Gingrich, Weber, Bourdieu

May 26, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

I imagine that Stewart, Colbert, Letterman, and the rest must have had fun with the Gingrich-Tiffany story. (I wouldn’t know. I haven’t been watching much TV lately, and it didn’t come up at all on “Dancing With the Stars.”) Newt had a $500,000 revolving charge account at Tiffany’s. Apparently he was a good customer.

The story was something of an embarrassment, and Gingrich tried to make the best of it.

If the U.S. government was as debt-free as I am, everybody in America would be celebrating. I think I have proven I can manage money.

I don’t know how this is playing out there in America – I haven’t seen any opinion surveys. But the Times went to the heartland for quotes:

But out in Iowa, Mr. Robinson says buying jewelry on credit somehow feels different from buying a refrigerator or a new washing machine. Rich Galen, a former Gingrich aide, agrees.
“It’s not something that normal people do,” Mr. Galen said. “I understand he’s made a lot of money and he’s done very well, and God bless him for it, but that’s sort of a departure from the Newt Gingrich that I knew.”

At first, I thought that this reaction was pure Protestant Ethic. It’s OK to make as much money as you can, and we’ll even tax you less. But don’t spend it for pleasure.

But on second thought, the problem isn’t that Gingrich spent rather than reinvesting or giving to charity. The problem is what he bought – or rather, where he bought, since he refuses to say exactly what his Tiffany purchases were. A $25,000 Tiffany necklace, even for your wife, is too elitist.

What is it OK to spend money on? A ranch, where you can clear brush and ride a horse into the sunset. But probably not a villa. A sports team is probably OK but not a Jackson Pollack. A Hummer (if they were still made) but not a Rolls.

What else should go on the approved list? The trick is to avoid implying that your tastes are better, or even different, from those of the ordinary guy. In America, we may not be egalitarian about wealth and power – hats off to those who have the most. But we are egalitarian about taste. You want to have tastes that do NOT require any special abilities of distinction or any education. You want to your tastes to be the same as what the woman in Iowa calls “normal people.”

It makes me wonder: what if Bourdieu had been American rather than French?

The Bad News

May 24, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Socioblog has never been one to shrink away from reporting the facts even when the news is bad. So here is a screen shot of an interactive graphic at the Chronicle. It’s based on Census Bureau data.

(Click on the image for a larger view.
Click on the Chronicle link above to get the full
interactive graph and see the breakdowns in each category.)

Oh, well – at least we didn’t get a BA in counseling psychology.

HT: Arnie Korotkin, whose Little Falls blog is here.

Conservative Grades, Liberal Grades

May 23, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Would conservative students prefer greater inequality in grades? That was the question I asked in a recent post. I was responding to a stunt by the Merced Republicans that asked A-students if they would be willing to give some of their GPA points to lower-GPA students in order to reduce inequality. The Republicans opposed such redistribution, so I wondered just how deep and solid was their preference for inequality. Would they favor a return to the less equal grade distributions of the 1940s, with far fewer As and more Cs and Ds?

My proposal was far more realistic. Students cannot transfer their GPA points, but professors can change their grading scales. And, at least in one study, Republican professors create grade distributions with greater inequality than those of their Democratic colleagues. Here’s a graph from a forthcoming article by Talia Bar and Asaf Zussman.

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

Students with high SATs get higher grades than do low-SAT students (despite all the criticisms of the SAT, it is still a good predictor of college performance). But those high-SAT students are more likely to get the highest marks in courses taught by Republicans. Students with low SAT scores get better grades from Democrats than they do from Republicans.

Relative to their Democratic colleagues, Republican professors tend to assign more very low and very high grades: the share of the lowest grades (F, D-, D, D+, and C-) out of the total is 6.2 percent in courses taught by Republican professors and only 4.0 percent in courses taught by Democratic professors; the share of the highest grade (A+) out the total is 8.0 percent in courses taught by Republican professors and only 3.5 percent in courses taught by Democratic professors.

The students were undergraduates in the College of Arts and Sciences at “an elite university.” The paper has been mentioned at The Monkey Cage and at a WSJ blog.

Congratulations CHSS grads

May 21, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

The College of Humanities and Social Sciences had its convocation Thursday on the football field. The students walked across the platform, shook hands with the president and the dean, then went back to the bleachers.

(MSU photo. Other pictures are here.)

I had nothing to do with the program. I sat on the stage with the other department chairs, and I stood up when the guys from the Dean’s office read the names of graduating Sociology majors. But if it had been up to me, I would have made a large backdrop of this graph showing scores on the CLA, an assessment of how much students learn in college.

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

The authors of the report* summarize their findings

There is notable variation in academic experiences and outcomes across fields of study. . . .While appreciating the diverse causes of differences by field of study, we observed several patterns in our data:

Students majoring in traditional liberal-arts fields, including social science, humanities, natural science, and mathematics, demonstrated significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study.

Students majoring in business, education, social work, and communications had the lowest measurable gains.

*“Improving Undergraduate Learning: Findings and Policy Recommendations from the SSRC-CLA Longitudinal Project” by Arum, Roksma, and Cho. (Full report downloadable here.)