySpacebook.

It’s impossible to keep the members of the right-wing discussion group Free Republic dot-com from reading the posts at My Barack Obama dot-com, and vice versa. The internet's killer app, as the onetime internet mogul Michael Wolff once said, is eavesdropping.

Hat tip to Tyler Cowen for the link.

Our Bumpers, Our Selves

June 20, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

A while back, I invoked Goffman to explain road rage (that post is here). In our nondriving lives, we say, “Sorry” and “Excuse me,” when we inadvertently bump someone or get in their way. Without that little apology, the act itself would imply a “dissing” of the other person, a diminishing of the social worth of that person. “Sorry” repairs the accidental affront the other person’s self. The highway removes the possibility of this “interaction ritual” (or ritual interaction). The other driver is left with only the fact of the offense.

Of course, not all drivers react identically. Some are more patient, others are quick to take offense at peceived disrespect. But how can you tell which is which?

Bumper stickers, window decals, and vanity plates, it turns out, are a good clue. William Zlemko, a grad student at Colorado State, found that the more of these a car sported, the more likely the driver was to respond to with anger (honking, tailgating) when he felt wronged by another car. And it didn’t matter whether the bumper stickers were about prying guns from cold, dead hands or visualizing world peace.

Szlemko frames the issue as territoriality. He refers to the vanity plates and bumper stickers as “territory markers.” I’d put it in terms of self. For some drivers, a car is a means of transportation. But for those who deck out their cars with these personalized items, the car is an extension of the self.

(The article is online at the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Vol. 38 Issue 6 Page 1664 June 2008. Gated.)

Rotten Tomatoes and Broken Windows

June 18, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

At Marginal Revolution, the anti-Krugman forces were firing with abandon. Krugman was writing about the recent killer tomato episode and other tainted-food crises (“Salmonella, salmonella, all I hear is salmonella”), and he pointed his finger at the free marketeers for their anti-inspection, anti-regulation policies.

MR’s Alex Tabarrok disagreed, providing some contradictory data, and the comments flooded in (over 100 and counting, some defending Krugman, some providing new data, some thoughtful, and some just snarky).

In the classic free-market model, nobody needs to keep an eye on food producers to make sure they are putting out a safe product. They’ll do it themselves. “Private companies would avoid taking risks with public health to safeguard their reputations and to avoid damaging class-action lawsuits.”

The argument reminded me of two principles from my days in the crim biz: deterrence and “broken windows.” Deterrence theory says that the effectiveness of punishment depends far more on certainty and swiftness than on severity. Giving a small punishment immediately after each infraction is more effective than lowering the boom only occasionally and a long time after the offense.

The broken-windows principle is that if you crack down on small stuff (broken windows), you’ll prevent more serious bad behavior. Conversely, allow the broken windows to go unrepaired, and you invite more serious violations.

Class action suits are like the severe punishment that comes rarely and years after the deed has been done. A company can cut corners for a long time before the crisis becomes visible. And if the harm does come to light, lawsuits still take a long, long time.

Regulation tries more for certainty. It tries to catch more violations and insists that they be remedied right away. Regulation also resembles a broken-windows policy. It tries to prevent big crises by making sure that the small violations are taken care of.

The downside of regulation, as the free-marketeers are quick to remind us, is inefficiency. It forces companies to devote time and resources to following the rules – effort that they might otherwise use in turning out product and turning a profit.

There’s a political irony here as well. When it comes to street crime, conservatives usually line up on the side of deterrence and broken-windows. Zero tolerance. When it comes to protecting consumers and employees against salmonella, mine collapses, occupational diseases, etc., these same conservatives oppose the deterrence and broken-windows approach of regulation. Instead, they prefer to leave victims to their own legal resources. (Some conservatives also want to limit those legal resources – restricting access to lawyers, limiting the range of class action suits, and putting caps on tort awards.)