Repo Men

June 19, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

“We will take America back.”

Rick Perry was here in New York Wednesday, and that was the rousing line he used to close his speech. It’s a frequent meme in Perry’s presidential campaign and on the right generally.

To talk about taking America back raises the question: whose country is this anyway? Since the late 19th century, the right wing has often put forth the idea that the US is their country and that it is being threatened if not actually destroyed by these other groups – more recently arrived, urban, ethnic, darker. In Sarah Palin’s famous phrase, these others are not “the real America.” (An earlier post on this is here.)

When Republicans are out of power – outvoted by these less real Americans – their rallying cry is, “Take back our country.” Our country, not theirs.

A comment on a recent post pointed out that “take back America” has also been used by the left, for example in the summer 2007 Take Back America Conference. I hadn’t remembered this conference, and I just didn’t recall the left as crying “take back” as regularly as does the right. Was I a victim of selective perception and confirmation bias?

Fortunately, Lexis-Nexis is less prone to these cognitive biases. To compare, I searched for the following phrases:*

Take back our country
Take our country back
Take back America

I used two time periods starting nearly two years before an election and ending on Nov. 6 after the election:

• Republicans in power (leading up to the Democratic victory of 2008)
• Democrats in power (leading up to the Republican victory of 2010)

Here’s the final tally

• Republicans (2009-2010) 2645
• Democrats (2007-2008) 1647

I also calculated the daily averages for calendar quarters.

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

Up until about six months before the election, there’s no difference. But at the top of the stretch turn (or when it’s gun lap time, depending on your preference in sports), when the election comes into view, the Republicans swing into full take-back mode. In 2008, the Democrats had endured seven years of GOP/Bush rule, and by mid-2008, it was clear that things in the US were not going well under Bush. We might have expected the Democrats to pound the take-back theme. But they didn’t.**

But in 2010, with Obama in office for little more than a year, the Republicans were clamoring for their supporters to take America back, presumably from the Democratic usurpers.

-------------------------------------------

*I left out “Take America back” (sorry, Gov. Perry) because the citations were a mixed bag. Too many of them were “take America back to the 1930s” or similar phrases that had nothing to do with who the country rightly belonged to. These references occurred far less frequently than the other three phrases, but I wasn’t going to read through the several hundred of them in order to pick out the relevant ones – not for just one lousy blog post.

** True, the Democrats had won the Congressional election of 2006, but the “take-back” theme was not part of that election either. The comparable numbers for the last two periods on the graph are 1.4 and 0.9.

The Big Time

June 16, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’m now officially on the masthead at Sociological Images, which has a less select readership than does this blog. (By “less select,” I mean that they get 25,000 - 50,000 hits a day.) Most of my posts there will also be cross-posted here, but not all. My post there today was an updated recycling of a SocioBlog post of 3-4 years ago, so I didn’t bother to repost it here. It’s about urinals. If you’re interested, you can find it here.

Health and Voting

June 16, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Maps showing county-level data:

• Change in life expectancy 1987-2007
• Change in the Presidential vote – 2004 - 2008 (blue indicates a shift to the Dems, brown a shift to the GOP)
  

I haven’t gotten the data and computed a measure of association, but the maps look very similar to my eye. Counties that swung right in 2008 are much more likely to have experienced a smaller increase (and in some cases a decrease) in life expectancy.

What’s going on here? Health care was a big issue in the 2008 election. It looks as though counties that had experienced the worst health outcomes in the previous two decades were voting to keep the medical status quo. Counties where life expectancy had increased were voting for a change.

The voting map is here. The life expectancy map is here, and the original study with interactive maps is here. Click on a county and find its life expectancy by race and sex, also short comparison lists of countries where LE is longer and where LE is shorter. The results are not encouraging. The title of the study is, “Falling behind: life expectancy in US counties from 2000 to 2007 in an international context.”

HT: Mark Kleiman

Uncertain About Uncertainty

June 15, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Listen to the Republicans, and you're certain to hear about uncertainty. What’s keeping unemployment high and stalling economic recovery? Uncertainty. Specifically, uncertainty about government regulation.

Now, here’s the evidence for it – Stephen L. Carter’s recent article “Economic Stagnation Explained, at 30,000 Feet”

The man in the aisle seat is trying to tell me why he refuses to hire anybody. His business is successful, he says, as the 737 cruises smoothly eastward. Demand for his product is up. But he still won’t hire.
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t know how much it will cost,” he explains. “How can I hire new workers today, when I don’t know how much they will cost me tomorrow?”
He’s referring not to wages, but to regulation: He has no way of telling what new rules will go into effect when. His business, although it covers several states, operates on low margins. He can’t afford to take the chance of losing what little profit there is to the next round of regulatory changes. And so he’s hiring nobody until he has some certainty about cost.

It’s anecdotal evidence, useful as an illustration. But we don’t know if it describes what’s going on with most other businesses. In fact, Carter’s seatmate might not even be accurate about his own firm. As Will Wilkinson and Ezra Klein suggest, the guy might be repeating the Republican line just because he’s a Republican.

A lot of people who do the hiring (or decide not to hire) are Republicans.

If companies aren’t hiring, the real problem, I suspect, is not lack of certainty but lack of customers. A NFIB report last fall, “Small Business Economic Trends,” asked small businesses what their “single most important problem” was. Unfortunately, “uncertainty about regulation” was not one of the choices, but the survey did offer “regulation”

(Click on the image for larger view.)

The big winner is lack of demand. Three years ago, fewer than 10% rated it as the most important problem. In the current recession, that has risen to over 30%.

The NYT had a very pretty graph of the longitudinal data.*


The Poor Sales section (white in the graph) suggests that when demand is high (good sales), as it was in the 90s, business have the luxury of worrying about regulation (orange). In good times, when employment is high, businesses may have trouble finding enough qualified workers (blue). But the problem today is not too much regulation or too few workers. It’s lack of demand.

I am not in business, but if demand is really up, as Carter’s seatmate claims, and if you don’t hire more workers, there are only two options:

• Get more out of your current workers – better technology or more hours.
• Ignore the demand.

The Times reported recently (here) that while businesses have been slow to hire more workers, they have been buying more machines and software. The Times story does not say how much of this investment in technology was coming from small businesses and how much from large firms that may be sitting on large amounts of cash and may as well invest it now.

But there are limits what newly-bought technology can do to increase production in the short run, and there are limits to how much employees can or will work.

As for option two – ignoring the demand – if the guy on the plane is letting orders go unfilled because he doesn’t want to hire workers, he is leaving money on the table. As I say, I’m not an MBA, but I suspect that not many “business models” (as we say today) call for turning away customers.

The point is that neither of these responses has anything to do with uncertainty about regulation. If businesses are not hiring, it’s probably because they are uncertain of how much of their product they can sell.

* The trouble with this data is that each year the percents must add up to 100% no matter how numerous or few the problems are.