Master Status

July 23, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Disability is often a “master status.”*  The term was coined by Everett Hughes seventy years ago to indicate a characteristic that, from the perspective of other people, floods out other aspects of a person’s identity.   

Last week’s “This American Life” provided an excellent example.  The story was about an actress and dancer – Mary Archbold - whose left arm ends at the elbow.  She was born that way.   Outside the house, she wears a prosthesis, and though it is hard plastic and cannot do anywhere near what a real arm can do, she is able to keep other people from realizing that she does not have two normal arms. 

And that’s the way she likes it – mostly because she is acutely aware of the master-status problem.  Here is the audio clip (it runs less than two minutes), followed by the transcript.

IRA GLASS: Is that moment [when you reveal to others] a moment of horror or a moment of pride? MARY ARCHBOLD: Half and half. There’s the horror of: What reaction is it going to be? And then there’s the quiet pride that maybe you saw me as me before you saw me as an actor with a disability. IRA: You feel like those two things are contradictory? MARY: [Immediately] Yes. IRA: I’m not sure I understand that. It’s like you’re saying you want them to see you. But you includes the fact that you have only one full arm. MARY: True. But it’s not my leading characteristic. And often times when people find it out first, that’s sort of how they describe me. I’m like categorized “one-arm Mary.” IRA: But everyone when you see them, you see some superficial thing – their hair or the way they’re dressed or their age whatever it is, their race whatever it is, and they get classified . . . MARY: And I’d be happy to be classified among any other things. You can call me “the short girl,” you can call me “the brunette girl,” you can call me “the blue-eyed girl” – whatever you want to say. Just not “the disabled girl.” . . . . . And because I am a performer, it’s sort of a professional necessity, ’cause otherwise the only role I’ll be called in for is “wounded vet who just came home from Afghanistan.” And this way, I get called in for “housewife,” I get called in for “mom.”

The entire episode of TAL illustrates other sociological and psychological principles as well.  The Mary Archbold segments (one with the title “There’s Something About Mary”) take up only 13 minutes, and they could easily be used as a companion piece if you’re teaching Goffman (especially Stigma).

------------------------------
*Hughes was using the old status/role distinction.  Look in almost any introductory sociology text, and you will read that “status” refers to the position in a social system while “role” refers to the expected behaviors of someone in that position. “Brother” and “sister” are statuses; the behaviors we expect (sharing certain chores, giving Christmas gifts, etc.) are part of the role. 

However, if you listen to sociologists any time except when they are delivering the intro lecture on role, they use role to refer to both the position and the behaviors.  Just as we say that someone is in the role of Lady Macbeth, referring both to her position in the play and the things she will do and say, we refer to  “the role of sister,” not the “status” of sister. 

As for “status,” except for the intro lecture and surviving coinages like “master status,”  sociologists speak of “status” almost exclusively to refer to hierarchical position, usually socio-economic status.

More Auroras?

July 21, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Will Wilkinson blogs (here) “Why Aren’t There More Auroras?”  Why don’t we see mass killings every week?  The Aurora slaughter, he says,  was not “senseless.” Just the opposite.

It is so easy to imagine from the perspective both of the murdered and the murderer . . . that I cannot quite fathom why it doesn't happen all the time. It is our safety that’s mysterious.

His answer is basically human nature.  His view is comfortingly anti-Hobbesian:

We are more thoroughly controlled by our society's norms than we tend to imagine. In a setting of peace, outside the context of war, to perpetrate an act like the Aurora massacre requires an almost superhuman feat of volition. There aren't more Aurora's because we are sociable robots, programmed for peace. To override that programming and act really monstrously requires both an uncommon estrangement and an implausibly free will.

My first reaction when I read Wilkinson’s question was that his starting assumption was wrong:  in fact there are more Auroras – disgruntled or unstable people who walk into an office or public space and start shooting.  There are so many in fact – twenty a year on average (USA Today) – that to be national news, the incident has to be unusual in some way.  Just three days before Aurora, a man in Tuscaloosa who had recently been sacked from his job got his AK-47, stood outside a crowded bar, and opened fire.  Nobody was killed, so the story didn’t get much coverage. 

My second reaction is that the question, stated that way, doesn’t easily direct us towards empirical data.  It does not imply variables – things that can be different in a way that allows comparison.  Instead, the question should be, “Why are there more Auroras at some times and places than at others?”  Why, for instance, does the US have many more Auroras than do other countries?  I doubt that human nature in the UK or Poland or Japan is any different than in the US.  I doubt that we have more people of “uncommon estrangement” and “implausibly free will.”  

But what we do have is guns – lots of them.  And really good ones too.  As in other countries, the uncommonly estranged here are very rare, as Wilkinson says.  But in the US, an uncommonly estranged nutjob can walk into a friendly gun shop and walk out with an 100-round AR-15. 

It’s much easier to be a mass murderer if you can get weapons of mass killing, much harder if you can’t.

In many countries, that AR-15 would be considered an unusual weapon and subject to greater restrictions than other guns.  But here in the US, it’s as normal as blueberry pie.  The Times (here) quotes Eugene Volokh, who is most definitely not a nutjob; he’s a law professor at UCLA, an expert on Constitutional law:

The guy basically had normal guns.

Maybe the Times quoted Volokh out of context.  I hope so, but I fear not.  I would like to think that a military assault rifle with a 100-round clip is not a normal weapon.  But apparently I am out of touch with the realities of American life. 


*     *     *     *     *

(Note to commenters: please keep your remarks civil and relevant.  This post is not about freedom or self-defense or the Constitution.  However, actual evidence on mass shootings, access to weaponry, uncommon estrangement, etc., in the US and elsewhere would be welcome.)

A Book by Its Cover – Children’s Version

July 19, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

What’s this book about?” asks the little girl as her parent browses in the Classics section of the bookstore.  Maybe she’s pointing to Middlemarch. Or Ulysses. What do you say?

Sunnychanel, who blogs at Babble.com, turned her slight frustration at trying to answer that question into a research opportunity.  If life hands you an inquisitive six year old, do research on book covers and youthful ideation.  Sunnychanel turned the question back on the daughter and asked her what she thought the book was about.Here are the book covers and just below them, the daughter’s synopsis.

Sometimes the kid came close to the mark.  For example, she totally nailed the “magical realism” of Garcia Marquez.

(Click on the image for a larger view that will allow you 

to read the synopsis beneath the book cover.)

On The Great Gatsby she wasn’t very close, but I’d have to blame that one on the graphic designer.

And there are some, like Lord of the Flies, where she hears the basic tune, but the minor sonorities of the original become a bright major upbeat melody, the sort of thing you might skip along to.

