Accidental Banksters

March 16, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

In a comment about the “Why I’m Leaving Goldman” op-ed, Peter Moskos wrote,

People working there have always been pricks. I mean, they were already pricks in college in the early 1990s.

Were they? 

In my early days in New York, I knew a gentle soul named Bruce. Whatever the opposite of macho is (mousy?), he was it.  Short, soft-spoken, reserved.  Bruce was in a clinical psych program and wanted to be a therapist.  No surprise there.  One evening in a group discussion, we briefly got on to the topic of taxis. Bruce  had worked as a cabby to pay for his tuition.  “If you drive a cab in New York,” he said, “you drive like an asshole.  You have to.”  It was clear that he was talking about himself, not just the other 30,000 cabbies in the city.

We usually think of motives and personality traits as residing within the individual person, as in Peter’s take on the folks at Goldman.  Some people are pricks, and they seek out settings like Goldman, where they can give free rein to their nasty motives and be rewarded handsomely for it.

But motive and character traits also reside in the larger system – in its structure and culture. In Bruce’s view, the aggression, risk, and rudeness of the guy behind the sliding plastic partition are like the dispatcher’s radio and the meter – a basic part of the cab, not the driver.

I’m sure that some of the people at Goldman were the Princeton pricks Peter knew in the 1990s.*  But for many graduates who signed on at Goldman, this quality (prickitude? prickiness?) was something they acquired on the job, probably without even realizing it. In a word, we’re looking at socialization.

A couple of years ago, Ezra Klein posted an interview with a Harvard grad who had spent some time at Goldman.  Reading the interview (here), it’s hard to see this guy or the others of his cohort as greedy cutthroats.

Investment banking was never something I thought I wanted to do. But the recruiting culture at Harvard is extremely powerful. In the midst of anxiety and trying to find a job at the end of college, the recruiters are really in your face, and they make it very easy . . . .  The idea is that once you pass the test at Goldman, you can do anything. . . . .  So it seems like a good way to launch your career.

Q:  The impression of the Ivy-to-Wall Street pipeline is that it’s all about the money. You’re saying that it’s actually more that Wall Street has constructed a very intelligent recruiting program that speaks to the anxieties of the students and makes them an offer that there’s almost no reason to refuse.

Exactly. . . .There are  certainly are people who want to be in finance, but a large portion are intrigued by these jobs for those reasons. I think that’s a majority, at least at Harvard. And the same goes for consulting jobs or even Teach for America . . . . And investment banking has the added advantage that you can make money very quickly and afford a great apartment in New York, which is very expensive.

The bankers don’t arrive on Wall Street with their motives fully formed.  Instead, much like Becker’s pot-smoking musicians of 70 years ago, they acquire their motivation on the job.  The motives – the reasons for doing what you do – also become the reasons for doing more of it. They (bankers, pot smokers) also learn a set of ideas that makes their questionable behavior legitimate and even virtuous.

There’s this notion of the accidental banker, people who get caught up in that world and get more and more pay and find it harder to justify leaving . . . . . A  lot of people decide to sacrifice much more time than they normally would because the money is so good, and then they believe they deserve extremely high pay because they’re giving up so much time. It’s not malicious. But there are a lot of unhappy people who end up in that situation.

This Harvard-Goldman grad winds up taking a much more sociological view of where the flaws are – not so much in the personalities of individuals as in the structural arrangements.

the malice towards the individuals at places like Goldman is misplaced. I get where it comes from, but just like it’s wrong for the banker to say they work harder than everyone else and deserve more, it’s also dangerous to paint bankers as evil. Lloyd Blankfein isn’t out to screw the world. Wall Street’s problems are more systemic.

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* For an example, read this guy, though perhaps I should add a trigger warning.  He may make you rethink your position on the bailouts and TARP and maybe your position on summary execution.

Leaving on a (Private) Jet Plane

March 14, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

You’ve probably already seen or heard about the Times op-ed piece that’s getting a lot of attention: “Why I’m Leaving Goldman.” A guy who has worked for Goldman for many years, has risen to a fairly high position, and has probably made a lot of money along the way says that in its greed for profits, Goldman has turned away from its original, admirable principles.

You might not have come across this blog post: “Why I Left Google.”  A guy who has worked for Google for many years, has risen to a fairly high position, and has probably made a lot of money along the way says that in its greed for profits, Google has turned away from its original, admirable principles.

Makes you wonder if maybe structural forces and not just greed have something to do with these changes.

The Wall Street Journal Or Your Lying Eyes

March 13, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

This graph tracks the share of income going to the top 1% in seven countries.  It’s from a paper by two Swedish economists, Jesper Roine and Daniel Waldenström (pdf here).

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

The trend was towards greater equality up to 1980 – the share of the 1% was shrinking.    Since then, the 1% have increased their share of the income pie in all seven countries.  But the graph seems to show important differences, especially in recent decades.  Here is a  cropped version of the graph showing the 1980-2004 years.  I have added straight lines connecting those two points for Sweden and for the US.

Both changes are increases, but are they the same or are they different?  The answer is crucial.  The US and Sweden have different economic policies.  If the changes are no different between countries, then inequality is just one of those inevitable things that’s happening no matter what governments do.  But if the growth of inequality in the US is much greater than in Sweden, maybe government policy can in fact mitigate the trend towards inequality.

The Swedish 1% share went from a little under 5% to about 7.5%.  In the US, the 1% share increased from about 7% to 16%.* You might see those increases as very similar.

In fact, Allan Meltzer in the Wall Street Journal takes precisely that view.  He stretches out the graph to de-emphasize the vertical differences, and adds a title implying that all countries are “together” in this shift of income to the top 1%.

