A Shot of Ethnography

March 17, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

(Although this post is partly about drunkenness, its appearing on St. Patrick’s Day is purely coincidental and should not be construed in any way as related to ethnic stereotypes.)

I miss ethnography, an idle pursuit in my academic youth. Survey research results are more frequently cited, in the journals and even in the newspapers (as Contexts Crawler faithfully documents), maybe even a little snazzy graph in USA Today or elsewhere. Ethnographers less so it seems, though they might occasionally turn up on TV.* Or in a New York Times column.

Contexts Crawler missed it, but on Monday, “Our Towns,” by Peter Applebome reported on the ethnographic fieldwork of James Roberts (Sociology and Criminal Justice department, University of Scranton).

The field for his fieldwork was the bars of Hoboken. Dr. Roberts is a Jersey boy – degrees from Stockton and Rutgers – and he has tended bar down the shore. I haven’t read his work, but from the Times column I gather that it focuses on questions of how bar patrons become excessively drunk and violent. Who is responsible for feeding even more drinks to people who are far beyond three sheets to the wind? Not the bartenders, it turns out. I would also guess that Roberts is watching to see how some interactions escalate to violence, perhaps along lines of Luckenbill’s old research on scenarios that end in homicide.

Survey research shows the relation between variables. Ethnography tells you how things work. Ethnography is about knowing who the players are and how they think. I remember Robert Weiss saying that if you’re a survey researcher and you want to know about cars, you get a sample of cars, and you discover that a car has an average of 5.38 cylinders, 164.7 horsepower, etc. (this was so long ago that he also included something about carburetors). But if you’re an ethnographer, you get a car, you open the hood, and you try to figure out how all those parts fit together.

There are other differences, notably control of the data and the demands that the data make on the researcher. You can’t do ethnography on your own terms. If you want to do research on drunkenness in Hoboken bars, you have to go to Hoboken, even if you live in Scranton. And you have to do your research when people are going to be getting drunk, even if you usually go to bed after the 11:00 news.

*I myself was once on a morning show called “For Women Only” or maybe its later incarnation “Not For Women Only,” both distant ancestors of The View.

Brackets

March 15, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Everyone knows it’s NCAA time. The brackets have just been posted.

And everyone knows XKCD. Or as Luke Surl says:

A note to those who haven’t heard of xkcd: Hello. We call this planet “Earth”

But Ted McCagg does some great Internet cartoons, and one of his favorite themes is brackets.

(Click on the chart for a version large enough to actually read.)

That’s just the West Regional. Check out the full draw.

I wonder what sociology brackets would look like.

Marginally Revolting

March 15, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

This was posted a while ago at Marginal Revolution with the subject line “The Auction Begins.”


Marginal Revolution is an economics blog, but what the picture really illustrates is the limit of purely economic assumptions. Does anyone, even a classical economist, really believe that someone who found the iPod Touch would call the $51 number? Does anyone, even a classical economist, really believe that this is the start of an auction and that the author of the original sign will raise her offer?

Some of the comments at MR speculated on the marginal effects of offering different rewards. Elsewhere, the few comments that thought the $51 was serious found it revolting. Most people took the sign as a joke, though they did not specfically mention that it was poking fun at economics.

My thinking ran much more to wondering what characteristics of the rightful owner and of the finder would affect whether the finder returned the iPod Touch, and if so, whether he or she initially refused the reward.

How Much is Three Percent?

March 11, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Freakonomics blog today assures us that emergency room overutilization is a “myth.” All that talk about the uninsured doing what George W. Bush suggested and using the emergency rooms as primary care, that’s just baseless scare tactics. Citing a Slate article, they give the data

E.R. care represents less than 3 percent of healthcare spending, only 12 percent of E.R. visits are non-urgent, and the majority of E.R. patients are insured U.S. citizens, not uninsured, illegal immigrants.

That “majority” might be 99.9% or it might be 50.1%. It turns out that the uninsured account for about 20% of E.R. visits.

My trouble is that I never know if those percents are a lot or a little. Take that 3% of spending. I’m not an economist, and although I haven't done the math, I figure that 3% of $2.3 trillion might still be a significant chunk of change. So just to make sure that 3% was in fact a pittance, a part of the “emergency room myth,” I looked for other Freakonomics articles with a similar number.

• foreclosure rates began a steady rise from 1.7 percent in 2005 to 2.8 percent in 2007. [Three percent of healthcare spending is a little; 2.8% of mortgages is a lot.]
  
• I was surprised at how high the fees were. . . . Even on big-ticket items like airline tickets, the credit-card company collects nearly 3 percent. [Three percent of healthcare spending is a little; 3% of an airline ticket is a lot.]
  
• The homeownership rate in the U.S. increased by 3 percentage points over the past decade — a clear break from the two previous decades of stagnation. [Three percent of healthcare spending is a little; 3% of homeownership is a lot.]

You get the idea. Maybe whether 3% is a lot or a little depends on its political use. I don’t follow the Freaknomics political views closely, but I’m guessing that they don’t like Hugo Chavez down in Venezuela.

opposition voters [those who opposed Chavez] experienced a 5 percent drop in earnings and a 1.5 percent drop in employment rates after their names were released. The authors also conclude that the retaliatory measures may have cost Venezuela up to 3 percent of G.D.P. due to misallocation of workers across jobs.

Chavez “may have” cost his country a whopping 3% of GDP, i.e, $9.4 billion (or possibly less -- note that “up to”). E.R. visits cost the US only a negligible 3% of healthcare spending. And the uninsured are only one-fifth of that, a mere $14 billion.

Whether 3% is a lot or a little seems to depend on your politics and what the issue is.

Unions too are bad, at least for business.

a successful unionization vote significantly decreases the market value of the company even absent changes in organizational performance. Lee and Mas run a policy simulation and conclude that, “ … a policy-induced doubling of unionization would lead to a 4.3 percent decrease in the equity value of all firms at risk of unionization.”

For a paltry increase of 100% in the number of workers getting the benefits of unionization compaines would suffer on overwhelming decrease of 4.3% decrease in equity.

Now about those 20 people in front of you in line at the emergency room. Only four of them (20%) are there because they don’t have insurance. They are part of what Freakonomics calls a “rosier picture.” I wonder if Freakonomics maybe has one or two posts where 20% is pretty big amount, something to worry about, instead of being the equivalent of a bunch of roses in the hospital.