“Other Than That, Merry Christmas”

December 28, 2018  
Posted by Jay Livingston 

Some countries have a ceremonial head of state — a person who stands above or at least apart form partisan politics and who therefore can more easily be seen as representative of the whole country. The UK has the Queen. It is the Queen, not the prime minister, who delivers the Christmas message.

When surveys ask Brits for the person they most admire, the Queen always wins. This year, Theresa May, the head of the government, didn’t even make the top five.

In the US, both roles — political/govermental leader and ceremonial head of state — fall to the president. The overlap can get tricky, but most US presidents, on ceremonial occasions, have tried to to avoid politics and to appeal to widely shared values and symbols. Their Christmas messages, for instance, project warmth and hope. Even if they mention problems (the suffering of those who are ill, poor, homeless, bereaved), they emphasize the American spirit that helps us overcome setbacks.

Donald Trump seems incapable of playing that role for more than a minute. The pre-recorded Christmas message from the Trumps (Donald and Melania) stayed true to the genre. But on Christmas day, Trump quickly returned to the spirit of Christmas Trump — belittling and combative. On Twitter, he wrote, “I hope everyone, even the Fake News Media, is having a great Christmas!” And speaking to reporters he concluded with, “It’s a disgrace what’s happening in this country. But, other than that I wish everybody a Merry Christmas.”*

Since 1946, the Gallup Poll has been asking Americans “What man that you have heard or read about, living today in any part of the world, do you admire most?” Nearly every year, the most admired man is the president or president-elect. In the graphic below, the names in red are most-admired men who were not.

(Click for a larger view.)

When a president is not the most admired, it’s because of policy failures (Truman and Korea, LBJ and Vietnam plus domestic strife, Carter and stagflation) or personal failure (Nixon and Watergate). But with Trump, it’s something else. In most of the years in the chart, the president was not really doing anything unusually admirable. The admiration was directed to him not as a person or politician but as the symbol of the nation. For better or worse, he is our Queen. What has kept Trump from the top of the list for both years of his presidency is his unwillingness or inability to play that symbolic role.

(Earlier blogposts about our lack of a Queen are here and here )

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* I doubt that anyone was surprised that Trump lumped together this supposed national disgrace and the national holiday. After all, at his very first ceremonial occasion, the inauguration, he spoke of “this American carnage.” (In that speech, he assured us that the carnage would “stop right now.” That was two years ago. Apparently, the carnage has not been stopped but merely transformed into disgrace.)

The Ferguson Effect Goes to School

December 27, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

The “Ferguson Effect” has disappeared from the headlines. It doesn’t come up much in political discussions. But now, conservatives are pushing the same idea applied to schools.

In case you’ve forgotten, proponents of the Ferguson Effect sketch out this scenario:

• A White cop kills a Black person, usually an unarmed Black person.
• Black people protest.
• The government, dominated by liberals, pressures police to be less aggressive, especially towards African Americans. Sometimes cops who have killed Black people are prosecuted.
• Cops, to avoid being exposed to prosecution and accusations of racism, withdraw from proactive policing.
• Crime in Black neighborhoods increases.
• Conclusion: A policy intended to reduce racism winds up hurting Black people.

The fault, according to this model, is not in our cops but in our liberals.

For the schools version, just substitute teachers and administrators for police; substitue disruption/violence/bullying for crime. The villain remains the same — liberal government policies. The equivalent of consent decrees forced on police departments is an Obama-era policy that threatened schools with loss of funds for disproportionately punishing Black kids.

Betsy de Vos, Trump’s Secretary of Education, is rescinding that policy, and conservatives are cheering. Here is Jason S. Riley in the Wall Street Journal:

Racial parity in school discipline, regardless of who was being disruptive. . . is as silly as demanding racial parity in police arrests, regardless of who’s committing crimes.

If the Obama policy means that Black kids are less likely to be punished for an offense, then Black kids’ misbehavior that will increase. The losers will be the other kids in their schools. And since US schools are racially homogeneous, the anti-racism policy will wind up hurting Black people. According to Riley, this Ferguson Effect has already happened since the Obama policy went into effect in 2014.

The result is that more schools have been disciplining fewer students in order to achieve racial balance in suspension rates and stay out of trouble with the federal government. . .  In Oklahoma City, principals told teachers not to request a suspension “unless there was blood.”

