September 14, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston
Another year. Two hundred posts, which sounds like a lot even to me.
I’ve gone back and selected a sort of top ten. I’m leaving out the culture reviews – a Randy Newman concert, Billy Elliot, Vicki Cristina Barcelona, Rachel Getting Married – even though I like them (and linked them, just in case anyone might be curious) . But most of the posts on the below are based on some quick and dirty data.
1. Godwin’s Law(“As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1”) seemed to apply more to the right than the left, so I counted (here). Since then, as you mght guess, the Obama-Hitler hits have doubled.
2. The whole anti-Obama movement struck me as an example fo what Joseph Gusfield called “status politics,” (here) and the Teabaggers and the rest look strikingly like the Temperance movement in Gusfield’s book, though this time around they’ve added gallons of personal vitriol.
3. and 4. The reaction to the Sotomayor nomination provided lots of sociologists with examples for their courses. Mine are here and here .
5. Crime and law enforcement came up, as in this post about racist outcomes without racist attitudes in the LAPD (here) .
6. After I posted on the decline in spouse killings, I found that there was more research on this than I had been aware of (too much and too inconclusive to summarize here).
7. Cop killings connected to drugs might not be all they’re made out to be in the media. But you’ll never convince Peter Moskos of it.
8. The media also got it wrong on clearance rates. A simple graph shows how the press turned good news into bad.
9. The press also found evidence that vouchers in primary education were working wonders. I had a different interpretation.
10. “Keynes from My Father” was just anecdotal evidence, and the allusion to Obama in the title was a bit much. But it’s a personal favorite, maybe because it comes from one of those intersections between what Mills calls biography and history. (The biography is more my father’s than mine.)
9-11 Counterfactual
September 12, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston
“Remember how the whole country seemed united?” someone asked yesterday, referring to the months following Sept. 11, 2001 and implicitly comparing the mood of the country then to what we have now.
Yes, it seemed only natural that when we felt that the whole country was under attack from the outside, we would forget internal differences. But now I’m wondering about the counterfactual:
What if Obama had been elected in 2000, and it was Obama who had been in office nine months when the attacks occurred. How would the Republicans, those in office and those in the media – the Joe Wilsons, the Limbaughs and Coulters and Fox TV – as well as the birthers and other good citizens who have been showing up at town hall meetings, how would they have reacted?
Posted by Jay Livingston
“Remember how the whole country seemed united?” someone asked yesterday, referring to the months following Sept. 11, 2001 and implicitly comparing the mood of the country then to what we have now.
Yes, it seemed only natural that when we felt that the whole country was under attack from the outside, we would forget internal differences. But now I’m wondering about the counterfactual:
What if Obama had been elected in 2000, and it was Obama who had been in office nine months when the attacks occurred. How would the Republicans, those in office and those in the media – the Joe Wilsons, the Limbaughs and Coulters and Fox TV – as well as the birthers and other good citizens who have been showing up at town hall meetings, how would they have reacted?
Poverty, Income (and Virtue?)
September 11, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston
Here’s a brief follow-up to the previous post about changes in income and poverty. First the news.
And then the longer view.
(Click on the graph to see it larger.
It makes no sense to talk about these economic facts in terms of “virtue” as David Brooks likes to do. Virtue is nice. I’m all for it. But it has nothing to do with what’s going on in the economy. Those 2,600,000 people who fell into poverty in 2008 (and the data for 2009 will be still more grim) are no less virtuous than they were in 2007.
(HT: I got the Census Bureau graphs from Brad DeLong.)
Posted by Jay Livingston
Here’s a brief follow-up to the previous post about changes in income and poverty. First the news.
And then the longer view.
(Click on the graph to see it larger.
It makes no sense to talk about these economic facts in terms of “virtue” as David Brooks likes to do. Virtue is nice. I’m all for it. But it has nothing to do with what’s going on in the economy. Those 2,600,000 people who fell into poverty in 2008 (and the data for 2009 will be still more grim) are no less virtuous than they were in 2007.