And then there’s Jane Eyre, the gold digger.

“Reader, I could really dig him.”

I guess you could turn this exercise into a projective diagnostic instrument – the Rorschach or Thematic Apperception Test, but more fun.

The full post is here.  An earlier SocioBlog post on book covers is here.  And if you haven’t seen BetterBookTitles, browse here.

HT: Shamus Khan

Postal Wisdom

July 18, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Some people are unhappy about the Happy Valley statue of Joe Paterno.  They want it removed, torn down. 

Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Times says let it stand.  Coates, who is African American, also wants to preserve a Columbia, SC statue of Senator Ben Tillman, “who helped found Clemson University and, in his spare time, defended lynching from his august national offices.”

For both statues, Coates applies the same reasoning:  We need to be reminded of our past sins – ours, not just those of the racist or the child-abuse enabler.

Arguing for the [Paterno] statue’s removal, the legendary coach Bobby Bowden said he wouldn’t want Sandusky’s crimes “brought up every time I walked out on the field.” That’s the point. Sandusky’s crimes should never be forgotten . . . .  It is shameful to deify men who put nationalist ritual before children. But it is more shameful to pretend that this elevation was achieved by Joe Paterno’s singular hand.

I’ll pass for the moment on questions about the function of heroes and whether we really need them and what it says about our society that we apparently do need them and who are the people we choose to make our heroes.  But the simple point is that the statue should never have been built.  And if the Happy Valleyans had known then what they know now, it would not have been built. 

What was the hurry? 

The Post Office comes in for a lot of criticism, but on this one they got it right: no commemoratives  until the person has been dead for ten years.* 

That seems like a wise policy other institutions should follow.

---------------------
* I was watching Jay Leno one night back when there were sightings of Elvis in supermarkets and other venues.  Leno mentioned the Elvis commemorative stamp and added, “The Post Office rule is that you have to be dead for ten years . . . and stay dead.” 

The London Games

July 17, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Olympics begin in London in less than a fortnight.  Just across the channel, Eurostar, the Paris-London rail link, has an ad campaign encouraging Parisians to make the trip to see how the British do the classical Greek games.  These posters have been springing up around Paris.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

I’m sure there’s cultural lesson here, aside from the obvious one about levels of prudery – something about cultural differences going back to the Hundred Years War.  There’s no written copy on the posters, but the unwritten copy is all about cultural superiority.  “We French are the keepers of the classical culture of ancient Greece.  Measured against those standards and forms, you Brits look foolish with their silly games and corpulent bodies.”  Or to paraphrase the French soldier in the film says, “I fart in your general direction, but I’m going to take the Eurostar to do so."

Or maybe it’s just about darts and snooker on the one side and babyfoot (i.e, foosball)  on the other.

HT: Rue Rude

Jerry Starr

July 16, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Jerry Starr died on Friday.  He was a good sociologist, a public sociologist.  In the 1960s he worked with Peace Corps volunteers.  In the 1980s he put together a curriculum on the Vietnam War for use in high schools, a curriculum that treated the issues with depth and honesty.  More recently he worked to keep public television in Pittsburgh public and relevant. 

I met Jerry at Brandeis.  He was a grad student, I was an undergrad, but the sociology department did its best to minimize that division, at least for upper-level undergrads who were interested.  We discovered shared interests.  We both liked jazz, and we both had been known to spend an afternoon with the horses (“track trash” was the phrase Jerry used), we knew a lot of the same jokes.  More than that, I appreciated his perspective on the world.  But while his intellectual style was a sort of bemused ironic detachment, but he combined that with a real-world political engagement.

He taught at Penn, then at West Virginia University, and teaching was one of te things we would talk about.  In my classes, I still often use an example I got from him. I think Jerry used this in his Sociology of Youth course, probably as in lead-in to the section on the school as an institution.

He would turn class discussion to the topic of dreams.  What could be more individual, personal, and psychological?  Then he would ask if any of them had ever had a dream where the setting is a school.  Most had.  What were the dreams like, he would ask.  I was two days late to class.  I couldn’t find my classroom.  I was in the wrong building.  I was naked in class.  You get the idea – anxiety dreams. 

Maybe, he would say, maybe these seemingly personal things, dreams, tell us something about the nature of an institution.   The example is about schools.   But it also epitomizes the sociological enterprise – going beyond the personal and individual to see the impact of social institutions.

Four years ago, Jerry was diagnosed with cancer.  He sent a letter to friends saying,

in fairness to the truth, we now know more than enough to know that I am inoperable, incurable and have months to live. As the doctors told me, it is just "bad luck" when a perfectly healthy person with no symptoms is discovered (by accident) to have cancer so advanced that nothing can be done.

He did try chemo and survived both the treatment and the disease.  Those four years are something of a bonus for us.  But this time, he rejected the idea of treatment, preferring, as he said four years ago “to see death as part of life.”


The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had an obit on Saturday. 
 

Brides of Quietness

July 15, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Lisa Wade at Sociological Images  says she can’t wait to see “The Mechanical Bride,” a documentary about artificial females created mostly for sex.*  The fantasy – a man creating the ideal female – is as old as Pygmalion, but over the millennia, the technology has improved.

In 1951, Marshal McCluhan put this fantasy into the general context of advertising – its messages and images – in his first book, The Mechanical Bride. 

 I wonder if the creators of the film make any mention of McCluhan.  I’m far away from the copy of the McLuhan book on my office bookshelf, so I’ll rely on this excerpt from an essay by Geert Lovink

 According to McLuhan, it is the dominant pattern of visual coverage in the popular press, comprising a fusion of sex and technology: Explore and enlarge the domain of sex by mechanical technique and possess machines in a sexually gratifying way. Long, slender ladies' legs are an expression of our 'replaceable parts' cultural dynamics. The industrial mode of production mechanized sex too. In ads the human body is depicted behavioristically as a sort of love machine capable merely of specific thrill, a view which reduces sex experience to a problem in mechanics and hygiene.   

I wonder if the filmmaker, Allison deFren, makes any explicit reference to McCluhan and his ideas.

-------------------------
* The 2007 movie  “Lars and the Real Girl” features one of these females – she had a title role but no Oscar nominations.  That movie was not so much about sex as about the social construction of reality.

Acts of Kindness

July 13, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Reward often works better than punishment.*  

Two examples came my way recently from very different sources  – one of those coincidences that are increasingly possible, especially if you spend way too much time on the Internet. 

The Monkey Cage linked to a Harvard Business Review blog (here) about reducing juvenile crime with a policy of  “Positive Tickets.”  Instead of nailing kids for bad behavior, the cops (the Mounties in Richmond, Canada)  gave rewards to kids when they came upon them doing the right thing.

