Yellow Peril

October 4, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

I could have understood it if Romney had gone after Welfare, which is still not a very popular concept, at least in the abstract.  Or if he’d said he was going to get rid of unnecessary Bureaucracy (and maybe Bureaucrats).  And of course I understood his promise to eliminate Obamacare, which a majority oppose, at least in opinion polls..

But Big Bird? 

The much-loved muppet was the second thing Romney mentioned, right after Obamacare, when he went into cut mode during last night’s debate.  Romney must also know that PBS is a minuscule fraction of the budget.  So surely this was not some spontaneous off-the-cuff remark.  It had to be a rehearsed zinger, to be inserted at the earliest opportunity.

Romney also phrased it so that everyone would get a clear picture in their minds – not the abstract PBS, but Big Bird. But why?

Does Big Bird really poll so badly?  Is the large yellow creature this election’s Willie Horton? 

The Romney people must know something about this that I don’t.  But what?

(Almost as soon as Romney had spoken, the pictures of Big Bird – mash-ups or with text added – started showing up all over the Internet.  Check Google Images.)

Political Donations - Check the Name on the Check

October 1, 2012 
Posted by Jay Livingston 
Cross-posted at Sociological Images

Are people’s first names a clue as to which party they support? Chris Wilson at Yahoo  created this nifty interactive graphic from information on contributors of $200 or more. Mouse over a name-circle to see the proportion of Democratic and Republican donors. Or enter a name in the search box. For example, 60% of the 3000 Scotts gave to Republicans.

 

The most obvious difference is that women (or at least people with women’s names) are all to the Democratic side of the of midpoint. Men are mostly Republican, though several fall to the left of the midpoint. Bob is the farthest left – 61-39 Democrat – though Robert breaks Republican (55-45). Jim and James follow the same pattern, with the 57-43 split going from Democrat to Republican as you go from informal to formal. 
Among the women, Ellen is the most partisan Democrat (81-19), Ashley the least (52-48). If you change the view from numbers of people to amounts donated, the whole chart shifts to the right. Republicans pony up more money. Or to put it another way, the political big spenders break Republican (despite what Foxies like Tucker Carlson claim).

 

 



Among the women, Ashley, Heather, Tiffany, and Betty all lean to the right on the money scale. The Democratic Heathers may outnumber their Republican sisters, but the Republican Heathers have more money to donate to politicians. And similarly for just about every name, male or female.

Among the men, the Jonathan is now the most liberal, giving 55% of his money to the Democrats. In fact, Jonathan is the only man to the left of the midpoint. But while Jonathan is a Democrat, John gives 63% to the Republicans. The difference here is probably ethnic/religious. Jonathan (Old Testament, son of Saul) is Jewish. John (the Baptist, New Testament) is Christian. Age may also be a factor.

Younger, thirtysomething names like Heather and Ashley, Tyler and Clayton, lean to the right. So perhaps the youth vote, or at least the youth money, is not as firmly in the Democratic party as we might have thought.

“Beasts of the Southern Wild” and Cultural Relativism

September 28, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

The crucial moment in “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” for me at least, was the sight of Hushpuppy  in a new purple dress.  Hushpuppy, a seven year old girl is the central figure in the film, and up until that point we have seen her, dressed in the same clothes every day, living in The Bathtub, a bayou area south of New Orleans, on the unprotected side of the levee.

Life in The Bathtub is harsh.  The people there (“misfits, drunks and swamp-dwellers,” – WaPo) live in shacks cobbled together from scrap metal and wood.  They fish from boats that are similarly improvised.  They scavenge.  The children’s education comes from the idiosyncratic stories of one woman. 

They are wild people living among wild things, unconstrained by laws or walls, reliant on ancient prophecies and herbal cures, at home with the water that may overwhelm them at any moment. [New York Review]

After a Katrina-like flood, the authorities force the evacuation of The Bathtub.  Hushpuppy and the others are housed in a shelter - a large, brightly-lit room (a high school gym?) – and given new clothes.  This is when we see Hushpuppy in her new purple dress heading out the door, presumably to a real school.

No, no, no, I thought. This is all wrong. This is not her.  She belongs back in The Bathtub, for despite its rough conditions, the people there are a real and caring community.  Her father loves her and prepares her for life there.  The people there all love her and care for her, as they care, as best they can, for one another.

That was the voice of cultural relativism telling me to look at a society on its own terms, with understanding and sympathy.

At the same time, though, the voice of ethnocentrism was whispering in my other ear.  This is America, it said.  These conditions are the things you deplore and want to improve – lack of decent health care, education, clothing, shelter, and basic safety.  (In an early scene, Hushpuppy tries to light her stove with a blowtorch, nearly incinerating her shack and herself.)  It’s wrong that people in America live like this. 

It was not much of a contest.  Cultural relativism won.

In turning the audience into cultural relativists, the movie plays on old themes in American culture.  We’ve always had our suspicions of civilization and refinement, and we’ve had a romantic attachment to the unrefined and rugged.  In “Beasts,” the shelter – sterile, impersonal, and bureaucratic – is contrasted with The Bathtub – rough-hewn, but an authentic community nonetheless. 

Then there is Hushpuppy. I’ve commented before (here, for example) that children in American films are often wiser, more resourceful, and more honest than the adults, especially those who would try to change them.  Add Hushpuppy to the list.* 

In the end, the audience seemed relieved when she and the others make their escape.  We don’t want Huck to be civilized by Aunt Sally.  And we do want Hushpuppy to light out for the territory of The Bathtub. 

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* I should add that much of the credit for convincing the audience goes to the six-year-old actress who plays Hushpuppy – the unforgettable girl with the unrememberable name – Quvenzhané Wallis. 

A Nation of Entrepreneurs?

September 25, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

To hear the Republicans tell it, the only people in the US worth mentioning are entrepreneurs (and maybe soldiers). Those who get a paycheck rather than a P/L sheet were absent from the speeches in Tampa. The same is true for the Romney and Ryan campaign talk since then. 

We hear the stories of the successes, the people who put in 70-100 hour weeks, risk their savings, and follow their dream. The trouble with that picture is that most business start-ups fail, even though those entrepreneurs too put in the long hours and take financial risks. Very few new businesses survive ten years. That’s capitalism’s famous creative destruction, which is fine as long as you’re not the one being creatively destroyed. (Dean Baker in yesterday’s Guardian has more on the “we built it” myth.)

Still, the image we get is that the US is just teeming with entrepreneurs.  Now I know I shouldn’t go making comparisons with other countries. As Marco Rubio told us in his speech at the GOP convention, other countries should be more like the US, not the other way round.  But I couldn’t resist taking a peek at the statistics on self-employment in the OECD factbook.  

I expected that the US, with lots of people working for themselves, would be way out ahead, followed, at a distance, by some of the stronger European economies. After all, independent entrepreneurship is what builds a great economy. 

(Click on the chart for a larger view.  Or go to the original spreadsheet.)

The green bar shows the 2010 rate.  The diamond shows the rate in 2000.

There must be problems of definition – not all self-employed people are what we think of as entrepreneurs.  Still, the differences are striking.  The US rate is less than half the OECD average.  And most of the countries with high rates of self-employment are the weaker economies.  Even among the wealthy countries, the US trails all but Luxembourg, which also has the highest income.  Independent work seems to be related to national wealth (and perhaps personal wealth), but not in the way I expected.

(HT: Ceterus Paribus (@imparibus) via Xavier Molénat.)