Red-State Health Care - Gut It Out

December 13, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston


George W. Bush at least talked about “compassionate conservatism.” The phrase was a response to the image of Republicans as cold-hearted. Rather than risk poor people becoming dependent on government, conservatives espoused principles of rugged individualism: you’re on your own no matter what.

Republicans today don’t even talk about compassion. Mostly, it seems, they just want to see Obama and anything connected with him fail. If that means punishing poor people, too bad.

A Supreme Court decision allowed states the option of refusing to go along with the Medicaid expansion that was part of Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).  Republican-controlled states are refusing to take federal money that would allow poor people in those states easier access to Medicaid. 

An article and video by Laura Ungar in the Louisville Courier-Journal compares Kentucky, one of the few red states to accept Medicaid expansion, with Indiana just across the border. What is the income ceiling on eligibility for Medicaid. Accoriding to Indiana’s unexpanded Medicaid regulations, if a working mother of two earns more than $4,687 a year, she’s too rich to deserve Medicaid.

 To be fair to the Hoosier state, the news article adds:

Indiana also has an alternative Medicaid “demonstration project” called the Healthy Indiana Plan, which the federal government recently extended through 2014. The program includes a health savings account and cost-sharing by participants, and doesn’t cover all the services covered by traditional Medicaid. It has a long waiting list.

Individuals with no children generally cannot get Medicaid in Indiana. The Healthy Indiana Plan is unavailable to individuals earning more than $11,490 nearly 30% lower than Medicaid. 

An Indiana woman in the video says,

For Louisville to have it and our people not when we are fifteen minutes away from each other, it’s just criminal. I am sorry, but I think it’s criminal that we’re not doing Medicaid expansion.

The 2012 Court decision allowing states to have different policies on Medicaid expansion upholds the principle of federalism – that states are “laboratories of democracy.”  It’s just that in this case, when you leave the Kentucky lab and walk into the Indiana lab, you’ll see a lot more poor people needing medical care. Instead, as the woman said, they rely on “over-the-counter medications.  And gut it out, just gut it out.”

 “Gut it out” pretty much summarizes the rugged-individualism theory of the state, and exponents of that theory will surely admire this woman. But I get the impression that this woman – unable to afford health insurance for the last 21 years – would gladly trade some of that admiration for affordable health care and would not mind at all if Indiana did something to make her individualism a little less rugged.

Jim Hall

December 11, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

Guitarist Jim Hall died yesterday. 

There’s not a lot of sociology in this post, except perhaps the reminder that art is a collective enterprise and that success and reputation depend on the people you work with.*  That may be especially true of sidemen, the jazz equivalent of supporting actors. And it may be even more true for sidemen with a non-flashy, understated, self-effacing approach to music.  Which pretty much describes Jim Hall.

The better-known musicians who chose Hall to work with them form an impressive list.  When Sonny Rollins came down off the Willimsburg Bridge in 1962,** ending his three-year absence from the music scene, he formed a quartet with Hall on guitar. Bill Evans and Ron Carter recorded duo albums with him.  He did several albums with Paul Desmond, who was famous because of Brubeck and “Take Five” (written by Desmond, not Brubeck), but who also eschewed flashiness. Asked what he had absorbed from Desmond, Hall said

 I had more respect for melody. It worked out perfectly for me because I don’t have the amazing chops that a lot guys have, anyway. I realized that playing nice melodies was okay, so that made it a lot easier for me.

Whenever I’m teaching. I have these students with incredible chops. I try things to get them to slow down. Occasionally, I’ll have them just play on one string like a trombone, or play a mode with three or four notes and develop that through a whole solo, make them more aware of what Paul was aware of, how it becomes an art form and gets away from all that macho b.s. [interview with Doug Ramsey]

Here he is with Art Farmer’s quartet playing “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You” (Farmer sits out on this one).  Steve Swallow, bass; Pete LaRoca, drums.

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* Gabriel Rossman has a fuller treatment of this idea in his ASR paper (with Esparza and Bonacich (“I’d Like to Thank the Academy” (here).

** Rather than woodshed in his apartment, Rollins spent up to sixteen hours a day practicing where the sound would not bother neighbors. He has more, and a picture, on his website.

Yes, But Harvard Students Know a Lot More Now

December 3, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

Headline in the Crimson today.

For comparison, here is the grade sheet from a 1940 Government course.*  The mean and median are a C+, so the B- by that fellow in the K’s is a shade above average.

(Click on an image for a 
clearer view.)

We professors can, and often do, go on at length arguing about the problem of grades, the purpose of grades, the effects of grades, and so on. But the trend is unmistakable. Grades have gone up, and much more so at private universities than at the publics.  Harvard is different in only in degree.

Yes, the most common grade at Harvard is an A, but the most common grade at universities generally is an A (the graph below ignores the + and –).

(The graphs are from gradeinflation.com)

For the record, this is not what my gradesheets look like. But I suspect that if I went back and looked at my gradebooks from when I started, I would find that I too give higher grades now than I did years ago.

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* I mentioned this to a friend who had been chair of her department at another school. “How did you get a gradesheet now from a course JFK was in?”
“The teacher was late turning in his grades,” I said.  She laughed. . . a lot.  Maybe you have to have been chair to really appreciate the joke.

Civilization and Its Stoplights

December 2, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross posted at Sociological Images

Three in the morning, Dad, good citizen
stopped, waited, looked left, right.
He had been driving nine hundred miles,
had nearly a hundred more to go,
but if there was any impatience
it was only the steady growl of the engine
which could just as easily be called a purr.

I chided him for stopping;
he told me our civilization is founded
on people stopping for lights at three in the morning.

— from a poem by Bruce Hawkins.

I read these lines on a political blog* this morning, and I thought of Murray Davis.

One December long ago, I got a ride home from Boston to Pittsburgh with Murray in his black VW Beetle. He was a graduate student, I was an undergrad, and in those days the trip took twelve hours.  We got into Pittsburgh some time after 2 a.m.  The streets were deserted

In Shadyside on Fifth Avenue, not far from my parents’ condo, we came to a red light. Murray paused, then drove on through.

“Sociology allowed me to do that,” he said.

I can’t remember his explanation, but I think it had something to do with “rules in use” and the negotiability of norms. That’s interesting, I thought.  Maybe it was even convincing, though I still turned in my seat to see if there were any cops behind us. There weren’t.

Murray was right. At that hour of empty streets, waiting for the green serves no rational purpose. When there is no traffic, traffic safety is not an issue. But Bruce Hawkins’s dad is also right.  He takes a more Durkheimian view: rationality is not the basis of society. What makes society possible is people’s attachment to the group and its ideas – its values, its beliefs, and its stoplights.I wonder what Murray would have said now about this poem.


(Murray died six years ago. The ASA obit is here.  He wrote some insightful books – Intimate Relations, What’s So Funny?, Smut., and a well-known essay on sociology and phenomenology. )

* Hat tip to Keith Humphrey at The Reality-Based Community. He reprints the poem in its entirety here.