Slow Food Nation

May 5, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

An hour a day. That’s how much more time the French spend à table compared with Americans.

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

The title on the chart (it’s from the OECD) is misleading. It’s not that the French need the extra time because they actually eat so much food. In fact, they eat less. French visitors to the US are often surprised (if not appalled or overwhelmed) by the huge portions in American restaurants. What the French are doing is not so much eating as having a meal. (OECD spreadsheets often provide the same data on two different sheets, one in English, the other in French. The French title for this same chart is, “Durée quotidienne moyenne des repas.” Eating is a necessary activity for getting nutrients into your body. A meal is an occasion, an end in itself.)

Americans seem to take a utilitarian view of eating. It’s something to be done as quickly as possible so that you can get on to more important things. Better yet, eat while you’re doing those other things. The great advantage of the Egg McMuffin is that you can hold your entire breakfast (egg, cheese, bacon, English muffin) in one hand while you drive to work. Your coffee rests securely in the cup holder – a device as indispensable in American cars as the automatic transmission. In New York, I see people walking down the sidewalk eating – a slice of pizza, a sandwich, a bag of fries – something you just don’t see in France. There, you sit down with others and have a meal.

It’s not just a matter of individual preferences. Americans who want “slow food” run into cultural and structural obstacles. It starts in school, where lunch period is usually less than a half hour, and the last kids in line may have less than ten minutes before their next class starts. And for adult workers, how many workers get a “lunch hour” that’s really sixty minutes? How many eat a sandwich at their desks while continuing to work?

But in France . . . On my first trip to Paris, I would sometimes compare notes with other Americans I met. Often, they were infuriated by the “fermature,” the midday closing of stores for two hours or more. They couldn’t understand why a commercial establishment would forgo a chance to make money just so that the owner and employees could eat a leisurely lunch. It was downright inconsiderate, not to mention inconvenient for Americans, who didn’t want to spend two hours in a restaurant.


(HT - PollyVousFrancais, who also prints the chart showing that the French sleep more than do people in other countries. And as with the repas, they may also pay more attention to who they are doing it with.)

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.