The ticket granted the recipient free entry to the movies or to a local youth center. They gave out an average of 40,000 tickets per year. . . .
Youth recidivism was reduced from 60% to 8%. Overall crime was reduced by 40%. Youth crime was cut in half. And it cost one-tenth of the traditional judicial system.

Just the day before I saw this item, my sister-in-law had sent around a link to this video of an Australian bank doing something similar.   The difference is that the bank’s dependent variable is not clearly defined or measured, and its method is over the top.

----------------
*Not always.  In psychology, especially with animals, there are all sorts of specifications and parameters that make this less than a categorical truth.

Kumar Goes to Sociology Class

July 11, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Add Kalpen Modi (Kal Penn) to the list* of inspiring sociology majors.
 
Gabriel Rossman posted a video of Modi’s commencement address to sociology students at UCLA.

A degree in sociology is far from useless.  The opposite is true. My sociology degree helped prepare me for every job I’ve ever had, and for life in general.

The above frame  is just a screen grab.  Gabriel (Princeton orange accenting the black gown)  is occasionally visible right behind Modi.  Watch the entire video on Gabriel’s blog or here.  It’s worth listening to, especially if you’re a Sociology undergrad.  




--------------------
* Regis Philbin, Michelle Obama, Ronald Reagan, Dr. Ruth, et. al.

Bitter Tea?

July 10, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
A less snarky version of this post is at Sociological Images.

In Sunday’s New York Times (here), Arthur Brooks explained  “Why Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals.”

Brooks pretends to be surprised at the happiness of conservatives.  In the first paragraph, he artfully constructs his straw man:

Barack Obama in 2008 . . . infamously labeled blue-collar voters “bitter,” as they “cling to guns or religion.”

Besides Obama’s perception (or as Brooks sees it, misperception)

there is an entire academic literature in the social sciences dedicated to showing conservatives as naturally authoritarian, dogmatic, intolerant of ambiguity, fearful of threat and loss, low in self-esteem and uncomfortable with complex modes of thinking.

(Note that Brooks is careful not to say that the research actually shows this, though it does.  Instead, the research – most of it by those unhappy liberals – is “dedicated to showing” conservatives in a bad light. Sort of like the research “dedicated to showing” that planet Earth is getting warmer – another liberal conspiracy.*)

Obviously, liberals must be happier, right?

Wrong, says Brooks. 

I’m not sure why he assumes that those characteristics of conservatives found in the scientific literature should make them less happy than liberals. But Brooks is not really interested in conservative traits that are uncorrelated to happiness.  He wants to explain what makes conservatives happy, and he finds two important factors: marriage (with children) and religion.

Religious participants are nearly twice as likely to say they are very happy about their lives as are secularists (43 percent to 23 percent). The differences don’t depend on education, race, sex or age; the happiness difference exists even when you account for income.

That’s a bit misleading. Happiness is in fact related to income, race, and education in exactly the ways you would expect, though for some reason Brooks does not include those variables in his analysis. What Brooks means is that the religion effect holds even when you control for those variables. 

What about the image of the “bitter” conservative?  Nonsense, says Brooks.  Obama, couldn’t have been more wrong. When you look across the political spectrum,

none, it seems, are happier than the Tea Partiers, many of whom cling to guns and faith with great tenacity.

This does not square with the image of Tea Partiers as bitter and angry.  But maybe that’s because until recently, they didn’t have much to be bitter about.  The US was their country, and they knew it.   That’s why ever since November 2008 they have kept talking about “taking back our country.” (See my “Repo Men” post  from two years ago.)

Still, Brooks insists that the extreme right are the happiest kids on the block.  The trouble is that Brooks is looking at pre-Obama data on happiness.  The most recent survey he cites is from 2006.  So Brooks is correct when he says, “This pattern has persisted for decades.”  Here for example is the GSS cumulative data since 1972. 

By about 10 percentage points, more conservatives identify themselves as “very happy” than do liberals.  The difference is even higher among the extreme conservatives. 

But what if we look at the data from the Obama years?

The GSS does not offer “bitter” as a choice on its Happiness measure or “Tea Party” as a political preference, but extreme conservatives are nearly three times as likely as others to be “not too happy.”**  And overall, the happiness gap between conservatives and liberals is hard to find.

-----------------------------

* The radio announcer for Celtics games when I was in Boston was Johnny Most, a considerable homer.  On radio, the Celtics never actually committed a foul.  Instead, Most would say, after some bit of shoving on the floor that ended with a 76er crashing into the seats, “and they call a foul on Havlicek.”  Or as Brooks would have it, the refs were “dedicated to showing” that the Celtics committed a foul.

 ** I suppose some caution is in order.  The GSS sample for the table is about 2000, but only 80 of those were Extreme Conservative.  Still, any other 2-year period with similar sample size would show Brooks’s happy-conservative tilt.  Only in the Obama years does the graph look like this.

Brooks v. Brooks (Self-control v. Rambunctious)

July 9, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

David Brooks is the New York Times’s conservative columnist, the guy who extols social skills and the ability of people to work within institutions, the guy who disdains efforts to change institutions and insists that change is personal – a matter of character.  David Brooks is the guy who sees  “The Book of Mormon” and unlike the Times’s theater critic (“blasphemous, scurrilous and more foul-mouthed than David Mamet on a blue streak”) finds a parable of character and self-control:

Rigorous codes of conduct allow people to build their character. Changes in behavior change the mind, so small acts of ritual reinforce networks in the brain. A Mormon denying herself coffee may seem like a silly thing, but regular acts of discipline can lay the foundation for extraordinary acts of self-control when it counts the most.

 “The Book of Mormon” was then (April of last year).  “Henry V” is now. Self-control might have been nice, but now let’s give it up for rambunctiousness.

Henry V is one of Shakespeare's most appealing characters. He was rambunctious when young and courageous when older.

How did Hal become so appealing and courageous?  Not through self-control taught by church or school, says Brooks.  Those confining institutions are the bad guys.  They don’t know how “to educate a fiercely rambunctious” kid.

But the big story here is cultural and moral. If schools want to re-engage Henry, they can't pretend they can turn him into a reflective Hamlet just by feeding him his meds and hoping he'll sit quietly at story time.

That stuff about people changing themselves – self-control to work within institutions – that was so 2011 Brooks.

Schools have to engage people as they are. . .   not just teachers who celebrate cooperation, but other teachers who celebrate competition; not just teachers who honor environmental virtues, but teachers who honor military virtues; not just curriculums that teach how to share, but curriculums that teach how to win and how to lose; not just programs that work like friendship circles, but programs that work like boot camp.

