Dixie Land Looks Away

September 21, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

“What’s with Mississippi? Is that, like, some other country?” a student once asked. She had been looking at data on the 50 states and noticed that on several of the variables, Mississippi ranked at the extreme.

I suppresed my Nina Simone bit, saying merely something like, “Well it’s not too different from some of the other Southern states.

But is the South, like, some other country?

Research on the US often splits the Region variable into two categories – South and nonSouth, and with good reason. It works.

Here’s a graph by Stephen Benen at Washington Monthly The data are from a recent Daily Kos poll, so it’s possible that the numbers tilt toward the Democrats. But that would not affect the differences among regions.

Joshua Tucker at The Monkey Cage reprints the graph and adds, “if I saw this type of regional distribution of support for a political party in a country like Slovakia, I would assume the party represented an ethnic minority.”

Among the citizens, the GOP may be the functional equivalent of an ethnic minority party. But it’s minority party with national power far beyond its electoral appeal. For starters, it effectively has veto power over national legislation, it controls the Supreme Court, it represents powerful economic interests, and it runs an entire TV network.

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.