Trump Unrestricted

September 15, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Commas are important. Sometimes.

• I waved to the young man who was wearing a gray suit.

“Who was wearing a gray suit” is a restrcitive clause. It’s called that because it limits the subject. There could have been a lot of other young men, but I waved to the one in the gray suit.

• I waved to the young man, who was wearing a gray suit.

With the comma added, the clause becomes nonrestrictive. The young man is the only possible one, and he was wearing a gray suit.

Today we have this statement from Donald Trump’s doctors.

We are pleased to disclose all of the test results which show that Mr. Trump is in excellent health, and has the stamina to endure — uninterrupted — the rigors of a punishing and unprecedented presidential campaign and, more importantly, the singularly demanding job of President of the United States.

With no comma, the clause “which show that Mr. Trump is in excellent health” becomes restrictive. It implies that there may other test results which do not show Trump to be in excellent health. Was the copy editor being cagey or merely careless?

Today’s statement is a bit more specific than the previous medical records released by a Trump doctor — “If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” which sounds almost as if the Donald himself could have written it.

Of course Mr. Trump is in great health, the best – believe me. I know his doctors, the finest really. I admire them, and they say his stamina is great. I can’t believe that people are complaining about a comma. Don’t get me wrong. I love commas. China – by the way, a very great country – China doesn’t have commas, and we’ve let them get away with that. China is incredible in many ways. I eat Chinese food. I mean, my Chinese chef is tremendous, tremendous. But many people say that there are no commas on the menus. No commas at all. Sad.

All In the Family

September 11, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

“God must love the common man,” goes the quote usually attributed to Lincoln, “He made so many of them.”

Greg Mankiw must love the rich. He writes so many articles promoting policies that help them. In today’s installment in the NY Times Business section (here), he writes about the estate tax.*

Mankiw probably didn’t write that headline, and it’s slightly misleading. It suggests that Mankiw wants to get rid of all inheritance taxes without making any other changes. In fact, he proposes other ways to “make sure those at the top pay their fair share.” But the headline captures the takeaway – or at least what rich people and their advocates take away.

Not taxing inheritances is what happened when Mankiw was, as he reminds us, chief economic advisor to President George W. Bush. Bush phased out the estate tax entirely. Presumably Mankiw raised no strong objections. It’s possible that Mankiw recommended to Bush the alternate taxes he mentions in today’s Times. We don’t know. But if he did, the only item in his advice package that Bush and the Congressional Republicans paid attention to was the call to just get rid of this pesky tax on the heirs of the wealthy.

In writing against the estate tax, Mankiw pulls the same switcheroo that other opponents of the tax use. He writes about it as though the people who pay the tax are those who accumulated the fortune. They aren’t. Calling the inheritance tax the “death tax” makes it seem as though the dead are being taxed for dying. They aren’t. If you leave an estate to your heirs, you have departed this mortal plane and are safely beyond the reach of the IRS.

The people who would pay the tax are those who inherit the money. If they had gotten this money the old fashioned way, by earning it, they would pay tax on it – and nobody objects on principle to taxing the money people get by working. But money they get because someone gave it to them gets preferable treatment. Mankiw dodges this issue by talking about “families,” as though the family were still the same as it was before the death of the one who made the money – as though the money hadn’t really changed hands.

The same logic would shield income in the paychecks that someone got by working in the family business. And who knows? Maybe Republicans will propose making income from the family business tax-free. The Trump kids would get a free ride. After all, if we don’t want a death tax, why would we allow a parenthood tax?


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*Another post on Mankiw and taxes is here. Other posts about Mankiw in this blog are here and here.

(A day after I posted this, Matt Levine made basically the same criticisms of the Mankiw piece. Levine writes for Bloomberg, so his post probably had a few more readers.)

Trigger Warnings

September 10, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

I posted a trigger warning last week, the first one I have ever used.

I begin the semester contrasting individual facts with social facts, and the example I use is Durkheim’s study of suicide – suicide rates and social integration as social facts. In each of the past two semesters, a student has told me weeks later that he or she (one of each) had recently experienced the suicide of someone they were close to, and the topic still upset them. I had had no idea that I was tromping around on someone else’s understandably sensitive toes. For the remainder of the course, in selecting examples to illustrate sociological ideas in the remainder of the course, I tried to avoid suicide.

