College Costs - The International Perspective

June 11, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

American students grumble when their universities raise tuition fees.  But in France and the UK, students take to the streets.  The lesson, I suppose, is that we compare ourselves to what we know, and while students know what their tuition was last year, they have no idea about tuition in other countries. 

Business Insider has some data to correct that ignorance.  As in so many other the USA is number one in absolute terms, with an average cost of nearly $14,000.  Relative to median income, two countries – Japan and Mexico – have college costs that are less affordable.  (As Business Insider points out, there’s a huge difference in the US between public and private universities.)

In 2008, French students protested Sarkozy’s proposed cuts to education.  I’m not sure they framed the issue as a return on what they were paying – $585.

Of course, they did have to suffer the hardship of living in cities like Paris and eating French food.
The protests in the UK are more understandable.  When the Conservative government proposed a tuition increase, 50,000 demonstrators took to the streets of London.

The increase would have put UK costs on a par with the US average (though much less than the costs of private universities in the US ).  

For the Business Insider snapshots of education costs in sixteen countries, go here. No doubt, the simple numbers obscure some other variables that might be considered in assessing the real costs of college.   But the numbers do give a rough idea.

Public Goods and Individual Mandates

June 10, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross-posted at Sociological Images



My son and his girlfriend arrived in Beijing ten days ago.  The got-here-safely e-mail ended with this:

was blown away by the pollution! I know people
talk about it all the time, but it really is crazy.

And it is.  Here’s a photo I grabbed from the Internet.

At about the same time, I came upon a this link to photos of my home town Pittsburgh in 1940.  Here are two of them.

Today in downtown Pittsburgh, the streetcars and overhead trolleys are gone.  So are the fedoras.  And so is the smoke.  

The air became cleaner in the years following the end of the War.  It didn’t become clean all by itself, and it didn’t become clean because of free-market forces.  It got clean because of government – legislation and regulation, including an individual mandate. 

The smoke was caused by the burning of coal, and while the steel mills accounted for some of the smoke, much of the it came from coal-burning furnaces in Pittsburghers’ houses.  If the city was to have cleaner air, the government would have to force people change the way they heated their homes.  And that is exactly what the law did. To create a public good – clean air – the law required individuals to purchase something – either non-polluting fuel (oil, gas, or smokeless coal) or smokeless equipment.* 

Initially, not everyone favored smoke control, but as Pittsburgh became cleaner and lost its “Smoky City” label, approval of the regulations increased, and there was a fairly rapid transition to gas heating.  By the 1950s, nobody longed for the unregulated air of 1940.  Smoke control was a great success.**  Of course, it may have helped that Pittsburgh did not have a major opposition party railing against this government takeover of home heating or claiming that smoke control was a jobs-killing assault on freedom.

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* Enforcement focused not on individuals but distributors.  Truckers were forbidden from delivering the wrong kind of coal.

** For a fuller account of smoke control in Pittsburgh, see Joel A. Tarr and Bill C. Lamperes, Changing Fuel Use Behavior and Energy Transitions: The Pittsburgh Smoke Control Movement, 1940-1950: A Case Study in Historical Analogy. Journal of Social History , Vol. 14, No. 4, Special Issue on Applied History (Summer, 1981), pp. 561-588.

Does Washington Weigh on Washington?

June 7, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Will Obama’s coming out for gay marriage swing a referendum in Washington state?

Gay marriage in Washington state is only four months old, but the straights-only forces are trying to nip it in the bud and at the ballot box.  They have filed petitions to let a simple majority of voters decide who has the right to marry.  This strategy has worked in the other states, where hetero majorities have consistently voted keep the gay minority out of their marriage club.

The Times story notes that in Washington it’s not clear which side is in the majority. The article cites surveys and previous voting. But then it adds,

President Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage rights last month is probably the biggest new variable in a state that he won handily in 2008 and where he still had a 54 percent approval rating in a poll released last week by Strategies 360. [emphasis added]

Is Obama’s support a big variable?

Surveys taken before and after showed  Obama’s announcement of his own “evolution” having no effect on White voters. It may have had some influence among Black voters, where support for gay marriage increased by nearly 20 points – from 41% to 59%.  That shift should be interpreted cautiously since the number of African Americans in the sample was not large. Even so, African Americans are only 3.6% of the Washington state population, and their percentage among voters may be even smaller  - more reason to question the weight of the Obama variable

Also, as Nate Silver says on his FiveThirtyEight blog at the Times, that effect may dissipate over time.  

