Money, Value, Quality

October 24, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

A year ago, Shamus Khan’s Privilege won the C. Wright Mills award.  The other day, Shamus discovered that Amazon was offering to buy back copies.  The price: 68 cents.

Here we have another case of where quality is unrelated to dollar value.  Privilege is just as good a book as it was a year ago.  But it must be disappointing to be told that your book is worth only a few pennies. Maybe Shamus can find some solace in a Times story that ran the same day about a Manhattan art gallery that had been selling expensive forgeries.  I know that in art, quality and value are two very different things.  Still, I had to stop and wonder when I read about

Domenico and Eleanore De Sole, who in 2004 paid $8.3 million for a painting attributed to Mark Rothko that they now say is a worthless fake.

One day a painting is worth $8.3 million; the next day, the same painting – same quality, same capacity to give aesthetic pleasure or do whatever it is that art does – is “worthless.”*  Art forgery also makes me wonder about the buyer’s motive.  If the buyer wanted only to have and to gaze upon something beautiful, something with artistic merit, then a fake Rothko is no different than a real Rothko.  It seems more likely that what the buyer wants is to own something valuable – i.e., something that costs a lot. Displaying your brokerage account statements is just too crude and obvious.  What the high-end art market offers is a kind of money laundering. Objects that are rare and therefore expensive, like a real Rothko, transform money into something more acceptable – personal qualities like good taste, refinement, and sophistication. 

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*  Other factors affect the perceived quality and authenticity of a work.  Artistic fashion plays an important role, but so does social context (see this post from 2007.)

Where in the World . . .

October 23, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

It wasn’t just a slip.  It wasn’t a temporary lapse to be corrected later.  Romney has been saying it for months.*

Syria is Iran’s route to the sea.

Anyone who looks at a map will know that Romney has some ’splainin’ to do.

 Maybe Romney assumes that most Americans will not look at the map and will be happy to remain ignorant of the rest of the world.**  As Ambrose Bierce said, “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.”

We haven’t gone to war with Syria or Iran, at least not yet, but we did invade Iraq.  Maybe Bierce’s observation applied seventy years ago, when newsreels had dash-lines rolling across a map to show the progress of Allied forces.  Maybe it applied during Vietnam, when TV news each night showed us the regional map with little explosion symbols marking battles or bombing targets. 

Will the network news shows tonight (not Fox, of course, but the serious news sources) show Americans where these countries are?

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*Back in April, Glenn Kessler at the WaPo FactChecker had this summary.

** Last month’s post on ignorance and arrogance is here.

George McGovern and the Wisdom of Crowds

October 21, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the 1972 presidential election, George McGovern lost every state except Massachusetts and DC. 

The Republicans said that McGovern

• advocated a withdrawal from Vietnam
• thought the war was a mistake
• wanted to abolish the military draft
• favored amnesty for men who had resisted the draft for that war
• favored legal abortions
• favored decriminalizing marijuana
• favored income support for poor people

Clearly, McGovern was on the wrong side of history.  The Republican slate of statesmen – Dick Nixon and Spiro T. Agnew – won in a landslide.

That worked out well, didn’t it?

A Time to Be Born

October 19, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Muhammad Ali and Evander Holyfield, Ty Pennington and Chris Kattan, John Le Carre and Trey Parker. Give up? They all were born on October 19. Happy Birthday.

The birthday problem came up again on a New York Times blog earlier this month.

How many people do you need in a room to get 50-50 odds that at least two of them share a birthday?

The official answer is 23.  The blogger, Steven Strogatz, takes you through the math (without once using the word factorial!) and even embeds the video clip of Johnny Carson getting it wrong. 

But even 23 is too high.  It assumes that birthdays are randomly distributed throughout the year.  But they’re not.

(The lack of a zero-point exaggerates the differences.  Still, September babies outnumber January babies by nearly 10%.)

The first thing it called to mind was the hockey aperçu made by Paula Barnsley but made famous by Malcolm Gladwell in the first chapter of Outliers.  The revelation takes place at a junior championship hockey game in Canada.  One of the spectators was Canadian psychologist Roger Barnsley.

   He was there with his wife, Paula, and their two boys, and his wife was reading the program, when she ran across a roster [that listed the players’ vital statistics]
   “Roger,” she said, “do you know when these young men were born?”
Barnsley said yes. “They're all between sixteen and twenty, so they'd be born in the late sixties.”
   “No, no,” Paula went on. “What month.”
   “I thought she was crazy,” Barnsley remembers. “But I looked through it, and what she was saying just jumped out at me. For some reason, there were an incredible number
of January, February, and March birth dates.”

In Canadian age-graded sports, kids are grouped by the year of their birth.  A boy born on Jan. 1, 2000 and a boy born on Dec. 31, 2000 are both twelve years old, at least for purposes of hockey eligibility, even though one is a year older than the other.  The older 12-year old is likely to be bigger and to have whatever other physical advantages develop with age.

Horse racing uses the same rule. Officially, every thoroughbred has the same birthday – January 1.  So the breeding season peaks in the late spring.  Most Kentucky Derby winners are foaled in March, very few after May. 

Is anything similar going on among human breeders, usually called parents?  Apparently not. The numbers for the early months are low rather than high.  (In Canada too, births in the first quarter are lower than in the next seven months.) 

Some school systems use a cutoff date of September 1, so all those September babies have an edge, but if parents were breeding rationally, we’d expect lots of births in the following months as well rather than the dropoff shown in the graph.

It looks as though most parents are not breeding rationally, or if they are, other considerations are affecting their scheduling. 

Yes, you can find articles (this one, for example) about competitive parents redshirting their 5-year olds – delaying a child’s entry into kindergarten for a year so the little tyke will have an edge over his even littler classmates.  It would appear that there are too few of these to make a blip in the graph. Still, I wonder what the graph would look like if it were based only on upper middle-class births. 

In any case, births are not distributed randomly. Cue The Byrds, channeling Pete Seeger channeling Ecclesiastes: “To everything there is a season . . .  a time to be born . . ..”