He adds this explanation:

As the . . . chart . . . shows, the share of income for the top 1% in these seven countries generally follows the same trend line. That means domestic policy can’t be the principal reason for the current spread between high earners and others. Since the 1980s, that spread has increased in nearly all seven countries. The U.S. and Sweden, countries with very different systems of redistribution, along with the U.K. and Canada show the largest increase in the share of income for the top 1%. [emphasis added]

If your pay went from $5 an hour to $7.50 an hour while your co-worker’s went from $7 to $16, you might think that your co-worker had gotten a substantially heftier raise.  But if so, that’s because you’re not the Wall Street Journal.  

Meltzer’s main point in the article is that we should not raise taxes on the very wealthy.  However, as Bruce Barlett points out (here), if the rich are getting just as rich in high-tax countries like Sweden and the Netherlands as they are in low-tax countries like the US, we may as well raise taxes on them. They’ll be doing just as well, like their Swedish and Dutch counterparts, and the nation will have more revenue to put towards Medicare, education, deficit-reduction, etc. 

But Meltzer is wrong.  Sweden and the Netherlands are very different from the US.  As the graph shows, the income share of the 1% in the US is twice that of the 1% in Sweden and 3 times that of the 1% in the Netherlands.  And it has risen more rapidly.  Yet Meltzer claims that inequality trends are similar everywhere. 

So who are you going to believe - the Wall Street Journal or your lying eyes?

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* Big hat tip to Andrew Perrin at Scatterplot.  Several economics blogs have also looked at the Meltzer article. 

UPDATE March 16: Gwen Sharp at Sociological Images posted this link to a database of income data from various countries.  You can to create your own graphs of income shares.

Deep Change in the Deep South?

March 12, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

The polling news today is that very few Republicans in Alabama and Mississippi (14% and 12%, respectively) think that President Obama is a Christian.  Three times as many think he’s a Muslim. (A pdf of the entire survey is here.)

The poll also finds that only about one in four Republicans in those states believe in evolution.  Five times that many flatly reject evolution, with about 10% “not sure.” 

The results I found most curious were the opinions on interracial marriage.  Alabama 21% thought it should be illegal, 67% thought it should be legal; in Mississippi,  29% illegal, 54% legal.  None of the news stories I looked on this noted that when the same pollsters (Public Policy Polling) asked the same question of Mississippi Republicans less than a year ago, the results were very different.  A plurality thought it should be illegal.  (My post on that poll is here.)

The margin of error is 4% (N = 600), so the 15-point swing supposedly reflects a real change.  But I’m skeptical.  What could account for such a large change if not sampling variation?  Did the GOP organize mass screenings of “The Help” and shame some of their number into allowing that maybe Loving v. Virginia wasn’t a mistake after all? Did the Heidi Klum - Seal breakup make it OK?   I can’t come up with even a dubiously speculative explanation.

The Wisdom of Crowds - Jersey Cow Edition

March 11, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

James Surowiecki begins The Wisdom of Crowds* with the true fable of Francis Galton and the ox.  Galton was at a country fair where an ox was on display, and the locals could submit guesses as to what the weight of the ox would be when it was slaughtered and dressed.  Galton, a statistician and a bit of a eugenics fan, figured that the guesses of the less savvy would dilute the accuracy of the smart money guesses.  So he kept track of the roughly 800 entries. 

No individual guess had the exact weight – 1198 pounds.  But when Galton caculated the mean of all guesses, it turned out to be 1197 pounds, much closer than the best individual guess.  That was in 1906, and while Surowiecki presents other examples of successful crowd-sourcing, I’m not sure if there has been an exact repeat of the Galton-ox scenario. 
We’re many months away from county fair season in New Jersey, so we have no oxen to be weight-guessed.   But The New Republic has come close to replication: crowd sourcing the weight of the governor.**

(The ox is on the left.  For a larger view, click on the image.)

Unfortunately, TNR closed the contest with only 19 entries, a far cry from Galton’s 800.  But for what it’s worth, the mean was 334 pounds. 

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* The SocioBlog has had several posts on this topic. See this one for an example and for links to others.

** I didn’t know whether I should  put the photo of the Governor behind an NSFW gate.  I even hesitated to use it, but then, Galton’s fairgoers too had to guess the weight of the ox before it was dressed.  (I found the photo here.  That site credits Wonkette.)

Freud Is Dead (Long Live Freud)

March 9, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

I had thought that Freud had pretty much disappeared into the fading intellectual mists of the twentieth century. 

But on “Live With Kelly”* this is “Spring Cleaning Week.”  Viewers send in their tips.  Some of these make for good on-air demonstrations – like using Tang to clean your toilet bowl or vodka in a spray bottle to wash windows. Others can only be read. This morning, guest host Martin Short read this one. 

Marry someone who’s very anal about housecleaning.

I remember a time when you would never hear the word anal on morning network TV.  I also remember a time when college students might have been taught the theoretical reason for linking anality and neatness.  They would have known about the anal stage in childhood psycho-sexual development à la Freud, with its attendant concerns of order and neatness. It’s spring break, so I can’t ask my students,** but if I could, I doubt that even the psych majors would know.
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* Did you really think I watched only “Downton Abbey”?

** I probably wouldn’t ask anyway, for fear of getting the obvious response, “Because housecleaning is for assholes.”

The Kindness of Strangers

March 8, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

A philosophy professor at Brown, Felicia Nimue Ackerman,  has come out against random acts of kindness. Her op-ed, originally in the Providence  Journal, appeared in a New Jersey paper today (here). No Blanche du Bois she, Prof. Ackerman begins:

Suppose you stop for coffee on your way to work. When you try to pay, the cashier smilingly informs you this won't be necessary. “Someone has paid for 20 coffees and you are number 8,” she says.
How would you feel?

