Halloween Follow-up

November 1, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

(This is an update to yesterday’s post about Halloween greed.) 

It turns out, there’s a nice Halloween field experiment I was unaware of (Diener, et. al, JPSP, 1976).  Here’s the setup.  On Halloween, a woman answers the door and invites the trick-or-treaters in.  She tells them to “take one,” and then leaves the room leaving the bowl of candy and a bowl of nickels and pennies.*  Overall (27 houses, 1300 kids) most kids (69%) took one.   But conditions mattered.

In one experimental manipulation, the woman either asked the kids who they were and where they lived or she allowed them to be anonymous.  Experimenters also noted whether the kids were trick-or-treating alone or in groups.  For some groups, the woman designated the smallest kid in the group as being in charge of making sure that kids took only one.   All these variables made a difference.  

The greatest rate of cheating (80%) occurred when the smallest child was designated as responsible but everyone was anonymous.  Diener reasoned that with responsibility shifted to the smallest link, the other kids would feel freer to break the rule. 

Those who did cheat usually took only an additional one to three candies.  But of those who did grab more than what was offered, 20% took both candy and coins.   Unfortunately, the Snickers study is not like the marshmallow study, so we don’t know where those greediest kids are now.
----------------
* Adjusting for inflation that would be closer to dimes and quarters, maybe even half-dollars.

HT: PsyBlog

Trick or Treat and The Street

October 31, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Why do the Wall Street super-rich seem so dissatisfied.  As a non-rich person, I like to think that I’d feel very satisfied if I had tens of millions of dollars or more; that I wouldn’t spend long days doing whatever it is that hedge funders or derivativistas do just to supersize my wealth; that I wouldn’t be disgruntled that my bonus from Goldman was a measly $11 million when the guy down the hall got $14 million?*  (I actually heard such a story from someone who knows.)  What could I do with $14 million that I couldn’t do with $11 million?

Obviously, my thinking about this was all wrong, and Halloween two years ago showed me why. 

We took a little tour of the building to see what people on other floors were doing.  (One family on thirteen made an elaborate haunted house out in the hallway.)  We left the basket of candy on a small table outside our apartment.

As I was coming back to my apartment, I saw two boys of twelve or so standing over our table scooping the candy bars into their bags.  They saw me, turned and ran past.  When I got to the door, I saw that the basket was empty except for a couple of Almond Joys. They had probably done this at other apartments in addition to whatever they got by knocking on doors. 

Could anyone actually eat that much candy? Probably not. This was not about the inherent pleasure of Snickers. It was some sort of competitive game, and the candy was just a way of keeping score.  Satisfaction came not from eating the candy but from the thrill of skirting the rules to get a lot of it and then from just having a lot of it for the sake of having it, or at least having more of it than other kids.

Are they any different from the super-rich? Well, yes. These twelve-year olds would not claim that what they do is virtuous or that it benefits all kidkind or that hyperglycemia, for want of a better word, is good. 

Maybe Wall St. should start giving bonuses in the form of Snickers, or better yet, lower-value currency like Necco Wafers and tiny boxes of Sun-Maid raisins.  (More on candy rates of exchange here.)

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

* This earlier post argues that greed is not so much  personal as institutional.  Its sources lie not in the traits of the traders but in the structure of  the Street.  

Art as a Commodity

October 30, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Andrew Gelman looks at my post about the fake Rothko from a slightly different angle – moral outrage. If you paid $8 million for what turns out to be a fake, you’ve been ripped off, and you react accordingly.

I agree.  But the moral consideration still doesn’t close the gap between aesthetic value and market value. You feel ripped off only if you were thinking of the Rothko as a commodity.

Two (or two and a half) personal anecdotes relate to this distinction, though I’m not sure how.

1.

When I was a young grad student, I bought a couple of Calder prints as a birthday gift for my mother.  The woman in the art shop said that if I preferred, she had the same prints but signed by Calder.  They cost ten times as much.

“You mean they’re identical except for a signature?” I asked.  (How naive I was.)  I bought the unsigned ones, very pleased with myself for getting such a bargain.  I had the same prints that some artsy pretentious schmuck was going to pay ten times as much for.

When my mother died, we consigned the prints, along with much of the rest of her stuff, to an auction house. 

They sold for much more than I’d paid decades earlier, but it was still less than I’d hoped. I kept wondering: what if I’d bought the signed version?  How much more would a signed Calder have appreciated?

2.

My first summer in New York, I met a guy at the tennis courts who turned out to be an art dealer.  (The people who have their afternoons free to play tennis are people who don’t have real jobs – musicians, actors, art dealers, professors . . .)

One afternoon I asked him, “Just hypothetically, if I was going to buy something, what would you suggest?”

“Well, right now I have some Frank Stella drawings you could have for $200.”

I passed.  It seemed like a lot of money back then, at least to me, even if I’d been crazy about Stella, which I wasn’t.

Occasionally, I still find myself thinking: what if I’d bought one (or more) as an investment, as a commodity?  I’d have done well.

2½.

I once asked the art dealer* if he’d seen some art show that was getting good coverage in the press.  No, he said. The only art that he could appreciate now was from the Renaissance. Why? I asked.

“Because I know I can’t touch it. With anything else, I’m looking at it and thinking about whether I could buy it and who I could sell it to and what I could get for it. I can’t enjoy it as art.”

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

* What I didn’t know at the time was that he didn’t really think of himself as an art dealer.  It was just something he did when he couldn’t make a living in his true metier – theater.  (I just discovered this by searching for him on the Internet. And now I realize why his regular tennis partner was a conductor/musical-director who did Broadway and other non-symphony gigs.)

Control Freaks

October 28, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

There’s much to be said for control. “Create Your Own Economy,” says Tyler Cowen in a book of the same name. Lane Kenworthy (here) summarizes part of Cowen’s argument:

Imposing order on information is psychologically satisfying. The increase in our ability to control the amount, the content, and the timing of information and entertainment we consume may be just as valuable, in terms of our well-being, as the increase in the amount of information to which we have access.

But do we really want to turn our lives into those Holiday Inn ads that promised “No Surprises”? 

Halloween is coming, and if you go to a costume party or wait for kids to come to the door for candy, you know you’re going to see people in costume. That’s fun. But last night I found it more amusing to see costumes in surprising places. 

