Lessons in Journalism

October 21, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Ah, the New York Post.  Some years ago, I said here that regardless of the actual content of the front page headline, the subtext is almost always the same.

This morning, the Post was playing off the old journalistic cliche: Go for the local angle.  While stuffy papers like the Times and the Wall Street Journal reported the death of Khadafy as an international story, the Post nailed the real import of the event for us New Yorkers.

If Your Survey Doesn’t Find What You Want It to Find . . .

October 19, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston(Cross posted at Sociological Images)


. . . say that it did.

Doug Schoen is a pollster who wants the Democrats to distance themselves from the Occupy Wall Street protesters.   (Schoen is Mayor Bloomberg’s pollster.  He has also worked for Bill Clinton.)  In The Wall Street Journal yesterday (here),  he reported on a survey done by a researcher at his firm.  She interviewed 200 of the protesters in Zucotti Park.

Here is Schoen’s overall take:

What binds a large majority of the protesters together—regardless of age, socioeconomic status or education—is a deep commitment to left-wing policies: opposition to free-market capitalism and support for radical redistribution of wealth, intense regulation of the private sector, and protectionist policies to keep American jobs from going overseas.

I suppose it’s nitpicking to point out that the survey did not ask about SES or education.  Even if it had, breaking the 200 respondents down into these categories would give numbers too small for comparison. 

More to the point, that “large majority” opposed to free-market capitalism is 4% – eight of the people interviewed.  Another eight said they wanted “radical redistribution of wealth.”  So at most, 16 people, 8%, mentioned these goals.  (The full results of the survey are available here.)

What would you like to see the Occupy Wall Street movement achieve? {Open Ended}

35% Influence the Democratic Party the way the Tea Party has influenced the GOP
4% Radical redistribution of wealth 5% Overhaul of tax system: replace income tax with flat tax
7% Direct Democracy
9% Engage & mobilize Progressives 
9% Promote a national conversation
11% Break the two-party duopoly
4% Dissolution of our representative democracy/capitalist system  4% Single payer health care
4% Pull out of Afghanistan immediately 
8% Not sure

Schoen’s distortion reminded me of this photo that I took on Saturday (it was our semi-annual Sociology New York Walk, and Zucotti Park was our first stop).

The big poster in the foreground, the one that captures your attention, is radical militance – the waif from the “Les Mis” poster turned revolutionary.  But the specific points on the sign at the right are conventional liberal policies – the policies of the current Administration.*

There are other ways to misinterpret survey results.  Here is Schoen in the WSJ:

Sixty-five percent say that government has a moral responsibility to guarantee all citizens access to affordable health care, a college education, and a secure retirement—no matter the cost.

Here is the actual question:

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: Government has a moral responsibility to guarantee healthcare, college education, and a secure retirement for all.

“No matter the cost” is not in the question.  As careful survey researchers know, even slight changes in wording can affect responses.  And including or omitting “no matter the cost” is hardly a slight change.

As evidence for the extreme radicalism of the protestors, Schoen says,

By a large margin (77%-22%), they support raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans,

Schoen doesn’t bother to mention that this isn’t much different from what you’d find outside Zucotti Park.  Recent polls by Pew and Gallup find support for increased taxes on the wealthy ($250,000 or more) at 67%.  (Given the small sample size of the Zucotti poll, 67% may be within the margin of error.)  Gallup also finds the majorities of two-thirds or more think that banks, large corporations, and lobbyists have too much power. 

Thus Occupy Wall Street is a group of engaged progressives who are disillusioned with the capitalist system and have a distinct activist orientation. . . . .Half (52%) have participated in a political movement before.

That means that half the protesters were never politically active until Occupy Wall Street inspired them.

Reading Schoen, you get the impression that these are hard-core activists, old hands at political demonstrations, with Phil Ochs on their iPods and a well-thumbed copy of “The Manifesto” in their pockets.  In fact, the protesters were mostly young people with not much political experience who wanted to work within the system (i.e., with the Democratic party) to achieve fairly conventional goals, like keeping the financial industry from driving the economy into a ditch again.

And according to a recent Time survey, more than half of America views them favorably.

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* There were other signs with other messages.  In fact, sign-making seemed to be one of the major activities in Zucotti Park.  Some of them. like these, did not seem designed to get much play in the media. 

Sex, Society, and Spatial Ability

October 18, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross posted at Sociological Images

It’s the kind of finding to warm the hearts of us liberal, Larry-Summers-hating,  gender-egalitarians.  Summers – you saw him in “The Social Network” as the Harvard president who had no patience for the Winklevoss twins (he didn’t have much patience for Cornell West either and probably many other things) – suggested that the dearth of women in top science and engineering positions was caused not so much by social forces as by innate sex differences in math ability. (More here and many other places.)