If you said you'd feel a bit more cheerful and that you might be inspired to do something similar, not so fast. Prof. Ackerman has a better idea.

If you want to make your thought count, why not direct it at a loved one? The money that you spend on 20 cups of coffee could buy a gift for your friend, spouse, parent or child, who would cherish it as a symbol of personal affection that — let’s face it — means a lot more than a cup of coffee from a stranger.

That’s the great thing about being a philosopher rather than a social scientist, I guess. You can make statements about what people would do or how they would feel and not have to worry about evidence. Me, I’m not so sure.  Assume a cup of coffee costs $1.50, so we’re talking about $30.  Also, economists tell us that it’s better to give cash rather than a gift.  It avoids “deadweight loss.”

Imagine a friend handing you $30?  “Here take it.”

“What’s that for?”

"‘Because I want you to have it. I want to give it to you.”

“Really?  But why?” And so on. 

None of this questioning of motives occurs with the explanation for the anonymous gift of a $1.50 cup of coffee. 

Which does more to increase the total amount of happiness in the world  – the 20 cups of coffee to 20 strangers or the single gift of  $30 in cash or merchandise to one friend? That is an empirical question, and not an easy one to settle. The two relationships (stranger vs. friend) are different.  More important, so are the outcomes Ackerman mentions (cheerfulness vs. strengthening of the relationship).  If I give my $30 to Dunkin’ Donuts, the last thing I’m looking for is to strengthen my relationship to the next twenty people who walk in.

Surely there must be some empirical evidence on both these kinds of gift.  For example, is there a variation of the Ultimatum game where the subject of the experiment is offered more than half and in the next round becomes the one who makes the offer?

Shut Up and Move On

March 6, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

If there’s a lesson in the recent Rush Limbaugh flap it’s this: when you make a mistake, apologize – simply and, as nearly as you can, sincerely.  Then STFU about it.  Don’t complain, don’t make excuses, and don’t try to shift the blame, especially if you play for the team that claims to be all for personal responsibility.*

That’s not what Limbaugh is doing.  His apology was lame, and now he’s making it worse.  He’s still insisting that the only thing he did wrong was to use “those two words,” when what offended most people was the idea behind those words.  After all, in his original attack Limbaugh carefully explained why those “slut” and “prostitute” were les mots justes.  He just does not get it.**

Then, he blames the left.  If it weren’t for those nasty lefties, he would never have “descended to their level.” 

That was my error. I became like them, and I feel very badly about that. I've always tried to maintain a very high degree of integrity and independence on this program. Nevertheless, those two words were inappropriate.

One of Limbaugh’s backers, James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal , goes even further in blaming the left.  He says that the whole thing was a cleverly designed snare, long in the planning, that the Democrats engineered to trap the Republicans and pull a fast one on the public.

The kerfuffle was no fluke but a left-liberal set piece.

If only.

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* This post is mostly speculation.  I don’t know of any evidence on the effect of the various statements made in recent days.

** “Getting it” is a concept coined by the 1960s feminists, or as Limbaugh calls them Feminazis, a term he applies freely and without apology to women who disagree with him, from Sandra Fluke to the woman who is now the US Secretary of State.

Birthers as an Economic Indicator

March 5, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Andy Borowitz sprays out a daily stream of one-liners, mostly political (you should follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his newsletter).  Some are just name calling (“Eric Cantor's Endorsement of Romney Could Persuade Undecided Sociopaths”).  But some are on target. 

When wingnuts got some press recently by claiming that Obama’s birth certificate was a fake, Borowitz posted  

In Positive Economic Sign, Republicans Starting to Say

Obama Wasn’t Born in US Again

It was just a joke.  But Barry Ritholtz stopped chuckling long enough to see if it fit with the evidence.  He compared

• the timing of birther references (Lexis-Nexis search with “Obama” and “birth” separated by no more that five words)
• with the fluctuation in jobs added (three month average)

Sure enough, when the job reports are good, birther stories go up. After all, the anti-Obama machine has to find some kind of fuel.

(How many gag writers have the data to back them up?  Maybe it’s because Borowitz, as an undergrad at Harvard, was a research assistant to sociologist Wendy Griswold.)

Something similar happened in the past few days.  For a while, the Republicans were shouting about “religious freedom” – i.e., the freedom of employers to pick and choose which prescription and procedures their employees’ health plan would cover.  Then Rush Limbaugh joined the chorus with personal attacks on a young woman, name calling the even Republicans felt uncomfortable with.  Rush screwed everything up, and that issue became a loser.  All of a sudden, Republicans couldn’t change the topic fast enough.  The whole thing was “absurd.”  They wanted to talk about the “real issues” that are “important to Americans.”  Limbaugh himself echoed this dump-your-losing-issues idea in an “apology”  that is characteristically inaccurate, and in its inept language is probably funnier than most of his material.  “I think it is absolutely absurd that during these very serious political times, we are discussing personal sexual recreational activities before members of Congress.” 

UPDATE (March 5):  John Sides at The Monkey Cage re-graphed the data.  Rather than plotting both variables against a time line, he created a scatterplot with Jobs Added on the X-axis and Birther stories.  The graph shows only a slight correlation, which disappears entirely when he removes two outliers (Trump’ s birtherism and Obama’ s release of his long-form birth certificate).

Sex, Power, and Rush Limbaugh

March 2, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Rush Limbaugh’s attack on Sandra Fluke reminded me of something; I just wasn’t sure what.  Fluke, as you surely know, is the law student who dared testify before Congress to support the idea that employers should not be allowed to choose which procedures and prescriptions their employee medical plans will and will not cover.*  The  item of dispute currently is birth control prescriptions.