You don’t expect to see a knight waiting for the downtown express.

When you’re walking to Times Square, you don’t expect to be approached by three gorillas.

These ghouls were just outside the entrance to the subway.

If I had seen these girls at a costume party, I would have shrugged – some girls in store-bought costumes. 

But seeing them in such an incongruous place – the stairs to the subway – tickled me.  And maybe when they got to the top of the steps they were tickled to see those zombies, more so than if they’d seen them at a costume party. 

Control is nice, but it isn’t everything.  You can’t tickle yourself.  (I don’t know, maybe Tyler Cowen can.)

Silly Ideas About Voting

October 27, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Elections are silly season,” says Katherine Mangu-Ward at Reason.  I agree, but on different grounds.  Mangu-Ward says that voting itself is silly, and so are the reasons people give for voting.  My view is that what’s silly are articles like Mangu-Ward’s. 

She repeats the usual arguments against voting:

•  your vote will not make a difference – elections are almost never decided by a single vote
•  “people do not typically vote in ways that align with their personal material interests.”
•  “the expected utility of your vote still amounts to approximately bupkes.”
•  the wrong people vote –  “Get-out-the-vote campaigns promote precisely the kind of morally condemnable ignorant voting we should be discouraging.”
•  people vote for “expressive” reasons – “Ignorant expressive voters, even rationally ignorant ones, may be committing immoral acts”

Underlying all these arguments and underlying her contempt for voting is one crucial assumption: the only worthwhile motive is calculated, individual self-interest.   Little wonder that most of the people who make these arguments are free-market economists* –  the people who also have a hard time wrapping their mind around economically irrational customs like tipping and Christmas presents.

The individual rationalists do manage to see the social motives that bring people to the polls – for example, a feeling of connection to wider communities.  (An earlier post on this sentiment is here).  But that connection as a legitimate motivation seems to have lost strength. That’s why Obama’s brief mention of citizenship in his acceptance speech was so unusual.  Much more common is the idea implicit in Romney’s statements:  Ask not what you can do for your country, ask how you can make a lot of money as an entrepreneur.

That difference in the way we think about citizenship (or don’t bother to think about citizenship) is nothing new.  Nearly thirty years ago in Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah and co-authors wrote about Biblical and republican traditions in America, traditions embodied in the small-town America we feel so much nostalgia for.  We feel that nostalgia because in the America of modernity and mobility, political discussion often speaks the language of “ individual utilitarianism.”  Mangu-Ward provides a stunning example.  She seems to be aware of the concept of citizenship – voting or participating because you are a member of the polity  –  but rather than celebrate citizenship as an important foundation of the nation, she dismisses this sentiment as unworthy.  It is “silly” and even “immoral.” **

And they say that it’s the liberals who are elitists.
--------------------

*Mangu-Ward is a journalist with an undergraduate degree in political science and philosophy, but the people she cites are conservative economists like Casey Mulligan and Greg Mankiw).

** Andrew Gelman (here) finds other flaws in Mangu-Ward’s essay – the “innumberacy” of some of her calculations and her assertion that “Rich people are not more likely to vote Republican,” which is just factually wrong. 

Catching FIRE

October 25, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Why do so few 18-24 year olds vote?

Greg Lukianoff, in a Times op-ed today (here), has the answer:  campus speech codes. I am not making this up.

Colleges and universities are supposed to be bastions of unbridled inquiry and expression, but they probably do as much to repress free speech as any other institution in young people’s lives. In doing so, they discourage civic engagement at a time when debates over deficits and taxes should make young people pay more attention, not less.

Lukianoff, who works at FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) offers not one shred of evidence for this assertion.

It’s true that younger people have lower rates of voting. 

But college students have very high rates of voting (high by US standards).  This survey found that in 2004, about 77% of college students voted (81% of women, 72% of men).  That’s 30 points higher than their non-college age-mates who are unfettered by oppressive campus speech codes.   It’s also higher than the rate for any other age group. 

FIRE can argue against speech codes as a matter of principle.  That’s a moral question.  FIRE can try to make its case on  Constitutional grounds.  That’s a legal question, and a bit thornier, especially with private schools, since the First Amendment protects us only from governmental infringement on free speech.

But if FIRE is going to argue that these codes have some general effect on students’ political thought or behavior, that’s an empirical question, and FIRE ought to offer some evidence in support of that claim. They do not, presumably because they have none.

Money, Value, Quality

October 24, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

A year ago, Shamus Khan’s Privilege won the C. Wright Mills award.  The other day, Shamus discovered that Amazon was offering to buy back copies.  The price: 68 cents.

Here we have another case of where quality is unrelated to dollar value.  Privilege is just as good a book as it was a year ago.  But it must be disappointing to be told that your book is worth only a few pennies. Maybe Shamus can find some solace in a Times story that ran the same day about a Manhattan art gallery that had been selling expensive forgeries.  I know that in art, quality and value are two very different things.  Still, I had to stop and wonder when I read about

Domenico and Eleanore De Sole, who in 2004 paid $8.3 million for a painting attributed to Mark Rothko that they now say is a worthless fake.

One day a painting is worth $8.3 million; the next day, the same painting – same quality, same capacity to give aesthetic pleasure or do whatever it is that art does – is “worthless.”*  Art forgery also makes me wonder about the buyer’s motive.  If the buyer wanted only to have and to gaze upon something beautiful, something with artistic merit, then a fake Rothko is no different than a real Rothko.  It seems more likely that what the buyer wants is to own something valuable – i.e., something that costs a lot. Displaying your brokerage account statements is just too crude and obvious.  What the high-end art market offers is a kind of money laundering. Objects that are rare and therefore expensive, like a real Rothko, transform money into something more acceptable – personal qualities like good taste, refinement, and sophistication. 

 --------------
*  Other factors affect the perceived quality and authenticity of a work.  Artistic fashion plays an important role, but so does social context (see this post from 2007.)

Where in the World . . .

October 23, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

It wasn’t just a slip.  It wasn’t a temporary lapse to be corrected later.  Romney has been saying it for months.*

Syria is Iran’s route to the sea.

Anyone who looks at a map will know that Romney has some ’splainin’ to do.

 Maybe Romney assumes that most Americans will not look at the map and will be happy to remain ignorant of the rest of the world.**  As Ambrose Bierce said, “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.”