As others were quick to point out, those differences are greater in societies with greater gender inequality.  That’s why the math gender gap in the US has become much narrower.  In societies with greater equality, like Sweden, Norway, and Israeli kibbutzim, the male-female gap in math disappears.* But even in those societies, males still score higher on spatial reasoning. 

I’m sure that evol-psych has some explanation for why male brains evolved to be more adept at spatial reasoning.  I’m equally sure that those who favor social explanations can find residual sexism even in Sweden to explain spatial differences.  That’s why a field experiment reported last summer is so interesting.

The research team (Moshe Hoffman and colleagues, link to pdf here) tested people from two tribes in northern India – the Karbi and the Khasi.  These had once been a single tribe but had split recently – a few hundred years ago.  (Recent is a relative term, and we’re talking evolution here.)  So they were similar economically (subsistence farming of rice) and genetically.

• The Karbi are patrilineal.  Only the men own property, and they pass that property to their sons.  Males get more education. 
• Khasi society is matrilineal.  Men turn their earnings over to their wives.  Only women own property, which is passed along only to daughters.  Males and females have similar levels of education.
  

Researchers went to four villages of each tribe, recruited subjects to solve this puzzle

They offered an additional 20 rupees if the subject could solve the puzzle in 30 seconds or less. 

In the patrilineal society, women were much slower to solve the puzzle than were men.  But among the matrilineal Khasi, the difference was negligible.

The results are encouraging, at least for those who argue for greater gender equality.  But I’m not sure how much weight to give this one study, mostly because of sample size.  Is the sample the 1300 villagers who worked the puzzle?  Or is it 1 – one inter-tribal comparison?

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* Even a small difference in the means will make for a large difference in who is represented in the tail of the distribution.  Imagine two groups with average height a half-inch apart – Group Blue 5' 10", Group Red 5' 10 ½". 

Pink shows overlap. 

If you’re picking a basketball team randomly (from the pink part of the distribution), you’ll probably wind up with as many Blues as Reds.  But if you’re choosing from among those few who are 6' 6" or taller, you’re going to have more Reds.

Summers was arguing not that there was a difference in the means but that the variation was greater among males.  That wider distribution as well would make for a preponderance of males in the upper reaches of the scale (and at the lower end).

Ground Zero - The Sacred and the Profane

October 14, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

What’s so infuriating about reading David Brooks is that sometimes he gets it right, but then in the next sentence, he’ll veer off in the wrong direction.  (Translation: Sometimes I agree with him, sometimes I disagree.)

Today (here) Brooks is writing about the rebuilding at Ground Zero and about Chris Ward, who was brought in to organize the whole project when it had become badly bogged down in conflict. 

Ward quickly understood his mission: to take a sacred cause and turn it into a building project. That is to say, to demystify it, to see it as it really is and not through the gauze of everybody’s emotions surrounding 9/11.

Ward’s approach, as Brooks says, was to  desacralize the mission, and Brooks picks out the detail that epitomizes this change

He changed the name of Freedom Tower to One World Trade Center.

But then Brooks tries to see Ground Zero as just one more example of a more general trend.

Maybe it’s part of living in a postmaterialist economy, but nearly every practical question becomes a values question. . . .  Many issues that were once concrete and practical are distorted because they have become symbolic and spiritual.

Tax policy, gun control, and Green Tech, says Brooks, all crumple under the weight of this symbolism.  Yes, these issues (he could have added health care to the list) can involve status politics, but it’s not at all clear how much the symbolism affects the actual policies.  Besides, Brooks gets the symbolism wrong.*

More important, Brooks closes his copy of Durkheim just when he should be turning to the next page.  Brooks ignores the structural problem.  The Ground Zero project inevitably comprises two functions – the sacred and the profane.** Like the buildings the terrorists destroyed, the new ones will be places where work, where they carry out the practical business of everyday life – buying and selling, making phone calls, entering and analyzing data.  But just because of its location, people will see the new structures as sacred. 

Usually, we separate these two realms.  We have sacred places and buildings whose only purpose is to enhance some group symbolism.  We do not ask our office buildings and  schools, stores and shopping malls, streets and parking lots, to express our collective spiritual ideas.  Nor do we ask that the Washington Monument and the Statue of Liberty do something useful like house the Department of Transportation or a Wal-Mart.

It’s hard enough to design a purely sacred monument – look at the controversies over memorials for Flight 93 and the Vietnam War dead.  Nor is it easy to design a huge complex of offices, parks, subways, etc. that works.  But to create something that carries out both functions to everyone’s satisfaction may be impossible. 
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*For example, Brooks says that gun policy is “seen as an assault on or defense of the whole rural lifestyle so to compromise on any front is to court dishonor.”  Doesn’t he listen to the gunslingers?  They’re not talking about lifestyles and dishonor. They’re talking about their individual freedom and safety.

** Profane in the sense of everyday and practical, not sacrilegious.