Bye-Bye Love

February 15, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

Arthur Brooks, in a Valentine’s Day op-ed in the Washington Post, brings us the sad news that the flame of romantic love is sputtering. “Particularly among young people, there is an increasing absence of romantic love.”

Really? To convince us, Brooks offers three bits of evidence.

1. While 69% of pet owners planned to give their pets a gift, only 61% of pet owners planned to give a gift to a spouse.

I’d put this in the “I am not making this up” category. Brooks really does offer it as evidence. The numbers are from VetIQ, a pet health company not widely known as a source of national survey data. Maybe he threw it in just to lighten the mood. Whatever. Brooks offers no information on planned Valentine gift-giving among the petless.

2. Surveys of kids show that the custom of dating is on the wane. Or as Brooks’s son, a college junior, says, “Nobody dates.”

3.  The General Social Survey. Now we’re getting serious.

from 1989 to 2016, the percentage of married people in their 20s fell from 32 percent to 19 percent. And lest you think they are forgoing marriage but not sex, note that the percentage of 20-somethings who had no sex in the past year rose by half over the same period, from 12 percent to 18 percent.

The decline in marriage and the increasing age for getting married may have just a wee bit to do with factors other than romantic feelings — things like the economy, the labor market, and the cost of having children. As for not having sex, if more 20-somethings are unmarried, more of them will be without sex partners. In any age category, the marrieds have more sex than do the unmarrieds.

So if we accept Brooks’s idea that no-sex is a good indicator of the lack of romantic love, we should look at just the unmarried. Here is the GSS data on 20-somethings.

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

If you look only at the first and last years (the GSS did not ask this question before 1989), you see what Brooks pointed out.  No-sex  goes from 17% to 23%. But there’s no clear overall upward trend (the dotted trend-line in fact goes downward). Yes, the 2016 numbers were high. But that may be a statistical anomaly like the unusually low rates in 2012. It would help if we had 2018 data, but we don’t, not yet.

But let’s pretend that romantic love, as measured by no-sex, really is decreasing. The question is why?

“Kids, I don’t know what’s wrong with these kids today.”

The father in “Bye-Bye Birdie” (1960) may not have known what’s wrong with these kids, but Arthur Brooks does. “The greatest culprit for the United States’ increasingly romanceless culture is fear.” Ya got trouble, my friends, right here in River City, with a capital F, and that stands for fear.

And how do kids come by this fear? From protective parents (known not long ago as “helicopter” parents.)

Children are discouraged from venturing alone out of the house by their parents, who also adjudicate their disputes with other children. The protection culture often deepens in college, with the proliferation of “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” to allow avoidance of hurtful ideas. As a result, many young adults enter their 20s with little experience in conflict and rejection — with the social equivalent of a peanut allergy. It is no surprise that love and dating would seem scary and foreign to so many.

If Brooks is right, we would expect to find that Americans brought up in less protective times and places are more daringly romantic. In addition, the upward trend towards less sex should be stronger among the children of protective, college-educated parents (Annette Lareau’s “concerned cultivators”) than among those whose less protective parents never got a college degree.

For the period 1996 - 2008, we see the difference Brooks would predict. The children of (presumably) protective parents are more likely to have been without a sexual encounter in the previous year. If Brooks is right about coddled kids, and assuming that protective parenting was still on the rise among educated parents in the 1990s, that difference should have grown even wider in the current decade. But it didn’t. Instead, it disappeared.

Protective parenting is relatively new, says Brooks, so we should also see a generational difference — a stronger trend towards no-sex among younger people.

(For both age groups, I excluded those who were married. For the older group 

I included the divorced and separated along with the never married.)

The older group, the ones raised before helicopter parenting, are more likely to have gone without sex. That’s the opposite of what Brooks would expect. Of course, it may have more to do with life circumstances and the ease of finding partners than with how protective their parents were. In any case, the trends in the two lines are not vastly different. 

Maybe Arthur Brooks is right, and America’s youth are the vanguard leading in the wrong (in his view) direction, away from romantic love. At least for the moment, I don’t find the evidence convincing. As listeners to the Annex Sociology Podcast might know, I tend to be skeptical about claims of social decline, especially those centered on young people. The two myths that I spoke about with host Joe Cohen on that podcast (here and here) are the decline of authoritarianism and the loss community. To this, we now add the fading rose of romantic love.

Billionaire? Moi?

February 4, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof had no problems with the word rich. He did not sing, “If I were a person of wealth, Ya da deedle deedle. . .” He laid it on the line.