For her efforts, Limbaugh called Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute.”   In a subsequent broadcast he said,

So Miss Fluke, and the rest of you Feminazis, here’s the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex. We want something for it. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.

At first, I thought that what was underlying Limbaugh’s reaction was the age-old male obsession with female sexuality and simultaneously a fear of female sexuality.  The efforts of men to control that sexuality, part of what Robin Hanson would call the “farmer” mentality, have been a regular and often unpleasant feature of male-dominated societies.

But Limbaugh wasn’t concerned that Fluke was doing something wrong sexually. She was doing something wrong politically.  The issue isn’t sex, it’s power.  (Limbaugh’s coinage Feminazi is another illustration.  Any woman who opposes his views is automatically both powerful and evil, a force to be feared and attacked –  like the Nazis.)   

Then I remembered the feminist observation that rape is not about sex, it’s about power. I found the Susan Brownmiller quote from her 1975 book Against Our Will:

Rape is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.

A bit over the top – all rape, all men, all women? I don’t think so.  But it’s certainly true of many rapes and many rapists.  This aspect of rape is especially easy to see – in Sudan, in Rwanda, in the Balkans . . .  – when the context is political conflict.

Similarly, in the current political conflict over healthcare, two things are clear

• In a dispute over policy, Limbaugh has chosen to make his attack sexual
• His goal is not sexual pleasure, it’s intimidation**

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* The government and the employee might have a legitimate claim to having some say in these decisions.  The government gives the employer money in the form of tax breaks, and the employee pays too – usually directly, and always indirectly in the form of a lower salary (if the employer weren’t paying for medical coverage, that money would go, at least in part, to salaries).


** It’s possible that in his own sexuality, Limbaugh does conflate intimidation and sexual pleasure.  Some men do.  But since he has not posted his own sex videos, we do not know.

UPDATE (March 4):  The response of the Republican candidates to Limbaugh’s vulgar incivility has been swift and severe.  Well, maybe not so swift.  It took them a couple of days, and they had to be asked directly about it before they denounced Limbaugh in no uncertain terms. 

Rick Santorum, the great moralist, said,  “He’s being absurd, but that's you know, an entertainer can be absurd.”  In other words, “Hey, that’s show biz.”  I’m sure he would have said exactly the same thing if similar remarks had been made about his own wife or daughter.

Romney said,“I’ll just say this, which is, it’s not the language I would have used.”  And he meant it –the “I’ll just say this” part.  He immediately changed the topic to something else.  Still, you have to admit that “not the language I would have used” is the kind of firm statement about principles that we have come to expect from him.

Deprivation at the Top

March 1, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Sometimes it’s hard to remember relative deprivation. 

Most of us aren’t going to get all weepy about the financial problems of the 1%.  We might sympathize with the rich in fictional TV shows and movies – like George Clooney in “The Descendants.”  (The Socioblog take on this film is here.)  Poor guy – he has to decide what to do with 25,000 prime acres in Kauai, and his wife and daughter have been a bit of a problem.  But it’s different when the real-life rich start complaining about the decline in their fortunes.

“People who don’t have money don’t understand the stress,” said Alan Dlugash . . .  specializes in financial planning for the wealthy. “Could you imagine what it’s like to say I got three kids in private school, I have to think about pulling them out? How do you do that?”

The full article (here) has some specifics on the real-life consequences of Wall Street cutbacks.  You’ll especially like the headhunter who used to make probably close to half a million a year and is now checking the supermarket newspaper inserts for the best price on Wheat Chex. 

There’s much to be said about this and I said some of it a while ago in a post about Todd Henderson, also mentioned in the article, who complained publicly that if the Bush tax cuts expired he just didn’t see how he could get by on his $400,000 a year.  (The full post is here, but you can just scroll down to the Stevie Wonder part and get the idea.)

Yes, deprivation is relative. 

“If you’re making $50,000 and your salary gets down to $40,000 and you have to cut, it’s very severe to you,” Dlugash said. “But it’s no less severe to these other people with these big numbers.”

In the context of their current lives, a 20% reduction in a $500,000 income is a big blow for the wealthy.  But what galls us is the insularity and insensitivity they show when they complain about it in public while millions of people are trying to cope with real deprivation.* 

The headhunter who used to buy his Wheat Chex without checking the price now sees the discount prices offered at some stores.  “Wow, did I waste a lot of money,” he says.   You can’t tell for sure, but I assume he was joking.  Maybe not.

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*  UPDATE, March 3.  This tendency of the rich to ignore the sufferings of the less wealthy while moaning about their own misfortunes is nothing new.  In 1759, Adam Smith, in  The Theory of Moral Sentiments, wrote:

A stranger to human nature, who saw the indifference of men about the misery of their inferiors, and the regret and indignation which they feel for the misfortunes and sufferings of those above them, would be apt to imagine, that pain must be more agonizing, and the convulsions of death more terrible to persons of higher rank, than to those of meaner stations..

 

The Dutch in Old Amsterdam Do It

February 28, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Amsterdam – “It’s a Disney World for ‘those’ people,” says Bill O’Reilly in the video below.

This clip is a further illustration of the role that the Netherlands plays in the imaginations of US conservatives, the topic of yesterday’s post.



Although it’s nice to have my perceptions confirmed, I’m a bit embarrassed not to have known about the Fox News frenzy over Amsterdam, which apparently goes back to at least 2010.  

Erik Voeten at The Monkey Cage posted the video, and advised us to pay close attention to O’Reilly’s keen sense of methodology evident at the end of the clip.  When one of the women mentions the rates of ever using marijuana – “Forty percent of people in the USA and only 22.6% of people in the Netherlands” – O’Reilly says,  

The way they do statistics in the Netherlands is different.  Plus it’s a much smaller country, a much smaller base.