The “blood” thing is a great quote, but if you are making generalizations about a nationwide policy, Oklahoma City is a very small n. Elsewhere in his article, Riley cites the report by the National Center for Education Statistics (here), a national survey, so that’s where I went for a broader view. The NCES asks teachers whether misbehavior is undermining their teaching.

(Click on a graph for a larger view.)

The graphs show no sharp changes after 2014. Misbehavior that interfered with teaching began to rise in 2007-2008 and continued to rise at about the same rate. Enforcement of school rules showed no change.

What were the effects of this supposed pullback in punishment? More bad stuff. Here’s Riley again.

After school districts in Los Angeles and Chicago softened their policies to curb suspensions, teachers reported more disorder, and students reported feeling less safe. Following a similar move in Philadelphia, truancy increased and academic achievement fell. Schools in Wisconsin that followed the guidance also saw subsequent reductions in math and reading proficiency.

Riley gives us three cities and one state, each with its own negative outcomes. It’s possible that these outcomes are related — more students feel unsafe so they stay away from school, and achievement falls. But Riley doesn’t tell us whether Los Angeles students, with their lower feelings of safety, also scored worse on tests of achievement. Or whether in Wisconsin, where achievement scores dropped, students also felt less safe. He mentions “disorder” but not actual crime or even bullying. Nor does he tell us the magnitude of these changes.

Were these cities and outcomes representative, or were they merely a few unusually juicy cherries that Riley picked? To get the more general picture, I went back to the NCES survey.  Had 2014 brought in a new era of  fear?

Fear decreased in the 1990s, and it leveled off in about 2010, and did not rise appreciably after that. There is no discernible effect of the 2014 policy. Bullying shows a roughly similar pattern.

In private schools, less affected by the Obama rules, bullying declined from 2013 to 2015. In public schools, it remained unchanged — hardly the effect Riley claims.

Finally, there is actual victimization. (The data is from the National Crime Victimization Survey.)

Victimization at school increased from 2010 to 2013. In 2014, the year when the new policy was introduced, victimization declined and has not risen since. So what can we say about the unintended consequences of the Obama policy? Where are those bad outcomes claimed by conservatives? On average nationwide, schools have not seen an increase in violence, crime, bullying, or fear.

This doesn’t mean that Riley is totally wrong. In some schools and some cities, decreased punishment of Black kids may have had the effects he claims. But it’s also possible that in some schools, the Obama policy had the good effects its proponents hoped for — Black schoolkids feeling less alienated, less resentful, and more positive towards school. At the very least, the policy did not lead to the nationwide crisis that conservatives would predict.

For the next two years (and perhaps more), thanks to DeVos-Trump, school staff will once again be free to punish who they wish, how they wish, without having to worry about charges of racism and without having to worry about federal pressure. If conservatives are right, bad things (bullying, crime) will decrease, and good things (attendance, learning) will increase, especially for Black kids.

Will that happen? No doubt, in 2020, our president will claim that because of this policy, schools are now beautiful, the best they have ever been in US history. The Wall Street Journal will publish cherry-picked success stories. The rest of us will have to wait for more systematic evidence.

Social Nostalgia and Myths of Decline, Part I: The Loneliness Fascination

December 12, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

  I. The Epidemic That Wasn’t

A couple of weeks ago, Arthur Brooks, in the New York Times, told us that an “epidemic of loneliness” was “tearing America apart.”  Brooks, citing a Cigna survey, brought us the bad news: “Most Americans suffer from strong feelings of loneliness and a lack of significance in their relationships. Nearly half say they sometimes or always feel alone or ‘left out.’”

I blogged my skepticism (here). That number — nearly half — was way out of line with what other repeated surveys like the GSS have found. Last week, Pew issued a “Facttank” report about loneliness. The Pew survey found, as had previous studies, that loneliness went hand-in-hand with feelings of dissatisfaction with family, work, and community. No surprise there. But the estimate of the scope of the problem was much smaller. Did nearly half the population suffer by these feelings? Hardly.

(Click to enlarge.)

Overall, one in ten Americans say they are lonely. Not having a partner makes loneliness more likely. So does not having money. (Nobody knows you when you’re down and out. Or rather, nobody knows 16% of you when you’re down and out, which is really not all that many — nowhere near the nearly 50% Brooks cites, thought it is more than the mere 6% of people with higher incomes.)