Howard Schultz is more squeamish, especially about people saying how much money he actually has — i.e., at least a billion dollars.

The moniker “billionaire” now has become the catchphrase. I would rephrase that and say that “people of means” have been able to leverage their wealth and their interest in ways that are unfair, and I think that speaks to the inequality but it also speaks to the special interests that are paid for people of wealth and corporations who are looking for influence. [from an interview yesterday with Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times, emphasis added]

“People of means” sounds dated to my ear, especially for a guy running for president in 2020. Ditto “person of wealth.” So I went to Google nGrams to see how the frequencies of these terms had changed over the years, at least in published books. I threw in another term that could also be used to indicate someone with large amounts of money.

Schultz’s preferred terms are indeed a throwback. They were at their peak back when Sophie Tucker said, “I’ve been rich, and I’ve been poor, and believe me, rich is better.” Or as Mr. Schultz might say, “I’ve been rich and I’ve been a person of wealth, and believe me, being a person of wealth is better. Rich makes me sound so greedy.”

These were also the years when you could still get a cup of coffee for a dime. Since then the popularity of “person of means” and “person of wealth” has been on the skids. As for the cost of that cup of coffee, maybe you should ask Mr. Schultz.

Today’s Big Match-Up

February 3, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

It’s Superbowl Sunday, and this year we’re about to see a contest between two rivals that have met several times previously on this blog. No, not the Rams and the Patriots, not exactly. It’s The Wisdom of Crowds versus The Smart Money.

The theory of the wisdom of crowds says that the average guess of all the interested participants is better than the guesses of the experts. The full title of James Surowiecki’s 2004 book on the topic is The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. He begins with the famous anecdote of Galton at the fair. Here’s a summary from an earlier blog post on the topic.

Plymouth, England, 1906. On display is an ox, slaughtered and dressed. How much does it weigh? Fairgoers submitted their guesses. A statistician, Francis Galton, happened to be there and recorded the data. Galton was also a eugenicist, so he was certain that the guesses of the masses would be less accurate than those of the experts. But it turned out that the crowd, as a group, was far more accurate. The average of all the guesses (n=787) was within one pound of the actual weight (1,198 lbs). No individual guess came that close.

Surowiecki doesn’t say much about sports betting, unless you consider ox-weight estimation to be a sport. But my immediate reaction was that if Surowiecki is right, then bookmakers should be an endangered species, constantly paying out on many bets and collecting few. Not a good business model.

Sports books are experts. They set a line that they think will bring in an equal amount on both sides.* They often assume that the public will share their views on the abilities of the teams, and often they are right. But sometimes, the public thinks that the bookmakers are wrong and bet so much on one team that the books have to adjust the point spread to bring in more action on the other side.

This year, bookmakers judged the Rams and Patriots as evenly matched. The opening line on the Superbowl was pick-’em. Neither team was favored. (A small number of books had the Rams as a 1-point favorite, a few others had the Patriots by one.) The crowd roared in on the Patriots, and the books quickly raised the line to New England minus 2½. Bet the Rams, and you start the game ahead by that many points. Or bet them without points and get $120 for a $100.

Even that couldn’t attract enough money on LA.  Bookies are holding three times as much money on the Pats as on the Rams. On Thursday, a high roller bet $2 million on the Rams at the MGM, and that still didn’t offset the New England money. If the Rams win and MGM has to pay out that $2M, it will still finish well in the black from all the losing bets from Patriots backers.

It’s not just the oddsmakers who think the crowd is wrong. The “sharps,” professional gamblers who make a living from sports betting,** are also hitting the Rams — just not in large enough amounts to balance the millions of dollars coming in on the Pats.

I am posting this four hours before kickoff, and perhaps the crowd will move in with lots of money on the Rams, but I doubt it. If things stay as they are, today’s game is a good example of The Wisdom of Crowds vs. The Smart Money. (Of course, it is only  a single data point and by itself will prove nothing.)
 
UPDATE: The crowd was wise. The Patriots won 13 - 3. The crowd was also wise on the over/under which started at about 58, but the crowd, betting heavily on the under, brought it down a couple of points.




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* Most point-spread bets are 11-10 — the bettor wagers $110 to win $100. If the action is evenly divided, the book makes money no matter who wins, paying out $100 to each winner and collecting $110 from each loser.

** The guy who made the $2M bet is not considered a sharp, even though he won a very large bet last year when he took the Eagles over the Patriots in last year’s Superbowl.

The First Derivative of the Wisdom of Crowds

February 2, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

If this is Superbowl weekend, then the Socioblog’s fancy must be turning to thoughts of the wisdom of crowds vs. the smart money.  It’s a question I have returned to several times since the first year this blog was on the field. (See. for example, this post about the 2010 Superbowl.)

