The Social Journalist

August 22, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Henry Tischler, sociologist and a friend of mine, took this picture at the Aspen Ideas Festival  last month – a gathering of hundreds of heavy hitters, many you haven’t heard of , many you have.  (No, Henry was not on the program.)

David Brooks (on the right) having breakfast with Alan Greenspan.

When Henry showed me the photo, I thought of what I.F. Stone once said.

Once the secretary of state invites you to lunch and asks your opinion, you’re sunk.

I.F. Stone was the classic outsider journalist.  He had no inside sources.  Nobody, Democrat or Republican, was leaking ideas or information to him.  Instead, he relied on official government information – documents, Congressional testimony – and on press reports to find out what was really going on. 

Stone didn’t have to worry about offending people.  He didn’t have to worry about being played by important people in government.   He didn’t have to worry that his relationships with the people he wrote about were influencing what he wrote and what he thought.*

David Brooks is a journalist who talks regularly to politicians and FED chairmen.  He sees them at dinner parties and at breakfasts in the Rockies.  Does that affect how tough he is on them in print?  Here’s the opening of a Brooks column of a week ago.

Very few people have the luxury of being freely obnoxious. Most people have to watch what they say for fear of offending their bosses and colleagues. Others resist saying anything that might make them unpopular. 

But, in every society, there are a few rare souls who rise above subservience, insecurity and concern. Each morning they take their own abrasive urges out for parade. 

The rest of the column is about Donald Trump.  But Jonathan Chait at The New Republic  thinks that this opening is really how Brooks feels about his colleague Paul Krugman.  Regardless of who is in that obnoxious “very few people” category (Trump, Krugman, whoever), it seems clear that Brooks counts himself among “most people” –  the ones who have to fear offending both their colleagues and those with more power, the ones who can’t afford to be unpopular.  (Brooks was at Aspen to talk about his book The Social Animal.)

Does Brooks’s sociability affect how he writes about newsmakers?  Guess who wrote the following: 

Alan Greenspan continues his efforts to cement his reputation as the worst ex-Fed chairman in history. 

(Hint: it’s not Donald Trump.  Answer here.)

In fact, the only Brooks mention of Greenspan I could find in a quick Google search was a column suggesting that Greenspan might have had some “misperception,” but hey, as Brooks explains, we all make perceptual errors.  You can’t blame a guy for being human.

I haven’t read The Social Animal, but I would expect that Brooks discusses how our perceptions and judgments can be influenced by our social ties to others.  Or maybe not.


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 * Stone’s independence was a virtue born of necessity.  He was a radical, a socialist.  In the fifties, amid the anti-communism phobia, nobody in Washington would be seen with him.   He could never question them directly.  The Sunday morning shows like “Meet the Press” no longer put him on their panels.

Civility and Weaponry

August 20, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

I concluded the previous post by asking for civility from commenters.  Instead, I got the all too familiar belligerence (“if you dared to tell the truth,” “Instead of ‘thinking’ why not actually do some research, eh.” “Shoddy research, insinuations and obvious bias.”). 

I said I would delete comments that violate common norms of civility.  Any maybe I should have done that and moved on.  But I’m responding and letting the comment stand  just because it’s so fucking stupid  because it includes two relevant facts:

• The UK has a higher rate of violent crime than does the US
• Chicago has a high murder rate because of the many gang-related killings.

These both support the idea that more guns make for more murder. 

On the first point: Start from the essential fact that the murder rate in the UK is a fraction of the US murder rate.  That might be because the British are just a less violent society.  But no.  According to the commenter the UK is more violent, not less (I’ll accept his assertion, though I haven’t checked the data).  How can Britain be more violent and yet have less murder?  The obvious answer is that their violence is not lethal, and it’s not lethal because the weapons they have at hand are less deadly. The British are concerned about knives – knives, not guns –  presumably because guns are not so prevalent and hence not so much a problem.

On the second:  The Christian Science Monitor quote provided by the commenter says,  

Chicago's gang problem is greater than that in either New York City or Los Angeles, according to Philip Cook . . . . 81 percent of [Chicago] homicides in the first seven months of this year were gang-related, which Mr. Cook says confirms his research that despite policing efforts, gun access is flourishing among Chicago’s gangs.

As I said in my original post, US cities, even those with a thinner gang presence than Chicago, have higher murder rates than London.  Los Angeles, the city mentioned in contrast to gang-ridden Chicago, has a population half that of London.  Yet it had more than four times as many teen murders from guns alone, making its rate of teen murder nearly ten times that of London.

Also, note why, according to Philip Cook, a gang problem makes for higher murder rates:

gun access is flourishing among Chicago's gangs

New York has a lower rate of teen homicide because it has less of a gang problem.  Cook’s argument is

•     Less gangs, less guns
•     Less guns, less teen homicide

I don’t know why the Second Amendment boys get so annoyed when someone points out that guns are far more powerful and deadly than other weapons.  If they weren’t, why would it be so important to preserve the absolute right to have them? Try telling the NRA members that they could just as easily defend themselves and their property, and protect their families if they armed themselves with knives or baseball bats. You would be greeted with anger and derision. And rightly so. The idea is preposterous. 

The gunslingers are arguing that guns in the hands of someone with good intentions make it easier for him to achieve good ends (all that defending and protecting).  But it’s equally true, probably more so, that guns in the hands of a person with bad intentions make it easier and more likely for him to achieve bad ends. Like murder. 

That was my point in the original post. The London chavs and other blokes may be as numerous and vicious as the nasty youths in our cities, maybe more so.  But they don’t have guns.  Therefore, London has a much lower rate of teen homicide.