This semester, before the first class meeting, I posted an announcement on Canvas (or “course management system”):

(Click for a larger view.)

The University of Chicago does not approve. In a now-famous letter sent to incoming students last month, the Chicago Dean of Students Jay Ellison said

Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so called ‘trigger warnings.’

I’m not sure why the Dean thinks it’s a good idea to spring disturbing material upon students without any advance notice. Maybe when it comes to movies he doesn’t like the MPAA warnings either. I do.

One evening long ago when I was a student, I went with some friends to see a new movie that they said had gotten good reviews and was by an important director.  Back then, before DVD, VHS, HBO, etc., if you wanted to see a movie, you had to go to the theater before the movie finished its run.
The movie was “Straw Dogs.” It’s another version of the adolescent boy’s fantasy that used to grace the inside covers of comic books.

(Click for a larger view.)

In “Straw Dogs,” instead of the bully kicking sand in the boy’s face while the girlfriend watches, the bullies rape the girl. And instead of merely returning to punch out one bully, the hero dispatches a septet of baddies using variously a fire poker, a shotgun, boiling oil, a nail gun, and a bear trap.

Immediately after seeing the movie, I was upset – angry at the movie, even angry at my friends. It was not the stupidity of the movie that disturbed me.  I’d seen the basic plot not just in comic book ads but in many American films. We American guys just loves us some justifiable revenge violence. What upset me was that the violence was viscerally arousing. The movie was rated R, but I had seen plenty of R movies. I just hadn’t seen any that put violence on the screen so effectively.* My reaction, I realized later, was probably like some people’s reaction to sex in the movies – it’s arousing in a way that they don’t want to be aroused, at least not by a movie. (They don’t want others to be aroused by it either, but that’s a separate issue.)

If someone had told me beforehand what to expect, my reaction to and against the film would not have been as strong, nor would I have been as pissed off at my friends for selecting the film. Maybe when film classes at Chicago show “Straw Dogs,” they remove the R rating and generally keep students in the dark. Apparently Dean Ellison would prefer it that way. Me, I’d warn the students in advance and risk being scoffed at as politically correct.

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* Making violence arousing is something that Peckinpah is very good at. Pauline Kael famously said of “Straw Dogs” that it was “a fascist work of art.”     

Labor Day - Unions on Film

September 5, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

A guy I know who hates teachers unions equates them with the corrupt and violent Longshoremen’s union portrayed in “On the Waterfront.” True, the union comes off badly in this movie. When Brando, having testified against union boss Johnny Friendly says, “I’m glad what I done to you, Johnny Friendly,” the audience is glad too. But what about other films?

Hollywood is much more likely to give us business executives than workers. The corporate biggies are usually corrupt and evil, but at least they’re up there on the screen. Workers, not so much.

I tried to think of American movies (non-documentary) where a union or even the idea of a union had an important role. The list I came up with on the spur of the moment was very short

• Norma Rae (1979)
• The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

Putting the question out to my Facebook friends brought only a few more to the list (ht: Philip Cohen).

• Matewan (1987)
• Hoffa (1992)
• Salt of the Earth (1954)

Googling “movies about unions” added

• The Devil and Miss Jones (1941)                                   
• F.I.S.T. (1978)
• Bread and Roses (2000)
• Blue Collar (1978)
• Won’t Back Down (2012)
• The Garment Jungle (1957)
• Black Fury (1935)

Given the Hollywood depiction of corporated bosses as bad guys, I expected that movies would also portray unions as  virtuous organizations helping virtuous workers.  That’s sort of true of 40s and 50s, though obviously “Waterfront” is an exception.* But in “Hoffa,” “F.I.S.T.,” “Blue Collar,” and “Won’t Back Down,” unions don’t come off so well.  Of movies from the last 30 years, only “Matewan” is unambiguously pro-union, and it was a low-budget indie. So much for the idea that Hollywood is dominated by leftists and liberals.

My favorite nomination – one ignored even by Google – came from my cousin, who wasn’t even born till about twenty years after the movie came out: “The Pajama Game” (1957).

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* The point of “Waterfront” was to make a virtue out of testifying to the government against the team you used to be on. Both the writer and the director, Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan, respectively, had testified before the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities and had ratted out other Hollywood people – naming names and ruining careers. Kazan acknowledged the parallel – he was glad what he done to his former associates. But Schulberg denied that the movie had anything to do with HUAC investigations.