I’m not sure which part of Brooks’s column is more fatuous. That paean to boot camp (see Charles Pierce’s commentary here ) is pretty good.  But Brooks also implies that the gender imbalance in disciplinary problems in schools (mostly boys) is recent:

Boys are much more likely to have discipline problems. An article as far back as 2004 in the magazine Educational Leadership found that boys accounted for nearly three-quarters of the D's and F's.

That “far back” date conveniently puts it in the contemporary era.  Was this imbalance any different in 1894?  In some ways, schools haven’t really changed all that much.  The first lesson kids have to learn is still the same:  sit still.

Surveys and Sequence

July 8, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Push polls are an extreme example of the problems inherent in surveys, even surveys that are not apparently tendentious.  You ask a seemingly straightforward questions, but respondents may not be answering the question you think you asked.  That’s why I tend to distrust one-shot surveys with questions that have never been used before.  (Earlier posts on this are here and here).

Good surveys also vary the sequence of questions since Question #1 may set the framework a person then uses to think about Question #2. 

“Yes, Prime Minister” offers a useful example – exaggerated, but useful in the research methods course nevertheless.

HT: Keith Humphrey

Au Canada

July 5, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

After the Supreme Court’s Obamacare decision, some conservatives announced Twitterers joked that they were so fed up they were moving to Canada (Buzzfeed story here.)

Maybe they were doctors thinking about administrative costs:

A 2010 Health Affairs study found that doctors in Ontario, a Canadian province, spent $22,205 each year dealing with the single-payer agency, compared to the $82,975 American doctors spend dealing with private insurance companies, Medicare and Medicaid.

Or maybe they were patients in need of costly tests:

An MRI that costs, on average, $1,200 in the United States comes in at $824 north of the border.

(from a WaPo blog by Sarah Kliff.)

The Flag

July 4, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Five years ago, Pew Research did a survey on patriotism.  The study was released with this title:

Who Flies the Flag? Not Always Who You Might Think
A Closer Look at Patriotism

Pew asked people if they displayed the flag at home, at work, or on their cars. Most of the demographic breakdowns were what you and Pew would expect.  Flag flying was more common among Whites, males, and Republicans. Apparently what surprised Pew (or its headline writer) was the regional breakdown.

As Pew says, “Notably, significantly more Northeasterners and Midwesterners fly the flag than do residents of the South or the West.”

Not to get to Clintonesque here, but maybe it depends on what  “the flag” means.  People in the South are in fact more likely to display a national flag. But the flag these patriots display is not the one in the picture above, the flag of the USA.  It is the flag of a country that fought a war against the USA – a war that killed a greater proportion of the population of the USA than has any other war in our history. (Even the absolute number of USA dead and wounded is second only to World War II.)

UPDATE:  A 2011 Pew survey found that 8% of the total sample said they displayed the Confederate flag.  If we assume that all these were in the South and add them to the 58% of Southerners in the 2007 survey who said they displayed “the flag,” the South still trails the Northeast in flagwaving, though the 3-point difference is within the margin of error. (HT: @ConradHackett)

Name, Race, and Class

July 3, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

The protagonist of Max Shulman’s 1957 novel Rally Round the Flag, Boys is Lt. Guido DiMaggio. He never had andy particular talent for baseball, but practically since he could walk, people were certain that any boy named DiMaggio must have baseball in his blood, so he was encouraged to play and play often.  As a result, he turned into a pretty good outfielder.*

Do names make for destiny because of the way people respond to them?  Freakonomics (2005) says it ain’t so, Joe.  Levitt and Dubner, writing about Black names, conclude that once you control for social class, names make no difference.  In the Freakonomist world, teachers, landlords, and employers are like Steven Colbert – they don’t see race. 

On average, a person with a distinctively black name . . .does have a worse life outcome . . . . But it isn't the fault of his or her name. . . .  The kind of parents who name their son Jake don't tend to live in the same neighborhoods or share economic circumstances with the kind of parents who name their son DeShawn. And that's why, on average, a boy named Jake will tend to earn more money and get more education than a boy named DeShawn. DeShawn's name is an indicator–but not a cause–of his life path.

I was skeptical about this when I read it years ago.  What about all those field tests for civil rights groups?  What about those black college grads who finally wise up and send out their resumes as D. William Green after DeShawn W. Green gets nothing but rejections? 

The problem is that we don’t know whether people are responding to “DeShawn” as a marker of race or marker of class or both. 

Now, S. Michael Gaddis has taken a step towards untangling the race and class in names.  He finds that some Black names are associated with more education, some with less. The same goes for some distinctively white names.  Nearly four out of five Jalens, for example, are Black, but 61% of Jalens have gone to college.  Ronny is mostly white and mostly dropout.

Gaddis went job hunting over the Internet using these names.  He looked at who was offered an interview and at what salary range.  On both outcome variables, race and class both made a difference. 

Moreover, the race- and class- based penalties compound for low-SES black males.  In other words, Jalen and DaQuan are both disadvantaged on the job market compared to Caleb and Ronny, but DaQuan is by far the most severely disadvantaged.  Worse yet:  the situation between white and black candidates does not change whether they are graduates from less selective schools like UMass and UC Riverside or highly selective schools like Harvard and Stanford.

Gaddis has a brief write-up of his research here.

HT: A tweet from Philip Cohen.

-------------------
* Readers of the first chapter of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers may hear an echo in this story.  Gladwell is writing non-fiction about hockey and age; Shulman is writing fiction about baseball and names.  But the “culling” effect  is similar.

Standing Your Ground in the Wild West

June 30, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Andrew Gelman has some comments on a recent NBER paper on the deadly effects of Stand Your Ground laws. The authors, McClelland and Tekin, conclude that “between 4.4 and 7.4 additional white males are killed each month as a result of these laws.”

The article is here but gated.  Andrew however provides some of the graphs . . . and some criticisms.  He also comments,

these laws aren’t really enacted as a homicide-control measure, right? It’s more the opposite, that they legalize certain violence that used to be criminal.

Presumably, if the killers were standing their ground, those additional dead white males deserved to die.  Or at least, their killing was justifiable.

I was reminded of a post I did for Everyday Sociology back in 2009, not about Stand Your Ground laws as such but about the more general claim that an armed citizenry is a deterrent to crime.  I’m off duty these days (I’m up in Maine for a wedding), so rather than post something new, I’m hauling this one out of the storage locker.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

April 16, 2009

The recent shootings in Alabama, Binghamton, and Pittsburgh along with the anniversaries of massacres at Columbine and Virginia Tech have brought more than the usual calls for stricter gun laws. The pro-gun side is also speaking up loudly, arguing that if more people were armed, we’d have less crime, and an armed citizenry would be a deterrent. If criminals knew that everyone was carrying a gun, the NRA reasons, they wouldn’t dare commit the crime for fear of being shot.

