Dismissing Durkheim . . . and Sociology

May 23, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

There it was again, the rejection of sociological thinking – not because it’s wrong or because it offers no effective policies, but just because it doesn’t make people feel better. 

A Newsweek article on suicide makes the obligatory hand-wave:

Sociologists in general believe that when society robs people of self-control, individual dignity, or a connection to something larger than themselves, suicide rates rise. They are all descendants of Emile Durkheim, who helped found the field in the late-19th century, choosing to study suicide so he could prove that “social facts” explain even this “most personal act.”

That’s 58 words in a 6600-word article, not so much a shout-out as a mumble-out.   I exaggerate.  The article does cite sociologists Julie Phillips and Sherry Turkle, and it tosses around statistics about suicide rates by age, sex, race, and birth cohort.  Still, the paragraph that starts with sociology and Durkheim ends with this curt dismissal of sociology because it cannot play to people’s feelings by predicting individual cases:

But when someone’s son dies by suicide and the family cries out for an answer, “social facts” don’t begin to assuage the pain or solve the mystery. When a government health official considers how he might slow down the suicide problem, “society” is a phantom he can’t fight without another kind of theory entirely.       

That other theory, needless to say, is focused on individuals, and the center of the article is a psychologist, Thomas Joiner, whose first job was to identify– and quarantine! – those who would otherwise kill themselves. 

He got to regularly look suicidal people in the eye, only this time he did so knowingly, as a therapist, and with a decision to make: which of these people were risks to themselves? Under Texas law he was allowed to lock people up if they were.

The article gives no data on whether Joiner was actually able to pick out the truly suicidal.  I would guess that he had a Texas-size false-positive problem. That problem comes with trying to predict and change individual behavior.  It is much more socially beneficial and accurate to think in terms of predicting and changing rates of behavior.

If someone’s son dies in a car crash, it might “assuage the pain or solve the mystery” to find out who was to blame – which driver was drunk or momentarily distracted or whatever.  It’s much less comforting to look at aggregate rates.  But when you do, you just might notice that crashes are frequent on this one stretch of road or that crashes are more likely to be fatal in cars without airbags or seatbelts.  Those “social facts” lead to structural policies that can reduce the overall numbers. 

In fact, the absolute number of highway deaths in the US in 2012, despite a 5% increase over 2011, was  lower than at any time since the early 1950s.  The rate per vehicle-mile has fallen by 80% since the 50s and 60s.  Most of that decrease – tens of thousands of saved lives each year – came not from identifying fatality-prone drivers but from changing the structure of roads and cars.  We don’t know which individual lives were saved.  We just know that there were a lot of them.

Not Your Grandfather’s Anti-Fluoridation Movement

May 22, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Fight Mental Health.”  The gag bumper sticker from decades ago was funny because of the double-take you did to realize what it literally meant. 

Yesterday, the citizens of Portland, Oregon voted No on fluoridation (a news story is here). I had thought that questions about fluoridation had been settled long ago, and that most Americans had made their peace with water that reduced tooth decay.  But the issue never really went away.

The “fight dental health” movement is no joke.  But the constituents and ideology have changed somewhat.  Here’s what it was like back in the day.

In Seattle, Washington, in 1951, for example, the anti-fluoridation committee drew support from Christian Scientists, a few dentists, health food operators, and fervent anti-Communists.*               

Those fervent anti-Communists seemed awfully worried about boundaries – the boundaries of the nation and the boundaries of the body.  McCarthy and his followers seemed less troubled about external threats – the military might of the USSR – than about internal ones.  Actors, directors, writers, schoolteachers and others – Americans all – had to be rooted out lest they insinuate an alien ideology into our unsuspecting brains.  

The anti-Communist imagery reminds me of Animorphs, a series of books once popular among grade-school kids (or at least among the one who lived in my house).  The series premise is that aliens from outer space have come to earth, but only the Animorphs -- our quintet of teenage heroes – knows about them.  The worm-like alien creatures, Yeerks, threaten to take over the country not by force but by stealth – taking over our minds.  A Yeerk slips into the porches of a victims ear, slides inside, and swift as quicksilver wraps itself  around the victim’s brain.  To others, the victim appears unchanged, an ordinary American citizen, but he is now under the control of the evil aliens.

As with Animorphs, so with fervent 1950s anti-Comnunists. Three months ago (here), I quoted Gen. Jack Ripper of “Dr. Strangelove”:

It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hard-core Commie works.

 Gen. Ripper and the Animorphs are fictional.  But they’re not far-fetched.

During the 1950s, Golda Franzen, a San Francisco housewife, became the leading exponent of the idea that fluoridation was a “Red conspiracy.” She predicted that fluoridation would produce “moronic, atheistic slaves” who would end up “praying to the Communists.” Franzen's warnings, echoed by such groups as the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan acquired particular salience during the anti-communist fevers of !he McCarthy era. For his part, C. Leon de Aryan, editor of an antiSemitic publication in San Diego, described the spread of fluoridation as a plot to “weaken the Aryan race” by “paralyzing the functions of the frontal lobes.”

 Maybe the Yeerks too wrapped themselves around the frontal lobes.

The mood of the anti-fluoridation forces today in Portland seems different, at least according to the WSJ account, more lighthearted (they have a film called “An Inconvenient Tooth”) and perhaps more concerned with filtration than with infiltration.  Rock musicians, not usually known for rigid boundary maintenance, participated. Local bands – the Dandy Warhols, the Guantanamo Baywatch – were part of the opposition.  On the other side, the Decemberists, who rock globally, were acting locally in favor of  fluoridation. 

