Happy Birthday, Jay Livingston (1915 - 2001)

March 28, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

It’s strange to go ego-surfing and the only person who turns up is some other guy. It’s only fair. He’s the one who wrote all those songs that were hits a half-century ago – “Mona Lisa,” “Tammy,” “The Mr. Ed” theme song, and of course of course, “Silver Bells.” Simple songs with simple chords.

That’s what he became known for. That’s what Hitchcock was looking for when he hired him to write a song for “The Man Who Knew Too Much.” What Livingston (and his songwriting partner Ray Evans) came up with was “Que Sera Sera.” Said Hitchcock when he heard it, “Gentlemen, I told you I didn't know what kind of song I wanted, but that's the kind of song I want.”

His only tune in the jazz standards repertoire is “Never Let Me Go,” so different from those other songs – darker, in a minor key, and with complex and unexpected chord changes. It was also his own favorite. He tells the story that after he finished it, he took it to another song writer (I can’t remember who) to ask his opinion. The other composer sat down at the piano, played through it, and said, “You didn’t write this.”

He did write one other song that a few jazzers and singers do. “Maybe September.” Here is the version from the second Bill Evans - Tony Bennett album, 1977. There may be other recordings with a better vocal, but this one has Bill Evans.

“Concerted Cultivation” and the March For Our Lives

March 25, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

A question that few people seem to be asking about Enough Is Enough and the March for Our Lives is: Why now? Or to paraphrase a question that some people soon will be asking: How is this school shooting different from all other school shootings?

There’s #MeToo and #Time’sUp of course. These may have inspired advocates of other liberal causes like gun control. But just three weeks earlier, a 15-year old in Benton, Kentucky brought a handgun to school and started shooting – 2 dead, 18 injured. The incident evoked only the usual responses, nothing more.

Here’s my hunch. When I first saw the kids in Parkland speaking out, organizing, demanding that adults do something, I immediately thought of a sociology book that had nothing to do with guns – Unequal Childhoods by Annette Lareau published in 2003.

These high-schoolers, I thought, are the children of “concerted cultivation.” That was the term Lareau used for the middle-class approach to raising kids. It’s not just that middle-class parents cultivate the child’s talents, providing them with private coaches and organized activities. There is less separation of child worlds and adult worlds. Parents pay attention to children and take them seriously, and the children learn how to deal with adults and with institutions run by adults.

One consequence is the notorious sense of “entitlement” that older people find so distressing in millennials. Here is how Lareau put it:

This kind of training developed in Alexander and other middle-class children a sense of entitlement. They felt they had a right to weigh in with an opinion, to make special requests, to pass judgment on others, and to offer advice to adults. They expected to receive attention and to be taken very seriously.

It is this sense of entitlement – the teenager’s sense that she is entitled to have some effect on the forces that affect her life – that made possible the initial protests by the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. And once word of that protest spread, it was this same sense of entitlement, these same assumptions about their place in the world, that made so many other high school students join the movement.

At Fox and elsewhere, conservatives had to denigrate the students. That goes without saying. But their choice of lies and slurs is instructive. Conservatives just could not believe that kids could or should be so adept at mounting an effective movement or that they could or should speak intelligently about political issues. So the right-wingers insisted that the students were paid “crisis actors” or pawns of various forces of evil – adult anti-gun activists, the media, the deep state, etc. They also claimed that the students were “rude” and that they did not have standing to raise the issue of gun control.

“[the students] say that they shouldn’t be able to own guns even though they can go to war, but they think that they should be able to make laws. None of this makes any sense at all.

(For this and more really stupid Fox commentary the day before the march, see the excerpts in the transcript here.)

In a way, Fox and their friends are hauling out the old notion that children should know their place. But it’s not necessarily do-as-you’re-told authoritarianism. The issue isn’t the child’s independence. As Lareau says, concerted cultivation makes children far more dependent on parents than does the “natural growth” parenting more common in working-class families. Besides, foreign visitors since the early days of the republic have remarked on the independence of American children. What’s new, and what is so upsetting to exponents of older ideas, is the demand by teenagers to be involved in the decisions that shape their lives.

Sondheim – “The Glamorous Life”

March 22, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

It’s Stephen Sondheim’s birthday – he’s a pianistic 88.

It’s hard to write about Sondheim without repeating what are by now cliches. But cliches (which Sondheim scrupulously avoids) usually contain some truth, and the one that sticks in my mind is this: Sondheim brings ambivalence to center stage. Sometimes it’s right there in the title of a song. In “Company,” in answer to the question, “Are you ever sorry you got married?” a character sings “Sorry Grateful” (“You’re always sorry, you’re always grateful, you’re always wondering what might have been.”)

