David Brooks Gets It Right (Just a Little)

September 18, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

From David Brooks’s column this morning

Op-Ed Columnist - No, It’s Not About Race - NYTimes.com via kwout

Of course he didn’t stop. Writing, I mean. He should have. Instead, Brooks went on to argue that the anti-Obama protests have nothing to do with race. That’s no doubt true of some of the protesters, maybe a majority.

But what about the ones who march under the flag of a country that fought a war against the United States of America and on the side of racism? They are a minority perhaps, but certainly not the fringe. They are numerous enough to have elected a Congressman like Joe Wilson, who fought to keep that flag flying above the Statehouse.

The anti-Obama protests are not about race in the same way that Prohibition was not about immigration and ethnicity. It’s about “small-town virtues and limited government” in the same way that Prohibition was about sobriety.

As I argued earlier (here), health care, bailouts, and other policies are convenient policy matters that the protesters have seized upon. What’s really at issue is their anguish at no longer running the show and their anger that they and others who look and think the way they do have lost their position of dominance. They feel that it is their country and that people who are not like them have taken it away. They consider the Obama presidency illegitimate. Which is maybe why their signs are about money, taxes, Freedom, abortion, and socialism. They say nothing about democracy, that nasty process that allowed this usurper to seize power via the sneaky tactic of getting the most votes.

Cardinal Rules

September 17, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

School mascots and team names are the subject of a discussion over at Sociological Images. Much of the discussion is about ethnic names – the Orientals, the Gauchos, etc. And of course all those variants on Native Americans (SocImages has more on them here),* which reminded me of my favorite story in this department.

At Stanford , since 1930 or so, teams had been the Indian. But in 1972, what with political correctness and all, the administration changed it to the Cardinals.


The alumni felt as though someone had flipped them the bird, and demanded that the Indian be reinstated. Being a democratic institution, the university put it to a referendum in 1975, and students voted on a ballot that included the Indians, the Cardinals, and several other choices including Sequoias, Trees, Railroaders, and Robber Barons.

And the winner is: the Robber Barons.

The administration felt that this was insulting to the dignity of their founder Leland Stanford (insulting, though accurate). So they ran another referendum, this time with Robber Barons removed from the ballot.

And the winner is: Robber Barons on a write-in campaign.

At which point the administration said to hell with it, it’s the Cardinal – the color, not the bird – though for some reason, the creature that cavorts on the field is mostly green, not red. Nor does it do much for the dignity thing.







* Montclair State underwent a similar transformation at about the same time. We had been the Indians. But we acquired some avian DNA and morphed into the Red Hawks.

Are Chefs the New Lawyers?

September 16, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

“What I’d really like to do,” Dave said, “ is quit, go to the CIA, and become a chef.” Dave is a real estate lawyer, and we were talking about his potato salad. The CIA he was referring to is the Culinary Institute of America, 90 miles up the Hudson River, not that other one.

Who’s cooking and who’s lawyering isn’t just a matter of individual desire. It’s also a matter of demand in the economy, and maybe Dave’s fantasy had something do with the dismal trough that commercial real estate had been in. But over the last several decades, both these occupations have grown.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

The graphs, showing the percent of the work force in each occupation, are from Job Voyager. I’d known about BabyName Voyager and used it an a post. As with BabyName, these graphs use blue for men, pink for women.

The boom for lawyers and chefs still looked good in 2000 (I wish the voyage had continued into the 21st century, but this is as far as the data set goes), but the graph for college professors might just as well be the graph for leisure suits and disco balls.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

The chart on the left shows all professors, but the hard sciences far outnumber the social sciences, which are shown separately on the right. In both charts, after the glory days of the 1970s, there’s a steep decline, steeper in the hard sciences than in the social sciences. But the social sciences curve does not rocket skyward in 1957 (remember Sputnik?) as the hard sciences do. I don’t know what accounts for the professorial bust that begins around 1980, but I’d guess that the baby boomers had something do with it as they aged out of their college years.

Bloggiversary

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.)