June 23, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross-posted at Sociological Images)
Is a university admissions office the same as the basketball team? Should selecting an entire student body for the college be like selecting players for the varsity?
Remember that kid at UC Merced, the one who argued that the graduated income tax was like redistributing GPA points? He found students who supported a graduated income tax and programs for the poor but who wouldn’t sign his petition to redistribute GPA points from the A students to those with lower GPAs. None of the students could articulate, on the spot, their reasons for not signing the GPA petition (assuming that he didn’t edit out any who did offer a reasonable explanation). (My earlier post on it is here.)
He’s baaaack. This time he’s asking students to sign a petition for affirmative action in sports – specifically to give preference to whites trying out for the team. Get it? If you support affirmative action in college admissions but not in sports, you’re a hypocrite. As before, students support one use of race preference but not the other, and as before none can give a convincing reason. The students all say, “It’s different,” but they can’t explain why.*
(To save time, I’ve set the video to start near the end – most students say the same thing. To see the whole thing, just drag the slider back to 0:00.)
Nyahh, nyahh – you’re for preferences for blacks where they’re a minority but against racial preferences for whites where they are the minority. You’re a hypocrite.** Either that, or your thinking has been muddled by liberal ideas, which is pretty much the same thing, isn’t it?
The video concludes with the dictum that college admissions and sports should be the same. “Race-based preferences are wrong.” Ah, moral clarity.
Is college really the same as a sports team? They are certainly different in their consequences. If you’re a student now, in the coming years when you apply for a job, will HR ask you if you played varsity? Maybe. But unless the job you’re applying for is power forward, your answer won’t matter very much. But HR will absolutely want to know if you have a college degree. And your answer will matter. A lot.
Sports and school are different in another important way. Schools seek out minorities more for the sake of campus diversity than for the benefit of individuals. Yale probably gives preference to applicants from Montana or Mauritania over those form Manhattan. (Yale also might give preference to a power forward if the team this year is short of guys who can work the low post.) The purpose of this admissions policy is not to benefit Montanans (or power forwards) but to provide other students with the experience of living with a diversity of people (and to provide the basketball team with the right diversity of skills).
That same goal of demographic diversity does not apply to the competitive teams or the glee club or orchestra for that matter because those groups have a much more narrowly defined task. It’s that difference in purpose, rather than the difference in which race gets helped, that underlies the responses in the video. Take those same liberal students who support admissions policies that bring more blacks to campus; ask then if they would also support race-based preferences to get more blacks into crew, the glee club, or the chess team. I’m sure they would say no. As in the actual video, they would probably be unable to explain why giving preference to African Americans is acceptable in admissions but not acceptable in activities.
They’ll say that the two are different, even though they can’t immediately explain why. Does that make them hypocrites, natural or un-?
The next time someone shoves a microphone in your face and asks for a justification for some distinction you make, smile at the camera and say, “As Michael Polanyi wrote in The Tacit Dimension, ‘we know more than we can tell,’ an insight that Richard Nisbett later developed with much social science evidence in his book Knowing More than We Can Tell.” See if you make it into the YouTube clip, or into Robin Hanson’s blog.**
*I had assumed that the petitioner and his camera people were students at Merced. But in this new video, he’s at UCR.
** As with the previous video, Robin Hanson, on whose blog Overcoming Bias I found both, files the students’ attitudes in the folder marked “natural hypocrisy.”
Fooled Again
June 21, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a 40-year-old married American man living in Edinburgh.
Six weeks ago, I posted something about values as legitimations. The post was an analysis of an incident recounted by “Amina Arraf” who blogged as A Gay Girl in Damascus. Thuggish government agents come to arrest her. Her father intervenes and persuades them to leave.
A week ago Gay Girl was exposed as a hoax.* The blog was the creation of one Tom MacMaster, who quite
possibly has never set foot inside Syria and who was blogging from Scotland. (Gawker’s report of the story is here.)
I take some comfort in knowing that many others were taken in. And sociologists much wiser and more distinguished than I have analyzed scenes from fiction and used them to illustrate sociological ideas. Of course, they knew that their source material was fiction.
I should get on my knees and pray that I don’t get fooled again. But I probably will.
