Divanalysis

September 10, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Quantitative methods for cultural analysis.

Jay Caspian Kang at The Awl:

. . . my crack team of consultants, statisticians and graphic designers have assembled DIVA-OFF 2010, a highly scientific (we used computers!) evaluation of the greatest divas of the past twenty-five years. A list of divas was evaluated on eleven levels of diva-ness, and, because each diva characteristic is not created equal, we scaled the values in the hopes of creating an aggregate diva number that will serve as a reference point for future generations.

Here, for example, are the results in the Hand Gestures category:

Admittedly, rater subjectivity may be a factor:

Of all the diva characteristics, Hand Gestures is the most open to personal preference. I certainly don’t like Celine’s slow-motion-deodorant-commercial hand gestures, but who am I to tell your mom that they aren’t cool? And while I always liked how Mariah would point out the notes in her runs, I can also see why your mother might find this to be a bit show-offy. One thing your mother and I can agree on, though: Carrie Underwood will never ascend to diva status because of her awful, awful work in this category.

Read the whole post (unless, of course, you’re a big Jordin fan), and watch the accompanying videos (with the sound off for the Hand Gestures).

Victims and Blame

September 9, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Blaming the victim.” William Ryan wrote the book and coined the phrase forty years ago to characterize explanations of poverty that ignored large social and economic forces and instead looked only at the behavior of poor people. If only they would anticipate the consequences of their choices in education, work, and family, theorized the victim-blamers, they would make other choices and rise from poverty. (My post on a very recent example is here.)

Now Courrier International, a Paris weekly with the tagline “L'anticipation au quotidien” takes blaming the victim to a new level. Here’s the English language version.


DesignTaxi comments:

In the latest instance, Saatchi & Saatchi France used an image of the New York skyline with a shorter twin towers, two airplanes flying innocuously over the buildings. The tagline? “Learn to anticipate”.

HT: Polly, who, hélas, is no longer in Paris and not blogging so much.

Jesus, American Style

September 8, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

American Christianity has transformed the church and even Jesus into something that would have appalled the real Jesus and his followers. That’s the sermon David Brooks was preaching in the Times yesterday. Megachurches for congregations mirror the mega-houses and mega-SUVs for individuals.

Brooks’s inspiration is the recent book Radical: Taking Back Your Faith From the American Dream by David Platt, himself once the pastor of megachurch (N = 4300) in Alabama.

Today, however, building budgets dwarf charitable budgets, and Jesus is portrayed as a genial suburban dude. “When we gather in our church building to sing and lift up our hands in worship, we may not actually be worshiping the Jesus of the Bible. Instead, we may be worshiping ourselves.”

Sound familiar? Mr. Brooks, Rev. Platt (2010), meet M. Durkheim (1912):

[Religion] is a system of ideas with which the individuals represent to themselves the society of which they are members . . .God is only a figurative expression of the society .

Employee Health Care Costs

September 4, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

It always seemed to me that the loud and vitriolic opposition to health care reform wasn’t really about health care. (My earlier post on this is here.) I found it hard to believe that so many people were so rapturously pleased with the current system and its direction and so angrily opposed to any changes. I had only two explanations based on rationality:

• Most people had no way to compare the current US system with the less expensive and often better health care in other countries
• People who got health care via their jobs could not see the true costs of those plans.

On the second point, Aaron Carroll at The Incidental Economist reprints some charts from the Kaiser Family Foundation annual survey of employee health benefits. Here are two of them.

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

A huge increase in prices, and people rallying in the streets NOT to change it? As Carroll says, the true costs of this increase are not easy to see.

employees actually pay the full cost of premiums (including the “employer” share) in the form of slower wage growth. Nevertheless, few workers understand this. The perception is that only the employee share is paid by workers. But that’s gone up too, so perception and truth align. Employees are paying more.