Tocqueville Pop

August 25, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Right now, I’m reading Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. It’s pretty heavy what he says about America. It could be an album.” – Iggy Pop quoted in Rolling Stone, July 29, 2010.

De Tocqueville as a rock album? I haven’t followed Iggy Pop’s career closely, so I won’t even guess as to what such an album might be like. But why not? Democracy in America is the basis for a recent novel, Parrot & Olivier in America by Peter Carey.

Carey takes liberties with Tocqueville’s biography, which is why he renames him – Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Garmont. His traveling companion is not Beaumont but Parrot, hired by Olivier’s mother to be his servant and secretary but also to spy on the young Frenchman and report to her. Parrot is an Englishman, older than Olivier and far less aristocratic. So Tocqueville/Olivier’s reactions to his circumstances are personal, not just abstract.

My intuitions and sympathies were limited by the circumstances of my birth. A person like my servant was a foreign land.

Olivier is almost a caricature of a nobleman – overly delicate (he gets frequent nosebleeds) and effete. His relations with people (notably Parrot and an American girl he falls in love with) provide plot. They also, along with a detailed painting of the scenery – New York streets, shops, and houses, rural farms – provide the background for the more general observations. Carey seems to have lifted these directly from Democracy in America. For example:

No matter how strong their religious sentiments, or their passion about the reform of criminals,* the Americans quickly revealed themselves to be obsessed with trade and money and beyond the walls of that particular cell they simply could not see anything that diminished their enthusiasm for self-congratulation. . . . The energy put into this quest for wealth left little room for anything one might think of as culture. (p. 161)

No doubt, Iggy Pop will do something similar, maybe tracking down what Tocqueville had to say about raw power.


*Like the real de Tocqueville, the fictional Olivier has come to America ostensibly to report on prisons, though Carey makes it clear that his mother was spiriting him out of France as a political precaution. Olivier’s grandfather, like Tocqueville’s, had been guillotined, and in 1830 there are rumblings of revolution.

Contaminated Chicken Feed

August 22, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

A supplier in egg recall has history of violations

That’s the headline from this morning’s AP story. I suspect that the AP and newspapers keep that phrase “history of violations” as a single keystroke macro. Reporters can quickly plug it into any story about rotten eggs, mine disasters, oil spills, building collapses, worker deaths, etc.

It makes me skeptical about either regulation or tort liability as a way to prevent these things. Torts cases take years and years and may be hard to prove – those armies of lawyers on corporate payrolls are there for a reason. As the AP notes, “The FDA investigation could take months, and sources of contamination are often difficult to find..” There’s a similar problem in the most recent Massey mine disaster, where the precise cause has not yet been determined. And that’s with the government, not a few lawyers, doing the heavy lifting.

Also, as we learned in the Gulf, corporations have lobbied to have caps put on their liability. Had BP not voluntarily waived that cap, the most they could have had to pony up was a puny $75 million.

DeCoster, the bad egg people, had been fined in 1997 for unsafe and unsanitary conditions. But the fine, the maximum allowed by law, was $2 million – chicken feed.

Constructing Value - Virginity, Balls, and Art

August 19, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Robin Hanson has a post about “fake virgins” in China – women who have had “hymen restoration” surgery. This surgery, Hanson says, can harm men. As Dave Barry says, I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. That’s what he says.

It seems to me many men really do have a strong preference for virginity, and are willing to pay a high price for it in a marriage bargain. This male preference for virgins seems as legitimate as the female preference for high status husbands. So it can do husbands a great harm to deceive them about virginity. [emphasis added]

The woman who fakes virginity is no different from a man who presents himself as wealthy when in fact he’s broke.

Imagine a woman [who] married a man in part because of his great job and income, and as soon as she has his first kid he reveals that it was a fake; his parents had paid for a temporary high-status job and big house/car/etc. so she could give them a high quality grandkid. Now that the kid has arrived, husband goes back to being a janitor with a bike and one-room apartment.

Hanson’s post got a ton of comments, many arguing that comparing virginity to wealth was ludicrous or worse.

But none of the comments made the point that immediately occurred to me: value is socially constructed. What something is worth depends entirely on what people think it’s worth. The baseball that ARod just hit for his 600th homer is indistinguishable from a baseball that anyone can buy at Sears for $12.99. But the value of the home run ball is far greater – just how much greater, we don’t yet know, but #500 went for $100,000.

(One of these balls is not like the other. One of these balls is worth $100K.)

The difference in value between real virginity and fake virginity (or no virginity) is like the difference in value between the ARod ball and the Sears ball. Or between a real Cézanne and a perfect copy. One isn’t inherently better than the other; it’s just worth more because people think it’s better.

(Click on the image for a larger view and see if you can tell which is the real Cézanne . . .*)

All realities and values are constructed, but some are more constructed than others. The reality of something depends on the degree of consensus and on the other practices and institutions that get built around it. The value of economic wealth seems like rock solid reality because we all agree on the value of money and because it is so central to so many other things we do.

The value of virginity, at least in our society (and maybe in China too), is much more obviously a matter of social construction. Not everyone agrees on its value, and it doesn’t affect much else in our lives. But in some societies, the value of female virginity has the same kind of reality that money has. The consensus is so unanimous that it’s impossible for people to see it as constructed. It seems entirely external to them. In those societies, virginity is also a central aspect of marriage, family, and gender roles.

For those societies, Hanson’s idea about harm may well be accurate. When there’s that much consensus, when everyone thinks that virginity is a treasure, then it really is a treasure, just like the ARod ball or the real Cézanne. The man who gets a fake can suffer harm, just like the person who buys the fake ball or the forged Cézanne.

Of course, in all cases, the deal harms the buyer only if he knows he got a fake, and the harm he suffers is greater if other people too know that it was a fake – more evidence for the idea that value is a social construction.


* . . . and which is by Joe Spooner.

Following the Money

August 18, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Why do you have a cell phone? If you didn’t have one, what would be the cost to your work and social life? In other words, to what extent is a cell phone a necessity?

Mike Mandel, an economist, looks at what Americans have spent more money on since the onset of the recession. Here’s the table.

(Click on the table for a larger view.)

Here’s Mandel’s take on it:

Right there up at the top is America’s love affair with mobile devices, where spending has soared almost 17% since the recession started. Also supporting my thesis of a communications boom–spending on wired, wireless, and cable services have risen by 5%.

Mandel seems to think that all spending is discretionary. We spend our money on what we love. If you want to know what’s in our hearts, follow the money.

It doesn't feel that way to me. If my landlord raises my rent and I don’t move out, does Mandel think it’s because of my “love affair” with my apartment? (Note: the increased spending on housing was more than 60 times that of telephones. )

Yes, cell phones show the largest percentage increase. But in actual dollars, that increase is pocket change compared to the increase in spending on healthcare including drugs. The phone increase was $1.5 billion. The increase in healthcare was more than 100 times that. Does this huge increase reflect “America’s love affair” with doctors and prescription meds?

Are the cellphone and wi-fi a whimsical purchase, like new pair of shoes when you already have more shoes than you can fit in the closet? Or are they like a car, almost indispensable for finding and keeping a job?

Here’s the other table – items Americans spent less on.

In some cases, the changes are caused by individual choices. But for many of the items in these tables, if you asked people why they changed their spending, they would probably see themselves as not having had much choice. My rent went up, the price of gasoline went down.