*I missed the exposing of the hoax and would have remained ignorant of the truth were it not for Dan Ryan’s post in his blog Sociology of Information.
Posted by Jay Livingston
On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a 40-year-old married American man living in Edinburgh.
Six weeks ago, I posted something about values as legitimations. The post was an analysis of an incident recounted by “Amina Arraf” who blogged as A Gay Girl in Damascus. Thuggish government agents come to arrest her. Her father intervenes and persuades them to leave.
A week ago Gay Girl was exposed as a hoax.* The blog was the creation of one Tom MacMaster, who quite
possibly has never set foot inside Syria and who was blogging from Scotland. (Gawker’s report of the story is here.)I take some comfort in knowing that many others were taken in. And sociologists much wiser and more distinguished than I have analyzed scenes from fiction and used them to illustrate sociological ideas. Of course, they knew that their source material was fiction.
I should get on my knees and pray that I don’t get fooled again. But I probably will.
*I missed the exposing of the hoax and would have remained ignorant of the truth were it not for Dan Ryan’s post in his blog Sociology of Information.
Misunderestimating
June 21, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
There it was again, this time in a report from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee quoted today without linguistic comment by David Brooks:
When I first mentioned this logical error (here), I hadn’t realized how prevalent it was. Today, Googling “cannot be underestimated” returns 2,070,000 pages, and I would guess that at least 2 million of them are like the one Brooks quotes.
A couple of those pages, though, are from Language Loggers, who have two explanations.* One is that the speaker means to say “should not be underestimated” rather than “cannot be underestimated.” Nice try, but it seems unlikely that people are thinking “should not” but saying “cannot.” Is there any other linguistic context in which people frequently confuse those two phrases? Offhand, I cannot think of any (or do I mean, I should not think of any?).
More likely is our inability to grasp multiple negatives. Putting things in the positive makes them much easier to understand. A simple single negative is also clear. But, beyond that, as I remember from algebra and multiplying polynomials, keeping track of those minus signs gets tricky. Sentences, especially in a government report, should not be written so that nobody can fail to misunderstand them.
That still leaves unanswered the question as to why we so often prefer to phrase things in the negative. As I said in that earlier post, I especially try to avoid negative phrasing when I’m writing True-False and multiple-choice test items. It’s unfair to students to require them to answer False when that means negating a negative
Brooks’s column, as you might guess, was about the contrary effects of all the money the US is now spending in Afghanistan. Did Brooks also, in the Bush-Cheney years, write about the unintended consequences of the billions spent in Iraq? The number of his columns on that topic cannot be underestimated.
-------------------
* Ben Zimmer summarized these earlier this year in his New York Times Magazine language column (here).
Posted by Jay Livingston
There it was again, this time in a report from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee quoted today without linguistic comment by David Brooks:
The unintended consequences of pumping large amounts of money into a war zone cannot be underestimated. [emphasis added]Usually I know what the writer means, but this time I had to go back and reread Brooks’s column up to that sentence. Yes, the committee meant the opposite of what it was literally saying. Literally, the sentence means that even if you think that there are zero unintended consequences, that’s still not an underestimate. No matter how low the estimate, you still cannot underestimate.
When I first mentioned this logical error (here), I hadn’t realized how prevalent it was. Today, Googling “cannot be underestimated” returns 2,070,000 pages, and I would guess that at least 2 million of them are like the one Brooks quotes.
A couple of those pages, though, are from Language Loggers, who have two explanations.* One is that the speaker means to say “should not be underestimated” rather than “cannot be underestimated.” Nice try, but it seems unlikely that people are thinking “should not” but saying “cannot.” Is there any other linguistic context in which people frequently confuse those two phrases? Offhand, I cannot think of any (or do I mean, I should not think of any?).
More likely is our inability to grasp multiple negatives. Putting things in the positive makes them much easier to understand. A simple single negative is also clear. But, beyond that, as I remember from algebra and multiplying polynomials, keeping track of those minus signs gets tricky. Sentences, especially in a government report, should not be written so that nobody can fail to misunderstand them.
