The Big Shill

October 25, 2011

Posted by Jay Livingston

Jay Smooth, posted a rap (here) with an outstanding analogy.  The media, he says, in its reaction to Occupy Wall Street, is like the shill in the three-card monte game. (Mr. Smooth did not name names, but you get the sense he watches a lot of Fox.)

The ringer’s* job is to pretend they’re an objective outside observer commenting on the game when they’re actually part of the hustle who’s there to help bamboozle the public into thinking this game is legitimate.

Like this other Jay, I too used to watch the 3-card-monte teams in Times Square back in the 80s. 
I liked listening to the dealers’ rhythmic, rhyming rap, and I admired the sleight-of-hand. (The basic move is very simple, but sometimes you’d see a truly skillful dealer who could work the bent-corner variation.) 

Mostly, I took a Goffman-esque delight in watching the game, seeing how each person played his role, creating the illusion that the game was honest and winnable, trying to manipulate potential marks using no weapon except self-presentation. Even when a knowing mark did pick the right card, the team had a ruse to avoid the loss while still keeping the appearance of an honest game. The shill would jump in with a $40 bet on a different card, and the dealer would turn that card up, collect the shill’s money and push the mark’s $20 back. “Sorry, only one bet per shuffle.”

It always seemed obvious to me who the shills were. They looked like the dealer (both were usually black in the sea of mostly white tourists) and dressed like the dealer, and they seemed utterly unfazed when they lost a twenty or two on what to the onlookers was obviously the wrong card. Even the occasional white shill (a “salt and pepper” team), with scruffy appearance and clothing, looked less like the passers-by and more like the dealer.

One afternoon as I was walking in Times Square, I saw a young man standing at a 3-card-monte table.** He looked like a preppy college kid from central casting – blonde hair, white polo shirt, green cotton cable-knit sweater knotted loosely over his shoulders. He had reached in his pocket and was fingering a $20, about to make a bet. I don’t know why I suddenly felt protective – maybe I didn’t want our tourists to dislike the city – but I moved up just behind him and said quietly, “If it was as easy as it looks, do you think he’d be here?”

The kid said nothing. He watched as the dealer tossed the cards (“the red, you’re ahead, the black’ll set you back”) and when the dealer stopped (“who saw it – just like that”), the kid put his $20 down. Hadn’t he heard me?

The dealer turned over the queen of hearts and put his $20 on top of it. (“I don’t get mad when I lose, I just grin when I win”), and the kid stayed to play again. And again.

Now that, I thought, is a shill.

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* Jay Smooth calls this role the “ringer.” I was brought up to call it the shill. Academic journal write-ups of psych experiments back in the day, the pre-IRB day, referred to them as “confederates of the experimenter.” Makes it sound more legitimate, don’t you think? But the deceptions of those psych profs would have left the 3-card monte guys drooling with envy and eager to learn.

** The “table” was a flattened cardboard box resting on another cardboard box – easily kicked down and left behind if the cops came by.

(The photo is borrowed from Ephemeral New York)

Dictatorships Are People, My Friend*

October 23, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

We usually think of a dictatorship as a ship run by dictator – a strongman, a tyrant who has absolute power and can do anything he likes to anyone he doesn’t like.  True, but it’s important to remember that dictatorship is not just a matter of personality.  It is also a structure.  Even a Saddam or a Khaddafi doesn’t do it all by himself.  To carry out his directives, he needs other people in other organizations – a coalition of the willing.  These usually include the military, but there may also be economic organizations, bureaucracies, and other groups whose strength the “strong man” needs.  He has to make sure that they remain willing.

Any dictator worth his salt tries to minimize the power of these groups and to arrogate as much power as he can to himself and his family. Often, that is not possible, and the dictator must allow these others wealth and power in return for their loyalty. But even when it’s all in the family, he has to keep the family happy.  Unhappy families are all alike – they can dissolve into conflict and even treachery. 

This is one of the messages of The Dictator’s Handbook  by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith.

Now, for those who are preoccupied with Wall Street, with its huge salaries and bonuses despite financial failure, Joshua Tucker at The Monkey Cage , extracts the money quote from The Handbook. 

In terms of the political organization of businesses, large publically [sic] traded companies most closely resemble rigged election autocracies. There are typically millions of people – shareholders – with a nominal say in the choice of chief executive. But in reality the decision to retain a leader comes down to the choices of senior executives, board members and possibly a few large institutional investors.  No executive lasts long if he does not keep this small group happy, which is why such insiders receive large bonuses and rewards even as the organization fails.

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* Most readers will recognize the allusion in the title of this post.  For those who don’t follow the GOP all that closely, the reference is here.

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.