Freedom and War

April 28, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Reporters Without Borders publishes an annual index of press freedom. We Americans value freedom so highly that it has become the basis of our major operations (Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom). So you would expect the US would be right up there at the top.

But no, on the 2008 list, the US comes in ranked at #36, well behind most European countries, though not all (I’m looking at you, Italy). And there are some surprises in the Caribbean as well. Reporters in Jamaica or Trinidad and Tobago are freer than their counterparts in the US.

Rank Country Note

• 1 Iceland 1,50
• - Luxembourg 1,50
• - Norway 1,50
• 4 Estonia 2,00
• - Finland 2,00
• - Ireland 2,00
• 7 Belgium 3,00
• - Latvia 3,00
• - New Zealand 3,00
• - Slovakia 3,00
• - Sweden 3,00
• - Switzerland 3,00
• 13 Canada 3,33
• 14 Austria 3,50
• - Denmark 3,50
• 16 Czech Republic 4,00
• - Lithuania 4,00
• - Netherlands 4,00
• - Portugal 4,00
• 20 Germany 4,50
• 21 Jamaica 4,88
• 22 Costa Rica 5,10
• 23 Hungary 5,50
• - Namibia 5,50
• - United Kingdom 5,50
• 26 Surinam 6,00
• 27 Trinidad and Tobago 6,13
• 28 Australia 6,25
• 29 Japan 6,50
• 30 Slovenia 7,33
• 31 Cyprus 7,50
• - Ghana 7,50
• - Greece 7,50
• - Mali 7,50
• 35 France 7,67
• 36 Bosnia and Herzegovina 8,00
• - Cape Verde 8,00
• - South Africa 8,00
• - Spain 8,00
• - Taiwan 8,00
• - United States of America 8,00
• 42 Macedonia 8,25
• 43 Uruguay 8,33
• 44 Italy 8,42
• 45 Croatia 8,50
• 46 Israel (Israeli territory) 8,83

(You can find the full list at the RWB Website. The Wikipedia entry is better visually.)

The index is based on things like censorship (including a measure of self-censorship), murders and threats against journalists, imprisonment of journalists, and other forms of harassment. It consists “not only of abuses attributable to the state, but also those by armed militias, clandestine organisations and pressure groups.”

RWB looks around the world and draws some conclusions about the social, political, and economic conditions that make for more or less press freedom

1. Europe dominates the free end of the list
2. Economic prosperity doesn’t have as large an effect as you might think. (Singapore is #144, Jamaica is #21)
3. Democracy is good for press freedom
4. Even in democracies, two things undermine press freedom: Corruption and War
   

The Iraq war, for instance. The US rank of 36 is an improvement over its 2007 rank of 48.

The release of Al-Jazeera cameraman Sami Al-Haj after six years in the Guantanamo Bay military base contributed to this improvement.

Al Jazeera, Mr Al-Haj’s employer, is one of the three largest international news channels (BBC and CNN are the other two). But except in a couple of small media markets, it cannot be seen in the US. Maybe that’s why RWB includes measure of self-censorship, financial pressure, and the actions of non-government groups.

And if a businessman broadcasts Al Manar, the Hezbollah channel, he goes to prison for six years. Officially, this case is not about freedom of the press. The businessman’s crime was doing business with Hezbollah, a designated foreign terrorist group. I wonder how Reporters Without Borders will classify this case.

Bureaucrats and Health Care

April 26, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

My health care plan will make it easier for more Americans to find and keep good health care insurance. His plan will . . . force families into a government-run health care system where a bureaucrat...(AUDIENCE BOOS)... where a bureaucrat stands between you and your doctor.(AUDIENCE BOOS)

That was John McCain addressing the Republican convention last September. It’s the official party line on health care. Bobby Jindal said the same thing in the Republican response to the State of the Union speech.

Health care decisions should be made by doctors and patients, not by government bureaucrats.

Maybe these guys never have to deal with insurance companies – like George Bush Sr. not knowing about checkout-line scanners – or maybe their non-Weberian definition of bureaucrat includes only those who work for the government.

I’ve got news for them. Insurance companies are bureaucracies. And unlike the government, they are in business to make a profit. They make a profit by taking in as much as possible in premiums and paying out as little as possible in claims.

Does this goal affect the decisions of their employees (i.e., bureaucrats)? Here’s a chart from a NPR/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard School of Public Health survey.*

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

One-fourth of the people had, within the last year, experienced exactly what the Republicans are talking about: a doctor’s decision was overridden by a bureaucrat. (The 46 million Americans who have no health insurance don’t have to worry about this.)

The survey also found that the cost of medical treatment mattered.


Even among those with high incomes ($80,000 a year or more), one in eight had postponed needed care or gone without a prescribed medication.

*A copy of the report is here.

Good Cheer

April 25, 2009 Posted by Jay Livingston< On Thursday, lisa posted this ad at Sociological Images, and I’ve watched it at least a dozen times since then.

Despite Lisa’s perfectly valid critique about men and family-work, I still love this ad, and I’m not sure why. Probably because the guy’s performance has absolutely no trace of irony or role-distance. Norms of age and gender be damned, he’s just into it, whole-heartedly and unself-consciously.
We’re a bit late on this one, we sociologists. If we watched The View, we’d have picked up on it when Whoopi aired it last September. (HT Megan, who was also touched by it, probably more deeply than I was).

Have You Stopped Killing Your Spouse?

April 24, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Something I read in another blog sent me digging into the statistics on homicide between husbands and wives or other “intimates.” I remembered from my days in the crim biz that the US was unique in that wives here killed their husbands almost as frequently as husbands killed wives. This statistic, the “spousal rate of killing” (SROK), was introduced in a now-classic1992 article by Margo Wilson and Martin Daly. In most countries, that rate is 25-30%. In the US, Wilson and Daly pointed out, it was about 75%.

But something has happened, over the last thirty years or so (data here). And as far as I can tell from a quick search on the Internet, nobody seems to have noticed.

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

Between 1976 and 2005, the number of women killed by their male partners decreased by about 25%, less than the decrease in all homicides nationwide. But the number of men killed by women dropped dramatically, from 1300 to 330, a 75% decrease (since the population increased in those three decades, the change in rates is probably even greater. The SROK fell from 82% to 28%.

My Internet search for explanations was cursory at best, but it turned up nothing. I have only two ideas:

1. Men Behaving Better. Men have stopped doing those things that made women want to kill them.

I offered this explanation to two women in the Justice Studies department here. They rejected it out of hand and without comment. (Maybe they didn’t like the blaming-the-victim assumption: if women kill men, it’s because of what men do. Or maybe they were using a convenience sample of anecdotal data on men’s behavior.) One of these women, Lisa Anne Zilney, offered a counter-explanation . . .

2. Women Having Options. Women’s shelters and other facilities have given women an alternative. Without these, the only way to escape an intolerable situation at home was to get rid of the cause. Providing abused and desperate women a safe place to go saves lives – and apparently not just the lives of women.

I’m not wild about either of these explanations for the steep decline in the SROK (and as I recall, Wilson and Daly weren’t wild about any of their explanations of why it was so high).

Any ideas?