How can we assess these claims? The usual strategy for measuring deterrence is to compare crime rates in states with different gun laws. Some states have strict gun laws. Other states have made carrying a concealed weapon (CCW) widely legal. The problem with this comparison is not just that we need to control for all the other factors that might affect crime. There is also the problem that even in states that do not restrict CCW, we don’t know how many people are actually walking around packing heat. And neither do the criminals.

It would be nice if we could do an experiment. We could create a place in America where everyone carries a gun. We’d give our experiment a few years, then we’d check the crime rates. It’s impossible to do, of course.

But wait. I think I’ve seen such a place. It’s called the Wild West. And in the versions that I’ve seen in movies and on TV, nearly everyone there (at least the men) carries a gun. And none of this concealed weapon stuff--the guns are in plain sight, holstered and ready for a quick deterrent draw.

But is that picture of the West accurate, and how much crime was committed there? Fortunately, there is a systematic study of crime in a real town in the Wild West – Bodie, California, a mining boom town high in the Sierras near the Nevada border.

In the 1870s, when news got out that there was gold or silver in those hills, Bodie’s population quickly grew from a few hundred to about 5,000. For our purposes this town is a good place to examine the links between guns and crime.

On the one hand, Bodie’s demographics should lead us to expect a high rate of crime. Most of the population consisted of young, single, men with no deep ties to the community and a social life centered around saloons, gambling halls, and prostitutes. Bodie had racial minorities (Mexicans and Chinese) and hard drugs (opium). On the other hand, nearly all those men carried guns.

Historian Roger McGrath* went back through court documents and newspaper reports to reconstruct the actual crime rates in the five-year period when Bodie was booming. His results can help us decide whether the net result of all those guns was good, or whether it was bad and ugly.

When McGrath counted up the numbers and did the math, it turned out that, by comparison with crime rates today, Bodie didn’t have much crime. Its rate of burglary was about one-sixth that for the U.S. today as a whole. That difference, though, probably has less to do with guns and deterrence than with the absence of things to steal. No iPods, TVs, or even jewelry. People didn’t have silver, they had silver mines, which are a bit harder to make off with. In fact, the most frequently taken items in Bodie were blankets and firewood (nights are cold in the High Sierra).

But what about robberies, where the bad guys are usually after cash? Bodie’s 21 robberies in five years work out to an annual rate of 84 per 100,000. That’s lower than the overall U.S. rate for 2007 (148 per 100,000). The closest cities geographically I could find 2007 data for were Carson City, Nevada, whose rate was much lower (38 per 100,000) and Reno, whose robbery rate was nearly triple that of Bodie.

So Bodie’s guns might have made a difference. The bank tellers were all armed, and Bodie had no bank robberies. On the other hand, the stagecoach had an carmed guard, but still McGrath counted eleven stagecoach robberies. (Just like in the movies, the bad guys weren’t completely bad. They took the strongbox but usually let the passengers keep their money and valuables.) So were guns a deterrent in Bodie? The overall picture is mixed so far.

But there was one crime where Bodie left contemporary rates in the dust – murder. In five years, Bodie had 31 murders, for an annual rate of 116 per 100,000, twenty times the national rate for the U.S. in 2007. Even our most murderous cities like Baltimore and Detroit have murder rates less than half of Bodie’s.

It’s also clear that the cause of Bodie’s high murder rate was those guns. When men have guns close at hand, ordinary arguments and disputes can become fatal. And remember, guns in 1880 were primitive by today’s standards. We can only wonder what Bodie’s murder rate would have been if those miners had been carrying .357 Magnums.

-----------
* McGrath describes Bodie in his 1984 book Gunfighters, Highwaymen, and Vigilantes: Violence on the Frontier. As for Bodie, it quickly declined after the 1880s, and by the early 20th century, it became a ghost town.

When the Going Gets Tough – Lipstick and Evolution

June 28, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

L’Oreal did not lose sales during the current recession.  And psychologist Sarah Hill says that this increase is part of a more general trend – “the lipstick effect.”  In a recession, women cut back on other stuff, but not cosmetics.

What makes L’Oreal worth it, even when times get tough, according to Hill, is evolutionary psychology.  (Hill’s new JPSP article  is here. She also has a shorter, more general write-up at Scientific American.)  It’s all about “reproductive strategy” – how to get your genes strewn about as much as possible. 

Human ancestors regularly went through cycles of abundance and famine, each of which favors different reproductive strategies. While periods of abundance favor strategies associated with postponing reproduction in favor of one’s own development (e.g., by pursuing an education), periods of scarcity favor more immediate reproduction. The latter strategy is more successful during times of resource scarcity because it decreases the likelihood that one will perish before having the chance to reproduce.

Got it? In good times, our human ancestors would try to get an education.  In hard times, they would try to get laid. 

Hill elaborates on the special problems for women.

For women, periods of scarcity also decrease the availability of quality mates, as women’s mate preferences reliably prioritize resource access.

“Reliably prioritize resource access” is from the SciAm blogpost, presumably the venue that’s reader-friendly for the general public.  What the sentence means, I think, is this:  A recession reduces the number of guys with enough money to take care of a family.

Those well-off guys, I mean males, thanks to evolution, are “men who seek in mates qualities related to fertility, such as youth and physical attractiveness.”  So a girl has to go even further in dolling herself up in order to snag one of them. 

It all makes sense, but it ignores one important factor – the economic  inequality between men and women.  The evol-psych explanation takes as a given that women must rely on men for “resource access” (which I think is roughly what you and I call “money.”)  What if women knew that their chances of getting a decent job were as good as a man’s, or better?  Would hard times still send them to the cosmetics counter?

Hill did include a measure of resource access, and found that it was not significantly related to the lipstick-effect, at least not in the lab experiments.  Here was the set-up: Subjects read an article that was either about the recession (“Worst Economic Crisis Since ’30s With No End in Sight”) or about “current architecture.” Then they were asked which products they preferred.  Women who read about the recession were more likely to go for (in the words of evolutionary psychologist C. Berry) “tight dresses and lipstick.”*  The “resource access” measure did not significantly alter that effect.  Rich girls and poor girls alike switched their preference to L'Oreal.

As for the guys, reading about the recession did not affect them in this way.  Their desire for “attractiveness products” was unchanged.

I never know what to make of psychology experiments.  Their elaborate contrivance gives them enviable control over the variables, but it also raises questions about their link to the real world.  In Hill’s experiments, as is typical, the subjects were “unmarried female university students” – what we used to call “college girls” (plus, in one of the experiments, college boys).  It would be interesting to see if actual recessions lead to lipstick-buying across the socio-economic landscape.  Evol-psych would predict that the effect should be most visible in places where the recession hits hardest.