(HT: I got the Census Bureau graphs from Brad DeLong.)
David Brooks Doesn’t Get It
September 9, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston
David Brooks’s persona, the character he plays in print and on TV, is the reasonable conservative – fair-minded, with ideas based in fact rather than ideology. He also likes to play the sociologist, offering broad pronouncements on society and culture. Especially culture.
Look at yesterday’s column, a puff piece for a new magazine, National Affairs, which he sees as the successor to The Public Interest. Brooks briefly summarizes the articles in the current issue.
Brooks loves virtue, which he usually subsumes under “culture” – the ideas people live by. But he ignores structure. He also forgets the basic insight of Sociology 101, week one – Durkheim: explanations of individual facts (like who gets ahead and who doesn’t) often aren’t much help in explaining social facts (like the overall degree of inequality and poverty in a society).
In explaining suicide at the individual level, sadness is a pretty useful concept. People who commit suicide are, no doubt, sadder than those who don’t. The surest way not to commit suicide is to be happy, not sad. But does knowing about these individual differences help us understand why the US has a rate of suicide nearly triple that of Greece? Are Americans three times as sad as Greeks? And within the US, are whites twice as sad as blacks?
Levels of income and degrees of inequality have as much to do with “virtue” as rates of suicide have to do with sadness.
From 2000 to 2007, median family income in the US fell by 5%. (Don’t look for the data on 2008 and 2009, when it comes out, to reverse this trend.) Can we conclude that Americans became more self-indulgent and irresponsible? That they threw away their degrees, broke up their families, and quit their jobs?
Since January 2008, over six million people in this country have lost their jobs. I guess the Bush administration wasn’t very good (and Obama, so far, no better) at “promoting virtuous behavior.”
Someone should suggest to David Brooks, that maybe, just maybe, when we consider income and inequality and unemployment at the national level, those individual–based explanations don’t help. It’s not a matter of culture or virtue. It’s the economy. Stupid.
Posted by Jay Livingston
David Brooks’s persona, the character he plays in print and on TV, is the reasonable conservative – fair-minded, with ideas based in fact rather than ideology. He also likes to play the sociologist, offering broad pronouncements on society and culture. Especially culture.
Look at yesterday’s column, a puff piece for a new magazine, National Affairs, which he sees as the successor to The Public Interest. Brooks briefly summarizes the articles in the current issue.
Brooks loves virtue, which he usually subsumes under “culture” – the ideas people live by. But he ignores structure. He also forgets the basic insight of Sociology 101, week one – Durkheim: explanations of individual facts (like who gets ahead and who doesn’t) often aren’t much help in explaining social facts (like the overall degree of inequality and poverty in a society).
In explaining suicide at the individual level, sadness is a pretty useful concept. People who commit suicide are, no doubt, sadder than those who don’t. The surest way not to commit suicide is to be happy, not sad. But does knowing about these individual differences help us understand why the US has a rate of suicide nearly triple that of Greece? Are Americans three times as sad as Greeks? And within the US, are whites twice as sad as blacks?
Levels of income and degrees of inequality have as much to do with “virtue” as rates of suicide have to do with sadness.
From 2000 to 2007, median family income in the US fell by 5%. (Don’t look for the data on 2008 and 2009, when it comes out, to reverse this trend.) Can we conclude that Americans became more self-indulgent and irresponsible? That they threw away their degrees, broke up their families, and quit their jobs?
Since January 2008, over six million people in this country have lost their jobs. I guess the Bush administration wasn’t very good (and Obama, so far, no better) at “promoting virtuous behavior.”
Someone should suggest to David Brooks, that maybe, just maybe, when we consider income and inequality and unemployment at the national level, those individual–based explanations don’t help. It’s not a matter of culture or virtue. It’s the economy. Stupid.
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