M*A*S*H-Up

November 18, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Men Who Stare at Goats, now playing at a theater near you, is a military comedy. It’s not M*A*S*H. It’s a mash-up – two mentalities: military and hippie.

Comedies are about mismatches. In military comedies, one of the mismatched elements is bureaucracy, especially its rule-bound lack of imagination, impersonality, and inability to adapt to novel events. These qualities are usually embodied by an authority, a high-ranking officer. Sometimes the authorities are benevolent, as in the fish-out-of water scenario. Here, the mismatch is that someone who was never meant to wear the uniform winds up in the Army. The authorities, with patience and firmness, manage to mold him or her (Pvt. Benjamin) into a soldier.

More typically, the mismatch is between the bureaucratic mentality of authorities and the human, fun-loving good guys, who are forever figuring out ways to get around the rules. The heroes are like little boys impishly scheming to have fun by fooling gruff old dad. But in the American version, the boys who ignore the regulations and the brass not only gain illicit pleasures (alcohol, sex, money); they also always turn out to be the ones who can actually accomplish important goals. They did it every week on M*A*S*H.

In The Men Who Stare at Goats, the Army creates a special program for soldiers to develop psychic superpowers. The program is sold to them largely by a former soldier (Jeff Bridges) who has done the hippie trip and now returns to train a select group of soldiers, the dippy dozen. The brass in their spotless uniforms give him great latitude, since they are looking for anything that can help win the Cold War. The soldiers let their hair grow long, do yoga, and try to develop supernatural abilities, like the ability to kill or at least stun animals by staring at them. Or to walk through walls.

Neither mentality comes off very well. The New Age ideas seem ridiculous, especially as military applications, and the military looks foolish too for being so desperate to beat the Soviets that they’ll believe this stuff. In an emblematic moment early in the film, we see an officer in full uniform psych himself up and try to walk through a wall at full speed. The result is inevitable.
That’s the gag that gets repeated throughout the movie – every time someone (usually George Clooney) tries to use these psychic powers, reality thwarts them, but they still continue to believe.

The message, one that is repeated not just on every episode of M*A*S*H but in many American movies, is this: acting on the basis of ideology is bad, whether that ideology is New Age or Cold War; acting on the basis of personal feelings for others is good. In Goats, what makes us like George Clooney is that despite his nutty ideas that never work, he doesn’t let the ideas get in the way of his more human impulses.

Mad Men and Me

November 14, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Mad Men” closed out its season.  (Spoiler alert). The agency is about to be sold to a huge firm, so the key players slip off to regroup as a new, independent firm, taking as many accounts as they can with them. The final scenes contrast the spacious and elegant offices, now deserted, with their new venue – a suite in the Hotel Pierre. Instead of an office, each person gets an area of the living room. The media guy goes over his files on the bed in the bedroom.

(Click on the picture for a larger view.)

Is it realistic, this social organization of ad agencies? Yes, and here’s my anecdotal evidence.

Way back, decades ago when I was a young academic, I did a consulting project in the private sector. The company had also called in the legendary ad man Julian Koenig. Koenig had been a copy writer at Doyle Dane Bernbach, where he was the brains behind the Volkswagen “Think Small” campaign, the Timex takes-a-licking campaign, and others. He left DDB, and, with Fred Papert and George Lois, formed their own agency, one that had much success. Then he quit.

Eventually, he decided to get back in the business, and that’s how our paths crossed. The same guy that had hired me for a sociological angle had hired Koenig for an ad man’s perspective. I met Koenig briefly out in the field. When I got back to New York, I wrote up my report and sent it to the company. Weeks later, I got a call from Koenig’s office inviting me to have lunch so we could compare notes.

Koenig had returned to advertising in a small way – a four person agency– and their office was a suite in the Delmonico Hotel. Koenig had set up his office in one of the two bedrooms, sharing it with their media expert; the secretary/receptionist/bookkeeper (she was also Koenig’s girlfriend) had a desk in the other bedroom; and the accounts man seemed to have the living room, where he welcomed guests (like me).

It looked very much like the suite in “Mad Men” but with less furniture – the same light filtering through the curtains, the same dull-colored, worn carpeting. I think Koenig had even managed to get the Timex account back in his portfolio. Watching Draper, Roger, and the others in that hotel took me back. The three of us (Koenig, Accounts Guy, me) had a nice lunch at a French restaurant, Koenig said he’d liked my report – my ideas tallied with his own – and that was that. But seeing this Mad Men hotel suite got me to wondering: what if I too had somehow been able to jump ship and throw in my lot with the ad men?

Spreading the Lack of Wealth Around

November 13, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Suppose a company in these hard times has to cut its payroll by 10%. It has two choices:

• fire 10% of the workers
• fire nobody, but reduce everyone’s hours and pay by 10%

Asked about this, Larry Summers, a top economic advisor to Obama, said,

It may be desirable to have a given amount of work shared among more people. But that’s not as desirable as expanding the total amount of work.