Knives Out

August 17, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

The London riots have provided tasty fodder for the “Broken Britain” crowd – the conservatives and right-wing tabloids that have been wringing their hands about the social and moral decay they see in the UK. For them, the riots are a delicious “see I told you so” moment.

A British publication, The Prospect, recently ran a long and calm assessment, and generally concluded that Britain is not broken. But it was this paragraph that caught my attention.

Consider violent youth crime, one of the hot-button issues of recent years. No one doubts that there is a serious problem in some parts of the country. Teenage killings in London have risen from 15 in 2006 to 27 in 2007, and stood at 21 halfway through 2008. But to read the Daily Mail, one of the government’s chief tormentors, is to encounter a Britain apparently on the brink of bloody collapse. Take this lurid piece, from 20th July: “A few nights ago, as an 18-year-old stab victim lay in a pool of blood awaiting his statistical turn to become the 21st teenager to die violently in the streets of London this year, we learned that crime statistics are dropping dramatically. All is well. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, while concerned that ‘knives are still being used,’ is best pleased. As well she might be, for the figures are the creation of none other than the British Crime Survey, itself a creation of Jacqui’s home office. If the British Crime Survey sounds like a vast analytical laboratory stuffed with academics in some ivy-clad university city, that is the whole idea.”* [emphasis added]

Knives?? They’re worried about kids with knives? Indeed they are. The article later mentions, “the fear spread by high-visibility ‘signal’ crimes, like knife crime in London.” And a year ago,The Guardian had an article called, “Can the fight against teenage knife crime be won?”

In America, we worry (some of us do) about kids with guns, serious guns. If we’re old enough, we think with nostalgia of the good old days when the authorities and tabloids were sounding the alarm about teenagers with switchblades and zip guns and greasy hair. Or even a decade or so later, when the scourge was the Saturday Night Special, a handgun whose reliability, accuracy, and deadliness are laughable by today’s standards.

A knife or a 9 mm – does the choice of weapon make a difference? Not if you believe that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” A killer will kill, regardless of the weaponry available. On the other hand, look at the numbers. Twenty-one teen murders in London in the first half of 2008. Suppose the trend continued and London had 40 teen murders for the year. Chicago’s population is less than half that of London; in 2006 it had 150 teen homicides from guns alone (I don’t know how many homicides from knives or other weapons, but it was surely far fewer). Houston, with a population less than one-third of London’s, had 89 gun homicides by teens. (More CDC data here.)

Are our kids so much more bloodthirsty than the London chavs? Or is it that the availability of guns makes teen nastiness more lethal here in the land of the free? New York, with a population about the same as London’s, had “only” 100 teen gun murders – a rate two-and-a-half times that of London but well below that of Chicago, Houston, LA, and other large US cities. I’d like to think that our New York teenagers are three times nicer than youths in those other cities, but I suspect that NYC’s relatively low teen murder rate has much less to do with the general level of teenage civility and propriety in the Big Apple and more to do with the NYPD making it much harder for kids to obtain guns and carry them on the streets.

P.S. A blogger friend once told me that sometimes when he’s feeling lonely and ignored, he’ll put up a post about guns, knowing that it’s sure to bring large numbers of people to his blog. Of course, they are mostly hard core NRA types, and they burst in, many of them, with both barrels blazing. I speak from experience. So a word to you gunslingers and other potential commenters: use your indoor voices; otherwise, I will delete your comment.

* Note how the Daily Mail, in good know-nothing fashion denigrating analysis and research, dismisses the evidence from the British Crime Survey.  The BCS is probably most accurate measure of crime in the UK.

Echoes of Everett Hughes on NPR

August 16, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

You probably didn’t hear Everett Hughes on “Fresh Air” recently. I did.

Hughes himself, regrettably, was not Terry Gross’s guest. That was Melissa Febos, ex-dominatrix, now English professor. Neither she nor Terry Gross mentioned Hughes by name. But Febos was talking about her work as a dominatrix – a four-year stint she did in her early twenties. (The paperback of her memoir Whip Smart has just been released, and this was a rebroadcast of an interview originally aired when the book first came out.) Much of the show sounded like material for Hughes's course on the sociology of work and professions.

In 1951, Hughes wrote that if you want to study the world of work, you can “learn about doctors by studying plumbers, and about prostitutes by studying psychiatrists.”

Sixty years later, Terry Gross said to her ex-dominatrix guest,

This is one of those jobs . . . probably a lot of people in the medical industry have this kind of experience, or maybe even people in sports, too. But you work very, very closely with human bodies in a way that most people don't.

A bit later in the interview there was this exchange:

GROSS: You know, I was thinking for some of the clients, it was probably not unlike going to a doctor or a therapist, in a way, because you've got this secret life, this secret part of you that you can't share with anybody. So you go to a paid professional and reveal it to them, whether that secret thing - I mean, in a doctor's office, that secret thing might be a, you know, a growth or, you know, something happening in a private part of your body.
. . . .
FEBOS: I was actually surprised, after I started working, at how sort of perfunctory a lot of people were about it. It was like their weekly checkup or their weekly session with their therapist, and it was just a built-in part of these men's lives. And to a lot of them, it was just as essential as a checkup with a doctor, or a session with a therapist.

(The full transcript is here.)

As Gross and Febos were talking, I was also hearing Everett Hughes and that bit of wisdom from the opening sentence of “Mistakes at Work.” That topic (mistakes) did not come up in the interview. Too bad.