We haven’t gone to war with Syria or Iran, at least not yet, but we did invade Iraq.  Maybe Bierce’s observation applied seventy years ago, when newsreels had dash-lines rolling across a map to show the progress of Allied forces.  Maybe it applied during Vietnam, when TV news each night showed us the regional map with little explosion symbols marking battles or bombing targets. 

Will the network news shows tonight (not Fox, of course, but the serious news sources) show Americans where these countries are?

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

*Back in April, Glenn Kessler at the WaPo FactChecker had this summary.

** Last month’s post on ignorance and arrogance is here.

George McGovern and the Wisdom of Crowds

October 21, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the 1972 presidential election, George McGovern lost every state except Massachusetts and DC. 

The Republicans said that McGovern

• advocated a withdrawal from Vietnam
• thought the war was a mistake
• wanted to abolish the military draft
• favored amnesty for men who had resisted the draft for that war
• favored legal abortions
• favored decriminalizing marijuana
• favored income support for poor people

Clearly, McGovern was on the wrong side of history.  The Republican slate of statesmen – Dick Nixon and Spiro T. Agnew – won in a landslide.

That worked out well, didn’t it?

A Time to Be Born

October 19, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Muhammad Ali and Evander Holyfield, Ty Pennington and Chris Kattan, John Le Carre and Trey Parker. Give up? They all were born on October 19. Happy Birthday.

The birthday problem came up again on a New York Times blog earlier this month.

How many people do you need in a room to get 50-50 odds that at least two of them share a birthday?

The official answer is 23.  The blogger, Steven Strogatz, takes you through the math (without once using the word factorial!) and even embeds the video clip of Johnny Carson getting it wrong. 

But even 23 is too high.  It assumes that birthdays are randomly distributed throughout the year.  But they’re not.

(The lack of a zero-point exaggerates the differences.  Still, September babies outnumber January babies by nearly 10%.)

The first thing it called to mind was the hockey aperçu made by Paula Barnsley but made famous by Malcolm Gladwell in the first chapter of Outliers.  The revelation takes place at a junior championship hockey game in Canada.  One of the spectators was Canadian psychologist Roger Barnsley.

   He was there with his wife, Paula, and their two boys, and his wife was reading the program, when she ran across a roster [that listed the players’ vital statistics]
   “Roger,” she said, “do you know when these young men were born?”
Barnsley said yes. “They're all between sixteen and twenty, so they'd be born in the late sixties.”
   “No, no,” Paula went on. “What month.”
   “I thought she was crazy,” Barnsley remembers. “But I looked through it, and what she was saying just jumped out at me. For some reason, there were an incredible number
of January, February, and March birth dates.”

In Canadian age-graded sports, kids are grouped by the year of their birth.  A boy born on Jan. 1, 2000 and a boy born on Dec. 31, 2000 are both twelve years old, at least for purposes of hockey eligibility, even though one is a year older than the other.  The older 12-year old is likely to be bigger and to have whatever other physical advantages develop with age.

Horse racing uses the same rule. Officially, every thoroughbred has the same birthday – January 1.  So the breeding season peaks in the late spring.  Most Kentucky Derby winners are foaled in March, very few after May. 

Is anything similar going on among human breeders, usually called parents?  Apparently not. The numbers for the early months are low rather than high.  (In Canada too, births in the first quarter are lower than in the next seven months.) 

Some school systems use a cutoff date of September 1, so all those September babies have an edge, but if parents were breeding rationally, we’d expect lots of births in the following months as well rather than the dropoff shown in the graph.

It looks as though most parents are not breeding rationally, or if they are, other considerations are affecting their scheduling. 

Yes, you can find articles (this one, for example) about competitive parents redshirting their 5-year olds – delaying a child’s entry into kindergarten for a year so the little tyke will have an edge over his even littler classmates.  It would appear that there are too few of these to make a blip in the graph. Still, I wonder what the graph would look like if it were based only on upper middle-class births. 

In any case, births are not distributed randomly. Cue The Byrds, channeling Pete Seeger channeling Ecclesiastes: “To everything there is a season . . .  a time to be born . . ..”

Unwed Moms or The Hood

October 17, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

The question to Obama was:

In 2008, you stated you wanted to keep AK-47s out of the hands of criminals. What has your administration done or planned to do to limit the availability of assault weapons?

Obama did actually respond to the question, in part. 

I also share your belief that weapons that were designed for soldiers in war theaters don’t belong on our streets.

And he even offered a relevant fact:

in my home town of Chicago, there’s an awful lot of violence and they’re not using AK-47s. They’re using cheap hand guns.

And then he wandered off into schools and opportunity.*

CROWLEY: Governor Romney, the question is about assault weapons, AK-47s.

Romney ignored the moderator ad made no mention of AK-47s.  He merely said he wanted no new gun laws. Then he too quickly skipped to matters that have nothing to do with the availability of AK-47s: education, hope, opportunity, and . . .

let me mention another thing. And that is parents. We need moms and dads, helping to raise kids.  . . . But gosh to tell our kids that before they have babies, they ought to think about getting married to someone, that’s a great idea.

Or as someone said or tweeted:

Guns don’t kill people. Unwed mothers kill people.

With variables like unemployment and single-parent families, it’s crucial to distinguish between individual effects and neighborhood effects.  Romney is thinking only about individual effects  – the effect of the family on the child.  The assumption behind Romney’s statement is that single parenting is bad parenting, and therefore it will have bad consequences.**

I confess that I haven’t kept up with the literature on crime, but as I recall, the individual-level correlations are not all that strong.  When you control for other variables, children of single parents or children of unemployed parents are not much more likely to commit violent crimes. 

So the problem is not the unwed mother or the unemployed parent.  The problem is what happens to a neighborhood with high rates of single-parent families and high rates of unemployment. 

We know this intuitively.  Imagine two boys – one with a two-parent family, the other with a single mother.  The two-parent kid lives in a neighborhood where most families are headed by single mothers and there are few employed men.  The single-mother boy lives in a neighborhood where most families have two parents, and most men have jobs.  Who is more likely to commit a violent crime? 

Or imagine that you yourself have a kid and a spouse.  If family structure is the overriding factor, and you wanted to be sure your kid didn’t commit violent crimes, then you would have no preference between those two neighborhoods.  But would you?