Maybe he's using a Bayesian approach that we need Andrew Gelman to explain.

Pinocchio Politics

February 27, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the Puritan mind, virtue is found in dutiful hard work, and easy pleasure is the road to ruin.  That mentality still reigns in certain strains of American thought. 

In yesterday’s post about Charles Murray, I said that US conservatives imagined  Europe to be something like Pleasure Island in the Disney version of Pinocchio.  Murray is fairly vague about the penalties Europeans pay for their pleasures.  He says only that they miss out on the satisfactions that we Americans have – doing a meaningful job, being a good friend, etc.  – though I don’t think he provides much evidence for that assertion.

In Pinocchio, the penalties are clearer and more terrifying.   The forces that govern the island and lull the boys with pleasure eventually transform them into donkeys.   A boy’s ears suddenly grow long and furry.  A tail springs out from his backside, tearing a hole in his pants.   When he realizes what is happening, as he sees his hands turn to hooves, he tries desperately to resist, but in vain.  He is now a donkey, a dumb beast under the command of the Island government.  This is the inevitable sad end for all the boys on the island. 



Do Europeans face a similarly horrible outcome?  While Murray demurs, Rick Santorum boldly speaks out.  Last week a New York Times blog embedded a video of Santorum relating his fantasies about the Netherlands.  It’s well know that the Dutch government is unusually indulgent of pleasures.  Not only is it generous in the usual Euro-socialism categories (family allowances, vacation weeks, unemployment insurance, etc.).  But the government even licenses drug dens and brothels.  Amsterdam is a Pleasure Island for grown-ups.

But pity those fools.  For just as Pinocchio’s peers paid a price, so do the Dutch.  The wages of their sin, according to Santorum, is not Donkeyism.  It’s Death.



Here’s a transcript of the first part of the clip.

In the Netherlands, people wear a . . . bracelet, if you’re elderly.  And the bracelet is “Don’t euthanize me.” 
Because they have voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands, but half the people who are euthanized every year — and it’s 10 percent of all deaths for the Netherlands — half of those people are euthanized involuntarily, at hospitals, because they are older and sick. And so elderly people in the Netherlands don’t go to the hospital, they go to another country, because they’re afraid because of budget purposes that they will not come out of that hospital if they go into it with sickness.

It’s not true, of course.  There is no forced euthanasia in the Netherlands, and the elderly Dutch do not wear the bracelets that Santorum imagines.  (The Times blog reports on the stringent requirements for legal voluntary euthanasia.)

I do not know why conservatives are so irresistibly drawn to this fantasy of death – forced euthanasia and death panels–  but they are.  They must convince themselves and others that universal affordable health care, health care that people don’t have to work and suffer for, must be a mortal danger.

 It’s one thing to use this pleasure/danger idea in cautionary tales for children – Pinocchio or Hansel and Gretel.  It’s another to use it as the basis of lies in discussing public policy.

Europe – the Tempations of Pleasure

February 26, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

At the ESS, in almost each session I attended, a speaker would refer to Charles Murray’s recent book.  This would happen in the Q-and-A, not in the formal presentation, and the speaker would invariably add that he or she had not yet actually read the book. 

Neither have I.  But for the purposes at hand, what we get from the reviews or excerpts is probably sufficient.  I’ll be curious to actually read the book and see Murray’s data on the moral disintegration of the white working class, but what strikes me now is Murray’s choice of bad guys – the liberal white elite. 

This explanation is nothing new.  Forty years ago, James Q. Wilson was making the same argument to explain the increase of drugs, crime, welfare, and out-of-wedlock births among African Americans in the 1960s.  It seemed unlikely then that what kids in Bed Stuy were doing had anything to do with ideas about “self-actualization” and “self-expression” that were becoming popular at Brandeis and Berkeley. But that was the argument Wilson was making.

Fast forward to 2012, and who does Murray blame for trends among poor whites?  Educated liberals . . . even though Murray allows that their behavior is exemplary. Yet they are to blame because they have not raised their voices in judgment on the ways of poorer whites.  This reluctance to preach is immoral not just in its consequences; its causes too may be venal.

If you are of a conspiratorial cast of mind, nonjudgmentalism looks suspiciously like the new upper class keeping the good stuff to itself.

Murray and Wilson are smart guys, so it must be something other than the evidence (or lack of evidence) behind their anti-liberal animus.  Something leads them to see a causal link between the behavior of rich liberals and that of poor people, and that something seems to be the Protestant Ethic*, a mind-set that makes them deeply suspicious of pleasure.  Virtue, in this Protestant-Ethic view, resides in self-denial, and much of Murray’s book is about how the decline in virtue has led to personal and social disaster. (My earlier post on this is here. )

But even where this abandonment of the Protestant Ethic has had no such visible ill effect, Murray insists that something is wrong.  Like in Europe.  Murray writes about the Europe  “Syndrome” – a complex of “symptoms.”  But it’s different from other diseases because it’s just so darned attractive.  In this passage late in the book, Murray looks across at Europe and sees an incarnation of the Pleasure Island scene in Disney’s Pinocchio.

There’s a lot to like about day-to-day life in the advanced welfare states of western Europe. They are great places to visit. But the view of life that has taken root in those same countries is problematic. It seems to go something like this: The purpose of life is to while away the time between birth and death as pleasantly as possible, and the purpose of government is to make it as easy as possible to while away the time as pleasantly as possible – The Europe Syndrome.

