Difference, Distance, and Distribution

June 11, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

In a famous, though probably apocryphal, quotation, F. Scott Fitzgerald says to Ernest Hemingway, “You know, the rich really are different than you and me.” Hemingway replies, “Yeah, they have more money.”

You can imagine the same conversation with “poor” instead of “rich.”

The question for those who are neither rich nor poor, those in the great middle, is how similar they feel to the people at either end of the income curve. That sense of difference or similarity may be especially important for people’s ideas about redistribution. If you feel some kinship with the poor, you’ll do what you can to protect Robin Hood. If you feel that you have more in common with the wealthy, you’ll rat him out to the sheriff.

Polls and policies are not always in sync. But when it comes to inequality and redistribution, Americans – both the general public and their legislators – differ from people in other countries. We are exceptionally tolerant of income inequality and exceptionally resistant to income redistribution – at least when that redistribution means government actions that shift benefits from the wealthy to the poor. My guess is that this resistance reflects the middle-class perception of having much more in common with the rich than with the poor.

It’s nice to find confirmation for your hunches even when those hunches are pessimistic. Henry Farrell at The Monkey Cage recently summarized this paper by Lupu and Pontusson. Their research on 15-18 OECD countries finds that

the key factor determining redistribution is the income gap between middle income voters and lower income voters . . . When the gap is high, middle class people will have a much weaker sense of solidarity with the poor, and hence be less supportive of redistribution.

Lupu and Pontusson use a measure they call “skew” – the ratio of the dollar distance of the middle from those at either end of the distribution. The question is: where do those in the middle stand relative to the rich and the poor. In the US, those in the middle of the income distribution are closer to the poor, the bottom 10%, than to the top 10%, probably because in the last few decades the very rich have zoomed even farther away from the other 95-99% of the population. If the US middle class followed the pattern of the other OECD countries, they would be more for Robin Hood. But they are not.

How then to explain the anti-redistribution preferences of the American middle?

In a post a few months ago (here), I suggested that perceived distance was still an important factor in our reluctance to redistribute, but that the distance was not so much economic as it was racial. What made the poor different was not their level of poverty but their race.

The Lupu-Pontusson paper reaches the same conclusion. Again quoting Henry’s summary:

Lupu and Pontusson . . argue that the explanation for this is straightforward – “it is clearly attributable to the high-concentration of racial-ethnic minorities in the bottom of the income distribution.” More bluntly put – middle class Americans feel less solidarity with the very poor because the very poor are more likely to be black.

So Fitzgerald might well have said, “You know Ernest, the poor really are different from you and me.” And Hemingway, having read the Lupu-Pontusson paper, would reply, “Yeah, they’re darker.”*

* What Hemingway would say is probably more like: “The poor have no money. But they are good people. When they fight in the bars it is a good fight, a true fight. Sometimes they have nada. It is a Spanish word. It means nothing. Nada. Nada. Sometimes when you run the regression, you get nada. The betas weigh no more than an ant and they have no stars. Nada. But sometimes you get the big r. It is a strong r, a true r. Then you go to the café and drink the cold crisp white wine.”

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