Vacation

August 20, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross-posted at Sociological Images

As I speculated years ago (here and here), it may be hard for Americans to imagine a world where the law guarantees them at least 20 paid vacation days per year. But such a world exists. It’s called Europe.* 

Americans are the lucky ones. As Mitt Romney has warned us “European-style benefits” would   “poison the very spirit of America.” Niall Ferguson, who weighs in frequently on history and economics, contrasts America’s “Protestant work ethic” with what you find in Europe – an “atheist sloth ethic.”

The graph is a bit misleading. It shows only what the law requires of employers. Americans do get vacations. But here in America, how much vacation you get, or whether you get any at all, and whether it's paid – that all depends on what you can negotiate with your employer. 

Since American vacations depend on what the boss will grant, some people get more paid vacation, some get less, and some get none. So it might be useful to ask which sectors of our economy are beehives of the work ethic and which are sloughs of sloth. (Ferguson’s employer, for example, Harvard University, probably gives him three months off in the summer, plus a week or two or more in the winter between semesters, plus spring break, and maybe a few other days. I wonder how he would react if Harvard did away with these sloth-inducing policies.)

The Wall Street Journal recently (here) published a graph of BLS data on access to paid vacations.

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

Those people who are cleaning your hotel room and serving your meals while you’re on vacation – only about one in four can get any paid vacation days. And at the other end, which economic sector is most indulgent of sloth among its workforce? Wall Street. Four out of five there get paid vacation. 

How much paid vacation do we get? That depends on sector, but it also depends on length of service.  As the Journal says,

Europeans also get more time off: usually a bare minimum of four weeks off a year. Most Americans have to stay in a job for 20 years to get that much, according to BLS data.

All this is by way of announcing that posts to the Socioblog for the rest of the month may not be frequent, and they may arrive faintly scented with salt air, sunscreen, and sand.

’Cause down the shore everything’s all right.**

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* The graph is from five years ago, but I doubt things have changed much.  The US still has no federal or state laws requiring any paid vacation days.

** The song, though associated with Springsteen, was written by Tom Waits.

Romney’s Taxes – Gentlemen’s Games and Morbid Curiosity

August 17, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Mitt Romney still refuses to make his tax returns public.  Instead, he now says that for the last ten years he’s never paid less than 13%.  The response from the Obama campaign: Prove it.

The Romneyites are in high dudgeon about this request.  To ask to see the actual returns rather than accept Mitt’s word, why, it’s so uncouth, so ill-mannered. Such curiosity is ungentlemanly; it borders on the morbid.

W.C. Fields fans will no doubt remember the scene in “My Little Chickadee,” set in the old West, where Fields (Cuthbert J. Twillie) approaches a stranger in a saloon. He offers to play a game: cut the cards, high card wins. They agree to play for $100. The stranger accepts and cuts a king.

FIELDS  

Don't show me the cards. A gentleman's game. 

I don't want to look at it.

Fields then cuts.  The camera can see that the card is a two, but the stranger cannot.

“Ace,” Fields announces and puts the cards back on the deck.

STRANGER

I didn't see it.

FIELDS

[He turns the deck face up and thumbs through it 

till he finds an ace, which he holds up for the stranger to see.]

Very well, here you are, Nosy Parker. Ace. 

I hope that satisfies your morbid curiosity.

(For full effect, this  should be seen, not transcribed, but alas, I cannot find an embeddable clip. You can watch the scene here. It’s less than 2 minutes.)

There are good reasons to have some morbid curiosity about those tax returns.  Thirteen percent sounds reasonable, though it’s far less than what you pay if you earn a salary of $75,000.  But thirteen percent of what? As Jonathan Zasloff says,

If Romney’s income (mostly from capital gains) was, say, $10 million a year, but $9 million of it is in a tax shelter in the Cayman Islands,  Romney could pay $130,000 on the $1 million and call it $13%.  But in fact, he would be paying on his real income only 1.3%. 

And that’s just a simple version.  Given the complexities of the tax code, Romney could have done much more creative accounting.  Another law professor, Victor Fliescher, has a slightly more complicated scenario (here).  Fleischer’s specialty is tax law, especially carried interest, so he knows that this is not a gentleman’s game.  To Romney’s 13% claim, he says in a most ungentlemanly fashion, “I call bullshit.”

Cream and Charters

August 16, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

A couple of weeks ago, NYC schools chancellor Joel Klein was waving around test scores for all to see as irrefutable evidence that charter schools do a better job than traditional public schools. I voiced some reservations (here).

Not all poor schoolchildren are alike, and there’s good reason to expect systematic differences between charter school kids and others. The charter school kids have parents who, while they may be poor, are more involved in their education.  The traditional public schools get the kids who are left behind. The cumulative effect of this selection makes for vastly different kinds of learning environments – differences that have much more to do with kinds of parents and children than with kinds of school organization or the presence or absence of unions.

The charter cheerers like Klein deny any such effect.  (Klein is not just a championr of charters, He puts the taxpayers’ money where his mouth is. He used his position as NYC schools chancellor to give every advantage to charters – especially all four of Eve Moskowitz’s Success Network schools – sometimes at the expense of traditional public schools.)

The latest issue of Educational Policy has some research on this very topic by Yongmei Ni (Ni is too polite to call it “creaming” and uses the low-fat term “sorting.”): “The Sorting Effect of Charter Schools on Student Composition in Traditional Public Schools.” (here gated – I found it thanks to a tweet by Shankar Vedantam)

From the abstract:

the dynamic student transfers between charter schools and TPSs are analyzed through a series of hierarchical generalized linear models. The two-way transfer analysis shows that the student sorting under the charter school program tends to intensify the isolation of disadvantaged students in less effective urban schools serving a high concentration of similarly disadvantaged students. [emphasis added]

The problem has no easy solution.  The solution for the individual is clear – get your kid into the best school possible.  But for the system, this creaming solution makes the most disadvantaged schools more chaotic, more hopeless.

Screen Gems

August 15, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

The film is “Staten Island.”  I pushed the “Info” button on the Verizon FIOS remote to see what it was about.

I actually checked a review at MRQE to make sure that the character was not some speechless but nevertheless supercool dude.


It makes me wonder where Verizon get its little film blurbs anyway. Someone has to be writing these things. 

There are those who will wring their hands and see this as yet a further debasement of the language, a creeping illiteracy, and the end of civilization as we know it.  But surely there is some more interesting linguistic relevance.  Does it show the pervasive influence of hip-hop diction? 

Anyway, it has inspired me to begin work on my novella – a tale of an aging but blocked writer who goes to Italy.  He hangs out in the Piazza San Marco, falls in love with the youthful hip-hop culture there, and winds up freestyling in local trattorie.  The title – and I call first dibs on it – “Def in Venice.”