For Democrats who oppose gay marriage, the issue now becomes a classic example of “cross pressure.”* Obama’s statement may make that pressure especially felt among African Americans. As Jon Bernstein at WaPo put it,

people who are on Team Church and Team Democrat now realize that those two are in conflict and they have to choose, while before they were getting only one signal.

The beauty of the ballot measure for the ant-gay-marriage forces is that cross-pressured voters do not have to choose. They can split the issues and vote for the Democratic candidate but against gay-marriage. That option makes any possible Obama effect even more feathery and ephemeral.

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* This was a topic of an early post on this blog (here), and although that post was about Republicans, Bernstein’s “Team Church” reinforces the relevance of that post’s title (one of my favorites): “The Old Rugged Cross-Pressure.”

Blaming the Media II

June 3, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross-posted at Sociological Images

If a person thinks that the media are infiltrating his mind and controlling his thoughts and behavior, we consider him a nutjob, and we recommend professional help and serious meds. But if a person thinks that the media are infiltrating other people’s minds and affecting their behavior, we call him or her an astute social observer, one eminently qualified to give speeches or write op-eds.   

The previous post dwelt on economist Isabel Sawhill’s WaPo op-ed channeling Dan Quayle, particularly Quayle’s speech asserting that a TV sitcom was wielding a strong effect on people’s decisions – not just decisions like Pepsi vs. Coke, but decisions like whether to have a baby. 

That was Quayle, this is now.  Still, our current vice-president can sometimes resemble his counterpart of two decades ago.  Just last month, Joe Biden echoed the Quayle idea on the power of sitcoms.  On “Meet the Press,” in response to David Gregory’s question about gay marriage, Biden said that “this is evolving” and added:

And by the way, my measure, David, and I take a look at when things really begin to change, is when the social culture changes.  I think “Will and Grace” probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody’s ever done so far.

“Will and Grace” ran for eight seasons, 1998 - 2006.  Its strongest years were 2001-2005, when it was the top rated show among the 18-49 crowd. If asked for systematic evidence, Biden could have pointed to GSS data on the gay marriage question.  In 1988, ten years before “Will and Grace,” when the GSS asked about gay marriage, only 12% supported it, 73% opposed it.  In 2004, six years into the W+G era, support had more than doubled, and it continued to rise in subsequent years.

(Click on a graph for a larger view.)

Because the gay marriage question was asked only in those two years, 1988 and 2004, we don’t know just when in that 16-year period, 1988 - 2004, things “really began to change.”  Fortunately, the GSS more regularly asked the respondent’s view on sexual relations between same-sex partners.  Here too, tolerance grows in the “Will and Grace” period (gray on the graph).

The trouble is that graph is misleading. To see the error, all we need do is extend our sampling back a few years  Here is the same graph starting in 1973.

The GSS shows attitudes about homosexuality starting to change in 1990.  By the time of the first episode of “Will and Grace” in 1998, the proportion seeing nothing wrong with homosexuality had already doubled.  Like Quayle’s “Murphy Brown” effect, the “Will and Grace” effect is hard to see.

The flaw in the Quayle-Biden method is not in mistaking TV for reality.  It’s in assuming that the public’s awareness is simultaneous with their own. 

But why do our vice-presidents (and many other people) give so much credit (or blame) to a popular TV show for a change in public opinion? The error is partly a simplistic post hoc logic.  “Will and Grace” gave us TV’s first gay principal character; homosexuality became more acceptable.  Murphy Brown was TV’s first happily unwed mother, and in the following years, single motherhood increased.  Cause - Effect.  Besides, we know that these shows are watched by millions of people each week. So it must be the show that is causing the change. 

It’s also possible that our vice-presidents (and many other people) may also have been projecting their own experiences onto the general public.  Maybe Murphy Brown was the first or only unwed mother that Dan Quayle really knew – or at least she was the one he knew best. It’s possible that Joe Biden wasn’t familiar with any gay men, not in the way we feel we know TV characters.  A straight guy might have some gay acquaintances or co-workers, but it’s the fictional Will Truman whose private life he could see, if only for a half hour every week.

Does TV matter?  When we think about our own decisions, we are much more likely to focus on our experiences and on the pulls and pushes of family, work, and friends.  We generally don’t attribute much causal weight to the sitcoms we watch.  Why then are we so quick to see these shows as having a profound influence on other people’s behavior, especially behavior we don’t like?  Maybe because it’s such an easy game to play.  Is there more unwed motherhood?  Must be “Murphy Brown.”  Did obesity increase in the 1990s?  “Roseanne.”  Are twentysomethings and older delaying marriage?  “Seinfeld” and “Friends.” And of course “The Simpsons,” at least Bart and Homer, who can be held responsible for a variety of social ills.