America’s Youth — Lost Yet Again.

August 13, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Last week, The Atlantic posted this article by Jean Twenge, and some of my Facebook friends linked to it with favorable comments.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

Just from what you can see in this graphic, I was skeptical.

1. Kids and Trouble. When I see titles like this, I immediately think of “Trouble” from “The Music Man” and “Kids” from “Bye-bye Birdie.” (What can I say – I was raised on LPs of Broadway shows.) I’ve mentioned these in posts going back ten years (here) and more recently (here).  Apparently, you can get a lot of attention by telling people that the youth of America are going to hell in a handbasket, or in this case, an iHandbasket.

2. Crying wolf. Jean Twenge sounded a similar alarm not all that long ago. Generation Me (2006) and The Narcissism Epidemic (2009).  I noted my doubts about the latter here.

3. Question titles.  Whenever the title of a book or article is phrased as a question, two things are almost certain:

• The author thinks that the answer to the question is “Yes.”
• The more accurate answer is “No.”*

I’d like to explore the evidence – it seems that the main source of Twenge’s data is Monitoring the Future, a long-standing survey housed at ICPSR – but it’s complicated. The survey gives different forms to different samples of different age groups (8th graders, 10th graders, 12th graders). And in 2012, the survey changed the way it compiled the surveys. Anyone who knows how to work with MTF, please raise your hand.

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*This is a slight variation on Betteridge’s Law

Chasing the Dragon

August 6, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Three weeks ago, I posted this photo on my Facebook, adding that apparently KEEPOFF had a solid fan base at the Jersey shore.

A former student (Thomas Springsteen, no relation) commented: “Their early stuff was way better.”

Perfect. It’s what people always say about rock groups. At least, it seems that way to me. Is there systematic evidence of the earlier-was-better bias? Well, sort of.

Philip Cohen asked people to rate performers twice on a scale of 1 (“terrible”) to 5 (“great”):

• how good were they in the 70s?
• how good were they in the 80s?

Here are the results.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

Most groups are on the 1970s side of the line of equality. And of those few who were better in the 80s, except for Pat Benatar and perhaps Prince and Michael Jackson, the degree of improvement is small.

Philip’s explanation (here)  is that his respondents are accurate reporters – music really did go downhill in the 80s, along with the whole damn Zeitgeist.

As I look back on these events – Reagan, the Cold War, sell-out music – in the context of what I thought of as my emerging adulthood, they seemed to herald a dark future, in which loss of freedom and individuality, the rise of the machines, and runaway capitalism was reflected in the decline of rock music.

Maybe. But maybe the results in this graph might not be so fixed in the historical moment. My guess is that Philip would have gotten similar results no matter what dividing point he chose. And not because of some inevitable law of musical entropy. It’s not the music, it’s the audience. The sound of a group or performer when they first become popular defines who they are. And that’s what we want to hear. We think: that’s what they sound like, and I really like it.

But what happens after a few years? The group can keep turning out music that sounds pretty much the same. We the fans think: yeah, it still sounds like them. But we don’t get that same thrill we had when we first heard them or saw them in concert.

Or the performers get bored and search out new sounds. They then risk losing their audience. A few can bring their audience along with them in these new explorations, like Dylan when he went electric or the Beatles with “Sgt. Pepper” and beyond. But these, I think, are exceptions.

My guess is that the graph looks the way it does for the same reason that we have oldies stations. We want to hear the songs that made us fans to begin with. Their early stuff was way better.

Directory Assistance

August 4, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

I don’t know why I became briefly obsessed with the 1940 Manhattan phone book when a Facebook friend linked to it yesterday, but I did. Nostalgia perhaps, though I wasn’t living in New York in 1940. I wasn’t living at all. But seeing the exchanges with names instead of numbers (area codes, of course, had not yet been invented) makes it just a little easier to imagine what life in New York was like three quarters of a century ago. 475 tells you nothing; GRamercy 5 evokes a neighborhood.*

I couldn’t find my wife’s family. In 1940 not everyone had a phone. Perhaps they didn’t get theirs (WAdsworth 8) until later. Then I went looking for other people who might have been living in New York then.

(Click for a larger view.)

You could just pick up the phone and call J.D. Salinger,** who might prefer not to have been bothered, or Coleman Hawkins, who would probably want to go out for a few drinks.