The purity-of-essence argument still has exponents, but they do not look at all like the anti-Communist Jack Rippers of the 1950s.  Their quest is not for freedom from insidious foreign influence but for what is “natural.” (A major organic food vendor was on board.)  I would guess that they prefer acupuncture and herbal remedies and don’t want their children inoculated.  I would also guess that even with Portland’s water still uncontaminated by fluoride, they drink only bottled natural spring water.

But the dominant non-medical theme seems to have been “choice.”  The government should not force you to do things without your consent, even if those things are good for your health.

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* From Donald R. McNeil (1985) “America's Longest War: The Fight over Fluoridation, 1950 —” (full text behind a paywall here.

Abortion and Infanticide

May 17, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross posted at Sociological Images

Does “the abortion culture” cause infanticide?  Does legalizing the aborting of a fetus in the womb create a cultural, moral climate where people feel free to kill newborn babies?

It’s not a new argument.  I recall a Peggy Noonan op-ed in the Times in 1998, “Abortion’s Children,”* arguing that kids who grew up in the abortion culture are “confused and morally dulled.”  Earlier this week, USA Today ran an op-ed by Mark Rienzi repeating this argument in connection with the Gosnell murder conviction. 

Rienzi argues that the problem is not one depraved doctor.  As the subhead says:

The killers are not who you think. They’re moms.

Worse, he warns, infanticide has skyrocketed.

While murder rates for almost every group in society have plummeted in recent decades, there's one group where murder rates have doubled, according to CDC and National Center for Health Statistics data — babies less than a year old.

Really? The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports has a different picture.

Many of these victims were not newborns, and Rienzi is talking about day-of-birth homicides – the type of killing Dr. Gosnell was convicted of – a substitute for abortion.  Most of these, as Rienzi says are committed not by doctors but by mothers.  I make the assumption that the method in most of these cases is smothering.  These smothering deaths show an even steeper decline since 1998.

Where did Rienzi get his data that rates had doubled?  By going back to 1950.

The data on infanticide fit with his idea that legalizing abortion increased rates of infanticide.  The rate rises after Roe v. Wade (1973) and continues upward till 2000.

But that hardly settles the issue. Yes, as Rienzi says, “The law can be a potent moral teacher.”  But many other factors could have been affecting the increase in infanticide, factors much closer to the actual killing of a child by its mother – the mother’s age, education, economic and family circumstances, blood lead levels, etc. 

If Roe changed the culture, then that change should be reflected not just in the very small number of infanticides but in attitudes in the general population. Unfortunately, the GSS did not ask about abortion till 1977, but since that year, attitudes on abortion have changed very little.  Nor does this measure of “abortion culture” have any relation to rates of infanticide.
 

If there is a relation between infanticide and general attitudes about abortion, then we would expect to see higher rates of infanticide in areas where attitudes on abortion are more tolerant. 

The South and Midwest are most strongly anti-abortion, the West Coast and Northeast the most liberal.  Do these cultural difference affect rates of infanticide?

The actual rates of infanticide** are precisely the opposite of what the cultural explanation would predict.  Regions that are more anti-abortion have higher rates of infanticide. Regions that are more accepting of abortion rights have lower rates of infanticide.  The abortion culture does not seem to work the way Rienzi and Noonan claim.

The data instead support a different explanation of infanticide, an explanation that looks at laws and policies and how these shape individual decisions. Some state laws make it harder for a woman to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.  Under those conditions, more women will resort to infanticide.  By contrast, where abortion is safe, legal, and available, women will terminate unwanted pregnancies well before parturition. 

The absolutist pro-lifers will dismiss the data by insisting that there is really no difference between abortion and infanticide and  that infanticide is just a very late-term abortion. As Rienzi puts it,

As a society, we could agree that there really is little difference between killing a being inside and outside the womb.

In fact, very few Americans could agree with this proposition. Instead, they do distinguish between a cluster of a few fertilized cells and a newborn baby. I know of no polls that ask about infanticide, but I would guess that a large majority would say that it is wrong under all circumstances.  But only perhaps 20% of the population thinks that abortion is wrong under all circumstances.

Whether the acceptance of abortion in a society makes people “confused and morally dulled” depends on how you define and measure those concepts.  But the data do strongly suggest that whatever “the abortion culture” might be, it lowers the rate of infanticide rather than increasing it.

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* I had trouble finding Noonan’s op-ed at the Times Website.  Fortunately, then-Rep. Talent (R-MO) entered it into the Congressional Record.

** The data are from the CDC.  In earlier version of this post, I used data based on the CDC’s more inclusive “external causes” codes which include accidents.   

Goffman in the Lunch Room

May 12, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

One of my favorite quotes from Goffman’s Asylums (on my syllabus this semester) appears early on in the section on The Staff World

This contradiction, between what the institution does and what its officials must say it does, forms the basic context of the staff’s daily activity.

The semester is over, but I was reminded of that passage when I read a New York Times online article about school lunches.  An 11-year old kid had surreptitiously taken videos of what was actually served and compared these with the official menus

there is a disconnect between the wholesome meals described on school menus and the soggy, deep-fried nuggets frequently dished up in the lunchrooms.

Apparently, the contradiction Goffman mentions goes all the way down the staff hierarchy, even to the people dishing out school lunches.

On a day advertising “cheesy lasagna rolls with tomato basil sauce, roasted spinach with garlic and herbs,” for instance, Zachary is handed a plastic-wrapped grilled cheese sandwich on an otherwise bare plastic foam tray.

Salads devised by the Food Network chefs Rachael Ray and Ellie Krieger are similarly plagued by missing ingredients. On the day Ms. Ray’s “Yum-O! Marinated Tomato Salad” is listed, Zachary is served a slice of pizza accompanied by a wisp of lettuce.

The filmmaker, Zachary Maxwell (that’s a nom-de-vid) has edited his clips into a 20-minute documentary: “Yuck.”

You can read the Times story and see an excerpt here.