In other songs, the ambivalence is subtext, as in “The Glamorous Life” from “A Little Night Music.” Frederika, young teenage girl, is singing about the glamorous life of her actress mother compared with the lives of “ordinary mothers.” It’s no contest, and yet, under the protestations of how wonderful it is to have a glamorous mother, Frederika senses that she’s missing something.

Ordinary daughters may think life is better
With ordinary mothers near them when they choose. . .

No, ordinary mothers merely see their children all year,
Which is nothing, I hear…
But it does interfere
With the glamorous—

Here is the great Audra McDonald performing the song at a celebration for Sondheim’s 80th birthday. Yes, there’s her powerful voice, but she also perfectly reveals the ambivalence. (I don’t see how an actual teenage girl could sing this song – the version in the movie of “Night Music” is not good – especially if she has ever heard this performance by McDonald.)

(The original Broadway version of the song was far different, an ensemble piece combining other songs performed by other characters. Sondheim rewrote the song for the movie so that it presented only Frederika's perspective.)

Connecting the Dots

March 22, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

Brilliance in science is sometimes a matter of simplifying – paring away complicated scientific techniques and seeing what non-scientists would see if they looked in the right place. That’s what Richard Feynman did when he dropped a rubber ring into a glass of ice water – a flash of brilliance that allowed everyone to understand what caused the space shuttle Challenger disaster.

Andrew Gelman isn’t Richard Feynman, but he did something similar in his blog post about an article that’s been getting much buzz, including at Buzzfeed, since it was posted at SSRN two weeks ago. The article is about Naloxone, the drug administered to people who have overdosed on heroin or opoiods. It keeps them from dying.

The authors of the article, Jennifer Doleac and Anita Mukherjee, argue that while the drug may save lives in the immediate situation, it does not reduce overall drug deaths. Worse, the unintended consequences of the drug outweigh its short-run benefits. Those whose lives are saved go back to using drugs, committing crimes, and winding up in emergency rooms. In addition, a drug that will prevent overdoes death “[makes] riskier opioid use more appealing.” 

The title is “The Moral Hazard of Lifesaving Innovations: Naloxone Access, Opioid Abuse, and Crime.” (A moral hazard is something that encourages people to do bad things by protecting them from negative consequences.)

Naloxone didn’t happen all at once. In 2013 fewer than ten states allowed it; the next year the number had doubled. In 2015, only nine states still did not allow its use. Doleac and Mukherjee used these time differences to look at bad outcomes (theft, death, ER admissions) before and after the introduction Naloxone in the different states.  Here are some of their graphs.

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

They conclude that “broadening Naloxone access led to more opioid-related ER visits.” As for deaths, “in some areas, particularly the Midwest, expanding Naloxone access has increased opioid-related mortality.”

There are reasons to be skeptical of the data, but let’s assume that the numbers – the points in the graph – are accurate. Even so, says Andrew Gelman (here), there’s still the question of how to interpret that array of points. Doleac and Mukherjee add lines and what I assume are confidence bands to clarify the trends. But do these added techniques clarify, or do they create a picture that is different from the underlying reality? Here’s Gelman:

The weird curvy lines are clearly the result of overfitting some sort of non-regularized curves. More to the point, if you take away the lines and the gray bands, I don’t see any patterns at all! Figure 4 just looks like a general positive trend, and figure 8 doesn’t look like anything at all. The discontinuity in the midwest is the big thing—this is the 14% increase mentioned in the abstract to the paper—but, just looking at the dots, I don’t see it.

Are these graphs really an optical illusion, with the lines and shadings getting me to see something that isn’t really there? My powers of visualization are not so acute, so to see what Gelman meant about looking only at the dots, I erased the added lines and bands. Here is what the graphs looked like.

Like Gelman, I can’t see any clear patterns showing the effect of Naloxone. And as I read the reactions to the paper, I sense that its results are ambiguous enough to provide rich material for motivated perception. Conservatives and libertarians often start from the assumption that government attempts to help people only make things worse. The unintended-consequences crowd – Megan McCardle, for example (here) – take the paper at face value. Liberals Richard G. Frank, Keith Humphreys, and Harold A. Pollack (here), who have done their own research on Naloxone – are more skeptical about the accuracy of the data.*

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* This reminded me of a post I did in the first year of this blog.  It was about an editorial in the WSJ that included an utterly dishonest, ideologically motivated connect-the-dots line imposed on an array of points. The post is here.