American Exceptionalism - The Cover Story

December 2, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

One of these covers is not like the others, though all are the Dec. 5 edition of Time.  (Hat tip to my colleague Sangeeta Parashar who found this image the OWS Facebook page.)

It reminded my of my third ever post to this blog in September 2006, showing covers of different editions Newsweek.

(Several other Websites and bloggers at the time – e.g., Kieran Healey at Crooked Timber  – had the same images.)

The covers illustrate one aspect of “American Exceptionalism.”  We are exceptionally uninterested in events outside our borders. Given a choice between hard news in some foreign land and lifestyle stories here in the US, gives happy young women, give us happy families, give us stories about how anxiety is good for us.

UPDATE: An off-blog comment noted that magazine covers affect mostly newsstand sales, not subscriptions.  So the comparison “is not between all Americans and all people in other parts of the world, but between those people who buy an English-language news magazine at a newsstand, airport bookstore, etc. in the U.S.  and those people in other countries who buy an English-language news magazine at a newsstand, airport bookstore, etc. in Europe, Asia, or Latin America.”

According to Wikipedia, Newsweek sells only about 40,000 newsstand copies compared with 1.5 million subscriptions.  (Both figures are substantially lower than they were a decade ago.)  The figures for Time are about double those of Newsweek, but the ratio of newsstand sales to subscriptions is about the same.

Casey Mulligan's Grapes

November 29, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Bloomberg reports (here) that the November increase in hiring – 120,000 jobs – will probably not affect the unemployment rate, which will remain at 9%.

Casey Mulligan, at the New York Times Economix blog, knows why unemployment is high: the safety net.

Government assistance programs have not only supported more people but become more generous, thanks to changes in benefit rules since 2007.
Of course, most people work hard despite a generous safety net, and 140 million people are still working today. But in a labor force as big as ours, it takes only a small fraction of people who react to a generous safety net by working less to create millions of unemployed. [emphasis added]

In February 2008, the official unemployment rate was 4.8% – about 7.4 million people.  By October 2009, the rate had more than doubled to 10.1% or more than 15 million unemployed people. 
 

Mulligan assures us that that in that 20-month period, “millions” of those newly-unemployed people decided that they preferred to live off government benefits rather than work. 

I had thought that the sharp increase in unemployment was caused by the crash set off by the bursting of the housing bubble, with its inflated house prices and dubious financial schemes based on those prices. Companies were laying off workers or going out of business entirely.  People didn’t lose their desire to work, they lost their jobs.

But what do I know? Mulligan is an economist at the prestigious University of Chicago, and presumably he has insight into the life-decisions of poor people. Still, I’m a bit puzzled because the official unemployment rate counts only those people who are looking for a job. So apparently they have chosen to live off government benefits and are lying when they say they are looking for work.  I guess you just can’t trust these people who aren’t working.

Mulligan’s solution to unemployment, consistent with his view of its cause, is to cut these overly generous benefits.

I suspect that employment cannot return to pre-recession levels until safety-net generosity does, too.

He’s talking mostly about the magnanimous $330 a week unemployment check, but he may also have in mind other programs like TAFN, food stamps, and the rest. 

(more after the break – or what should be a break if this new version of Blogger is working correctly)

In Other Words

November 28, 2011

Posted by Jay Livingston

From The Social Construction of Reality by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman

Reciprocal typifications of actions are built up in the course of a shared history. . . .

The habitualizations and typifications undertaken in the common life of A and B, formations that until this point still had the quality of ad hoc conceptions of two individuals, now become historical institutions. . . . This means that the institutions that have now been crystallized . . . are experiences as existing over and beyond the individuals who “happen to” embody them at the moment. In other words, the institutions are now experienced as possessing a reality of their own, a reality that confronts the individual as external and coercive fact.

From Collected Poems, by Philip Larkin

The daily things we do
For money or for fun
Can disappear like dew
Or harden and live on.
Strange reciprocity:
The circumstance we cause
In time gives rise to us,
Becomes our memory.

Thanksgiving — a Classroom Memory

November 24, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

If you become a teacher
By your pupils you’ll be taught
                                   — Oscar Hammerstein, “The King and I”

It was my Monday-Tuesday-Thursday criminology class, and the two guys, both tall and slightly overweight, always sat in the back row together. They weren’t the best students in the class, but I liked them because they were willing to get into the discussion, often with something that was both on-topic and funny. 

This was decades ago.  One day I was talking after class with one of them, and our conversation drifted to the topic of football and betting.  “George is incredible,” he said.  “Every Thursday he gives me a couple of teams for the weekend. He’s like nineteen and one. This guy’s paying my tuition.”

The next week was Thanksgiving, and on Tuesday, I ended class wishing the students all a good holiday. Then I said, “So George, what do you like this weekend?”

Without missing a beat, George leaned back, raised his index finger to indicate certainty, and said, “The Lions at home on Turkey Day.”

I can’t remember if the Lions won on the field, but I’m sure they covered.  I did not forget or ignore his words of wisdom, not that year, or the next, or the next.  As I said, this was decades ago.  In recent years you could have lost a lot of money following his advice. This year, the Packers are seemingly unstoppable.  They opened as 5½ or 6 point favorites and the line got bet up as high as 7 before settling down to 6 or 6½ this morning.  But the Lions are much improved team this year.

UPDATE:  The betting public must have been paying attention.  A lot of money came in on Detroit, and by game time the spread had dropped to 4½ or even 4.  It looked like a test for my skepticism about “wisdom of crowds” in sports betting (see an earlier blog post here with links to even earlier posts).  The crowd was on Detroit, and the crowd lost its shirt.  The Packers won 27-15. 

I wonder what George would say.