Back in the 1980s, researchers like Rob Sampson were shifting the focus from individuals and families to neighborhoods.   Unfortunately, political debates about crime and violence often ignore what every parent knows: that  parents can do only so much, and kids are subject to many influences outside the home.***

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

* When I become czar of presidential debates, we will have not just time-keepers to make sure speakers stay within their time but topic-keepers to remind candidates when they are not addressing the question that was asked.  In the three debates this month, topic-keepers would have been very, very busy.

** Romney hedges – “A lot of great single moms, single dads” – but it’s clear that he thinks these are lucky exceptions to the general rule.

*** Philip Cohen has conceptual blog post about the link between unwed mothers and violence (here).

Dialing for Donations . . . and Deductions

October 16, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Google finishes your sentences for you. At least, they finish your partially typed search string, based on what searchers before you have sought. 

Then Google gives you a list of Websites based on their Algorithm. The way people talk about The Algorithm, I get a picture of some powerful, mysterious god.  Those who can unravel its secrets stand to gain mightily by having their Website win the race to the top. 

Maybe the Republicans have nailed it. Or maybe they just paid for it.   Here’s what you get if you want to donate money to the Democratic National Committee.  (Pink-background sites are paid ads.)

I guess the GOP thinks they’ll get some money by advertising to people who want to give to the Dems.

A search for donating to the Republicans has no Democratic ads. 

(Click on the image for a larger and possibly clearer view.)

What’s interesting here is the autocomplete.  Apparently, a lot of people who want to donate to the Republicans are also concerned that they get a tax break for their largesse.  Which  pretty much confirms what they’ve been telling us about their position on taxes all along – paying less on their taxes is really, really important to them.

Do Pro Athletes Want Gambling?

October 14, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

The obits for Alex Karras  all noted that the NFL suspended him and Lions teammate Paul Hornung for gambling.  Then there’s Pete Rose, whose gambling has kept him out of the Hall of Fame.  And Tim Donaghy, the NBA ref who later said his gambling affected the way he called games. 

What’s up with White sports dudes and gambling? 

Chad Millman at ESPN touts the latest issue of their  magazine (he’s the editor) with the promise of some data.

In that issue we run one of our Confidential polls, in which we question dozens of athletes about taboo topics. In the current version we asked 67 jocks from the four major sports: . . . do you think sports betting should be legalized?

Let’s stipulate that a non-random sample of 67 jocks-we-could-get-to-answer-our-phone-call divided into four categories is less methodologically rigorous than we would prefer.  Still the differences among the sports are striking.  The NHL players were overwhelmingly in favor of legalized sports betting, the NBA players against it.

Here’s a graph that makes the ESPN data look more impressive than it actually is.

The Whiter the sport, the more its professional practitioners want legalized gambling.

Millman is not an academic, so he didn’t end his article with a call for further research (and funding).  But maybe he should have.

Majestic Inequality

October 12, 2012

Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross posted at Sociological Images

In 1894, Anatole France said,

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

Back in June, Mitt Romney said

I want to make sure that we keep America a place of opportunity, where everyone . . . get[s] as much education as they can afford

After all, Mitt got as much education as he (his parents, really) could afford, so he thought it best if everyone had that same majestic equality of opportunity. 

Opportunity – how much is that in American money? 

Yesterday, Planet Money posted this graph showing the costs and benefits of a college education in several countries. 

The title of the post summarizes the interpretation of the college-educated folks at Planet Money.

College Costs More In America, But The Payoff Is Bigger

But what if you look at the data from the other side? Here’s the glass-is-half-empty title

    College in the US Costs a Lot, and If You Can’t Afford It, You’re Really Screwed

or words to that effect.

What the chart shows is inequality – specifically, the inequality between the college educated and everyone else. In advanced economies, like the those of the countries in the chart, education is important. But some of those countries, like the Scandinavian countries, have reduced the income sacrificed by non-college people relative to the college educated. Other countries, those toward the right side of the graph, favor a more unequal distribution of income. 

I looked at the Gini coefficient for the ten countries in the Planet Money chart. The correlation between the Gini and the economic benefit of college for men was 0.83, which seemed a bit extreme.  So I added another ten OECD countries.

The correlation is 0.44.  Either way, the US is the clear outlier.  In the land of opportunity, if you’re a male, either you pay the considerable price of going to college, or you pay the price for not going to college. 

With this inequality come the kinds of social consequences that Charles Murray elaborates in his latest book about non-educated Whites – disability, divorce, demoralization, death. 

Sore With the Eagles

October 6, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

A 17-year old boy had completed his final project to qualify as an Eagle Scout, but the scoutmaster blocked his application.  Why?  The kid’s gay.  His mother got up a petition and also apparently went to the media.  (The USA Today story is here.)

The statement from the troop’s high commander says that the plucky lad “does not meet Scouting's membership standard on sexual orientation.”

Fair enough.  Me, I dropped out after Cub Scouts, so I wouldn’t know, but it does make me wonder: What activities or projects do the Scouts require for a demonstration or proof of heterosexuality?  And are there merit badges for that sort of thing?

I also refer back to the founder Baden-Powell’s writing that was the basis for the organization - the 1908 book with the delightfully ambiguous title.

Do entendres get any more double?

Communication Craft

October 6, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

I couldn’t understand why Mitt Romney would make a point of telling people he was going to off Big Bird.  What was the political wisdom in promising to get rid of something everyone likes?  But his statement seemed so deliberate, I figure his people must have tested it or at least thought it through, and maybe they have evidence that contradicts common sense.

Here’s another political ad where the strategy seems all wrong.  Don’t the communications experts say that everything should to work together? Consultants coach candidates on how to make the body language consistent with what they’re saying.  In ads, images should amplify the message stated in words. If the candidate is talking about farm policy, show him in front of a field of cows.

Maybe the ad does work.  When I was watching it, I realized, just as the researchers say about cell phones and driving, I couldn’t attend simultaneously to two different things– the written Kerrey-ad video and the Steve Martin home-crafts instructional video.  When I read the writing on the pages, I lost Martin, though if I tried, I could shift my attention quickly from one to the other. 
I wondered if the end of the ad would have a voiceover: “I’m Clair Parlance, Professor of Communications studies, and boy, did I not approve this message.”