Europe’s short workweeks and frequent vacations are one symptom of the syndrome. The idea of work as a means of self-actualization has faded. The view of work as a necessary evil, interfering with the higher good of leisure, dominates . . . The decline of fertility to far below replacement is another symptom. Children are seen as a burden that the state must help shoulder, and even then they’re a lot of trouble that distract from things that are more fun. The secularization of Europe is yet another symptom. Europeans have broadly come to believe that humans are a collection of activated chemicals that, after a period of time, deactivate. If that’s the case, saying that the purpose of life is to pass the time as pleasantly as possible is a reasonable position. Indeed, taking any other position is ultimately irrational.

The alternative to the European Syndrome is to say that your life can have transcendent meaning if it is spent doing important things – raising a family, supporting yourself, being a good friend and good neighbor, learning what you can do well and then doing it as well as you possibly can. Providing the best framework for doing those things is what the American project is all about. (p.284)

Those poor Europeans.  They’ve been turned into donkeys, leading meaningless lives, unaware of the absence of transcendent meaning in their lives – sans friends, sans neighbors, sans family, sans craftsmanship, sans belief, sans everything but their sybaritic pleasures.

No wonder the Republicans constantly warn us against the temptations of “European-style socialism.” The warning is not really necessary since most Americans don’t know about legally mandated vacation time, maternity leave, paternity leave, government support for all families with children, job protection, and other family-friendly policies. Nevertheless, the conservative helmsmen stuff our ears with wax and lash themselves to the mast lest the siren song of European pleasure lead us off our American course.

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* Robin Hanson, from whose blog I borrowed the excerpt from Murray’s book, says that Murray’s view of vice and virtue is part of the agricultural stage of society – “a farmer-style intellectual point of view” (the full blogpost is here). The agricultural revolution stretches back thirty centuries, give or take, but I think the puritan ideology Murray exemplifies is much more recent – not necessarily simultaneous with the rise of Protestantism, but not far off.

Inflation - Garden Variety

February 22, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Sports is a business. 

The Dow is getting close to 13,000.  The Knicks are getting close to .500.  This month at least, it’s the Knicks who have been doing better, but then the Dow doesn’t have Jeremy Lin.  The Knicks do. 

The Knicks are owned by MSG, and the change in the Knicks’s fortunes has been taking place not just on the floor of the Garden but on the floor of the Stock Exchange as well.  Here is the chart of MSG vs. the Dow so far this year.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

Lin’s breakout game was against the Nets on Feb. 4, a Saturday.  The next trading day, Feb. 6, MSG shows mostly a continuation of a pre-Lin upswing.  But Lin does seem to have had an effect.  The stock kept rising over the next several days, climbing higher than it had been in a couple of years.  February 13 was the first trading day after Lin’s 38-point game against Kobe and the Lakers.  Both the volume of trading and the price were up. 

The people at The Harvard Sports Analysis Collective (they have an understandable interest in all things Lin) have tracked the Lin effect on the stock price and compared it with similar periods surrounding the arrival of other big Knicks – Carmelo and Stoudemire.  Air ball.  Apparently, the traders at the NYSE ignored those trades at the Garden. 
The Collective provides one other financial indicator:  $503.82.  That was the average cost of a ticket to Sunday’s game against Dallas (the Knicks won by five).  That Nets game back on the Feb. 4th would have cost you, on average, only $140.57.  The price of a Knicks ticket has more than tripled in less than a month.  Talk about inflation (and no, I’m not going to say it, not here, not in the post’s title, not anywhere.  Enough already.)

Distinction in the Buff

February 21, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

According to a story in today’s Guardian, Bourdieu is “the second most frequently quoted author in the world, after Michel Foucault.”  

Sociology students the world over are familiar with concepts such as social reproduction, symbolic violence and cultural capital.

Funny you should mention cultural capital, given another story in the Guardian (and elsewhere) about Dominique Strauss Kahn.  I may be misinterpreting Bourdieu, but I think cultural capital includes the ability to distinguish what is of high quality from what is ordinary.  La distinction is what characterizes the French elite.

As for Strauss Kahn,  certainly a member of that elite, he’s being questioned by French police about his part in recruiting prostitutes for “soirées coquines” at a hotel in Lille.   (In France, being a client is not illegal, but pimping is.)  DSK is claiming that he didn’t know the women were prostitutes.   As his lawyer said, shortly after the case came to light in France,  

People are not always clothed at these parties. I challenge you to tell the difference between a nude prostitute and a classy lady in the nude

That “classy lady” may not be le mot juste.  Worse, this Times translation also loses the Bourdieu angle – distinction.   Here’s what the lawyer actually said,

Je vous défie de distinguer une prostituée nue d'une femme du monde nue.

I’ll have to reread Bourdieu to see if he makes the point that la distinction requires that people have their clothes on.

Exceptional American Magazine Covers

February 18, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

American “exceptionalism” often takes the form of American insularity – the assumption that we don’t really need to know anything about the rest of the world.  The European economic crisis, how and whether it is resolved, surely will have an impact on the US economy.  But to judge from Time Magazine covers (the Feb. 20 edition) , it’s not worth our attention, at least not when you compare it with something really important – like animal friendships.

Kos has several other examples.  Or go to the source and click back through the weeks.

I’ve noted before (here) how news magazine covers show the American preference for life-style stories rather than hard news.  Again, I’m reminded of the line spoken by Ben Kingsley as Behrani, the Iranian immigrant in the movie “The House of Sand and Fog”:

Americans . . . They have the eyes of small children who are forever looking for the next source of distraction, entertainment, sweet taste in the mouth.

Avoiding Indeterminacy (Predicting the Past)

February 15, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

One of the most difficult ideas to grasp or accept is indeterminacy, randomness.  We devote a considerable effort to making up stories to show that nothing is random, that everything is, or was, predictable. 

“We should have seen Lin coming” was the headline in Carl Bialik’s Wall Street Journal blog post (here) on Monday. 

