False Equivalence

September 22, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross posted at Sociological Images)

Do Democrats and Republicans have a similar lack of respect for science?  Alex Berezow seems to think so.  The title of his op-ed in USA Today  is “GOP might be anti-science, but so are Democrats.”

I hope that others will point out the false equivalence.  For evidence of  Democrats’ anti-science, Berezow cites mostly fringe groups like PETA, which objects to scientific research on animals, and fringe issues like vaccination.  According to Berezow, many people who oppose vaccination are Democrats.  True perhaps, but these positions are held by only a small minority of Democratic voters.  And neither of these positions has been espoused by any of the party leaders.* 

Compare that to Republican anti-science.  Most of the leading GOP presidential hopefuls, now and in the previous election, have voiced their skepticism on evolution and global warming.  Only Huntsman and Romney have hinted that they agree with the near–unanimous opinions of scientists in these fields. 

Maybe the candidates take these anti-science positions because the people whose votes they want – the GOP faithful – also reject the scientific consensus.

Here are the results of a recent Gallup poll   that asked which position  “Comes closest to your views.”

• God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10 000 years or so
• Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process
• Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process

Half of all Republicans think that humans have been around for only 10,000 years.

The Republican base is also much more dubious about global warming than are Democrats.

The graph goes only to 2008, and beliefs about global warming since then Americans’ have become somewhat more skeptical about the issue, but I am certain that Republicans are still well above Democrats on the chart.

As for the anti-vaccine crowd, Berezow sees them as mostly Prius-driving, organic-vegan liberals.    Maybe so.  I have a scientist friend whose son runs an organic food co-op, and she is furious at his decision not to have his kids (her grandchildren) vaccinated.  (FWIW, she drives a Prius.)  But is there more systematic evidence of this liberal/anti-vaccine connection?  Here’s Berezow’s proof.

a public health official once noted that rates of vaccine non-compliance tend to be higher in places where Whole Foods is popular — and 89% of Whole Foods stores are located in counties that favored Barack Obama in 2008. . . . . With the exception of Alaska, the states with the highest rates of vaccine refusal for kindergarteners are Washington, Vermont and Oregon — three of the most progressive states in the country.

Areas with Whole Foods have both more vaccine skeptics and more Obama voters.  The thread of the logic is a bit thin (how big a difference is “tends to be higher”?), and it runs the risk of the ecological fallacy.  But it sounded right to me – my friend’s son lives in Vermont – and 75% (three states out of four) is pretty impressive evidence.

But there are 46 other states plus DC, and I wondered if they too followed the pattern.   So I looked up the CDC data on the  percentages of vaccination refusal for non-medical reasons in each state (here).  I also got data on how Democratic the state was – the margin of victory or loss for Obama in 2008.** 

Sure enough, the top three – Washington, Vermont, and Oregon – are all on the Obama side of the line, though it’s worth noting that in Washington, vaccine exemption was as common in the conservative eastern part of the state (near Idaho, which also has a high exemption rate and was strongly for McCain) as it was in the more liberal western counties.   And of the states with 3% or more taking non-medical exemptions from vaccination, eight were for Obama, four for McCain. But overall, the correlation (r = 0.12) is not overwhelming.   And even in the most anti-vaccine, pro-Whole Foods states like Washington and Vermont, nearly 95% of parent s had their kindergartners vaccinated.  That’s hardly convincing evidence that Democrats are anti-science.   Compare that with the 50% of Republicans (and 75% of their presidential hopefuls) who think evolution is a hoax or at best “just a theory.”

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*Berezow notes that seven Democratic senators (and one Republican) wrote a letter to the FDA “threatening to halt approval of a genetically modified salmon.”  But he implies that their position had more to do with money than anti-science.  They were from the salmony Northwest, while the company seeking approval is in Massachusetts.

** The CDC had no data for Arizona, Colorado, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Wyoming.

Bloggiversary

September 20, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Well, says the CarTalk-like voice in my head, it’s happened again – you’ve wasted another perfectly good year blogging.  Another 180+ posts.  (Five years, 830+ posts in all.)  Here’s a selection of ten from this year that I liked.  They are not necessarily the most astute or the most sociological; my criteria for choosing them, as nearly as I can tell, were inconsistent and idiosyncratic.

Pleasant Surprises (Oct. 18) The unplanned crossing of paths and cultures that can happen in cities.

Blockheads  Oct. 12) Mostly because I’m twitting (no, not tweeting) a Very Big Economist.

The Sneakiest Sneak  (Dec. 16) Applied Goffman.

Onward Christian Soldiers   (Nov. 20) No more Medals of Honor for killing.

Mom and Apple Pie Sesame Noodles   (Jan 17) The “Tiger Mom.”


Hard Work and Its Rewards  (Jan 24) The work ethic and American values.