(For another example of audio not matching video, take a look at this version of “The Shining” with Seinfeld music and laugh-track)

Yellow Peril

October 4, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

I could have understood it if Romney had gone after Welfare, which is still not a very popular concept, at least in the abstract.  Or if he’d said he was going to get rid of unnecessary Bureaucracy (and maybe Bureaucrats).  And of course I understood his promise to eliminate Obamacare, which a majority oppose, at least in opinion polls..

But Big Bird? 

The much-loved muppet was the second thing Romney mentioned, right after Obamacare, when he went into cut mode during last night’s debate.  Romney must also know that PBS is a minuscule fraction of the budget.  So surely this was not some spontaneous off-the-cuff remark.  It had to be a rehearsed zinger, to be inserted at the earliest opportunity.

Romney also phrased it so that everyone would get a clear picture in their minds – not the abstract PBS, but Big Bird. But why?

Does Big Bird really poll so badly?  Is the large yellow creature this election’s Willie Horton? 

The Romney people must know something about this that I don’t.  But what?

(Almost as soon as Romney had spoken, the pictures of Big Bird – mash-ups or with text added – started showing up all over the Internet.  Check Google Images.)

Political Donations - Check the Name on the Check

October 1, 2012 
Posted by Jay Livingston 
Cross-posted at Sociological Images

Are people’s first names a clue as to which party they support? Chris Wilson at Yahoo  created this nifty interactive graphic from information on contributors of $200 or more. Mouse over a name-circle to see the proportion of Democratic and Republican donors. Or enter a name in the search box. For example, 60% of the 3000 Scotts gave to Republicans.

 

The most obvious difference is that women (or at least people with women’s names) are all to the Democratic side of the of midpoint. Men are mostly Republican, though several fall to the left of the midpoint. Bob is the farthest left – 61-39 Democrat – though Robert breaks Republican (55-45). Jim and James follow the same pattern, with the 57-43 split going from Democrat to Republican as you go from informal to formal. 
Among the women, Ellen is the most partisan Democrat (81-19), Ashley the least (52-48). If you change the view from numbers of people to amounts donated, the whole chart shifts to the right. Republicans pony up more money. Or to put it another way, the political big spenders break Republican (despite what Foxies like Tucker Carlson claim).

 

 



Among the women, Ashley, Heather, Tiffany, and Betty all lean to the right on the money scale. The Democratic Heathers may outnumber their Republican sisters, but the Republican Heathers have more money to donate to politicians. And similarly for just about every name, male or female.

Among the men, the Jonathan is now the most liberal, giving 55% of his money to the Democrats. In fact, Jonathan is the only man to the left of the midpoint. But while Jonathan is a Democrat, John gives 63% to the Republicans. The difference here is probably ethnic/religious. Jonathan (Old Testament, son of Saul) is Jewish. John (the Baptist, New Testament) is Christian. Age may also be a factor.

Younger, thirtysomething names like Heather and Ashley, Tyler and Clayton, lean to the right. So perhaps the youth vote, or at least the youth money, is not as firmly in the Democratic party as we might have thought.

“Beasts of the Southern Wild” and Cultural Relativism

September 28, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

The crucial moment in “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” for me at least, was the sight of Hushpuppy  in a new purple dress.  Hushpuppy, a seven year old girl is the central figure in the film, and up until that point we have seen her, dressed in the same clothes every day, living in The Bathtub, a bayou area south of New Orleans, on the unprotected side of the levee.

Life in The Bathtub is harsh.  The people there (“misfits, drunks and swamp-dwellers,” – WaPo) live in shacks cobbled together from scrap metal and wood.  They fish from boats that are similarly improvised.  They scavenge.  The children’s education comes from the idiosyncratic stories of one woman. 

They are wild people living among wild things, unconstrained by laws or walls, reliant on ancient prophecies and herbal cures, at home with the water that may overwhelm them at any moment. [New York Review]

After a Katrina-like flood, the authorities force the evacuation of The Bathtub.  Hushpuppy and the others are housed in a shelter - a large, brightly-lit room (a high school gym?) – and given new clothes.  This is when we see Hushpuppy in her new purple dress heading out the door, presumably to a real school.

No, no, no, I thought. This is all wrong. This is not her.  She belongs back in The Bathtub, for despite its rough conditions, the people there are a real and caring community.  Her father loves her and prepares her for life there.  The people there all love her and care for her, as they care, as best they can, for one another.

That was the voice of cultural relativism telling me to look at a society on its own terms, with understanding and sympathy.

At the same time, though, the voice of ethnocentrism was whispering in my other ear.  This is America, it said.  These conditions are the things you deplore and want to improve – lack of decent health care, education, clothing, shelter, and basic safety.  (In an early scene, Hushpuppy tries to light her stove with a blowtorch, nearly incinerating her shack and herself.)  It’s wrong that people in America live like this. 

It was not much of a contest.  Cultural relativism won.

In turning the audience into cultural relativists, the movie plays on old themes in American culture.  We’ve always had our suspicions of civilization and refinement, and we’ve had a romantic attachment to the unrefined and rugged.  In “Beasts,” the shelter – sterile, impersonal, and bureaucratic – is contrasted with The Bathtub – rough-hewn, but an authentic community nonetheless. 

Then there is Hushpuppy. I’ve commented before (here, for example) that children in American films are often wiser, more resourceful, and more honest than the adults, especially those who would try to change them.  Add Hushpuppy to the list.* 

In the end, the audience seemed relieved when she and the others make their escape.  We don’t want Huck to be civilized by Aunt Sally.  And we do want Hushpuppy to light out for the territory of The Bathtub. 

-------------------
* I should add that much of the credit for convincing the audience goes to the six-year-old actress who plays Hushpuppy – the unforgettable girl with the unrememberable name – Quvenzhané Wallis. 

A Nation of Entrepreneurs?

September 25, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

To hear the Republicans tell it, the only people in the US worth mentioning are entrepreneurs (and maybe soldiers). Those who get a paycheck rather than a P/L sheet were absent from the speeches in Tampa. The same is true for the Romney and Ryan campaign talk since then. 

We hear the stories of the successes, the people who put in 70-100 hour weeks, risk their savings, and follow their dream. The trouble with that picture is that most business start-ups fail, even though those entrepreneurs too put in the long hours and take financial risks. Very few new businesses survive ten years. That’s capitalism’s famous creative destruction, which is fine as long as you’re not the one being creatively destroyed. (Dean Baker in yesterday’s Guardian has more on the “we built it” myth.)

