Ulysses in LaLa Land

April 17, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

A non-sociological post. 
I’ve never been all that good at resisting the obvious.

From today’s New York Times:

The indictment also named Molly Bloom, who made headlines in 2011 for her role in arranging clandestine games for high-rollers, including Tobey Maguire, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

And then he asked me if he could get into the game yes and would Matt be there yes and Ben with himself so pumped up and proud yes yes and Leo too all blond and often staying in with only king seven yes and he took out his checkbook and asked with his eyes if this would be enough for the buy-in yes and it was a wondrous number with lots of zeros yes yes yes

Underground Demography

April 16, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross-posted at Sociological Images


The magic of demographic knowledge is a memorable moment in John Sayles’s 1984 movie “Brother From Another Planet.”   On the A train, a young man shows an elaborate card trick to the title alien, who looks like an African American but seems to have no understanding of the trick.  So the magician offers another.

                                                                               

From 59th St. to 125th St. is one stop on the express.  But as the movie shows, that short ride covers a large demographic change, and it’s not just racial.  The New Yorker has posted interactive graphics (here) showing the median income of the census tracts surrounding subway stations.* 

Take the A train one stop  – from the southern border of Central Park to a few blocks above its northern border – and see median income drop by $100,000. 

Many other lines travel the extremes of economic inequality.  My line is the 2. 

In the early morning commute, I see blue collar workers in their hoodies or rough jackets and steel-toe boots next to well-dressed people reading The Wall Street Journal.  They didn’t get on at the same stop.  The people who live in and work in the Wall Street census tract, which includes Park Place, are not on the train.  Here’s what their housing looks like.

And here is Franklin St., Brooklyn.

The subway demographic trick is not limited to New York. Here’s a time-lapse video of the Red Line of Chicago’s CTA.

Time-Lapse of the CTA Red Line: a 2-hour trip in 1 minute from WBEZ on Vimeo.

(If the video does not play, you can see it here.)

Despite the social class segregation in housing, in cities like New York and Chicago, people of vastly different economic circumstances are likely to share the same subway car, at least for a few stops. 

Yet I don’t get a sense of strong resentment or even envy among the have-nots (though I wish I had systematic data on this).  These cities are also where the rich are more likely to be liberal and in favor of redistributionist policies.  As Andrew Gelman has shown, the wealthy in rich states are far more liberal than the wealthy in poor states.  That may be partly because in rich states, the wealthy live in the large cities.  How strong would that effect be if we used Upstate New York, Downstate Illinois, Massachusetts outside Rte. 128, and so on?

Or to quote James Carville’s famous line about Pennsylvania: “Philadelphia in the east, Pittsburgh in the west, and Alabama in between.”

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HT: Jenn Lena for the link.

Bitcoin - "A Currency Without an Army*

April 15, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

I must be missing something in Paul Krugman’s dismissal of bitcoins (today’s NYT column here).  Krugman says that unlike gold and paper money, the value of bitcoins does not rest on some intrinsic usefulness or upon the power of a state. 

Bitcoins, however, derive their value, if any, purely from self-fulfilling prophecy, the belief that other people will accept them as payment.

Then a few paragraphs later, he approvingly quotes Paul Samuelson saying that money is a “social contrivance.”  What makes paper, silver, or gold worth something is “the expectation that other people would accept them as payment.”

So bitcoin and metals and paper all depend on socially constructed definitions.  But then how is bitcoin different from more traditional kinds of money? 

Or does Krugman mean that because the free-floating bitcoin is untethered to precious metals or governments, those definitions are less stable and that the bitcoin’s value is more susceptible to the mood swings of the public? (FWIW, the price of gold has fallen 13% since Thursday.)

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*The subject line of this post is a variant of what has often been said of Yiddish – a language without an army

Special Victims

April 13, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

An op-ed, by Glenn McGovern in the Wall Street Journal (here but behind a paywall) says that attacks on prosecutors are on the rise.  McGovern begins with the recent shootings of district attorneys in Texas.  Then he says,

Each year in this country, well over 100 police officers are killed in the line of duty.

That number is correct in a technical sense, but since McGovern is writing entirely about “attacks” on law enforcement officials, it’s misleading. Most police officers who die on the job – usually about 60% – are killed in accidents. 

 The number of lethal attacks on police never gets close to 100.

As for attacks on prosecutors, according to McGovern, the number for this decade, as of April 1, 2013, is 15.  By comparison, as of the same 44-months-into-the-decade* of the 1990s and 2000s, only six such acts of violence had been recorded in each of those periods.  He finds no “geographical logic” or other demographic patterns in these attacks.  But with a total of only 27 attacks over a 23-year period, differences would show up only if they were extreme. 

The 543 killings of police officers in the last decade do indeed show regional difference.

(Click on the graphs for a larger view.)

Both in absolute numbers and rates per population, cop-killing is most prevalent in the South.  My first guess was that this had to do with the greater prevalence of guns in the South.  It’s no surprise that guns, especially handguns, are the most frequent weapon when cops wind up dead.

But when it came to choice of weapons, differences between regions were minimal and in an unexpected direction.  In the South, about 3.5% of the weapons used in nonlethal attacks on the police were guns (not including “personal weapons,” i.e. fists and feet).  For the Northeast percentage of guns was slightly higher – 4%.  Yet the South kills far more police.  So if it’s not the choice of weapon, we are left the Southern culture-of-violence explanation: When Southern men feel they have been seriously wronged, they are more likely to use violence to defend their honor. 

It’s in the South that we are most likely to find “stand your ground laws” allowing the deadly defense against the intrusions of other people.  It’s also where we’re more likley to hear anti-gun-control arguments based on the idea that guns are necessary to defend against the intrusions of government. 

This explanation should hold for attacks on prosecutors as well.  As McGovern says, the prosecutor must almost inevitably denigrate the honor of the defendant:

For hours and hours over many days and weeks, under the glaring eyes of a defendant seething with anger, these prosecutors argue to a judge or jury that this person should be locked away for life, or even forfeit his life.

The number of incidents is too small to reveal patterns of regions of urban vs. small town.  Let us hope that it remains that way.  Sometimes a small n is just what we want.
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*I’m not sure how April 1 is 44 months into the decade rather than 39.