It’s also worth noting that L’Oreal might have been the exception this time around.  Sales in the industry as a whole suffered in the recession and did not reach pre-recession levels till 2010, and much of the increase came from bargain hunters.  (An industry report is here.) That contradicts Hill’s lab experiment results showing that “the lipstick effect applies specifically to products that enhance beauty, even when those products are more expensive.”   The larger increase in cosmetics sales came in 2011, especially for nail products (up 59%, go figure).

The experiment’s “priming” with newspaper stories is also a problem.  I’m puzzled about the use of that “current architecture” article as a control.  Why not an article that was upsetting but had nothing to do with economics – something like “How Hackers Easily Get Your Phone Messages”?  Maybe any disturbing article would have the same lipstick effect, even though cell phone privacy has nothing to do with a woman’s ability to pass along her genes.  As the t-shirt says, “When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.” Maybe it doesn’t matter whether the tough-going is economic or something else.

Finally, I wonder about those guys.  If recessions make women but not men worry about their genes, asking college guys about face cream and tight polo shirts might not be the best way to operationalize the variable.  Why not ask about things that most guys think make them more attractive to women – probably consumer goods that signal cultural and economic capital?  Maybe college boys who read the recession article would shift their preference from video games to dress shirts and ties; or maybe the change would go the other way.  Whatever the outcome, I'm sure evol-psych would have an explanation. 

-----------------------
* I am not making this up: “The three attractiveness-enhancing products were (a) form-fitting jeans, (b) form-fitting black dress (women) / form-fitting polo shirt (men), and (c) lipstick (women) / men’s facial cream (men).”  And, as noted above, these were college girls, not all that much older than sweet little sixteen.

The Criminal Mind

June 26, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Decades ago, when I was reading up on car theft for a section in my crim text, I discovered that some proportion of thefts are for the very modest purpose of transportation – a sort of precursor of the Zip Car.  Can’t afford to buy a car?  Just take one, drive to your destination, and leave the car. 

I remembered this when reading Jody Rosen’s story (at Slate) about finding his stolen bicycle – stolen in Brooklyn, and then found barely four-and-a-half hours later near Union Square in Manhattan, five miles away.

Rosen focuses on the essential role of Twitter in the search. But what struck me was not the Twitterpolice procedural; it was the epilogue, where we discover the criminal’s deep and devious motivation.

The police told me they would hang out for a while in case the thief materialized. “Where do you think he is?” I asked. “In there, probably,” said one of the cops, motioning to the entrance of the building we were standing in front of. It was a Department of Social Services facility, home to the New York City Job Center, the New York City Residential Center, and the New York City Food Stamp Office. Times are tough.

Comedians Breaking Definitions

June 26, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Martha Plimpton’s brief bio on Twitter:

I put dead people’s hair on my head and talk loudly in front of strangers for money.

In a previous post (here) I noted that actors and magicians share with their audience an unusual and self-contradictory definition of the situation. The performer makes every effort to convince the audience that he is something he is not – the possessor of supernatural powers, a prince of Denmark, etc.  But he must also convey the idea that he is really just an ordinary person and that he is fully aware that he is not what he is claiming to be.  As long as everyone shares this definition of the situation, the show can go on. Without that definition, the professional actor, as Ms. Plimpton suggests, sounds absurd if not deranged.

Comedians and their audiences have a similar tacit agreement.  It’s most obvious with the old-style, joke-telling stand-up comedians.  The rabbi, the priest, and the kangaroo did not really walk into a bar.  Newer-style “observational” comedians blur the line slightly, calling our attention to real absurdities we might not have noticed.  Elayne Boosler asks her audience, “Ever notice that Soup for One is eight aisles away from Party Mix?”  But we know she does not really think that supermarkets are trying to segregate the shoppers – one aisle for the lonely, another for the socially successful.  And when Seinfeld asks what’s the deal with automobiles or airlines or whatever, we know that he is not really puzzled and that he understands them the same way that we do.

But some comedians break the agreement. The Times yesterday had an article about comedian Tig Notaro seeming to forget her own routine.*

Time passed slowly. Ms. Notaro spotted a familiar face in the crowd and asked for help. Her friend shouted a reminder. Ms. Notaro started the story again, froze, joked and asked for help. As this series of false starts continued, patterns emerged in expressions, gestures, cadence.

She is violating the usual definition of how comedians should perform, and the audience is puzzled.

Not all of the audience however was amused. As minutes went by, people start checking their watches and rolling their eyes. This atmosphere resembled what I imagine the first minutes of watching Andy Kaufman read the entire “Great Gatsby” onstage were like. The audience chuckled, then murmured. Was this all a stunt? And seriously, when was it going to end?

I saw Andy Kaufman a few times at The Improv long ago, and the audience reaction (or mine at least) went beyond puzzlement or boredom to places like distress or anger. 

One night, Kaufman came on stage and started to play a conga drum.  (I don’t remember if he spoke an introduction or just started playing.)   At some point, he started to sing in some indecipherable language. The audience laughed. But then he continued, long after the audience had stopped laughing.** 

In this, and in other routines, Kaufman would stay in character so long that the audience would not know what to make of him. Maybe this guy is really crazy, you would think. Maybe he doesn’t realize that the audience doesn’t think he’s funny. Maybe he’s doing this out of some schizo inability to sense the reactions of others, and he is attending only to his own internal imagined reality. 

The thought that you were looking not at a comedian but at a seriously troubled mind was not at all funny. It was upsetting. 

I don’t remember how he would end this bit. My guess is that he said his, “Tank you veddy much,” and did his stiff little bows and got off stage. But whatever the ending was, it did little to convey the idea that he knew it was all just an act.

One night, I left the club – it must have been close to 2 a.m. – and out on the sidewalk, not far from the door, Kaufman and Elayne Boosler,*** who had also performed that night, were having a heated argument.  “You can’t do that,” she shouted at him. “You can’t do that to people.” 

I wish I had stayed longer to eavesdrop on the rest of the conversation.  At the same time, I felt relieved to know that Kaufman was not out of touch with reality.  His ability to have an argument about his act meant that he knew it was just an act. 
-----------------


* Notaro’s more typical version of the routine – a long (11-minute) anecdote involving Taylor Dayne – is here

** A video of a much less ambiguous version of the congas bit is here

*** Kaufman and Boosler were good friends, possibly romantically involved, though I certainly did not know that at the time.