The “wisdom of crowds” is like the Ask-the-Audience option in “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” The “smart money” is like Phone-a-Friend — a friend who knows a lot about the subject.

The trouble with the wisdom of crowds is that sometimes the crowd is wrong, as it was in the 2007 NFC championship game between the Bears and the Saints that I blogged about at the time (here.)

Now, a trio of academics — John McCoy (marketing), Dražen Prelec (management), and  H. Sebastian Seung (neuroscience) — has a variation that allows you to derive the right answer from the crowd even when the crowd is wrong. You might call it the first derivative of crowd wisdom.

Is Philadelphia the capital of Pennsylvania? 

Suppose you don’t know, and you ask the crowd.

The correct answer is no. The capital is Harrisburg. But many people think it is, because Philadelphia is a large, populous city. Most people know about Philadelphia. When you ask that question to a crowd of people, as we did with MIT students, only about a third of the crowd gets the correct answer.*

Yes is the popular answer. The crowd, by two-to-one, says Yes, Philadelphia is the capital. The crowd is wrong. The capital of Pennsylvania is Harrisburg. So much for the wisdom of crowds.

Wait, not so fast, say McCoy and his colleagues. Let’s also ask another question: “What percent of people do you think will answer No to this question?” The average estimate is 23%. But in fact, 33% answer No. This makes No a “surprisingly popular” answer, surprising in that more people than expected say No. It’s as though you are taking the first derivative of crowd wisdom rather than the wisdom function itself.

If you went with the popular answer, you’d say Yes and be wrong. But if you go with the derivative — the “surprisingly popular” answer —  you’ll get it right.

McCoy sees applications of this to all kinds of forecasts — the market for some product, the price of gold, voting, He doesn’t mention the Superbowl. Right now, about 25% of bettors think that the Rams will win or that they will lose by 2 points or less. But suppose we asked all bettors, “What fraction of people do you think are betting the Rams?” If they guessed that only 10% of them are backing the Rams, then the Rams would be the “surprisingly popular” choice, and you would be a fool not to put down a grand to win $1250. Alas, I know of no such surveys. Besides, I don’t trust Belichick.

Two other thoughts:
First, McCoy’s makes the concept harder to understand by choosing an example where No is right. “Is No the correct answer?” “Yes, No is right.”

Second, I was stunned that two-thirds of MIT students did not know the capital of fifth most populous state in the country. Look, people, we’re not asking about Pierre or Carson City. This is not rocket science. And now I get the feeling that at MIT a question about rocket science might have gotten a higher proportion of correct answers.

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*From an interview with McCoy on a Wharton School podcast. An article by Prelec, Seung, and McCoy in Nature is here behind a paywall.

Michel Legrand — 1932 - 2019

January 28, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

As a callow youth, I dismissed Michel Legrand as a guy who wrote pretty tunes and scores. In fact, he did write 200 or more scores for movies and TV. Then I heard Legrand Jazz (1958) with his arrangements for three different groups — 1. a big band, 2. a group centered on Ben Webster and four trombones, and 3. the core of Miles Davis’s 1958 sextet (Miles, Coltrane, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers), Phil Woods instead of Cannonball, plus a few other instruments including flute and harp.

The tunes were  eleven jazz classics, from Dixieland (Louis Armstrong’s “Wild Man Blues” ) through swing (Benny Goodman, “Stompin’ at the Savoy”) to bebop (Dizzy’s “Night in Tunisia”). The arrangements were “far out” for the time, and even 60 years later, they hold up well.

Legrand later described the recording session with the Miles.

Everyone said to me: “Miles will come to the meeting and stand near the door, keeping his trumpet in his closed case. He will listen for five minutes, and if he likes music, he will sit down, open his case, and play. If he does not like, he will leave and he will never again contact you.” I was so afraid that I had flare-ups of sweat! I started rehearsing with the orchestra. The door opened, and Miles listened by the door for five minutes. Then he sat down, opened his case and began to play. After the first catch, he asked me, “Michel, is my game [playing] suitable?” That is how it all began.

Here is that group playing Fats Waller’s “Jitterbug Waltz.”

The record went out of print and out of sight. I rarely met anyone, jazzers included, who knew of it. It was something of a collector’s item. Somewhere along the line, I lost my copy and wound up paying the equivalent today of about $75 for a used copy. Eventually, the album was re-issued as a CD, and now you can stream it anytime, anywhere.

