The Fading Auto Industry

May 3, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

It's not just American cars that may be vanishing. SocProf posted this picture of a Skoda.


The Czech car is actually there, but artist Sara Watson painted it to make at appear to disappear. (She spent weeks on the project.)

It reminds me of Julian Beever’s sidewalk trompe l’oeil art, with the minor difference that in Watson’s illusion, you don’t see something that really is there. With Beever’s drawings, you do see something, but it isn’t really there. Like this bottle of Coke.


It’s not the real thing – just chalk on a sidewalk.

I guess the sociological lesson is that what you see depends on where you stand. Both Watson’s and Beever’s illusions require the viewer be in just the right spot.. Here’s a Beever drawing, “Baby Food.” When you look at it from the wrong side, the baby is safe.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

More Beever here.

Is This Racist -- Actually?

May 2, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Overt acts of racism still occur – in hiring, in lending, in renting, and other areas. But people concerned about racism increasingly are concerned not with the actions of a few but with thoughts and attitudes that are more widespread, thoughts that we are often unaware of.
But you don’t need an Implicit Association Test when you have statements like this from right-wing blogger Byron York.

(Click on the box for a larger image.)

Some bloggers on the left are taking York to task over that last sentence. OK, “taking him to task” is not the mot juste. They’re calling him a racist.

York’s point was that support for Obama and his policies was much higher among African Americans than among whites. Obama’s approval rating in the New York Times poll was 68%, but the single number masks a large difference. Approval was 96% among blacks, 62% among whites, and there were similar black-white differences on other questions.*

Nobody was accusing York of using the data incorrectly. It was rather his attitude as revealed in that last sentence – “some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are.” He doesn’t seem to think that blacks count.

In a subsequent post, York defends himself.

I thought the word “overall’ conveyed the idea that there was a difference between the total job-approval number and the complexities of opinion of Obama on various issues. Maybe “across-the-board’ would have been better than “overall.”

But “overall” isn’t the problem. The problem is “actually.” Actual in the sense of real. The statement assumes that only white’s opinions are “real” and that black opinions are not part of reality.

I don’t know if Byron York is a racist. I’m fairly sure he’s not a Klan sympathizer, and I wouldn’t be surprised if in all his personal dealings with people of all races he is scrupulously fair. But I also doubt that he would have said JFK wasn’t “really” so popular because Catholics rated him much more highly than did non-Catholics. Or that Bush’s approval ratings were “actually” even lower than they appeared because he got very high approval ratings from fundamentalist Christians.

What’s at issue is his apparent assumption that America is “actually” white (and male), like Sarah Palin’s “real Americans.” So you can understand why people might think that he was, at some level, a racist. And that picture accompanying his article doesn’t help much either.

* These figures are from a NYT poll that York links to. But the numbers York gives in his article are different: “the Times had him at 69 percent approval,” “Asked whether their opinion of the president is favorable or unfavorable, 49 percent of whites in the Times poll say they have a favorable opinion of Obama. Among blacks the number is 80 percent.” Not only are the numbers different from what the Times gives, but they don’t add up. The 80% (black) and 49% (white), would not average out to 69% when weighted for population.

Capitalists and Cultural Capital

April 29, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

This month’s Atlantic has an important article by Simon Johnson about the financial crisis and the government’s response: “The Quiet Coup: How Bankers Seized America.” He argues that in the US, just as in emerging market nations, “the finance industry has effectively captured our government.”

Johnson alludes briefly to Bourdieu: “American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital—a belief system.”

But now his fellow blogger at Baseline Scenario, James Kwak, makes the Bourdieu basis explicit.

In Distinction, Bourdieu’s best-known work, he described how economic class is reinforced by cultural capital . . . . Upper-class parents take their children to fine art museums and teach them how to talk about Rembrandt, Monet, and Picasso; later in college, job interviews, and cocktail parties, the ability to talk about Rembrandt, Monet, and Picasso is one of the markers that people use, consciously or unconsciously, to identify people as being from their own tribe.

Kwak’s ostensible starting point is a Sunday New York Times piece on Treasury secretary Tim Geithner. But Geithner is merely the most prominent example.

Geithner got the cultural education that rich people get, except instead of just going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, he was educated in the culture of Wall Street. Just like an education in art history is a marker of class distinction that is used to perpetuate class distinction, an education in modern finance is a marker of distinction that sets off those who understand the true importance of Wall Street for the American economy. As long the powerful people in Washington, including the regulators who oversee the financial industry, share that worldview, Wall Street’s power and ability to make money will be secure.

That is the importance of cultural capital.

The article and blog post should be required reading.

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.