Still, the image we get is that the US is just teeming with entrepreneurs.  Now I know I shouldn’t go making comparisons with other countries. As Marco Rubio told us in his speech at the GOP convention, other countries should be more like the US, not the other way round.  But I couldn’t resist taking a peek at the statistics on self-employment in the OECD factbook.  

I expected that the US, with lots of people working for themselves, would be way out ahead, followed, at a distance, by some of the stronger European economies. After all, independent entrepreneurship is what builds a great economy. 

(Click on the chart for a larger view.  Or go to the original spreadsheet.)

The green bar shows the 2010 rate.  The diamond shows the rate in 2000.

There must be problems of definition – not all self-employed people are what we think of as entrepreneurs.  Still, the differences are striking.  The US rate is less than half the OECD average.  And most of the countries with high rates of self-employment are the weaker economies.  Even among the wealthy countries, the US trails all but Luxembourg, which also has the highest income.  Independent work seems to be related to national wealth (and perhaps personal wealth), but not in the way I expected.

(HT: Ceterus Paribus (@imparibus) via Xavier Molénat.)

Ignorance and Arrogance

September 24, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Visitors to the US are often dismayed by how little most Americans know about the rest of the world.  As Ambrose Bierce said, “War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.”  We don’t even know all that much about the countries we do make war on.  But why should we?

In his speech to the Republican convention,  Marco Rubio said,

These are ideas that threaten to make America more like the rest of the world instead of making the rest of the world more like America. [NB: threaten]

In Rubio’s view, knowing nothing about other countries is fine because we can just assume that America is best at everything.  Other countries should copy us. 

The defense for our ignorance is our arrogance.   But who benefits from our ignorance of the rest of the world?

When Verizon offered me their land phone-cable-Internet “triple play,”  it seemed like a good deal.  But my basis for comparison was what I was paying before (more), and what Time Warner was offering (roughly the same).

Then I heard David Cay Johnston interviewed on “Fresh Air.” Johnston too must have gone for a package deal. 

We're way behind countries like Lithuania, Ukraine and Moldavia in the speed of our Internet. Per bit of information moved, we pay 38 times what the Japanese pay. If you buy one of these triple-play packages that are heavily advertised, where you get Internet, telephone and cable TV together, typically you'll pay what I pay, about $160 a month, including fees.

Well, the same service in France is $38 a month . . . . And instead of two-country calling, you get worldwide calling to 70 countries. You get an Internet that is 10 times faster . . . downloading and 20 times faster uploading. And you get much broader international television stations than you get here in America.

To the list of countries that are way ahead of us in average speed Johnston could have added Latvia and  the Czech Republic as well as more likely countries like Japan and South Korea. 

Oh, that threat of being like other countries. I wouldn’t mind the threat to reduce my Verizon bill to $28.  But why is my bill so high?  Must be the cost of freedom.  As Rubio explained, the US “chose more freedom instead of more government.”
The threatening ideas Rubio was referring to – those bad ideas used by other countries – are ideas about the role of government.  Much better is the idea of American capitalism: If the government doesn’t interfere, then competition among corporations will bring us more and better stuff at lower prices.  At least that’s what Rubio, the corporations, and their other defenders tell us.

Johnston looks at his triple-play bill and sees the actual government role as something different from that ideal.  The bill is higher, he says, because telecoms use their wealth and power to get legislatures to write friendly laws that force consumers pick up the tab.* Our ignorance – ignorance of those laws and how they are made, and ignorance about other countries – is a big help to the corporations.

When George W. Bush used to insist that America’s health care system was the best in the world, most Americans had no idea what other systems were like or how much they cost.  Besides, how can you define quality in health care, and in any case, it’s hard to imagine yourself going to a French or Swiss doctor. 

But we all know what an Internet connection is, and we get the bill every month.  It’s just that most of us can’t discuss that bill with anyone in Paris or Vilnius. 

Maybe we should follow Rubio’s advice and avoid making that comparison. Ignorance is bliss. It’s also beneficial to Verizon.

---------------
*Johnston has much more about this in the interview and in his new book The Fine Print.

Moral Principles and Political Tension

September 21, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Riffing last week on the Jonathan Haidt’s moral chart, I said (here) that the conservatives’ choice of five moral principles makes it easier for them to justify any idea or action.  Liberals have to get by on just two such principles. 

It hadn’t occurred to me that this moral diversity may also make it harder for conservatives to agree among themselves. We usually think of the Democrats as the weak magnet, unable to keep its iron filings from floating away.  Hence Will Rogers’s famous “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.”

But B.A., who blogs for The Economist,* notes (here) that the different branches of the Democratic party are not really at odds on specific policies.

Obama’s embrace of gay marriage did not require him to cut food stamps. Supporting card check neutrality for unions does not interfere with opposing tort reform. In fact, all of these positions can be collectively thrown together under the rubric of fairness and equality.

In fact, the policies mirror Haidt’s liberal diptych

• Harm / Care
• Fairness / Reciprocity

Things are different on the other side of the aisle.  Republicans seem remarkably similar to one another – the  convention in Tampa looked like a huge gathering Buick drivers – but the ideological voices aren’t always in harmony.  B.A. refers to

the competing blocs within the party – pro-immigration businesses versus nativists, tax-cutting zealots versus defense hawks and retirees who want to keep their entitlements . . .

He could have added the Randian libertarians and the religious conservatives. These seem to comprise all five of Haidt’s moral principles – the liberal two plus

• Ingroup/ Loyalty
• Authority/ Respect
• Purity/ Sanctity

(Haidt has recently added a sixth  – liberty, a card which he deals to both sides of the table, making the count six vs. three.) 

B.A. credits this moral diversity in the GOP for Romney’s refusal to make specific proposals lest he offend one of those blocs.  But these blocs have long been part of the GOP.  Back in the Bush years someone (can’t remember who) referred to them as “The Taliban, the Predators, and the Neo-cons.”  But as long as the party was winning, everyone was happy, and these differences seemed unimportant.  Now that the party teeters on the verge of losing the big prize yet again to a Kenyan socialist, conservatives are looking at one another and wondering whose principles should be put front and center to bring back the glory days.  That goal, “taking our country back,”** may be the main thing they all agree on.  They just can’t agree on which of their principles to push forward.