This is a policy non-sequitur – how the work is divided is a separate issue from how much work there is. And as Paul Krugman points out today after quoting this line, we are not in fact making much headway on expanding the total amount of work. The question of distributing the work remains, and Summers was dodging it.

But in answering it, we should consider not just the effect on individuals. After all, if you look at it as an economist might, the overall impact of the two policies is exactly the same. But there's a more sociological view that also considers the effect not just on the sum of the individuals but on the institution as a whole.

The Summers quote and this problem reminded me of a talk given recently by the president of a private university. Like all such schools, its endowment had taken a big hit. Here’s what he said (I’m paraphrasing*):

Other schools put in a hiring freeze. That’s fine with the faculty who are there. The only ones who suffer are people they don’t know – the people who didn’t get hired. But we put in a pay freeze. That may have hurt each faculty member somewhat. But it allowed us to hire new faculty, and boy was this a good time to be hiring. With those other schools taking themselves out of the market with their hiring freezes, we were able to hire twenty absolutely top rate people that we might not have gotten otherwise.

Spreading the lack of wealth around benefited the students and the university as a whole. And in a non-financial way, it also benefited the faculty whose pay had been frozen.

And about those new faculty, he was right, at least according to my informant, a sophomore at the university. Last weekend, he went to a panel discussion that included one of them, and he was so impressed that he decided on the spot to try to take courses with her.


*I wish I could quote the lines verbatim. This president is just an excellent speaker – part scholar, part stand-up.

Comments Galore

November 11, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The previous post brought an unusually high number of comments for this blog, most of them not highly complimentary. But for the most part, the commenters and I agreed on the basic idea that was at issue. I phrased it offensively: using a gun to stop someone else from doing something you don’t like. There’s another way to phrase it. As I said in the original post, “Gun advocates put this in terms of self-defense.” Oh boy, did they. Check out the comments.

I also said that distrust of the government was a common theme. The comments also bear this out. At a minimum, commenters did not trust the government to protect anyone from criminals. They seem to distrust government in other ways as well.

So we agreed on what guns do. The smidgen of disagreement arises over whether guns galore is a good idea. The commenters seem to be united in their certainty. I am less so. I just have these gnawing thoughts that allowing anyone and everyone to buy this kind of weaponry might not be an unmitigated good. I don’t know the Texas law and how it works in practice, but my guess is that Hasan could have made his purchases even if he had not been in the military. If any disturbed, angry, jihad-minded nut could have walked into Guns Galore and come out armed to the teeth, that gives me cause for concern.

The problem is not that gun owners are “psychotic killers on power trips,” as one commenter interpreted my post. The problem is that psychotic killers on power trips have no trouble becoming gun owners. Their massacres, not to mention the individual shootings, are a very high price to pay.

Another commenter made a comparison with the UK. Here’s the most recent info I could find (here)

The murder rate in England and Wales has fallen to its lowest level in 20 years, with 648 homicides recorded in 2008/09 – 136 fewer than the year before. Home Office statisticians said the drop was "not a blip".

Annual crime figures published yesterday show the number of murders and manslaughters and infanticides fell to a level not seen since 1989.
There was a significant further fall in gun crime with the number of incidents involving a firearm down by 17% to 8,184. The number of fatal shootings fell from 53 to 38.

That works out to a rate of 1.4 - 1.5 murders per 100,000 population. The rate in the US last year was more than triple that – 5.4 per 100,000.

The CDC report mentioned by another commenter does say that there is not enough evidence to show that gun laws are effective in reducing violence. That may mean merely that the gun laws we have don’t really reduce the flow of guns, especially to those who are most likely to misuse them. Or, as the CDC says in a Rumsfeld-like utterance, absence of evidence for violence reduction is not evidence of the absence of violence reduction. The effect may be there, but the difficulties of doing this kind of research make it very hard to find.

Finally, one commenter wrote of guns as a means of “punishment to defectors.”

Guns are the means to--if necessary--to punish defectors (criminals) within a population of cooperators (law-abiding citizens) as a means of maintaining the trust required for other-wise costly altruism.

It's also a probably factor in out of control crime-rates in cities. Not so much the loss of altruism at the individual level, but the inability for local populations to maintain an ability to promote social norms regarding trust and altruism.

That’s an interesting point, and I have a vague memory of seeing some lab-experiment studies on it. I don’t know of any real-world data. (It may well exist, but I’m just not up on this literature.) Usually, it’s the government that punishes defectors. Where the government cannot fulfill that function, altruism and trust break down. But I don’t see how individual gun ownership – self-defense – replaces governmental control. The more likely solution to the government’s failure would be vigilantism – private, but collective, punishment of defectors.

Thanks for all the comments, guys. I hadn’t known about LiveJournal – what it is or how it works. I’ll have to check it out.