Confidence Games

January 19, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

Timing is crucial in comedy. In can be important in survey research as well. If you ask about satisfaction with government, and you take your survey at a historical moment when the Republican party controls the government, don’t be surprised if Republicans are more satisfied than Democrats. But also don’t write up your findings to imply that this means that Republicans have a deep and abiding faith in American institutions.

We’ve been here before, not with “satisfaction,” but with something similar — happiness. People who make claims about the relation between happiness and political views — people like Arthur Brooks, for example — often don’t bother to look at which party was holding sway at the time the survey they’re using was done. But that context matters a lot, especially now that the country has become so partisan and polarized, with people remaining loyal to their party the way sports fans are loyal to their team. In a post two years ago inspired by a Brooks column, I put it this way

When you’re talking about the relation between political views and happiness, you ought to consider who is in power. Otherwise, it’s like asking whether Yankee fans are happier than RedSox fans without checking the AL East standings. [the full post is here.]

I had a similar reaction to a recent thread on Twitter about who has lost confidence in American institutions. The answer is: everybody. But some more than others.  Patrick Egan of NYU looked at the “confidence” items in the General Social Survey and created these graphs showing the average confidence in twelve different institutions.

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

Confidence has dropped among all categories. But the steepest decline has come among non-college Whites. Their overall level of confidence is the lowest of any of these groups. They are also the strongest supporters of Donald Trump. This reinforces the image of the core Republican constituency — Trump’s staunchest supporters — as dissatisfied, even resentful. They have lost confidence in traditional American institutions, and they acclaim the strong outsider who could bring sweeping changes.

In response, Joshua Tucker posted a link to a report he was co-author on — the American Institutional Confidence Poll (AICP) from the Baker Center for Leadership & Governance at Georgetown University. The AICP found that demographic characteristics didn’t make much difference. Politics did. Here is AICP’s Number One Key Finding:

Why the discrepancy between the GSS data the AICP conclusions? I wondered if it might be the sample. It wasn’t.

The interviews were conducted online from June 12 to July 19, 2018, by the survey firm YouGov. The sample includes 3,000 respondents from the U.S. general population. Additionally, the poll includes samples of 800 African-Americans, 800 Latinx Americans, and 800 Asian Americans.

Their sample, as they note elsewhere, is larger than that of most political surveys, plus the  oversampling of smaller populations they want to have good data about. No problem there.

But what about the timing? We know that on November 1, 2016, Democrats were much more likely than were Republicans to say that the economy looked good. Two weeks later, those positions were reversed. The economy did not change in those two weeks. The occupancy of the White House did.

The AICP survey was done last summer, months before the midterm elections, when the GOP controlled the White House, the Senate, the House, and the Supreme Court. That seems like kind of an important fact, but to find it, you have to scroll down to the methodology notes at the end of the report. 

Even in the GSS graphs, Egan has drawn a trend line that smooths out these shifts that are possibly caused by electoral changes. Egan also has lumped together twelve institutions. Separating them in to categories (e.g,. government, non-government) might allow us to see even sharper demographic differences.

The AICP, on the other hand, does report about confidence in specific institutions, twenty in all. The authors conclude that “confidence in institutions is largely driven by party affiliation.” They neglect the corollary: who has confidence in which institution can shift quickly when an election changes the party in power. This volatility makes it a bit misleading to talk about confidence in “institutions” as though people were thinking about them in the abstract. For example, the authors say, “The executive branch is the institution in which Democrats have the least confidence, while Republicans rank it the fourth highest.” Surely this difference is not about what people think of “the executive branch.” It’s about Donald Trump. These days, isn’t everything?

“Cold War” — A Love Story

January 15, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

Like “Ida,” his 2013 film, Pawel Pawlikovsky’s new film “Cold War” is visually stunning. Like “Ida,” it is shot in black and white, often with high contrast, and in the old 4:3 aspect ratio. And like “Ida,” it departs from movie conventions we’ve come to take for granted. (My post on “Ida” is here.) The storytelling is elliptical. It skips over long periods of time, and the characters rarely explain their choices. The audience must fill in the gaps.

“Cold War” is set in Europe — mostly between Communist Poland and Paris, mostly  in the 1950s. That’s half the implication of the title.  It’s a love story, but not the kind we’re used to. That’s the other half. In “Cold War,” love is a powerful force of attraction between the couple, Wiktor and Zula. But while it brings them together, it brings them little joy. The main publicity picture for the film (the freeze frame below) shows a moment of happiness and tenderness between them. But in the film, such moments are rare.

