Win Ben Stein's Advocacy

May 18, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

In a comment on the previous post, “Anonymous” takes me to task for not writing about Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the hotel maid as members of social categories (“a high-power white man attempting to rape an African immigrant woman”).

Now Ben Stein, in an American Spectator post yesterday, uses reasoning by social category but on behalf of Strauss-Kahn.

In life, events tend to follow patterns. People who commit crimes tend to be criminals, for example. Can anyone tell me any economists who have been convicted of violent sex crimes? Can anyone tell me of any heads of nonprofit international economic entities who have ever been charged and convicted of violent sexual crimes? Is it likely that just by chance this hotel maid found the only one in this category? Maybe Mr. Strauss-Kahn is guilty but if so, he is one of a kind, and criminals are not usually one of a kind.

What do we know about the complainant besides that she is a hotel maid? I am sure she is a fine woman. On the other hand, I have had hotel maids that were complete lunatics, stealing airline tickets from me, stealing money from me, throwing away important papers, stealing medications from me. How do we know that this woman's word was good enough to put Mr. Strauss-Kahn straight into a horrific jail? Putting a man in Riker's is serious business. Maybe more than a few minutes of investigation is merited before it's done.

Drawing conclusions about an individual’s motivations, behavior, honesty, etc., based on these demographic characteristics – there’s a word for that: stereotyping.

• Powerful white men go around trying to rape powerless women.
• Very successful economists don’t commit violent crime.
• Privileged people get away with crimes against powerless victims
• Chambermaids, out of their own self-interest, can be dishonest.

Simple caricature and plotline. You can take the few facts that have become public and create the comic book you prefer. In fact, we often do convert the world into familiar stories. The trouble is that these stories are not always accurate.

The one thing that Stein says that is not in dispute is that Rikers (like jails generally) is horrific. I wonder whether he has ever before expressed this concern. I don’t know all of Stein’s oeuvre, but maybe others can enlighten me. (Obvious Ben Stein tag line here.)

L'Etat C'est Moi

May 15, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the likely Socialist candidate for President of France, was arrested in New York, accused of sexual assault on a chambermaid in his hotel.

Strauss-Kahn no longer electable for many French (Reuters)

Strauss-Kahn Rape-Attempt Charge May End Presidential Prospects (Bloomberg )

Allegations leave presidency bid in tatters (Financial Times)

None of those headlines about Strauss-Kahn’s political future rests on actual evidence except perhaps a brief in-the-street interview or the estimate of some politician. Maybe DSK’s presidential career is fini, at least for now. But maybe it isn’t. The point is that the people who wrote those headlines and articles don’t really know what the electorate thinks. Like Louis XIV, they are conflating themselves with the nation. (Another post on this bit of journalistic arrogance is here.)

The Monica Lewinsky scandal broke on January 17, 1998. Here are some headlines from that time.

People Talking about Clinton: 'If He's Lying, It's Over' (AP, Jan. 22)

Clinton's Cooked If It's Fire, Not Just Smoke (Daily News, Jan 22. 1998)

Public's Tolerance Wears Thin (Star-Ledger, Jan. 23)

Some pundits assured us that Clinton’s presidency was all but over. The nation would not tolerate such behavior. Sam Donaldson, a top reporter at ABC news, predicted that Clinton would resign within days. These predictions seemed like a good idea at the time. But Clinton remained in office.

Later, Donaldson said he was “just dumb” to have made that prediction. But in October,a month before the election, he made the same prediction based on his reading of “the American public.” Wrong again.

Are A-student Liberals Hypocrites?

May 13, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

On his Overcoming Bias blog, Robin Hanson posted a video of UC Merced College Republicans asking A-students to sign a petition to redistribute GPA points. Students with high GPAs, the top 10%, would give up some fraction of points; those with low GPAs would get those points.

Nobody signs the petition.

As the kid in the video says, the proposal is supposed to be “ kind of like emulating the federal tax structure.” These liberal students favor a progressive income tax to pay for federal programs for the poor, yet they won’t give their own GPA points to those who are poor in GPA. Gotcha.

The students cannot come up with reasons why their positions are not inconsistent. Robin Hanson pronounces them guilty of “Natural Hypocrisy.” Megan McCardle, who slings an even heavier blog than Hanson, smashes the arguments for why GPA redistribution is different from a progressive income tax.

Yes, grades do share certain qualities with income, and students often use the language of money and income when they speak and think about a grade – it’s what you earn by working, and you try to maximize it, sometimes with the least amount of effort (students have to budget their time).

