Poltical Culture

March 22, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Keith Humphreys (here) comments on the reactions of the British to Margaret Thatcher’s dementia, first made public in 2008.

When [Ronald Reagan] was revealed to have Alzheimer’s disease, many people who voted against him voiced sincere sympathy for what he and his family were going through. In contrast . . . if Ms. Thatcher’s own dementia is generating sympathy in Brits who hated her policies, they are doing a frightfully good job of hiding it. I don’t even hear much sympathy from people who did vote for her.

Matt Yglesias (here) explains this with some electoral data. Thatcher was never the preference of the majority of voters. Her election wins were all minority: “a three way election in 1979 with 44 percent of the vote. In 1983 her support slipped slightly to more like 43 percent. In 1987 she won again, but her support further dropped to around 42 percent.”

Matt concludes,

the ability of a prime minister to wield extraordinary power based on a parliamentary majority obtained with an electoral minority seems likely to engender a lot of bitterness.

Political culture may also have something to do with it. In the US, the President is also the symbolic head of the nation. In the UK, that function belongs to the Queen. The President, even after he leaves office, is still addressed as Mr. President. The Prime Minister is just a politician. (See an earlier post on this here.)

Matt’s post, especially that last comment, took me back to a personal incident that suggests other differences in political cultures. In August of 2005, we rented a flat in London – Vauxhall, just south of the river – for a few days. The woman we rented from met us at Victoria station in her Toyota and gave us a motor tour of London before taking us to the flat. (She had been in the travel business and was now retired, which is why she could rent out her flat while she removed to a family house in Sussex.) “There’s no Brits in London any more,” she said pointing to the pedestrians as we passed. And indeed, there were many who looked to be Asian, Arab, or African. She also complained about the “queers” in her neighborhood.

In the US, a person who talked like that would surely have voted for Bush and other Republicans. So I quickly pegged her as a hardline Thatcherite Conservative. But as we drove through Westminster, she slowed a bit and pointed up at a bronze statue.

“That’s Oliver Cromwell,” she said, “the only dictator Britain’s ever had. Except for Maggie Thatcher.”

Weber Fails B-School (or the Other Way Round)

March 21, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Having written a textbook, I know that textbooks don’t get everything right, but c’mon guys.

From Peter Klein at Organizations and Markets

Focusing on Max Weber, Cummings and Bridgman document a series of whoppers that appear consistently in leading management texts, such as the belief that “ideal type” means best or optimal; that Weber did his major work in the 1940s (Parsons’s translation of Wirtschaft and Gesellschaft appeared in 1947, 27 years after Weber’s death); that Weber personally admired bureaucracy (In Search of Excellence avers that Weber “pooh-poohed charismatic leadership and doted on bureaucracy”); and other gross misunderstandings. FAIL

(I'm surprised that the OrgTheorists didn’t pick this up.)

Ethnocentrism and Family Values

March 20, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

When Alexandra Wallace’s video – the epiphanus interruptus* complaint about Asians at UCLA using their cell phones in the library – went viral, most of the reactions were accusations of racism. I'm not sure where the line between racism and ethnocentrism lies, but I was struck more by the underlying ethnocentric assumptions about family, assumptions that are widely shared here and by people who would never be accused of racism.

We Americans all agree that we value family. When I begin the unit on culture, I ask students to jot down three American values. The one that appears most frequently is family. If I asked students what things they themselves value, I’m sure many of them would say family. So, I suspect, would Ms. Wallace.

But here’s how she begins her rant, after a brief disclaimer:

It used to really bug me but it doesn't bother me anymore the fact that all the Asian people that live in all the apartments around me – their moms and their brothers and their sisters and their grandmas and their grandpas and their cousins and everybody that they know that they've brought along from Asia with them – comes here on the weekends to do their laundry, buy their groceries, and cook their food for the week. It's seriously, without fail. You will always see old Asian people running around this apartment complex every weekend. That's what they do.

(The transcript does not quite do justice to Ms. Wallace’s presentation. The video was taken down, but in 2018 a copy became available.)

These Asian families, in Ms. Wallace’s view, include too many peripheral members (grandparents, cousins). And family members spend too much time together and do entirely too much for one another.

The trouble apparently is that Asians really do value family.

The too-much-family motif runs through her objections about cell phones as well She obviously doesn’t know what the callers are saying or who they’re talking to, but she suspects that it’s family back in Asia:

I swear they're going through their whole families, just checking on everybody from the tsunami thing.**

Many international students in the US have noted this same contradiction between Americans’ proclaimed value on family in the abstract and what to the international students seems like a fairly thin and compartmentalized connection to family in the real world. As Rebekah Nathan says in My Freshman Year,

Americans, they felt, sharply distinguished their family from their friends and schoolmates; more than one international student remarked about the dearth of family photos on student doors,*** as if family didn’t exist at school. . . .Peter [a student from Germany] told me . . . “No one here says, “come on and meet my family.”

Do, do Americans value family? Yes, but. . . . The ‘but’ is a competing value that pervades American culture, including the family – Independence.**** As Ms. Wallace says in the conclusion to her complaint about Asian families, “They don't teach their kids to fend for themselves.”

-------------

*

I'll be in like deep into my studying . . . getting it all down, like typing away furiously, blah blah, blah, and then all of a sudden when I’m about to like reach an epiphany... Over here from somewhere, “Ooooh Ching Chong Ling Long Ting Tong, Ooohhhhh.”

** Adding “thing” to “the tsunami” makes Wallace seem especially callous. Linguists must have looked into this, but for some reason, “thing” here implies, “I don’t know or care much about this because it’s not very important.”

I vividly recall a scene in the 1993 film “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” where Joe Mantegna, as the competitive chess father, is at a parent-teacher conference. The teacher is concerned that Mantegna’s chess-prodigy son (age 8 or so) is falling behind academically and socially. She adds,

I'm sure he's very good at this chess thing,
but that isn't really the issue.

Mantegna loses it.

My son has a gift. He has a gift, and once you
acknowledge that, then maybe we'll have something
to talk about. Chess is what it’s called.
Not the “chess thing.”

*** If you watch the Wallace video, look at the board of photos behind her and try to find parents.

**** See my earlier post on the family-vs,-independence conflict as it appears on American television, especially in sitcoms that have pretensions of seriousness.

March Wisdom

March 18, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’m skeptical about the Wisdom of Crowds, at least when it comes to sports betting. I’ve blogged as much occasionally (the occasion usually being a big NFL game – see this post, for example).

Now Mark McClusky at Wired has taken up the fight in the arena of March Madness. The crowd whose wisdom he’s challenging is the ESPN online pool. Against them he pits “two top college basketball analysts.” Here’s a reduced spreadsheet with the large Crowd-Expert discrepancies highlighted. If you’re betting, it’s red for bad, green for good.

(Click on the chart for a larger view. The full spreadsheet is here.)

As McClusky notes, “most of the top seeds are highly inflated, especially Kansas.” Also, “Mountain West pair of San Diego State and Brigham Young are two of the best values out there.” He also said – and this article was posted Wednesday –

The single biggest gap between the two sets of picks? Utah State vs. Kansas State in the first round. According to the numbers, Utah State has a 57 percent likelihood of knocking off the higher-seeded Wildcats, but 73 percent of ESPN users have picked Kansas State.

Kansas State opened as 1 ½-point favorites. That line was bet up to 2. The Crowd was wise this time, both in their brackets and their bets. Kansas State 73, Utah State 68.

We’ll see how the rest of the tournament goes.

h/t Max

UPDATE, March 22: Never too late, the master of brackets Ted McCagg has finally posted his March Madness drawing (here).