Jeremy Lin – is there anybody who has not heard about “Linsanity”? – a guard for the Knicks, is the NBA’s new great white hope, though he’s Asian (his parents are from Taiwan).  Single-handedly he is bringing the NBA a new demo.  Even when the Knicks are on the road, the fans – in Washington, in Toronto, wherever – cheer for Lin.

Like one of those huge best-sellers by an unknown author that 39 publishers turned down before one took a chance, Lin’s talents might never have seen the light of NBA.  He played well at Harvard but in the NBA draft received not a nibble.   Eventually, he was picked up by the Knicks, but they too had no idea that Lin was star material.  Coach D’Antoni didn’t give him much court time until a game earlier two weeks ago when Lin went in to give Bibby a breather.  He scored 25 points, and since then, he has been headline news.

How did everyone miss him?  Carl Bialik is the WSJl’s “Numbers Guy,” and he puts together some numbers to show that Lin’s abilities were clear from the start.  Numbers like this:

Per 40 minutes this season, he’s taken 7.8 shots at the rim and made five of them. That’s the second-most made field goals from the rim for guards who’ve played at least 10 games and at least 10 minutes per game, and a percentage in line with the impressive Nos. 1 and 3 on the list . . .

If you thought a rim shot was something that followed a lame joke in a burlesque house, you might not find this convincing.  But Bialik has more such numbers, and he makes the case. 

Still, it reminded me of days at the horse track.  The Racing Form provides a wealth of information, mostly quantitative, on each horse in the race – the horse’s past performances.*   Horseplayers process all this data and make a bet.  Then, after the race, as they tear up their losing tickets, they go back to the past performances, and no matter which horse won, they can always find the bits of data that made it clear why that horse was bound to win. 

Prediction is very hard, especially about the future, as Yogi Berra or someone said.  Prediction about the past and present is much easier, as Bialik’s blogpost illustrates.  Or as Duncan Watts puts it in the title of his excellent book, Everything is Obvious . . . Once You Know the Answer.** 

There’s another reason the Knicks didn’t know how good Lin was.  Here’s Knick announcer Clemson Smith-Muñiz (la voz en Español de los Knicks):

I’ve asked the coaching staff the question this way: didn't you see this in practice? And the answer has been, invariably, “What practice?” Due to this condensed season, which included barely 4 weeks of pre-season, all teams are limiting their practices, especially the full-court scrimmages, on off days.

Their point, again, is that the Lin phenomenon was not indeterminate.  Given a chance to see Lin in practice, any good coach would have seen his abilities.

Of course, Lin might turn out to be a flash in the pan.  Maybe by his second time around the league, the other teams will have learned how to play him.  It hasn’t happened yet (last night, his three-pointer with less than a second on the clock won the game), but if it does, sports writers, maybe even Carl Bialik, will write columns and blog posts saying that his short-lived success was utterly predictable.

Linsanity is fine, Lindeterminacy is intolerable.

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* When non-horseplayers appropriated the term “track record,” they distorted its meaning, just as Bialik does in his blogpost (I did not bother to quote it).  What they are referring to is what horseplayers know as “past performances.” 

Not only does the popular meaning of “track record” have nothing to do with its meaning at the race track, but in most cases, the speaker or writer could drop the “track” without changing the meaning, except perhaps to make it clearer. 


** Another blogpost on Watt’s ideas and horse races is here.

Class and Virtue

February 13, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

How to inculcate virtue in the lower classes?  Since Victorian times, if not before, this question has troubled the upper classes.

I’m sure that it’s pure coincidence that Charles Murray’s new book* hit the stores just a few days before the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens.  To us, looking back to the England of Dickens, it seems obvious that the virtue of the upper class was a luxury afforded by their wealth (largely inherited).  And the absence of virtue, the vice, of the lower class was a reasonable response to the cruel conditions of their position in society. 

I can’t really do a Tale of Two Charleses here since I haven’t read Murray’s book (I confess I never read that other Charlesbook, the two cities one, either), but the reviews make it clear that Murray’s central theme is virtue, especially the decline of virtue among the white lower classes.  Here is economist Bryan Caplan paraphrasing:

College graduates in high-IQ occupations aren’t just doing well economically; they continue to practice the Founding Virtues of marriage, industry, honesty, and religion.  The working class, in contrast, has fallen apart.  Never mind their stagnant wages; they’ve almost completely lost touch with the Founding Virtues that allow college graduates to live successful, meaningful lives. 

Pay no attention to those stagnant wages behind the curtain. Focus on virtue.

But maybe even virtue can be confusing.  Take family for example.  Murray provides the statistic that among white women who never went past high school, the proportion who have had out-of-wedlock children has risen to 40%.  This should have disastrous consequences –  for the children themselves, for the women, for the working class, and maybe for whole sectors of society. 

But apparently it is not inherently damaging.  If bastardy (to use Dickensian diction)  indicates lack of virtue, and if a healthy economy rests on virtue, countries with high rates of out-of-wedlock births must be in for a rough time. By contrast, a country with a very low rate of out-of-wedlock children, a virtuous society, would be rich in other ways too.

Just to confirm this, I looked up some data on OECD countries. 

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

The US is at just about the OECD average, but look who’s above us. The Scandinavian countries, France, Belgium, the Netherlands – they all have national rates that are above that of our “fallen apart” white working class.  And yet, their economies are relatively solid, even in these uncertain times.  And who’s way below us?  Greece, for one, along with some other countries – notably Italy and Spain –  which are said to be near the brink of economic disaster.

The point is that the consequences of having an out-of-wedlock child are not automatically disastrous. Governments can do things to make having children – in or out of wedlock – more economically difficult or less so. 

The marital status of a mother may be less important than her age.  Having a child at an early age makes everything more complicated.  And the US has many more teenage mothers than do other advanced countries.