Mo’ principles, mo’ problems.


* The Economist identifies its bloggers only by initials.  Apparently, in the magazine’s view, these scribblers are not worthy of a full byline.

** An earlier post on this meme is here.

Romney and The Help

September 20, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

The “Romney 47%” recording reminded me of “The Help.”  Apparently, the recording was made by the help – a waiter or bartender or some other hired servant who, either independently or at the behest of a reporter, put the camera or cell phone on the counter and pushed “record.”

I didn’t find “The Help” all that impressive a film (further comments on it are here).  It was too pretty.  Emma Stone was prettier than the real author, and race relations in the film were prettier than Mississippi of the early sixties.  But “The Help” did accurately show one often overlooked aspect of the relation between servants and those who hire them:  servants are so powerless that from the masters’ perspective they become non-persons.   Servants are harmless.  And all they are is servants, at least to the master. 

No man is a hero to his valet.  But masters also forget that the valet may be more than just a valet. So masters relax the usual constraints of self-presentation and information control, and servants acquire a lot of information.

Most of the time, servants use that information only among themselves, largely as protection for the self.  By swapping stories that deflate the self of the masters, they  narrow the self-worth gap between the two statuses. Information is power, but the power of servants’ information usually remains potential. 

Still, every so often, as in “The Help” and in “Romney 47%,”  that power becomes actual.

Quote, er Insult, of the Day

September 18, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

The quote of the day was from a day back in May but just leaked yesterday – Mitt Romney speaking to people who had ponied up $50,000 for dinner.  Speaking about the 47% of Americans who pay no income tax, Romney said that they are people who

believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. . . . . And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.

I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

Random thoughts:

1.  Half of the 47% (closer to 46%, but who’s counting) pay no taxes because their income is so low that standard deductions wipe out any income tax liability.  The other half, who have higher incomes, pay no taxes because of “tax expenditures” – special deductions written into the tax code.  Of those people, most are accounted for by elderly tax benefits, credits for children, or credits for the working poor (Earned Income Tax Credit).

The Tax Policy Center (here) provides this pie chart of the people Romney says do not take personal responsibility or care for their own lives.

(Click on the pie for a larger view.)

2.  Romney’s complaint is that because these people pay no income tax, he can’t win their votes by promising to cut their income taxes.  The problem is not that their taxes are too low but that as far as cutting their taxes goes, someone else got there first. 
    And who were those dastards who ruined it for Romney?  Sneaky liberals like Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon (the EITC, signed by Ford, was an outgrowth of Nixon’s idea for a Negative Income Tax) and the big tax cutters Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. 

3.  Not long ago there was speculation that for several years in the recent past, Romney himself was among the 47%.  Romney has denied this, and although he has the evidence to back up what he says,  he refuses to provide that evidence.  In any case, of people making more than $200,000 last year,  72,000 paid no income tax.  Of those, 18,000 made a half million or more.

4.  Romney is wrong about voting.  Seniors favor Romney by 8-10 points. And about one-third of the lowest income group (the white males mostly) will vote for Romney.  I doubt that Romney’s insulting them will change their minds.

The Atlantic (here) posted this map showing the non-paying tax filers.  The ten states with the highest percent of non-payers are red, the lowest blue.

The low-income voters in those Southern states favor the Democrats.  No wonder Republican-controlled governments in so many of those red states are passing laws to keep poor people from voting.

(Note:  the percentages are low – the highest state, Mississippi, has only 49% not paying any tax – because the figures are based on those who filed tax returns. Millions more poor people did not bother to file.  Including them would raise the percentage of income tax non-payers.)

5.  Is it possible these insults will help Romney?  What if it’s like advertising, and people make their choices on the basis of fantasies of who or where they want to be rather than where they actually are now?  If Romney can convince people that Obama is for losers (working drudges and moochers) and Romney is for winners (independent and successful entrepreneurs), he should pick up the votes of wage-and-salary voters who dream of starting their own businesses. 

6.  At the dinner for his wealthy donors, Romney was confirming their view of Obama voters.  The picture was a largely inaccurate stereotype, but it was what the $50,000 crowd already thought and wanted to hear more of.  As others (Ross Douthat at the Times for example) have pointed out, Obama and the Democrats have done the same thing.

Another Year

September 17, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Bloggiversary.  A year ends, a year begins.  For the blog, this will be year 7 - a far cry from 5773, I know, but six years still seems like a long time.  I’m sure there was much to atone for, but that comes later.  Meanwhile, here are ten posts from the past year that I liked.

1.    Nov. 7 Patriotism Goes to the Movies

2.    Nov. 17 Constructing Character

3.    Dec. 5 Economics and Ethos

4.    Jan. 3 Myths That Move Us (and That Bus)

5.    Jan 17 Civil Rights and American Conservatism

6.    March 16 Accidental Banksters

7.    June 2 Blaming the Media I

8.    June 30 Standing Your Ground in the Wild West

9.    July 10 Bitter Tea

10.    August 9 Charting the Climb

Conservative Morality in Benghazi

September 13, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

The nice thing about having several principles in your moral toolkit is that you have more ways to justify acts that some other people might find unsupportable – things like torture and assassination.

Jonathan Haidt has become famous for saying that liberals have a narrower set of moral principles than do conservatives.  Liberals base moral judgments on just two principles:

• Harm / Care
• Fairness / Reciprocity

Conservatives consider those but also include

•  Ingroup/ Loyalty
•  Authority/ Respect
•  Purity/ Sanctity

With those principles at the forefront, conservatives eagerly cheered their support for the Bush-Cheney policy of torture. (See my earlier posts here and here.)  Those same principles also seem to underlie the attacks at Benghazi and the support for those attacks.  

First reports from Libya assumed that the killers were motivated by anger over a video that made fun of Mohammed the Prophet. Now it appears the attack was not so spontaneous.

Officials said it was possible that an organized group had either been waiting for an opportunity to exploit like the protests over the video or perhaps even generated the protests as a cover for their attack. [NYT]

Whatever their motivations, the assassins apparently knew that the bloodshed would get popular support, support based on conservative morality. The attack epitomized loyalty to the ingroup (Islam). The video was an act of grave disrespect, so avenging it upheld the authority of the faith.  The video was also violation of rules of purity surrounding the sacred elements of Islam. According to principles in the conservative moral toolkit, avenging the American-made video by killing Americans was a very moral act.

