The Kindness of Strangers

March 8, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

A philosophy professor at Brown, Felicia Nimue Ackerman,  has come out against random acts of kindness. Her op-ed, originally in the Providence  Journal, appeared in a New Jersey paper today (here). No Blanche du Bois she, Prof. Ackerman begins:

Suppose you stop for coffee on your way to work. When you try to pay, the cashier smilingly informs you this won't be necessary. “Someone has paid for 20 coffees and you are number 8,” she says.
How would you feel?

If you said you'd feel a bit more cheerful and that you might be inspired to do something similar, not so fast. Prof. Ackerman has a better idea.

If you want to make your thought count, why not direct it at a loved one? The money that you spend on 20 cups of coffee could buy a gift for your friend, spouse, parent or child, who would cherish it as a symbol of personal affection that — let’s face it — means a lot more than a cup of coffee from a stranger.

That’s the great thing about being a philosopher rather than a social scientist, I guess. You can make statements about what people would do or how they would feel and not have to worry about evidence. Me, I’m not so sure.  Assume a cup of coffee costs $1.50, so we’re talking about $30.  Also, economists tell us that it’s better to give cash rather than a gift.  It avoids “deadweight loss.”

Imagine a friend handing you $30?  “Here take it.”

“What’s that for?”

"‘Because I want you to have it. I want to give it to you.”

“Really?  But why?” And so on. 

None of this questioning of motives occurs with the explanation for the anonymous gift of a $1.50 cup of coffee. 

Which does more to increase the total amount of happiness in the world  – the 20 cups of coffee to 20 strangers or the single gift of  $30 in cash or merchandise to one friend? That is an empirical question, and not an easy one to settle. The two relationships (stranger vs. friend) are different.  More important, so are the outcomes Ackerman mentions (cheerfulness vs. strengthening of the relationship).  If I give my $30 to Dunkin’ Donuts, the last thing I’m looking for is to strengthen my relationship to the next twenty people who walk in.

Surely there must be some empirical evidence on both these kinds of gift.  For example, is there a variation of the Ultimatum game where the subject of the experiment is offered more than half and in the next round becomes the one who makes the offer?

Shut Up and Move On

March 6, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

If there’s a lesson in the recent Rush Limbaugh flap it’s this: when you make a mistake, apologize – simply and, as nearly as you can, sincerely.  Then STFU about it.  Don’t complain, don’t make excuses, and don’t try to shift the blame, especially if you play for the team that claims to be all for personal responsibility.*

That’s not what Limbaugh is doing.  His apology was lame, and now he’s making it worse.  He’s still insisting that the only thing he did wrong was to use “those two words,” when what offended most people was the idea behind those words.  After all, in his original attack Limbaugh carefully explained why those “slut” and “prostitute” were les mots justes.  He just does not get it.**

Then, he blames the left.  If it weren’t for those nasty lefties, he would never have “descended to their level.” 

That was my error. I became like them, and I feel very badly about that. I've always tried to maintain a very high degree of integrity and independence on this program. Nevertheless, those two words were inappropriate.

One of Limbaugh’s backers, James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal , goes even further in blaming the left.  He says that the whole thing was a cleverly designed snare, long in the planning, that the Democrats engineered to trap the Republicans and pull a fast one on the public.

The kerfuffle was no fluke but a left-liberal set piece.

If only.

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* This post is mostly speculation.  I don’t know of any evidence on the effect of the various statements made in recent days.

** “Getting it” is a concept coined by the 1960s feminists, or as Limbaugh calls them Feminazis, a term he applies freely and without apology to women who disagree with him, from Sandra Fluke to the woman who is now the US Secretary of State.

Birthers as an Economic Indicator

March 5, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Andy Borowitz sprays out a daily stream of one-liners, mostly political (you should follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his newsletter).  Some are just name calling (“Eric Cantor's Endorsement of Romney Could Persuade Undecided Sociopaths”).  But some are on target. 

When wingnuts got some press recently by claiming that Obama’s birth certificate was a fake, Borowitz posted  

In Positive Economic Sign, Republicans Starting to Say

Obama Wasn’t Born in US Again

It was just a joke.  But Barry Ritholtz stopped chuckling long enough to see if it fit with the evidence.  He compared

• the timing of birther references (Lexis-Nexis search with “Obama” and “birth” separated by no more that five words)
• with the fluctuation in jobs added (three month average)

Sure enough, when the job reports are good, birther stories go up. After all, the anti-Obama machine has to find some kind of fuel.

