Profiling - A Modest Analogy

July 17, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

Under current New York City policy, Blacks are far more likely to be stopped and frisked by the police.  Richard Cohen in the Washington Post (here) defends the policy.

In New York City, blacks make up a quarter of the population, yet they represent 78 percent of all shooting suspects -- almost all of them young men. We know them from the nightly news.

Those statistics represent the justification for New York City's controversial stop-and-frisk program, which amounts to racial profiling writ large. After all, if young black males are your shooters, then it ought to be young black males whom the police stop and frisk.

Needless to say, some people – especially people likely to be stopped and frisked – objected (see Ta-Nehisi Coates for example.)

Here’s an analogy, though as with most analogies, it’s imperfect. Maybe it’s completely wrong.  It is merely submitted for your approval . . . or disapproval.

Suppose that back in the 1960s, 70s, or 80s, a Bloomberg-like mayor looked at New York City’s contracts for construction, paving, concrete, etc. and discovered that there was a good deal of fraud and waste because the work went mostly to mob-affiliated companies.  The city was paying too much and sometimes getting shoddy goods.  The great majority of these companies, or the people who ran them, had Italian names.

So the mayor decrees that all companies with Italian names, or companies whose owners or directors are Italian-Americans, will be barred from doing business with the city. To become eligible for city contracts, such a company must submit to a thorough audit of its books, a review of previous deals that the company has had with the city, and a thorough background check of its owners’ or executives’ contacts – business and social. Only after passing these rigorous investigations can an Italianate company be allowed to bid on city business. 

The new policy will save the taxpayers millions of dollars, and it will dry up an income stream that had been flowing to mobsters.  Win-win. 

Sure, some Italian-Americans would protest, but the inconvenience and resentment of at most a few hundred businesses or even a couple million people is a small price to pay in the fight against organized crime and for honest government.

Burgers and Budgets

July 16, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

McDonald’s, which always has its workers’ interest and welfare at heart, has distributed this pamphlet showing employees how to make a budget and stick to it.

(As you can see, the pamphlet is a joint effort by McDonald’s, VISA, and (apparently said with a straight face), Wealth Watchers International.

The  “key to your financial freedom” is keeping a budget journal.

Here’s the sample budget McDonald’s uses. 

The budget is encouraging, to say the least.  With an income of $2060 a month, a 2-earner family can save $100 each month.

But do you notice anything missing?  Food, for example. Presumably, that comes out of the $27 a day in spending money.  Transportation costs? Car payments are included, but not gasoline or upkeep. On an income of $24,000 a year, will this family have a car that needs no maintenance?  And if the two earners have only one car, it’s likely someone will have to take public transportation to work.  Oh, wait  – maybe they both work at the same McDonald’s. And they never buy clothes.

I’m not sure how McDonald’s employees get health insurance for $20.  Or home heating for free. 

I compared this budged with those found at the The Economic Policy Institute, which has a “Family Budget Calculator.”  You enter the location and the number of adults and children, and it shows the budget for “a secure yet modest living standard.”  Since McDonald’s used a 2-earner family, I imagined a family with two adults and one child.  Here’s what they would need in San Antonio.*

Here’s a northern city, Akron.

Both cities require a monthly income of $4400 for a modest living, more than double what McDonald’s envisions for its employees.  The big difference is health care – $1200 a month is a lot more than $20.  Then comes transportation ($600 vs. $0).  Then there’s the $580 for childcare, an item that is also absent from the McDonald’s budget.  (Apparently, workers at Golden Arches are part of that low-fertility problem that some observers in the Wall Street Journal worry about – here for example).

As for daily spending, food alone, at $600, more than wipes out what the McDonald’s budget suggests. Perhaps McDonald’s assumes that the family eats most of their meals on site, taking advantage of the 50% employee discount.  

So much for the spending part of the McDonald’s budget.  What about the income part?  The Glass Door  posted these pay ranges for various positions.  

Workers might get as little as $6 or even $5 per hour.  The average seems closer to $7.  That means that at least some fast food is not covered by federal minimum wage, but let’s use that minimum, $7.25, as a default estimate.  A forty-hour week, four weeks a month, comes in at $1160 – very close to the $1105 in the McDonald’s sample budget. So that side of the balance sheet is fairly realistic.

That annual income of just under $24,720 is above the official poverty line – $19,530 – but not by all that much.  Given the omissions in the expense column, I would think that a family would find it very hard to live on that little.  And I doubt they could sock away $100 in savings, no matter how much “journaling”** they did.

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* My choice of cities was arbitrary except that I wanted to avoid high-cost areas like San Francisco.

** My linguistically conservative ear still reacts with pain when I hear journal as a verb.  The McDonald’s-VISA pamphlet has sections on “Journaling” and “How to Journal.”  I guess that’s to compensate for the omission of Fooding, Public Transportationing, and Health Insurancing.

A Loss of Innocence

July 14, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a tremendous asset to the public discourse, and I love the way he comes across in his writing. You might disagree with him, but I don’t see how anyone could dislike him.  And usually, he gets it right.

But he gets one small thing wrong in his “thoughts on the verdict of innocent for George Zimmerman.” 

Back when I taught criminal justice, I brought a Legal Aid lawyer to campus to give a talk about his work. During the Q-and-A, a student started to ask, “If a you’re on trial and a jury finds you innocent . . .”  The lawyer immediately stopped her right there and said, “Since the founding of this republic two hundred odd years ago, no jury as ever found any defendant  innocent.”  The girl was more tha baffled, she was stunned.  Then he explained that in our system of criminal justice, there is no such thing as innocence.  Innocence is a factual matter. Guilt is a legal matter.

The question a jury must answer is not “did the defendant do it?”  And it’s certainly not, “what verdict would do justice?”  The question is much narrower: is there reasonable doubt?  More specifically, is there reasonable doubt that the defendant’s actions make him guilty of the crime as defined in the criminal code – the crime that the state has charged him with?  

The distinction is not particularly important in Coates's column, which I recommend that you read right now (here) – after all, the guy took valuable time away from his Paris sojourn (on Bastille Day yet) and his French lessons to write it. And while you’re at it, read Andrew Cohen (here), who explains why in highly publicized cases, the issues for the jury are very different from the issues that most engage the public.

Covers

July 13, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the arts, when one work resembles another, it’s not always clear whether the similarity is coincidence, influence, homage, or just a plain ripoff.

This book cover for Lolita appears in a BuzzFeed piece on books that are “harmless. Until a friend or loved one tells you that one of them is their favorite.”  A FB friend of mine thought the cover was brilliant.  And it is.

But I couldn’t help thinking of that other meaning of “cover” – the one in music, as in  “Madonna’s cover of Lady Gaga’s ‘Born This Way.’” The Lolita cover reminded me of a black-and-white photo by Ralph Gibson, a photographer known for his minimalist style as well has his nude and erotic photography.

I’m fairly sure that the Gibson photo predates the Lolita cover by decades.  I have no idea whether the book designer had ever seen the Gibson photo.  But even if he or she actually had seen it, and even if the Lolita cover was deliberate imitation, there’s no way for the designer to credit Gibson.  Works of art do not include footnoted references.

(The problem of imitation/influence/plagiarism in the arts was the topic of one of the first posts on this blog.  That one (here) was about magicians.  This one and this one were about fiction.)