That still leaves unanswered the question as to why we so often prefer to phrase things in the negative. As I said in that earlier post, I especially try to avoid negative phrasing when I’m writing True-False and multiple-choice test items. It’s unfair to students to require them to answer False when that means negating a negative
Brooks’s column, as you might guess, was about the contrary effects of all the money the US is now spending in Afghanistan. Did Brooks also, in the Bush-Cheney years, write about the unintended consequences of the billions spent in Iraq? The number of his columns on that topic cannot be underestimated.
-------------------
* Ben Zimmer summarized these earlier this year in his New York Times Magazine language column (here).
Corporate Altruism?
June 20, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
I do not have a very sophisticated theory of the firm. I have never taken a business course, and, I must confess, I have never read Ronald Coase.* But I wonder how sophisticated a theory of the firm we need to be skeptical when corporations lobby for huge tax breaks saying that these will allow them to create jobs. Which is what they are doing. Corporations are asking us to buy a theory of corporate altruism.
US-based companies have bales of cash profits overseas, and they are now asking for huge tax breaks to “repatriate” all that glorious black ink. They will use it, they say, to create jobs here in the US.
We’ve been here before, so I guess you could classify this under “Fool me once . . . .” A front page article in the Times today (here), gives the details. In 2005, as part of the “American Job Creation Act,” the Bushies gave US corporations a similar “repatriation holiday” (yes, that’s what it’s called). And oh what a holiday celebration there was.
A few years later, something similar happened in the bank bailout. The government gave the banks a ton of money with few strings attached. The bankers, rather than sending that money into the economy, used it first to shore up their own balance sheets and bonuses. (“Fool me once again. . . .”) Senators held hearings to register their shock and dismay at the bankers’ priorities and low level of altruism. And now, three years later, some of our lawmakers like Rep. Brady (quoted above) are still pushing that good old theory of corporate altruism.
* I’m not even sure how to pronounce his name.
Posted by Jay Livingston
I do not have a very sophisticated theory of the firm. I have never taken a business course, and, I must confess, I have never read Ronald Coase.* But I wonder how sophisticated a theory of the firm we need to be skeptical when corporations lobby for huge tax breaks saying that these will allow them to create jobs. Which is what they are doing. Corporations are asking us to buy a theory of corporate altruism.
US-based companies have bales of cash profits overseas, and they are now asking for huge tax breaks to “repatriate” all that glorious black ink. They will use it, they say, to create jobs here in the US.
Corporations and their lobbyists say the tax break could resuscitate the gasping recovery by inducing multinational corporations to inject $1 trillion or more into the economy, and they promoted the proposal as "the next stimulus" at a conference Wednesday in Washington, D.C.Really? How about this theory: Corporations are not in business to create jobs. They are in business to make money – money for the people who own the shares and money for the executives who run the show (and often own a hefty sackful of those shares or options). If they have to create jobs to do that, fine. But if they can do that without spending money creating jobs, even better.
"This is about creating jobs, expanding U.S. businesses and strengthening American companies," said Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, who introduced such a measure this spring.
We’ve been here before, so I guess you could classify this under “Fool me once . . . .” A front page article in the Times today (here), gives the details. In 2005, as part of the “American Job Creation Act,” the Bushies gave US corporations a similar “repatriation holiday” (yes, that’s what it’s called). And oh what a holiday celebration there was.
While the tax break lured 800 companies into bringing $312 billion back to the United States, 92 percent of that was used for dividends and stock buybacks, according to the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research. The study concluded the program "did not increase domestic investment, employment or research and development."Shareholders and executives made out very well, thank you. But none of those ex-pat dollars went to employee wages or to hiring. Some companies actually cut jobs.
The law forbade the use of repatriated funds directly for executive compensation or stock buybacks, but companies found plenty of ways around it. "Fungibility is one of my favorite words," [said Jay Schwartz, who in 2005 was head of Merck's international tax department].
A few years later, something similar happened in the bank bailout. The government gave the banks a ton of money with few strings attached. The bankers, rather than sending that money into the economy, used it first to shore up their own balance sheets and bonuses. (“Fool me once again. . . .”) Senators held hearings to register their shock and dismay at the bankers’ priorities and low level of altruism. And now, three years later, some of our lawmakers like Rep. Brady (quoted above) are still pushing that good old theory of corporate altruism.
* I’m not even sure how to pronounce his name.
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