Civility or Mindless Compliance?

July 3, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Suppose you were about to walk into a campus building, and you saw this sign.


Would you take the door indicated? If you were headed for one door when you saw the sign, would you change your course, even if it meant adding a full three steps to your journey?

If so, according to the people at The Situationist, you are guilty of “gender conformity” and “mindless compliance.”

Here’s the full video. (Note: it’s silent. Don’t bother, as I did, trying to figure out what’s wrong with your computer’s sound.)

The Situationist lists “related” posts on the Zimbardo prison, the Milgram obedience experiments, and the Asch conformity experiments.

Why didn’t they link to something about civility?

Suppose you’re walking into a building, and a stranger says, “Excuse me, would you mind walking through this other door?” would you stop and demand that he explain the rationale for his request? Or would you say, “Sure,” and go on your way?

The experimenter, Sarah Lisenbe, frames this as a gender issue. But would the results have been different if the sign had indicated different doors for first-year students and sophomores and above? Or students and faculty?

The video ends with a sigh (a signed sigh). But it left me with a question: what about the people who saw the sign but deliberately ignored it? What kind of person would disregard such a simple request?

Yes, I know there’s a counter-argument – that mindless conformity to signs based on gender only serves to reinforce gender inequality. It’s like obeying the Jim Crow signs for colored and white drinking fountains. (Is it relevant that this video was apparently taken at Mississippi State?)
So I guess the question is this: do you see the sign as an intrinsic part of a system of sex segregation and male domination; or do you see it as another request, like a traffic arrow, that’s so minor you don’t even bother to wonder about its rationale?

Mainstream vs. Bloggers

July 1, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Socioblog is pleased that the New York Times picked up on yesterday’s blog post and ran with its own horror story about private health insurance (in this case, Aetna). The Times also quotes from Wendell Potter, the former Cigna exec who testified before Congress a week ago about private health care insurance.

Insured but Unprotected, and Driven Bankrupt by Health Crises - Series - NYTimes.com via kwout

How do the mainstream media decide what is news and what isn’t? The Times did not see fit to cover Potter’s testimony when it was news. But why was it not fit to print? Potter was a former insider telling several inconvenient truths about insurance companies. He was making accusations in point-blank terms. Yet when I searched Lexis-Nexis, I found only two newspapers that gave ink to the story – the Washington Post and the Philadelphia Inquirer. A few others (e.g., WSJ, Hartford Courant) had the story on line. The AP put Potter at the end of a short item (621 words) about insurers using a “flawed database.” No TV networks covered it.

But several blogs had the story.

The disparity reminded me of the old days and I.F. Stone’s Newsletter.* After he was blacklisted, and most Washington insiders avoided him, Stone made a virtue of necessity. While most reporters avoided the boring stuff of actual legislation and got their stories from government insiders, Stone made a careful reading of transcripts of Congressional hearings. When it came to foreign affairs, especially the Vietnam war, he didn’t much bother with the press briefings from the White House or Pentagon, but he did look closely at non-US sources like Agence France Presse. It was like finding out inconvenient truths by going through the garbage people threw out. It was out there and public, though most reporters ignored it, and it often didn't smell very good.

I know that a lot of dubious material floats around the blogosphere, but the medium has allowed a thousand I.F. Stones to blossom. (Well, maybe not a thousand, but there are dozens of good ones.)

* Update, July 2: I am, it turns out, far from alone noticing the resemblance. According to a recent article in the L.A. Times by Stone’s biographer D.D. Guttenplan, “many contemporary observers” have dubbed Stone “the first blogger.”

There may be at least one difference between Stone and contemporary bloggers. Stone was meticulous about copy. His daughter says that he once told her, “Typos are worse than fascism.”

Anecdotal Evidence on Health Care

June 26, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Opponents of government involvement in health care seem to have two strategies. One is name-calling – “socialism” and “European-style” are two of their favorites. The other is to repeat anecdotes to illustrate the horrors that people in Europe and Canada have suffered – delayed treatment, denial of treatment, and so on. There’s a third strategy – spending huge amounts of money in lobbying legislators directly – but that’s less visible.

The Obama Administration has asked Americans for their own stories about their experiences with the insurance industry. Stories have poured in by the thousands. You can read them here, read them and weep.

Some people report on their experiences with socialized European-style health care, and the US does not come off on the plus side (here, for example). Others compare experiences with private insurance against public plans in this country Again, the private system comes off as inferior.
I’ve blogged before (here and here) about the utter hollowness of the claims that socialized health care will mean that “bureaucrats” rather than doctors will be making decisions. In fact, the bureaucrats are already doing that. And a few of them have contributed their stories to the Obama website. Here’s one from Barbara in Barbara, Deer Island, FL

I worked for United Health Care in small group customer service. If a company was more than 5 days late in their monthly payments, United would "terminate" their coverage. When they were terminated the group administrator from the "termed" company would call me to reinstate their coverage. I would take their phone number, go to my supervisor's office and get a computer disk showing all small groups "loss ratios." If the company I was working with was in the high risk ratio, I was not to reinstate their coverage. This meant people in the hospital or scheduled for surgery would never nave coverage with any company because of pre-existing conditions if their coverage was less than 90 days. Sometimes a new group misses payments in the first few months before they get on a payment schedule. This is how United Would "weed out" the high claims group. Their actions were not illegal, but were IMMORAL!

That term “loss ratio” refers to the ratio of premiums that the insurance company pays out. When your insurance company pays a claim to your doctor or hospital, that’s a loss.

Barbara’s story was amplified recently in Congress. Wendell Potter, a former executive at Cigna, testified before the Commerce Committee.

"They look carefully to see if a sick policyholder may have omitted a minor illness, a pre-existing condition, when applying for coverage, and then they use that as justification to cancel the policy, even if the enrollee has never missed a premium payment."
(Potter’s full testimony, thanks to Ezra Klein, is here.)

Selling (Out) Public Transport

June 26, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Even in my early morning stupor, I couldn’t help noticing the new turnstiles at Penn Station. Where once spotless chrome gleamed, proclaiming the subway’s purity, now speaks the crass voice of commerce: There’s a sale at H&M waiting for you upstairs when you leave the station. You can get something for as little as five bucks. Cheap.



It’s not so different from the ads on the walls, I thought. Besides, it might help to keep the fare from going up too much. At least the MTA isn’t selling naming rights to the subway the way the Port Authority nearly sold the George Washington Bridge to Geico (see my old blog entry here.)

That was then. Yesterday, the MTA announced that the Atlantic Ave. Station in Brooklyn will henceforth also be known as the Barclay’s Bank station. The station is a major hub, with transfers available from at least four different subway lines. For a large British bank, the $200,000 a year is pocket change. Talk about cheap.

Oh well, at least they didn’t sell the name for my station.