The film spans fifteen years. For much of that time, the lovers are apart, in different countries having joyless, passionless affairs and marriages with other people. Yet when Wiktor and Zula are together, their relationship is marked by conflict, anger, and betrayal. They separate, sometimes for years, but they cannot escape the force that makes each reunion passionate and painful. That force could be called love, but it’s far different from the love played out in most American films.

In our movies, love makes sense. It brings together two people who should be together. It infuses their relationship with passion, warmth, contentment. Conflicts may arise, but love can overcome them. Usually those conflicts are internal — the person’s own thoughts or problems that prevent him or her or both from realizing their love for the other person. Or the problem may be external — another man or woman trying win one of them away. Usually this person is flawed, acting on some selfish motive, The main character eventually sees through it all and frees himself or herself from whatever hold this person has on them and returns to the one who was right for them all along. If the movie is drama and not comedy, the lovers might not wind up together in the end. One or both may die. They may go their separate ways. But they’ll always have Paris.

In “Cold War,” Wiktor and Zula have Paris, where the freedom of the West allows them to develop their music (he’s a pianist, she a singer). The folk tunes that in Poland they had to transform into large choral numbers and then hymns to Stalin in Paris become sultry, smoky jazz songs, notably the one in the trailer.

You can imagine how this would play out in an American film. With artistic freedom, the lovers blend their Polish traditional culture with jazz, find success, and live happily ever after. In “Cold War,” the transition from Poland to France brings little comfort. The translation of that song from Polish to French falls flat. (I assume the symbolism is deliberate.) The words are meaningless. “The pendulum killed time.” Worse, the translator is a woman Wiktor is sleeping with. Nor is Zula exactly faithful. (“Michel is great,” she tells Wiktor, “he fucked me six times in one night.”)*

Love in “Cold War” also has a decidedly unAmerican relation to the larger forces of government and society. In our films, these forces may keep the lovers apart for a while, but either the lovers fight against these constraints and win, or they escape. Even if they die, their spirit is undaunted. In “Cold War,” both Wiktor and Zula, in different ways, compromise themselves, or rather the state, personified by Communist bureaucrat Kaczmarek, forces compromise upon them. The solutions that are almost a cliche in movies set in the West are unimaginable in a totalitarian state, not even in the movies.

Bleak, yes, but well worth seeing. The film does not yet have wide distribution. It may not be coming soon to a theater near you. Currently it’s playing in only six theaters, three of them in New York. But if you have the chance, see it while you can.

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* The only other clip from the film that I could find on the Internet also gives the same sense of their relationship in Paris. Wiktor and Zula sit at the bar in a club. Wiktor talks to a man seated next to him, Zula looks bored. “Rock Around the Clock” comes up on the jukebox. Zula gets up and dances with one man after another and finally gets up on the bar, dancing solo, flouncing her skirt, while Wiktor looks on with what seems to be a combination of resignation and distaste. The video is here.

Mrs. Maisel — Expletives Then and Now

January 13, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

When I watch “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” the words that usually catch my attention are the anachornisms (see earlier posts here and here).  On Episode 7, which I watched last night, handsy, skill set, poster boy, and a few others sounded jarringly modern. But I also noticed a word that people in 1959 really would have used – goddam. The word stood out because on the show, it’s so rare.

The writers on “Mrs. Maisel” far prefer the word fucking. In fact, in the above scene, Susie’s brother-in-law has just said, “Give me the fucking chips.” The episode has just one other goddamn, but characters say fucking a total of sixteen times. That’s not unusual. Here are the totals for series.

In 1959, when educated, middle-class people wanted an expletive, fucking was not their go-to negative intensifier — especially among women and especially in mixed company. Think of Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, stories set and written in the mid-1950s. (The Glass family lives just across Central Park from the Weissman apartment we see so much of in TMMM.) I found an extensive collection of excerpts from the Salinger stories (here ) – thirty goddamns and not a single fuck. Google nGrams searches all books and finds something similar.

In 1959, goddamn and variants appear ten times as often fucking. (The fucking boom that begins in 1965 continues. The lines cross in 1970, and by 1990 fucking is three times as frequent as goddamn. 

(The above graph goes only through 1990. In 2019 fuck was more than ten times as frequent. In a graph from 1920 to 2019, the dominance of fuck would be so great as to make the differences in earlier years practically invisible.)

Apparently, goddamn, like damn and hell, is an intensifier that has lost its intensity. Two years ago, I speculated (here) that these words derive their power from the power of the religion they blaspheme. As religion fades as a dominant force in American life, so do religion-based swear words. As I say, I am just guessing. What the heck to I know about it?