Montclair SocioBlog

Miracle Cures and Doing the Math

August 25, 2020
Posted by Jay Livingston

When Jill Lepore, in an article on police, misreported a percentage from a research study, I said (here), “If a number just doesn’t sound right — it’s way too big or way too small — you’d better double-check.”

On Sunday, FDA commissioner Dr. Stephen M. Hahn cited a Mayo Clinic study showing that blood-plasma treatment for Covid-19 yielded a 35% reduction in mortality. Here’s how Dr. Hahn explained it.

So let me just put this in perspective. Many of you know I was a cancer doctor before I became FDA commissioner, and a thirty-five percent improvement in survival is a pretty substantial clinical benefit. What that means is . . . 100 people who are sick with Covid-19, thirty-five would have been saved by the administration of plasma.

Not just pretty substantial, very substantial. So substantial that maybe we should double-check. When we do, this is what we find:

The Mayo Clinic study measured 7-day mortality rates.

Of patients who did not receive plasma, 11.9% died

Of patients who did receive plasma, 8.7% died

If you lower something from 11.9 to 8.7, that’s a 35% reduction (11.9 - 8.7 = 3.2. and 3.2 is about 35% of the original rate). Dr. Hahn mistook the reduction in the percent of mortality for a reduction in number of patients who died. For 100 Covid patients, the number of lives saved by plasma would be closer to 3, not 35.

Hahn made his statement at a press conference Sunday night. Trump and HHS secretary Alex Azar were also there and emphasized the 35% figure (see this Bloomberg story). But other scientists who heard about the claim quickly pointed out the error. Within twenty-four hours, Hahn admitted his error, saying in a Tweet, “I have been criticized for remarks I made Sunday night about the benefits of convalescent plasma. The criticism is entirely justified.”

I wonder if President Trump and Secretary Azar will offer similar corrections. No I don’t. Trump keeps promising Covid miracles, so he will continue to tout plasma as a miracle cure along with his other pet miracle cure hydroxy chloroquine and whatever other miracle cures come along until Covid 19 disappears. Like a miracle.

Hold the Moral Judgments About Transactional Sex — This Is a French Movie

August 24, 2020
Posted by Jay Livingston
“Une Fille Facile” (it can be translated as “An Easy Girl” or “A Simple Girl”) opened on Netflix recently. A glamorous and self-assured 22-year old girl from the big city comes to visit her younger cousin who has just turned sixteen. Through the younger girl’s eyes, we see the cousin blatantly using her sexuality (she has already had breast implants). She uses sex to tease boys her own age, and with men twice her age to gain access to their world of wealth. A yacht, wealthy art collectors, Italian villas, expensive jewelry, sex. The younger girl rejects her high school friends and tags along, fascinated at this new world that her cousin has brought her to.

We know how this will end, or at least we know how it would end if it were an American movie. By summer’s end, the glamour will show its tarnish, Naïma, the younger girl will come to see her cousin Sofia’s life as empty, unfulfilling. The movie may inflict some punishment on Sofia. It might have her attempt suicide, or she might suffer ill treatment at the hands of the wealthy. Naïma will return to her simpler life and be grateful for it. (Surely there must be American movies that follow this template. I just can’t think of any.)

But this is a French film, and the film’s morality is not so simple, not so easy.

The trailer outlines the plot and sketches the settings.

On the last day of school, the day she turns sixteen, Naïma comes home to her modest apartment in Cannes to find her cousin Sofia just arrived from Paris.Sofia is six years older than Naïma, but much more worldly. Also more sexual. And she uses her sexuality.

Early in the film, in a club, Naïma and her high school friend Dodo watch as Sofia picks up a wealthy art dealer (Andrès) and his advisor (Philippe). Andrès invites them all back to his yacht. Dodo and Sofia get into a small argument, and Dodo turns to leave the yacht. “Come on, let’s go,” he says to Naïma. She looks torn, but decides to stay. That is the turning point. She leaves her simple world and, with the film taking her point of view, she follows Sofia into the world of the Riviera wealthy.