Western observers often characterize the angry Muslims as “medieval.” If Libya and other countries were modern, goes this reasoning, these medieval reactions – the fatwas and the assassinations of cartoonists, homosexuals, rape victims, and others – would be confined to a retrograde fringe.  But the social bases of this morality span a slightly broader period than the dark ages. Conservative morality seems to be an aspect of agricultural society – going back 10-15,000 years. In the hundreds of thousands of years before then, hunter-gatherers placed less emphasis purity, authority, and loyalty. These conservative principles also have a diminished role in “modern,” i.e., industrial, societies of the last 300 years. 

But the overlap of economy and morality is far from perfect.  Even in a thoroughly industrial or even post-industrial society, segments of the population may support torture or the blanket exclusion of outsiders (currently Muslims). As Haidt’s studies – done mostly in the US – show, medieval morality can hang on long after the economic basis of society has changed. 

Loopholes

September 12, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Romney has promised broad tax cuts and a reduction in the deficit.  But the only way you can reduce tax rates for everyone and maintain the same amount of tax coming in is to close tax “loopholes.”  Which is what Romney said he would do.  The only trouble is that when it comes to which loopholes, he’s keeping that a secret.  (When it comes to specifics about taxes, Romney apparently has a don’t-tell policy.)

If Romney wanted to identify a few loopholes, he’d have a very wide choice.  The tax code is huge and complicated, and it is full of tax breaks. The Washington Post recently posted this interactive graphic that allows you to mouse through the mountain of tax expenditures* and see when each was created, how much it costs the government, and whether the money benefits mostly to individuals or to companies. 

Here’s a screen shot.

(Click on the image for a larger, clearer view.  Better yet, go to the WaPo Website.)

----------------
* Some people have a hard time understanding the idea of “tax expenditure” especially at the individual level.  But from the perspective of the bottom line, it should be clear that forgoing money by not collecting a billion dollars in taxes has the same effect on the deficit as spending a billion dollars.

Reducing Poverty

September 11, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

The poverty rate in the US in the mid-2000s was about 17%.  In Sweden, the poverty rates was 5.3%; in Germany, 11%.   That was the rate after adding in government transfers.  In Germany, the poverty rate before those transfers was 33.6%, ten points higher than that in the US.  Sweden’s pre-transfer poverty rate was about the same as ours.

Jared Bernstein has this chart showing pre-transfer and post-transfer rates for the OECD countries.

(Click on the chart for a larger view.  Or see it at Jared Bernstein's blog.)

Three  points:

1.  Governments have the power to reduce poverty, and reduce it a lot.  European governments do far more towards this goal than does the US government.

2.  It’s unlikely that America’s poor people are twice as lazy or unskilled or dissolute as their European counterparts.  Individual factors may explain differences between individuals, but these explanations have little relevance for the problem of overall poverty.  The focus on individual qualities also has little use as a basis for policy.  European countries have fewer people living in poverty, but not because those countries exhort the poor to lead more virtuous lives and punish them for their improvident ways.  European countries have lower poverty rates because the governments provide money and services to those who need them. 

3.  The amount of welfare governments provide does not appear to have a dampening effect on the overall economy.

Names and Character

September 8, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Tough uses the word “grit” a lot.

In today’s Times (here), Joe Nocera writes about a book, How Children Succeed, by Paul Tough.  Mr. Tough recommends that schools teach not just reading and math but “character” – traits like “resilience, integrity, resourcefulness, professionalism, and ambition.”

In the past few years, some psychologists have published peer-reviewed papers supposedly showing a relation between names and life choices or behavior. Dennis becomes dentist, George becomes a geologist and moves to Georgia.  It sounds silly, and it is. The research doesn’t hold up.  Andrew Gelman (here) has written about it. So have I (here).

But even when you know the systematic evidence, the anecdotal data jumps out at you. Like Mr. Tough and grit. 

Having endured “I presume” my entire life, I sympathize with Mr. Tough for the “jokes” he must have tired of long ago.  I just hope that the research on grit and schools is better than the research on names and personal choices.

What Is This Thing Called, Love?

September 6, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Talk about sex often is often oblique and ambiguous.  In the early days of computerized content analysis, I knew some researchers who were trying to code ethnographic folk tales for sexual content.  The trouble was that pre-literate storytellers as well often preferred the vague to the explicit, much to the frustration of the researchers.  How can you  write a program that can distinguish between the nonsexual and sexual meanings of words like “it” or “thing”* (“And then he took out his thing and did it to her”)?

I was reminded of this when I read Philip Cohen’s post and N-gram graph about “make love” and “have sex.”

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

“Sex” takes off starting around 1970, “love” rises more slowly and after 1990 declines, while “sex” continues to climb. 

I don’t think Philip meant to imply that there’s has been a trend towards less love and more sex.  My guess is that what we’re looking at is the decline of “love” as a euphemism for “sex.”  Prior to 1950 or so, “make love” was an innocent or slightly naughty term without much connotation of explicit sex.  The added sexual meaning that grew in later decades made the term ambiguous.  In 1960, with Hollywood self-censorship still strong, the film title “Let’s Make Love” with Marilyn Monroe raised no eyebrows. 

 By 1974, when Roberta Flack sang, “Feel Like Making Love to You,” things were less clear.

When you talk to me
When you're moanin’ sweet and low
When you're touchin’ me
And my feelings start to show
Oo-oo-ooh
That's the time
I feel like makin’ love to you.

 The pre-1970 “make love” line of the graph is carrying both meanings,  the sexual and the romantic.  But with the sexual revolution in full swing, some of the purely sexual references shift from the “make love” curve to the “have sex” curve.

That doesn’t mean that “have sex” became the preferred term.  Even for sexual references, “make love” may still be more popular.  For some reason, that sexual meaning is clearer when the phrase is in the past tense.  “Let’s make love,” is ambiguous.  “We made love” is more explicit.  And when you compare “We made love” with “We had sex,” the winner is still love.

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

*The title of this post is an old Benny Hill line (based on Cole Porter of course).  It was probably luv rather than love, but in any case, the word thing here is another example of ambiguous language when we talk – or don’t talk –  about sex.