Exchange Rates

October 10, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Viviana Zelizer has a new book coming out in a week: Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy (or what’s left of the economy). I got an e-mail about it from Amazon. They’ve got me pegged.

Will I spend $23.62 for the book? If I thought rationally about money, I would consider what else that $23.62 could buy. But nobody thinks about money with perfect rationality. Dollars are fungible, but not completely so. They have a different value in different sectors of life and do not always flow easily from one sector to another. Exchange rates between sectors are idiosyncratic and rarely specified.

I was reminded of this yet again by Jacob Avery’s recent paper on poker players. Is it rational to bet an amount greater than your weekly paycheck on the turn of a card or the outcome of a baseball game? It’s irrational only if money is perfectly fungible from the world of gambling to the world of everyday living. But it isn’t.

The gamblers I knew would frequently say that “gambling money” was “sacred.” In other words, there was such a thing as gambling money, and it was different from other moneys. It fell under a different set of rules and valuations.

Here’s a slightly different example though also from the world gambling. It’s from a “This American Life” show originally broadcast in November, 2003.* The reporter is Mary Beth Kirchner.

This 2:20 excerpt is from a story about a limo driver in Las Vegas. He is a good blackjack player. Yet he will leave the table, where he’s making a bundle, so as not to miss the peak hours for catching fares, even though these will net him less money than blackjack:



Here’s a transcript from the last part of the clip:

JOE: I was playing about like $2000 a hand. And I told the doorman, “If you get a good ride, like to the golf course, come and get me,” y’know, like $75. Anyway, he came up to the table and told me, “Hey, I got a ride” Seventy-five dollars. The people in the pit, they all think I’m nuts, y’know. I just stopped.. I left, I took my money, and I ran down to take the guy for $75, and there I am playing two grand a hand.

I try to separate the two. One has nothing to do with the other.

MARY BETH: I don’t understand that.

JOE: I know. Nobody does.

 MAURY BETH: Do you understand it?

JOE: I don’t. I just. . . .Gambling to me is gambling, work is work.

Nobody understands it? Viviana Zelizer does. So do most people, at some level. They know that their treatment of dollars is not universalistic They just don’t write books about it.


*This is my first try at embedding an audio clip. If it doesn’t work, you can go to the full This American Life podcast (here): The story begins at about the 23 minute mark. The part I excerpted here begins at about 33:20.

Size Matters

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The New York Walk

October 6, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

We had our semi-annual (or is it annual?) Sociology New York Walk on Saturday. We started at the flea market on W. 39th St., where one of the vendors had a box of typesetters sorts and slugs. I should have taken a picture since in class the previous week I had mentioned the Gutenberg revolution, and many of the students had no idea what movable type was. The Gutenberg era was a nice five and a half centuries while it lasted, but it’s over. Gutenberg is now a large source of e-books, fee of charge and free of metal. Those movable-type letters are quaint relics that you find in a flea market not far from the old Lucky Strikes placard.

We walked over to Grand Central Station. The Whispering Gallery is always a crowd-pleaser. After lunch at the food court (so much better than the typical mall food court), we took the subway to Astor Place and wandered the Lower East Side – gentrification happening as you watch. A community garden on Avenue B was having a harvest festival, with barbecue and salads (pay what you like) and a trio playing Indian-style music, and it was like walking back into the sixties.

It was a beautiful day, and there was much more to see and eat and drink. Join us next time.

Here we are. The picture on the left is just outside the Library at 42nd and Fifth. The one on the right is down on the Lower East Side.

(Click on the picture for a larger view.)

Leave the Name, Take the Accent

October 2, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

In a post a while ago, I said that it seemed to me that far fewer actors are changing their names. Not like the old days, when Margarita Carmen Cansino became Rita Hayworth. I was reminded of this again reading the obits for Tony Curtis, born and raised in the Bronx as Bernie Schwartz.
If a kid named Bernie Schwartz today wanted to be an actor, would he change his name? It’s a ridiculous question, of course. Nobody these days names their son Bernie. Bernard is barely in the top 1000 names for boys. When Curtis, er I mean Schwartz, was born, it was #46.

He may have changed his name, but he never lost his accent, as the obits were quick to point out, quoting famous lines like, “"Yondah lies the castle of my fad-dah,” which Snopes says is for real, from “The Black Shield of Falworth.” The obit and NJ.com has a version from a different film, “ Son of Ali Baba”: “Dis is duh palace ah my fadda, an’ yonda lies duh Valley ah duh Sun.”

You wouldn’t hear that today. My impression is that although actors now retain their ethnic names, they lose any ethnic or regional accent they might have, at least they do if they want to play big roles. With comedy roles and character parts, a regional accent adds “color” even if it’s the wrong color. (Cab drivers in movies often have a working-class New York accent, even if they are driving their cab in Chicago or Atlanta.) But if you want to be a star, it’s best to be able to sound like a generic, unplaceable American.

Maybe that has always been true; maybe even fifty or seventy years ago, Curtis would have been a glaring exception. Can you think of stars from whatever era who, like Curtis, spoke with an identifiable ethnic or regional accent yet played roles outside of those boundaries?