“Calling Claude Fischer,” I said in that blog post, because for years, Claude has been  been debunking these claims about loneliness epidemics, comparing them against the available evidence from social science. On Sunday, the Times included his response to the Brooks article.

Loneliness is a serious social problem, but there is no good evidence that it has spiked over the last couple decades or so. . . . We have no current epidemic of loneliness, but we do have periodic epidemics of alarm about loneliness.

The Times published several other letters on this topic (here) . Claude’s was the only one expressing any doubt about the loneliness panic.

Even among sociologists, he is in the minority.  The plague-of-loneliness idea and its corollary, the demise of community, have been at the core of important sociology books going back a half century or more.

More tellingly, these three books – David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, Philip Slater’s Pursuit of Loneliness, and Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone — are part of a small, select group — serious sociology books that sold well outside of academia. These books were bought and read even by people who weren’t going to be asked about them on the final. Apparently, Americans like reading about loneliness.

(Continued in the next post.)

Social Nostalgia and Myths of Decline, Part II: Turtles All the Way Down

December 12, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

(Continued from the previous post.)

II. A Myth of Decline for Everyone

Obviously, loneliness cannot have been increasing at epidemic levels every year since 1950. Nor could the sense of community have been similarly decreasing. If they had, we would be at 100% loneliness and 0% community. Yet each generation looks to the past as having been a time of greater community and less isolation. What makes this idea so irresistible?

My hunch is that the persistent appeal of this idea of a communitarian past has the same roots as another popular myth of decline — the authoritarian past. According to the authoritarian myth, parental authority has all but disappeared, and kids today are far less obedient than their counterparts of a generation ago. But of course, a generation ago, adults were saying the same thing about their kids, as were the adults of the generation before that about theirs, and so on. Turtles all the way down.

Nearly twelve years ago, I suggested (here) that these myths resemble the 19th century idea in evolution that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” but in reverse. They project the experience of the individual onto the entire society.  In that post, I imagined the man who says, “The things kids say and do today — I could never have gotten away with that with my old man.”

He pictures his own father as much more powerful than he, the speaker, is now. But that’s only because he is remembering his father from the perspective of a child. When he was a child, his father really was much more powerful than he was — so much bigger and stronger, it seemed the father could do whatever he wanted. But when that child grows up and thinks about himself today, he is not looking up from the viewpoint of his own small children. Instead, he sees himself from his own place in the larger world. He knows that he is certainly not the biggest or strongest person around, he knows that his actions are limited by all sorts of constraints that are largely invisible to children. He sees that he cannot control all aspects of his children’s lives.

This perception generalizes to the idea that adults a generation ago were more powerful vis-à-vis children than are adults today.

The same logic underlies the idea of the decline of community. The world of the child is warm, nurturing, and personal; dependence on others is taken for granted. Compared with the world of grown-ups, life is simple. (Of course the child does not make that comparison; grown-ups do.) Adults, by contrast, move among a complicated diversity of separate settings where feelings count for less, where dependence is less tolerated, and where interactions are based on people trying to accomplish their own goals. Childhood is Gemeinschaft, or as that word is usually translated, community.  Then, as we grow up, the Gemeinschaft share of our lives dwindles, leaving us with a nostalgia for those simpler times. Mentally transposing that personal experience to the society at large takes us from “my childhood” to “the good old days,” you know, the time when people knew one another and cared about one another, when life was simpler, and nobody was lonely — just like when we were kids. But of course, when they were kids, their parents were similarly mourning the loss of the good old days, as were their parents. Turtles all the way down. 

There’s an interesting difference between these two myths of decline. The myth of the authoritarian past appeals mostly to those who find authoritarianism appealing. But the decline-of-community finds adherents across the political and cultural spectrum.  It’s not just liberal sociologists who patrol the loneliness-community axis. The Brookses at the New York Times who write about it (Arthur and David) are politically conservative but culturally liberal. But go way over to the right, and you’ll hear Hannity, O’Brien, Glenn Beck, and others mourning the loss of a more Gemeinschaft-like world. From left to right, these observers disagree about just what has caused the crisis (smartphones and social media are the latest villains), but they are united in their assumptions, despite the shakiness of the evidence.