Free Samples

June 23, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Google has nGrams for quick content analysis of words and phrases in “lots of books.”  Google also has Correlate which allows you to trace search strings across time and place and to discover correlations between search strings. 

Facebook too makes information on their users available, though their motive is not so selfless as Google’s.  The do it so that advertisers can narrow their target.  Planet Money had a story recently about a pizza joint in New Orleans that used FB’s data to select the target audience for its ads.

Their first idea was to target the friends of people who already liked Pizza Delicious on Facebook. But that wound up targeting 74 percent of people in New Orleans on Facebook — 224,000 people. They needed something narrower.

The Pizza Delicious guys really wanted to find people jonesing for real New York pizza. So they tried to target people who had other New York likes — the Jets, the Knicks, Notorious B.I.G. Making the New York connection cut the reach of the ad down to 15,000.

Seemed perfect. But 12 hours later, Michael called us. “It was all zeroes across the board,”  he said. Facebook doesn't make money till people click on the ad. If nobody clicks, Facebook turns the ad off. They'd struck out.

So they changed the target to New Orleans fans of Italian food: mozzarella, gnocchi, espresso. This time they were targeting 30,000 people.

Those ads went viral. They got twice the usual number of click-throughs, on average. The ad showed up more than 700,000 times. Basically, everyone in New Orleans on Facebook saw it. Twice.

To get the access to the data, you don’t really have to be an advertiser; you just have to play one on Facebook.  Neal Caren at UNC tells you how.  He used Facebook to compare rates of same-sex and hetero preferences across age groups and states.  His instructional post is here.

(HT: Philip Cohen)

Whose Kids Are All Right?

June 22, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Miscellaneous thoughts on the Regnerus study.

1.    Oranges and apples.  This study is not about the effects of gay marriage.  Opponents of gay marriage trying to cram it into that cubbyhole apparently have not read the title: “How different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships? Findings from the New Family Structures Study.” [emphasis added]

Who are these “parents who have same-sex relationships”?  They are not gay couples (there were only two of those in the sample, both female).  The image I get is the closeted homosexual trying to do the right thing, maybe even “cure” himself, by getting married.  The cure doesn’t work and he is now in an unhappy, unfulfilling marriage, but he stays because of the kids.  Eventually, he gives in to his desires, has a “same-sex relationship,” and maybe leaves his family.  

Is this scenario common in Regnerus’s sample?  I don’t know.  But to make gay parent vs. straight parent comparisons on the basis of the sample with only two gay couples is to compare these unhappily married oranges with Ozzie-and-Harriet apples.  As Regnerus’s defenders delicately put it, “This is not an ideal comparison.”

2.    Secondary deviance.  Edwin Lemert coined this term to refer to deviance that arises as a reaction to the social or legal stigma that comes with the primary deviance.   The crime is primary, the coverup is secondary.  The coverup occurs only because the original act is criminal.  The same applies to non-criminal forms of deviance and to social sanctions rather than legal ones.

Again, the Regnerus defense team: “This instability may well be an artifact of the social stigma and marginalization that often faced gay and lesbian couples during the time (extending back to the 1970s, in some cases) that many of these young adults came of age.” 

3.    Rights and Research.  As Ilana Yurkiewicz at Scientific American says, even if good, relevant research on the topic of gay marriage (which the Regnerus study is not) showed that kids from gay marriages do worse than kids from straight marriages, that’s no reason to deny people the right to marry.

Research has already found such differences between other categories of people – poor vs rich, for example.  Should we deny poor people the right to marry because their kids are less likely to do well in school or more likely to have run-ins with the law?  I would not be surprised if back in the mid-20th century, research would have shown (or perhaps did show) that the children of interracial marriages did not do as well on several variables as did Ozzie-and-Harriet or Cosby-show offspring.  Would that have been a valid reason to uphold laws banning interracial marriage?

4.    Etc.  Philip Cohen is much more qualified than I am to offer criticisms and comments on the study.  You should read his as yet unpublished op-ed.

Rules of the Club

June 21, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Alex Stone was expelled from the Society of American Magicians.  In 2008, Stone wrote an article for Harper’s

The Magic Olympics:  With tricks explained!

Explaining tricks to the public is a no-no.  The first rule of magic is: you don’t talk about magic, at least not to laymen.* 

In this article, you blatantly exposed the secret, not only of your act but the acts of several other magicians as well.  By doing so, you have acted in opposition to the SAM’s Code of Ethics and Oath . . .We hereby ask for your resignation . . . .

But it’s not quite so simple.

Magicians make a strange deal with their audiences.  They do everything they can to convince the audience of something that is not true – that they have the power to makes things appear, disappear, levitate, or change form, that they have to power to predict the future and read minds.  Yet while they claim to have these powers, they must also convey the idea that they do not have these powers and that what they are doing is “just a trick.”

The key clause in the tacit contract between performer and audience is voluntary deception – “fooling.”  We in the audience know that we are being fooled.  We know that the coin did not really appear out of thin air, that the girl was not actually sawed in half and then restored.  The magician has fooled us into seeing it that way.**

Performers who claim actual supernatural powers, who refuse to acknowledge that they are fooling us, are no longer protected by the professional rule against exposing secrets.   Magicians like The Amazing Randi or Penn and Teller take great pleasure in exposing psychics and healers who are using standard magic-act techniques (often not very skillfully).

But what about this?



The video is from “America’s Got Talent,” but Kevin James performed it at the Magic Olympics that Stone wrote about for Harper’s.

A website devoted to optical illusions had this to say:

Kevin James . . . sawing a man in half has to be one of the best magic optical illusions I have seen in a long time. . . . At first I thought this could be done with animatronics. . . . The part that astonished me was once the patient was stapled back together he jumped up in the air and walked off stage; this is currently not possible by todays robotics. . . . . It is beyond me as of how this trick was pulled off.

Stone too was baffled when he saw this illusion at the Magic Olympics in Stockholm.  Things soon became clearer.

I board a small plane back to the States. Several of the artists and competitors are on the flight, all looking as haggard as I do, and feel. . .  . ln the first row sits the illusionist of last night's sawed-in-half routine, a meaty, florid man with triangular eyebrows and thin red lips. His trick has been gnawing at me since I saw it. No boxes. No mirrors. How? Now, suddenly, I understand. Sitting next to him, in the aisle seat, is a slender, dark-skinned man who looks normal in all respects save one: his body terminates just below the waist. No legs. No hips. Nothing.

The “America’s Got Talent” clip is edited.  The tables are wheeled offstage and back on in order to switch the half-man for a full one (the one who springs up from the table at the end).*** But the baffling stage of the routine (baffling if you hadn’t seen the guy on the airplane seat) is the sawed-in-half part. 