Iyengar Management  (April 14)  Mostly for the pun in the title, but also the similarities and differences in the two video clips.

Overcoming Social Desirability Bias  (April 19) Mostly for the G&S parody.  The post is about methodology.
 
Compulsory Fun   April 24  A foreigner sees taken-for-granted, unnoticed aspects of American culture.

That Uncertain Feeling  (September 5) My one post that went viral (well, a modified, limited virus), getting mentioned in blogs and tweets by real political scientists and economists.  And Andrew Sullivan.

It Didn’t Stay in Vegas

September 19, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Everett Hughes cautioned that the worst sin for a sociologist was snobbery.   I think he meant not just cultural snobbery, but moral snobbery as well.

The next generation – Becker, Goffman, Gans, and others – similarly showed how our understanding suffers when we turn observation into a primarily moral enterprise.   As researchers, especially as ethnographers, we’re better off bracketing our aesthetic and moral judgments. 

As has been repeatedly shown in the study of non-literate societies, the awesomeness, distastefulness, and barbarity of a foreign culture can decrease to the degree that the student becomes familiar with the point of view to life that is taken by his subjects.  (Goffman, Asylums)

So here’s grad student Colby King back in South Carolina fretting publicly at Everyday Sociology over what happened in Vegas.  He’s concerned that his instincts as a sociologist – to become familiar with the point of view of people in Vegas– were politically correct.  At the ASA meetings in Las Vegas, Colby went out to talk to people. 

I began a conversation with one of the gentlemen wearing a shirt and passing out cards. I asked him about his work, and then when I felt I had established some rapport, I asked him if it would be possible to purchase a shirt like his. He smiled, sat down his cards, reached into a bag, and pulled out a t-shirt that just like the one he was wearing.

Some of my peers have admonished me for this action. They have underscored the point that I could not have done anything to appear more like a privileged white male than to ask a man working on a street corner for the shirt off of his back. I have also realized that by buying the shirt from him I was in some small way endorsing the industry in which he works, thereby furthering in the exploitation of workers like him and the women advertised on the shirt. I even worried about admitting I had purchased the shirt, afraid that such an action would be perceived as unprofessional.

This sort of Puritanism – constant examination of oneself and others for any sign of sin or deviation from correctness  – is not likely to endear the researcher to those he or she is studying.  (The title of the Las Vegas Sun article – “To the sociologists: If you don’t like Vegas, don’t come back” – succinctly summarizes this reaction.  The whole article is worth reading.)  Worse, that view often comes at the expense of seeing the reality lived by the people.  I think it was Becker who said something like, “We want the people we study to be able to see themselves in what we write about them.”

I wonder how Hughes, the son of a Methodist minister, would have reacted if Colby were his student.

Chart Art - FBI-Style

September 17, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross-posted at Sociological Images.)

The FBI is teaching its counter-terrorism agents that Islam is an inherently violent religion.  So are the followers of Islam.  Not just the extremists and radicals, but the mainstream. 

There may not be a ‘radical’ threat as much as it is simply a normal assertion of the orthodox ideology. . . .The strategic themes animating these Islamic values are not fringe; they are main stream.

Wired  got hold of the training materials.  The Times has more today, including a section of the report that describes Muhammad as “a cult leader for a small inner circle.” (How small? Twelve perhaps?)  He also “employed torture to extract information.”*

An FBI PowerPoint slide has a graph with the data to support its assertions.


The graph clearly shows that followers of the Torah and the Bible have gotten progressively less violent since 1400 BC, while followers of the Koran flatline starting around 620 AD and remain just as violent as ever.

Unfortunately, the creators of the chart do not say how they operationalized “violent” and “non-violent.”  But since the title of the presentation is “Militancy Considerations,” it might have something to do with military, para-military, and quasi-military violence.  When it comes to quantities of death, destruction, and injury, these overwhelm other types of violence. 

I must confess that my knowledge of history is sadly wanting, and I was educated before liberals imposed all this global, multicultural nonsense on schools, so I know nothing about wars that might have happened among Muslims during the period in question.  What I was taught was that the really big wars, the important wars, the wars that killed the most people, were mostly affairs among followers of the Bible.  Some of these were so big that they were called “World Wars” even though followers of the Qur’an had very low levels of participation.  Some of these wars lasted quite a long time – thirty years, a hundred years.  I was also taught that in the important violence that did involve Muslims – i.e., the Crusades** – it was the followers of the Bible who were doing most of the killing. 

Perhaps those with a more knowledge of Muslim militant violence can provide the data.


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* To be fair, the FBI seems to have been innocent of any of the torture that took place during the Bush years.  That was all done by the military and the CIA – and by the non-Christian governments to which the Bush administration outsourced the work. 

** Followers of the Bible crusading to “take back our city” from a Muslim-led regime may have familiar overtones.