But the analogy is far from perfect. The GPA proposal has only one goal – to reduce grade inequality. But taxes are not primarily intended to be a mechanism of direct redistribution. Taxes are primarily intended to pay for what the government does. Some of those things benefit the poor. Some don’t. (If it weren’t for taxes, those Merced Republicans would be paying double what they are now for their college education.) Over half of the federal budget goes for the military, Social Security, and Medicare – programs whose benefits do not exclude anyone, even the rich. So the question is who should pay how much. Should the rich pay a higher rate?

GPA points, unlike taxes, don’t pay for anything. So students at every GPA level would object to any tax on their GPA, even a flat tax. If you asked the Merced Republicans to sign a petition to lower everyone’s GPA by 10%, you wouldn’t get many signers. Does that mean they oppose a flat tax? Or if they support a flat tax on income but oppose the 10% GPA reduction, are they natural (or unnatural) hypocrites? No, because nobody would benefit from those lost GPA points.

But suppose GPA points actually could buy something useful for the school – improved health services, for example. Would high-GPA students object to paying more of their points while students with fewer GPA points paid less? Would healthy students gripe that their GPA points were going to benefit only the sick and not themselves? I doubt it. Consider the example – a real example, not a hypothetical one or a phony petition – of scholarship programs. These benefit lower-income students while more affluent students pay full fare. Have you ever heard even one full-fare student or parent complain about financial aid going only to lower-income students rather than to a tuition-reduction for themselves? I’ve certainly heard parents and students complain about tuition, but I’ve never heard them complain about financial aid that goes to others. (Of course, I have no idea what college Republicans say among themselves.)

As for reducing GPA inequality, that has already happened thanks to grade inflation. Back in January, I posted (here) a grade sheet from a Harvard class JFK took seventy years ago.** The average grade was C+. In a class of nearly sixty students, nobody got an A, two students got A-. How do conservative students feel about this narrowing of inequality, this inflation that cheapens the value of an A?

How about another petition? Let’s take our camcorder to a campus with mostly conservative and libertarian students and ask them to sign a petition calling for grade deflation. Here’s our pitch: “Right now, the real distribution of grades runs from A to B, maybe B-. We want professors to use the full grading range, A down to F. The student who’s now getting B- would get a D or D+, a C- would probably be an F, those getting a B would get a C or C-. A’s would be really, really hard to get. This will make students work harder and learn more, which is what college is all about. Here’s the petition; here’s a pen.”

Will the UC Merced Republicans sign?

* There are rich people who feel that taxes should be more progressive – very rich people, like Warren Buffet.
** “Where’d you get a grade sheet from 1940?” a friend asked. I said that the professor was a little late turning in his grades. My friend, who had also served as department chair at her school, thought that was a pretty good joke.

Hondling With the Bureaucracy – Again

May 11, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’ve learned my lesson. When the bureaucracy offers you a deal, don’t push your luck.

Two years ago, when I challenged a ticket, the Parking Violations Bureau offered me a deal – one-third off. This seemed violate basic sociological ideas – the quintessential government bureaucracy was offering to be flexible about what I would pay – I blogged it (here).* I also continued to maintain my innocence, hoping for a better deal. Silly me. I wound up paying the full $65.

A few weeks ago, I came down to the car on Monday morning to find no license plate on the rear of the car and a ticket on the windshield for failure to have a license plate. Sixty-five bucks. I pled not guilty on the grounds that hey, I’m the victim here, not the offender. Back came the offer – $43. The letter didn’t say, “Final Offer.” But I knew. I paid.

I had learned one lesson. But my trip to the local precinct had two other reminders about public bureaucracies. First, it brought to mind a sentence that I wrote in my crim textbook decades ago. I began the chapter on courts with a brief description of what I saw when I spent a day hanging around at the criminal court. “What you see in the criminal court is what you see at the public hospital or the welfare department: poor people waiting.” At the precinct house for my neighborhood (median household income $78,000) , the income in the room may have been slightly higher, but the atmosphere was similar.

Second, what goes in the file is more important than what really happened. The desk sergeant told me that they would have to classify the license plate as “lost” rather than “stolen.” “Y’know, sometimes if someone hits your bumper a few times squeezing into a parking space, the plate can fall off. “ The two screws that had held the plate in place for several years of New York street parking had been removed – a fact I pointed out to no avail. “If both plates are gone, it’s a theft. Only one, it’s lost.”

Could this classification have had anything to do with a concern for the precinct’s larceny statistics?

* Two months later, the Times ran a story on this policy which, unbeknownst to me and most New Yorkers, had been in place since 2005.