Our adolescent fertility rate has decreased considerably since 1980, but it’s still three times that of most European countries.  Should we chalk this up to lack of virtue?  Murray seems to blame the kinds of people who drive to Whole Foods in their Priuses, or better yet, go on their bicycles, and then of course recycle.  You know them, the liberal elite – the ones that conservatives accuse of wanting the US to be more like Europe.  Maybe on this teen motherhood thing, these elitists have a point; being more like Europe might not be so bad.

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* Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010

What Were They Thinking . . .

February 10, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross-posted at Sociological Images - with some interesting comments)


 . . .  or not thinking?  

Being in the dominant majority allows you that comfort of not thinking.  People in that majority can assume that everyone shares their views, ideas, and even characteristics, and much of the time, they’ll be right.  “Flesh colored” in the US, sometimes even today, means the color of white people’s flesh.

White is the default race, the American race.  It’s easy to ignore that African Americans might not see those Band-Aids as flesh colored.  Similarly, Christianity is the default religion, and those who are in the majority can make those same flesh-colored assumptions.  Justice Scalia, for example, seemed unable to understand that the Jewish families of Jews killed in war might not feel “honored” by a cross placed on the grave of their son or daughter. (My post on this is here.)

The latest example:  this Hannukah card sent in South Carolina, presumably to Jews, by Rick Santorum’s local team.  First tweeted by political reporter Hunter Walker, it’s rapidly making the rounds of the Internet. 

Whoever created and sent this card, it just did not occur to them that Jews might not feel the holiday warmth of that New Testament message from Jesus.

Psychology (!!!) or Sociology (zzz)

February 8, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

News media have to come up with provocative headlines and ledes, even when they’re reporting on academic papers.  And even when the reasonable reaction would be “Well, duh,” rather than a gasp in 72-point caps.  But if that’s the route you want to go, it usually helps to think psychologically rather than sociologically.

Here’s a headline from Forbes

Facebook More Addictive Than Cigarettes, 

Study Says

And the Annenberg School Website started their story with this.

Cigarettes and alcohol may not be the most addicting drugs on the market, according to a recent study.
A team from the University of Chicago's business school has suggested everyone's suspicion: social networking is addictive. So addictive that constantly using sites like Facebook and Twitter may be a harder vice to kick than smoking and drinking.  [emphasis added]

The study in question is “Getting Beeped With the Hand In The Cookie Jar: Sampling Desire, Conflict, and Self-Control in Everyday Life” by Wilhelm Hofmann, Kathleen D. Vohs, and Roy F. Baumeister, presented at a recent Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference.  They had subjects (N=205) wear beepers and report on their desires. 
I found out about it in a Society Pages research round-up (here).

A study of 205 adults found that their desires for sleep and sex were the strongest, but the desire for media and work were the hardest to resist. Surprisingly, participants expressed relatively weak levels of desire for tobacco and alcohol. This implies that it is more difficult to resist checking Facebook or e-mail than smoking a cigarette, taking a nap, or satiating sexual desires.

Of course it’s more difficult.   But the difficulty has almost nothing to do with the power of the internal desire and everything to do with the external situation, as The Society Pages (a sociology front organization) should well know.  In a classroom, a restaurant, a church, on the street, in an elevator – just about anywhere – you can quietly glance down at your smartphone and check your e-mail or Facebook page.  But to indulge in smoking, sleeping, and “satiating sexual desires,” you have to be willing to violate some serious norms and even laws.

It’s not about which desires are difficult to resist.  It’s about which desires are easy to indulge.  The study tells us not about the strength of psychological desires but the strength of social norms.  You can whip out your Blackberry, and nobody blinks.  But people might react more strongly if you whipped out, you know, your Marlboros. 

The more accurate headline might be

Checking Twitter at Starbucks OK, Having Sex There, Not So Much, Study Finds

But that headline is not going to get nearly as much attention.

Doing the Math

February 7, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

My students sometimes have trouble with math, even what I think is simple math.  Percentage differences, for example.  I blame it on the local schools.  Once I explain it, I think most of them catch on. 

Stephen Moore is not from New Jersey.  His high school diploma is from the highly regarded New Trier, he has an economics masters degree from George Mason, and he writes frequently about economics.  A couple of days ago he wrote in the Wall Street Journal (here) about how much better it was to work for the government than for private employers.* 

Federal workers on balance still receive much better benefits and pay packages than comparable private sector workers, the Congressional Budget Office reports. The report says that on average the compensation paid to federal workers is nearly 50% higher than in the private sector, though even that figure understates the premium paid to federal bureaucrats.

CBO found that federal salaries were slightly higher (2%) on average, while benefits -- including health insurance, retirement and paid vacation -- are much more generous (48% higher) than what same-skilled private sector workers get.

It’s not clear how Moore arrived at that 50% number.  Maybe he added the 2% and the 48%. 

Let’s assume that the ratio of salary to benefits is 3 - 1.  A worker in the private sector who makes $100,000 in salary would get $33,000 worth of benefits. The government worker would get 2% more in salary and 48% more in benefits. 

	Private	Gov't.
Salary	100,000	102,000
Benefits	33,000	49,500
Total	133,000	151,500

If total compensation for private-sector workers is $133,000, and if government workers were getting 50% more than that, their total compensation would be $200,000. But the percentage difference between the $150K and the $133K is nowhere near 50%.  The government worker pay package is 14% higher. 

I think I could explain this so my students would understand it.  But then again, they don’t write columns for the Wall Street Journal.

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* The WSJ gives the article the title “Still Club Fed.” The more accurate title would be “Government Jobs Are Good Jobs.” Of course, the latter takes the perspective of people looking for work, a viewpoint that doesn’t get much consideration at the WSJ.