(How many gag writers have the data to back them up?  Maybe it’s because Borowitz, as an undergrad at Harvard, was a research assistant to sociologist Wendy Griswold.)

Something similar happened in the past few days.  For a while, the Republicans were shouting about “religious freedom” – i.e., the freedom of employers to pick and choose which prescription and procedures their employees’ health plan would cover.  Then Rush Limbaugh joined the chorus with personal attacks on a young woman, name calling the even Republicans felt uncomfortable with.  Rush screwed everything up, and that issue became a loser.  All of a sudden, Republicans couldn’t change the topic fast enough.  The whole thing was “absurd.”  They wanted to talk about the “real issues” that are “important to Americans.”  Limbaugh himself echoed this dump-your-losing-issues idea in an “apology”  that is characteristically inaccurate, and in its inept language is probably funnier than most of his material.  “I think it is absolutely absurd that during these very serious political times, we are discussing personal sexual recreational activities before members of Congress.” 

UPDATE (March 5):  John Sides at The Monkey Cage re-graphed the data.  Rather than plotting both variables against a time line, he created a scatterplot with Jobs Added on the X-axis and Birther stories.  The graph shows only a slight correlation, which disappears entirely when he removes two outliers (Trump’ s birtherism and Obama’ s release of his long-form birth certificate).

Sex, Power, and Rush Limbaugh

March 2, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Rush Limbaugh’s attack on Sandra Fluke reminded me of something; I just wasn’t sure what.  Fluke, as you surely know, is the law student who dared testify before Congress to support the idea that employers should not be allowed to choose which procedures and prescriptions their employee medical plans will and will not cover.*  The  item of dispute currently is birth control prescriptions.

For her efforts, Limbaugh called Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute.”   In a subsequent broadcast he said,

So Miss Fluke, and the rest of you Feminazis, here’s the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex. We want something for it. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.

At first, I thought that what was underlying Limbaugh’s reaction was the age-old male obsession with female sexuality and simultaneously a fear of female sexuality.  The efforts of men to control that sexuality, part of what Robin Hanson would call the “farmer” mentality, have been a regular and often unpleasant feature of male-dominated societies.

But Limbaugh wasn’t concerned that Fluke was doing something wrong sexually. She was doing something wrong politically.  The issue isn’t sex, it’s power.  (Limbaugh’s coinage Feminazi is another illustration.  Any woman who opposes his views is automatically both powerful and evil, a force to be feared and attacked –  like the Nazis.)   

Then I remembered the feminist observation that rape is not about sex, it’s about power. I found the Susan Brownmiller quote from her 1975 book Against Our Will:

Rape is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.

A bit over the top – all rape, all men, all women? I don’t think so.  But it’s certainly true of many rapes and many rapists.  This aspect of rape is especially easy to see – in Sudan, in Rwanda, in the Balkans . . .  – when the context is political conflict.

Similarly, in the current political conflict over healthcare, two things are clear

• In a dispute over policy, Limbaugh has chosen to make his attack sexual
• His goal is not sexual pleasure, it’s intimidation**

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* The government and the employee might have a legitimate claim to having some say in these decisions.  The government gives the employer money in the form of tax breaks, and the employee pays too – usually directly, and always indirectly in the form of a lower salary (if the employer weren’t paying for medical coverage, that money would go, at least in part, to salaries).


** It’s possible that in his own sexuality, Limbaugh does conflate intimidation and sexual pleasure.  Some men do.  But since he has not posted his own sex videos, we do not know.

UPDATE (March 4):  The response of the Republican candidates to Limbaugh’s vulgar incivility has been swift and severe.  Well, maybe not so swift.  It took them a couple of days, and they had to be asked directly about it before they denounced Limbaugh in no uncertain terms. 

Rick Santorum, the great moralist, said,  “He’s being absurd, but that's you know, an entertainer can be absurd.”  In other words, “Hey, that’s show biz.”  I’m sure he would have said exactly the same thing if similar remarks had been made about his own wife or daughter.

Romney said,“I’ll just say this, which is, it’s not the language I would have used.”  And he meant it –the “I’ll just say this” part.  He immediately changed the topic to something else.  Still, you have to admit that “not the language I would have used” is the kind of firm statement about principles that we have come to expect from him.