Defectors

April 1, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

After putting up the previous post, I wondered if maybe there actually had been some Moussa Koussa jokes. So I check Andy Borowitz’s tweets. Borowitz is a funny guy (one of today’s tweets:

“What does Fox News do on April Fool's Day?” is a question akin to “What do slutty nurses do on Halloween?”

In fact, he did have some Koussa tweets, but they were mostly jokes about the name, not the man. For example,

Gaddafi Replaces Moussa Koussa with New Foreign Minister, Banana Fanna

Now, here’s the sociological connection. Andy Borowitz was a sociology researcher. Well, not quite. But he appears in the initial footnote of a classic article, Wendy Griswold’s “American Character and the American Novel” (AJS 1981).

The indefatigable research team consisted of Andy Borowitz . . . .

Clearly, Borowitz coulda been a contender. Instead, he turned his back on sociological research (maybe he wasn’t all that indefatigable after all) and went with comedy. I guess it was a choice between sending out reprints or cashing in residuals. In Hollywood, he created “Fresh Prince,” which ran for six seasons and is probably still being recycled today somewhere on cable.

'Taint Funny, Moussa

April 1, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Moussa Koussa, the newly defective foreign minister of Libya, was a sociology major at Michigan State.

My first reaction was that this was a set-up line waiting for a punch line. But it’s not funny, and it’s not an April Fool thing. This guy was involved in some very nasty stuff – assassinations of Libyan exiles, probably Lockerbie and perhaps another airplane bombing. (Video of old TV news stories is here.)

Men and Women of the Blogosphere

March 31, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Talk is cheap. So is blogging, which is pretty much the same thing economically – no fixed costs (unless you have to pay for your own computer and Internet), no variable costs. There are many economist bloggers (some with huge followings), including quite a few heavy hitters – Presidential advisors (like Greg Mankiw), Nobel Prize winners (like Paul Krugman). But they are mostly men.

There are 52 women on the list of the top 1,000 economists. None of them blog.

That was the subhead in a recent Christian Science Monitor article (“Where Are the Female Economist Bloggers?”) by Matthew Kahn.

Economist Diane Lim Rogers responded:

I think we female economists have our own empirical (not just theoretical) reasons why those of us who blog aren’t the same people as those of us who are at the top of the REPEC* list. . . . It’s called we have and care about other things and people in our lives, not just our own individual, introspective views about how the supposed world around us supposedly works (in our own opinion)! And that’s even things and people other than what Matthew counts so endearingly as the “home production” sort of things–you know, “cooking and rearing children.”

Kahn, besides speculating on why female economists don’t blog, also says why they should blog:

The shrewd academic uses his blog to market his ideas and to “amplif” his new academic results. This is a type of branding.

But I think that when it comes to the reasons men blog – the things they care about – Lim Rogers and XKCD are closer to the mark.** It’s about Ego, though it usually marches under the banner of Principle.



Is it gender stereotyping to assume that the figure at the computer is a male and that the out-of-panel voice is a female? Stereotype or not, it is apparently accurate – and not just for economists.

The female sociologist bloggers I know of who have children at home have either joined blogging co-ops or reduced their output to a very occasional post. “Home production” and time-opportunity costs may play a part. But if the rewards of blogging are, as Lim Rogers says, narcissistic (telling everyone how the world works, not to mention the pissing contests that go on between blogs or in the comments sections), fewer women may be interested in these gratifications. I suspect that the region of the blogosphere where the interaction is supportive rather than combative, that’s where you’ll find more women


*RePEc (Research Papers in Economics)) ranks economists by publications, citations, and other criteria. As Kahn says, it “provides an objective measure of who is ‘Royalty’ in the economics profession.”

**Matt Yglesias also included this when he reprinted Lim Rogers’s remarks.

Elijah Is Here Now

March 30, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Where can you find the following?

Jacob	Gabriel
Ethan	Nathan
Joshua	Isaiah
Noah	Isaac
David	Caleb
Benjamin	Jonathan
Elijah

If you said “in the Old Testament,” give yourself one point. You paid attention in Sunday school.

But these names are also among the 50 most popular names for boys in 2009, according to the US Census. The first four on the list were in the top 10.

Three weeks ago I spent some time with a relative named Noah. He’s two months old. My grandnephew. Twenty years ago, the name Noah was not even in the top 200. Now it’s in the top ten. But why? As I tell students, individual choices add up to social facts. And these fashion trends in names should alert us to the idea that seemingly individual ideas and choices (like whether a name is cool or not) are subject to social influence. The influence is largely invisible and unintentional. Nobody is trying to pressure anyone’s choice of names, and unlike fashions in clothes, nobody is making any money from changes in ideas about what’s cool. I suppose the better question is not Why but How. How do names go in and out of fashion?

In any case, I have no explanation for this flood of Old Testament names, I don’t think that the country is more religious now than in years past. There were only four names I recognized as New Testament (Matthew, Luke, John, James).* I doubt that the nation is becoming more Hebrew and less Christian. Besides, on the girls’ side of the roster OT influence pretty much disappears. Only Sarah (21), Hannah (23), and Leah (28) were in the top 50. Even New Testament names were given short shrift (is anything ever given long shrift?). Only Chloe (1 Corinthians) at #9.**

Some other name trends have continued, notably the final “n” for boys. In addition to the four in the above list, add Jayden, Aiden, and Brayden, Landon and Brandon, Jordan and Justin, Logan and Ryan (but bye-bye Brian), among others for a total of 21 out of the top 50.


* Matthew, Luke, John, and . . . .James? Mark, for some reason, hasn’t been in the top 50 since 1994. I did not put Michael on the list; he appears in both testaments, though the mention is brief. Like some other popular names (John, David), it has lost most of its Biblical overtones.

**Mary was #1 or #2 for nearly a century - the Census name site goes back only to 1880; Mary was #1 or #2 from that year till 1966, when she fell to #3, and it was downhill from then on. She dropped out of the top 10 forty years ago, out of the top 50 ten years ago, and now isn’t even the top 100. (Joseph, in that same period has been no higher than #7 but no lower than #16.)