Estee Lauder lived just a few blocks from me, and we shared an exchange – ENdicott 2, (The elegant Endicott Hotel, built in the 1890s, was just a few blocks north.)

You can browse the entire phone book here.

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*  “I know the last part of your number –  6160,” I said years ago to a fellow West Sider, “but I can never remember – is it 479 or 749.”
“749,” he said as though it were obvious. “RIverside 9.”
That was decades ago. I still remember it.

**   “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.”

Cosmopolitans and Roots

August 3, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Why did White House advisor Stephen Miller call CNN reporter Jake Acosta “cosmopolitan”?

At the end of yesterday’s press briefing, Acosta asked about the Trump administration’s new proposals on immigration – reducing the total number of green cards by half and giving preference to people who are more skilled and people who speak English well.

ACOSTA:   The Statue of Liberty has always been a beacon of hope to the world for people to send their people to this country. They're not always going to speak English.. . . Are we just going to bring in people from Great Britain and Australia?

MILLER: I have to say, I am shocked at your statement that you think that only people from Great Britain and Australia would know English. It reveals your cosmopolitan bias to a shocking degree.

Cosmopolitan? Acosta’s question suggests the exact opposite – provinicialism. A worldly and sophisticated person would know that some countries in Asia and Africa have English as their national or dominant language and that people all over the world learn English as a second language. Only a rube would think that English proficiency was limited to Great Britain and Australia.

What did Miller mean by cosmopolitan? The question sent me back to the article that put “cosmopolitan” into the sociological lexicon – Alvin Gouldner’s 1957 “Cosmopolitans and Locals.”

 Cosmopolitans:

• low on loyalty to the employing organization
• high on commitment to specialized role skills
• likely to use an outer reference group orientation

Locals:

• high on loyalty to the employing organization,
• low on commitment to specialized role skills
• likely to use an inner reference group orientation.

Gouldner was writing about people in organizations. Miller is concerned with politics. The common element here is loyalty. Miller, along with Steve Bannon, engineered Trump’s “America first” doctrine, and by “cosmopolitans” he seems to mean people who are not putting America first. On immigration, people like Acosta are thinking about what might be good for an uneducated but hard-working Guatemalan, when instead they should be thinking only about what’s good for the US.

The alt-Right has been using cosmopolitan for a while now, and perhaps it was Miller’s familiarity with White nationalist discourse that made the word so available as a put-down of Acosta even though Acosta’s question seemed based on the kind of ignorance about the world that is much respected over on the right.

Like “America first,” “cosmopolitan” has a history of holding hands with anti-Semitism. In Stalin’s Russia, the phrase “rootless cosmopolitan” was a synonym for Jew, and Stalin murdered quite a few of them. In the US today, the antipathy to “cosmopolitan” embodies this same fear of rootlessness and the same dislike of Jews. Here is one Website’s take on yesterday’s press briefing.

The twist here is that Acosta, the alleged cosmopolitan, is not Jewish, but Miller is. (The alt-Right uses the triple parentheses around a name to designate a Jew.) I don’t know how Miller resolves the dissonance other than to claim that he has never had anything to do with White nationalists (a claim that is probably false).  For the anti-Semites, the Website has this:

While not a Jew himself, Acosta is the end result of the education and programming pushed by the Rootless Cosmopolitans wherever they dwell – even Stalin grew wise to them near the end of his life. Miller would of course understand this, and I think those more dedicated to The Tribe get the reference as well.

To sum up the website’s take: First, Acosta’s cosmopolitanism came from being educated by Jews. Second, Miller and other Jews must surely understand the overtones of the term cosmopolitan. And finally, let’s throw in a good word for Stalin: an anti-Semitic Russian autocrat – what’s not to like?

Three Cosmopolitans

(Click to enlarge. The rootless cosmopolitan on the right is from a Soviet humor magazine 1949).

UPDATE: Jeff Greenfield says something similar and more at Politico. ( “It’s a way of branding people or movements that are unmoored to the traditions and beliefs of a nation, and identify more with like-minded people regardless of their nationality.”) (I met Greefield once long ago at a party, back before he was on CBS, ABC, CNN, back when he did a morning show once a week on WBAI.)