Cancer Is Good For You (Asthma Too)

June 9, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the 1950s, as the evidence on smoking was becoming undeniable, someone suggested that the cigarette companies were about to launch a new ad campaign: “Cancer is good for you.”

It was a joke, of course. But how about “A really bad is recession is good for your marriage”? No joke. The National Marriage Project has released a report with a section claiming that the current economic crises has produced “two silver linings” for marriages. Philip Cohen at Family Inequality eviscerates this report with the level of snark that it deserves.

A bad recession is good for crime too, or so says the title of James Q. Wilson’s article in last Sunday’s Wall Street Journal:

Hard Times, Fewer Crimes*

And now welcome the next cancer-is-good-for-you entrant, Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private coal company, which spends millions each year lobbying against clean-air legislation. Last month, Peabody was the object of Coal Cares, a clever spoof Website

(Click on the image for a larger view. Or go to the Website.)

What appears in this recent screen grab as “Patriot Coal” was, in the original version, “Peabody Coal.” For some reason,** the creators of the Website changed it. But it was Peabody’s press release in response that makes them the clear winner of the Cancer-Is-Good-For-You competition.

The United Nations has linked life expectancy, educational attainment and income with per-capita electricity use, and the World Resources Institute found that for every tenfold increase in per-capita energy use, individuals live 10 years longer.

The spurious logic – the implied fallacy of composition, fobbing off correlation as cause – is so obvious that it could easily be part of the Coal Cares spoof. But no, it was for real, at least while it lasted. Unfortunately, Peabody removed the document before we could award them the CIGFY trophy.

What the UN data actually show is not surprising: Richer countries produce more electricity. They also have better health, education, and income. The message Peabody wants us to get takes the global and misapplies it locally, and it reverses cause and effect If you want to be long-lived, educated, and rich, live near a coal-driven power plant.

Cancer, asthma, and heart disease are all good for you.

*I don’t know if Wilson wrote that headline. Unlike the post-hoc logic the title suggests, Wilson does not argue that the recession caused the decrease. But he does imply that the recession did not exert any upward force on crime.

**Peabody is no stranger to lawsuits, and while they are usually the defendants, their massive legal guns can also shoot from the plaintiff side.

Meatheads

June 8, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Henry Tischler called my attention to this nugget in the Wall Street Journal a week or so ago:

Archie Bunker used to call his son-in-law “Meathead” for his fatuous opinions, and Meathead was a graduate student in sociology. A graduate student in sociology is one who didn't get his fill of jargonized wishful thinking as an undergraduate.

(I guess the WSJ is trying to catch up to The Weekly Standard in the let’s-trash-sociology category.)

It’s from a piece by Harvey Mansfield. In a mere 500 words, Mansfield manages to be both a know-nothing and an elitist. As a know-nothing, he’s leery of quantitative research. As an elitist, he apparently thinks that a university should be like the military academies, which he mentions in his first paragraph, telling students what to study, and what to think. He’s all for instilling values, but only if they are the right values, i.e., Mansfield’s values.

Just as Gender Studies taints the whole university with its sexless fantasies, so economists infect their neighbors with the imitation science they peddle.

That pretty much summarizes his view of what’s wrong with universities – taint from the wrong values, infection from quantitative data and logic. You can read the whole thing here.

iMagic

June 8, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

No sociology in this post, and if you don’t like magic, read no further. But if you have an iPad, you should watch this.


(Personal note: the app that may tip the balance and tip me into iPadland is one that a piano player, Andy Ezrin, showed me – the iRealBook. He had it on his iPhone).

HT: Richard Wiseman

Careers in Academia – Endings and Beginnings

June 7, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

David Rubinstein, professor of sociology, was, by his own account, something of a slacker. Now that he has retired, he’s telling tales out of school (i.e., at the Weekly Standard) about how much he was paid for how little work.

Sure, he didn’t do squat, he seems to have been a lousy teacher. But even though he pranked academia for several decades, and even though he’s standing there, thumbs to ears, waggling his fingers and sticking out his tongue at his former home, I’m ambivalent about lobbing tomatoes at him. You see, I owe my first job, and the prestigious name Princeton on my vita, to a Rubinstein-like professor.

I had finished my third year in grad school and had no more course work to do, just the dissertation. It was a mid-May afternoon, and I was hanging around in the department. The academic business for the semester was over. Almost nobody else was around, and I was chatting with one of the secretaries who I was on good terms with. A call came in. She answered it. I discreetly moved down the hall.

When I came back, she said, “That was John Darley at Princeton. They need an advanced graduate student to be on the faculty. Here’s his number.”

I called back almost immediately. John was the head of the social psychology section of the psychology department. He explained that there was a guy in the department, an older, tenured professor, that they’d been trying to get rid of for years. He taught the minimum, did little or no research, didn’t work with any of the grad students, and spent most of his time in his office on the phone making real estate deals. Finally, he had announced his retirement, leaving the department with a use-it-or-lose-it line and no time to do a real search.

John was calling his old professors looking for a grad student to fill in. I guess I sounded reasonable, for he told me to fly down to Newark, rent a car, and drive to Princeton for an interview. Which I did. The “interview” was a year-end department party, faculty and students drinking and milling around, and I was introduced to them. That was about it.

A day or two after I had returned to Boston, John called and told me I had the job – a lectureship. I wouldn’t really be teaching. I’d run some “precepts” (discussion sections) – basically what their grad students did. My instructor’s salary was at the bottom of the faculty scale, but it was three times as much as the stipends my fellow grad students got. And if I needed secretarial help (this was way before computers), all I had to do was ask. All told, a sweet deal. I had my own office and plenty of time to work on writing my dissertation. Come to think of it, I was bit like Rubinstein myself, getting pretty good money for not very much work.

I’m not sure what Princeton got out of it except a place-holder for two semesters. It was made clear to me that I needn’t bother entering the real search that they were doing during my time there (though I did attend a couple of the presentations). That was fine with me, for as I got to know what academic psychology was, I realized that I definitely was not a psychologist.

That was my first job in academia – two semesters and out. I held what John referred to as the Folding Chair in Social Psychology.