Ignoring Good News

November 2, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’m writing this before the polls close, but like everyone else, I expect this to be an anti-Obama election. And like most people, I think the reason is the economy. But . . .

• Obama has lowered taxes for almost all Americans.
• Most of the TARP money for Wall Street has been recovered, and the country will make about $16 billion in profits from it.
• The economy has grown by 3% in the past year, the Dow and S&P are up for the year.

In thread on a previous post, there was some discussion about ignorance – what people know, and what they think they know but are wrong about. A Bloomberg poll today showed that most people

• believe taxes have increased
• think the TARP money has disappeared down the drain (or into the bankers’ pockets)
• think the economy has been shrinking

The ignorance on these items is, of course, greater among Republicans. But many Independents and Democrats also share the erroneous perceptions.

Why? The head of the company that did the poll blames the Democrats for their failure to communicate the good news. My guess is that it’s more like a halo effect, or what Bruce Oppenheimer (political science, Vanderbilt), quoted in the article, calls “a dark cloud.”

The halo or cloud is the overall global impression that people form. From that general perception they deduce the specifics. If your overall impression is that the economy sucks, then you'll guess that anything that has to do with the economy is going the wrong way – taxes going up, the economy shrinking, the big bad bankers getting away with robbery, etc.

Oppenheimer thinks that the dark cloud is unemployment. True, no doubt. I suspect that real estate – home values and sales – also plays a part. It’s not just that people pay more attention to bad news than good. But the information on TARP, growth, and even taxes is more remote. Taxes you pay only once a year. Does anyone make close comparisons of the deductions in their check stubs from last year? TARP – would anyone have first-hand knowledge of that?

But if you own a home, you might know about its value. And you can see empty, unsold houses with the naked eye, “For Sale” signs lining the streets like Burma-Shave signs. Unemployment isn’t just a number like 9.5%. If you’re out of work, or if you know people who can’t find a job, it’s right there in the room with you, and you just might not care all that much about GDP numbers or the stock market.

Update: I heard about this survey only today. Turns out it was released three days ago and covered in a few places including WaPo and NPR. That same day, David Dayen at FireDogLake had the same reaction that I did today. Or as he put it, the survey showed “that Americans don’t pay attention to CBO or NBER reports or watch C-Span very often.”

Signs of Reason

October 31, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

It’s Halloween, and I feel sadly deficient for my lack of knowledge of the zombie. I think I missed about 80% of the allusions in Gabriel’s post, just as I did last year. But then this picture from the Jon Stewart rally turned up in my inbox.


I wasn’t there, but what I’ve heard and seen does convince me that sanity is possible. The event was sort of a meta-rally – a rally about rallies – delightfully devoid of anger, hyperbole, paranoia, demonization, and self-righteousness.

I confess, I had to look twice at the Biblical citation.


Many more on display here.

Atheists in Foxholes on the Campus Battlefield

October 28, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

We all know that conservatives on campus have it rough.

outnumbered by liberals by 3 to 1 even in fields known to be relatively conservative, such as economics, by more than 5 to 1 in moderate fields such as political science and by 20 to 1 or more in many fields, such as sociology and anthropology.

The numbers are cited by Richard Redding in a recent op-ed in LA Times and other newspapers (including yesterday’s Star-Ledger, which is where my colleague Arnie Korotkin found it and brought it my attention.)

If you’re a conservative like Redding, what do you see as the solution? Surely you would not be in favor of affirmative action, forcing schools to hire more conservatives to the faculty and admit more conservatives to the student body. That tramples on the sacred rights of the individual. If you oppose affirmative action based on demographic characteristics (race, sex), you would oppose it even more strongly when it’s based on ephemeral qualities like political orientation.

But no. Redding is all for affirmative action for conservatives, and he defends it on the same grounds that liberals defend affirmative action for minorities and women. It makes for greater “educational benefits.”

Campus conservatives like Redding (he’s a dean and professor at a law school) feel as though they’re in a foxhole (a FoxTVhole?), and they’re giving up their affirmative action atheism. Now they believe.

Conservatives also oppose campus speech codes. These are well-intended, they argue, but by trying to assure that feelings are not hurt, these codes trample on freedom of speech. From the conservative view, if the minorities and women on campus feel intimidated by other people’s free speech, that’s too bad. They’ll just have to man up.

But another part of Redding’s argument is very similar to the speech-code rationale. He cites a survey of students which found that “most did not think it entirely safe to hold unpopular opinions on campus . . . . conservative students feel alienated . . . conservative students lack academic role models.” Apparently, when the feelings of conservatives are involved, it’s time for action – affirmative action.

On the Money

October 26, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the previous post, I suggested that Americans were much more likely to name streets after military heroes than after luminaries in other fields as the French do.* As Denis Colombi noted in his comment on that post, the French don’t ignore their military victories. But in looking for people to name things after, they cast a wider net.

Whose praises do we sing? Follow the money. If you’re an American, you know the greenback line-up: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Hamilton, Jackson, Grant, Franklin.

How surprising to go to France and see a bill like this – something you would never have seen in the US. (You won’t see it in France any more either, now that the Euro reigns.)


An artist (Delacroix) and bare breasts.

Or this:


A female scientist, Marie Curie, and her husband Pierre.

Or this.



Voltaire, a writer remembered chiefly as a satirist. Why not a Mark Twain bill for the US?

Who else filled the bill? Eiffel, Cézanne, Saint-Exupéry, Hugo, Molière, Racine, Voltaire, Debussy . . . .


* We do sometimes confer these naming honors on artists. I myself attended a primary school named after the great composer Stephen Foster.