Maybe that is what allowed Stone to expose the secret of the trick.  The magician was not fooling us.  The man really was, in effect, sawed in half.  It isn’t magic (“Can I, too, buy a half-man at my local magic store?” Stone asks).  So exposing the secret is perhaps not such a clear violation of the norms. 

 (Stone’s new book Fooling Houdini is reviewed in the Times today, here.)
--------------------------

* This is the term magicians often use to refer to non-magicians.

** Stage actors and audiences make the same deal.  For example, the Times critic complained about Philip Seymour Hoffman in Death of a Salesman: “as a complete flesh-and-blood being, this Willy seems to emerge only fitfully.”  But suppose that Willy did emerge fully as “a complete flesh-and-blood being” and that we wept at his death.  After the final curtain, Hoffman would come out, we would applaud, and he would bow  – a ritual that says in effect that he was just fooling us.  He was not really a salesman, and he did not really die eight times a week.

***  (A video of the full 5-minute routine is here.)

Me and Him Say It That Way

June 19, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Planet Money had an excellent podcast  about the natural experiment that Oregon created when it could allow only 10,000 additional people onto Medicaid.  Many thousands more qualified but had to be turned away, thus providing a control group for researcher Katherine Baicker.  The study showed that Medicaid does work.  People on Medicaid were healthier and happier than those who were turned away from the program.

That result did not surprise me.  But one sentence from reporter Alex Blumberg did. 

It is the perfect control group that Katherine Baicker had been waiting for her entire career.  Her and her team got in touch with Oregon and went about designing a study . . .  [it comes at about 3:25 in the podcast]

Not to go all prescriptivist or anything, but “her and her team got in touch”??

I’m not sure what other stories I might have heard by Blumberg.  But him and his team are getting pretty casual with English grammar.  Are them and other reporters also the kind to say “she told Alex and I about her research”? 

I’m from the generation that was taught to use the same pronoun in a compound form that you would use if it stood alone.  If you wouldn’t say, “Her got in touch with Oregon,” then don’t say, “Her and her team got in touch with Oregon.” Ditto, mutatis mutandis, for “she told Alex and I.”  But us and our kind are out of step.

Hat tip to The Language Log for the New Yorker cartoon, which is from 2010.  But the “between you and I” world is hardly new.  It has had a resurgence in the last 20 years, but as the Log’s Arnold Zwicky pointed out (here)

it’s safe to say that the rise of “between you and I” in Late Modern English goes back at least 150 or 160 years, not 20.

He wrote that in 2005, well before the birth of Google Ngrams, which now provide further support for his history of  “between you and I.”

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

Overqualified

June 18, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

What can I do with a Ph. D. in industrial chemistry?  Not that I have a lot of students asking me that question, but here’s one answer.  Get a job as a street sweeper in Rome.

Reuters assigned photographers to do portraits of people who are, shall we say, overqualified for the jobs they could find.  The Atlantic has posted seventeen of these. 

I was reminded of the duelling Tumblr pages.  We Are the 99 Percent, started during the early days of the Occupy movement and showed the brief biographies of people like Francesco Foglia (the streetsweeper above) except that they were all Americans.  They often mentioned their student debt, their medical costs, and other difficulties that came with unemployment or with work in low-paying jobs which provided no healthcare.

We Are the 53% was created in response.*  The typical narrative there was one of hard work leading to success, often with explicit commands to the 99% that they should stop complaining and get a job.

A regular theme underlying the 99% is a sense of having been conned.  They’d been told that if they got an education and were willing to work, they would be better off.  But now they can find only menial jobs or none. From their viewpoint, something is wrong with the system.

The 53% have jobs and presumably incomes high enough to be in the tax-paying range.  They attribute their success to their own virtue, so by implication those less successful must be less virtuous. 

If this were a round of musical chairs with ten players, the nine people who fought their way to a seat might well be attributing their seated status to their own abilities.  The tenth, looking at the whole scene from his standing position, might see lack of success as having something to do with the ratio of chairs to people.  “Nonsense,” say the seated ones. “I got my chair thanks to my own efforts, so stop complaining.” 

Of course, in musical chairs, those who are now seated will soon be chairless and get a different view of the game.  In the real world, unemployment rates do not keep rising.  Still, something like one-third of small businesses fail in the first year.  Fewer than half last four years.  I wonder if those entrepreneurs have different ideas about what makes for success or failure than do the 40-45%. 

(The chart based on SBA data, is from Small Business Trends.)

Maybe the successful ones knew more about how to run a business, unlike, say, Jessica Mazza, another in the Reuters photo exhibit, who has a degree in painting and business management from Ball State. She probably did not invest in that education thinking that she would wind up working in a diner.

-----------------------
*The name comes from the statistic that 47% of the population have incomes so low that they owe no federal income tax.

The Economy Is Lousy – But Where?

June 15, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross-posted at Sociological Images


What’s familiar isn’t so bad, even if it’s bad. 

One of the things I remember from my days in the crim biz is that people’s perceptions of crime don’t have a lot to do with actual crime rates. This was back in the high-crime decades, and people were more afraid of crime than they are now.  But people felt safer in their own neighborhoods than in other neighborhoods, even when their own neighborhoods had a higher crime rate. 

These were the days when I would give someone directions to my building – “Get off the IRT* at 72nd St. . . . .” – and they would often ask, “Is it safe?” 

“Of course it’s safe.  It’s my neighborhood,” I would say, “I live here. I ought to know.” Yet when I would go to a party in the East 20s or, God forbid, Brooklyn, I would emerge from the subway and follow the directions with a certain sense of apprehension and caution. 

Apparently, the same link between far and fear holds true for people’s perceptions of economic well-being.  A recent Gallup poll asked people how the economy was in places ranging from their own city or area to the world generally.  The closer to home, the better the economy.  The farther from home, the lower the percent of people rating economic conditions as excellent or good.

(Click on a graph for a larger view.)

And the farther from home, the higher the percent of people rating economic conditions as “only fair” or poor.

Republicans were the most pessimistic about the economy, regardless of location.  Democrats were the most sanguine, with Independents in between. The graph shows the percent who rated the economy positively minus the percent who rated it Poor.

This obviously has nothing to do with familiarity but with contempt.  Apparently, for Republicans, a Democrat – especially a Kenyan socialist Democrat – in the White House means that the economy must be bad everywhere.

------------------
* These old subway line designations – IRT, BMT, IND – are no longer in official use.  But when did the MTA jettison them?  If you know the answer, please tell me.

UPDATE, June 22:  Andrew Gelman has formatted the data as line graphs, making the comparisons and trends clearer.  He has also added his own observations – things I wish I had known or thought of.