Sofia is not interested in love, she tells Naïma, only sensation and adventure. She has a tattoo on her lower back — “Carpe Diem” written in fancy script. That first evening on the yacht, she has sex with Andrès (Naïma — the movie is from her POV — opens a door for a moment and sees them. Sofia coolly returns her gaze, seemingly indifferent to what Andrès is doing.) The next day, she takes Naïma to a jewelry stylish boutique and tells Naïma to select something. There’s a watch that costs 1500€. “Is that the most expensive?” Sofia asks the boutique owner. “No, we have this one at 3500€.” It’s too small, says Naïma. “That doesn’t matter,” says Sofia, “take the most expensive.” She tells the boutique owner to charge it to Andrès’s account.

What’s notable, and perhaps notably French, about the film is its refusal to condemn Sofia. Despite her calculated use of sex and her materialism, she has integrity. She is self-aware, and she is smart. The wealthy who try to put her down wind up looking foolish or worse. They are condescending to Sofia, indifferent or cruel to the workers who serve them, and dishonest. When Andrès wants to get rid of the girls, he falsely accuses them of stealing a valuable antique sextant which he himself has hidden.

Their adventure ends. Summer ends. Sofia goes back to Paris. Naïma will go back to her normal life, her friends, her internship in the kitchen of a fancy hotel. She will keep a fond memory of Sofia, with no regrets, just as she will keep the Chanel handbag Sofia has given her and the Carpe Diem tramp stamp that she has gotten for herself.

It’s hard to imagine an American version of this film. A girl who trades on her sexuality purely for her own amusement might be the object of our fascination, just as Sofia is for Naïma and for the audience. But the American version would take a more critical view of such a Jezebel.

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* The actress who plays Sofia, Zahia Dehar, was in fact a prostitute, starting at age 16, mostly for the wealthy (they could afford her €1,000 - €2,000 fees). There was a scandal when it was revealed that several soccer players had paid for her services when she was under 18, the minimum age for legal prostitution in France. She has leveraged this notoriety into a line of lingerie, a career in modeling, and now film.

And jazz fans, in case you were wondering, Coltrane’s classic recording of his composition “Naïma” does make a brief appearance.

Smart Names — Test Scores and Social Class

August 19, 2020
Posted by Jay Livingston

“You’re still crushing it on the bac,” I told my friend Adele [not her real name].

“What?”

“Well, not you, but your namesakes over in France.”

The bac is a national test taken by all high school seniors,. Each year, sociologist Baptiste Coulmont, publishes a graph showing the percentage of très bien for each name. (The other categories are assez bien, bien, and not passing.) Here are the results for 2020.

(Click for a larger view. Or view the graph on Coulmont’s site.)

Of the 550 or so girls named Adele, about 33% got très bien.* Only the Josephines did better. Every year, Adèle is in the top 10. In five of the last nine years, she’s been #1 or #2. My friend Adele (who lives in New York state, not France) told me I’d mentioned this to her before, “my name coming up over and over in France — it seems really odd though.”

But it’s not odd that the Adèles are always on the high end of the x-axis and the Kevins always at the other end. That's the basic idea of sociology — that society is a thing in itself with qualities and properties that are different from those of the individuals who make up that society. The individuals who take the bac are completely different from one year to the next — none of the 2019 Adèles and Kevins took the bac in 2020 — but the rates are a property of the society, and unless the society changes, we can expect the rates to remain fairly consistent.

To see this consistency, go to this page that Coulmont has created, enter a name into your browser’s search box, and click on the years going back from 2019 to 2012.

“But why,” asked my friend, “would having a certain name make you do well on an exam?”

Of course it’s not the name that causes kids to do better. It's who gives their kids which name. In France, Anglo boys names are popular among less well-off, less educated, and maybe less smart parents, who watch soap operas imported from the US or other anglophone countries. The French elite do not watch the soaps or at least are not so taken with the names of the characters. Instead they prefer names like Eleonore and Garance. Those names are fairly rare, but the few girls with these names do well on the bac. Other elite names have frequencies too low to make the chart (<200): Guillemette, Quitterie, Domitille — very upscale and with a high percent of très bien.

My friend, though not a sociologist, is very smart, and I wondered why she didn’t immediately see that it was all about social class. The link between social class and test performance is well-known. But what about the connection between social class and tastes in names? It’s possible that names in the US do not divide along class lines as rigidly as in France, but the distinctions still exist.

“Suppose you looked at a professor’s class list on the first day and had to guess which students would do well. What would you predict for Tiffany, Brandi, or Taylor? How about Sarah, Claire, and Margot?”

“I get your point,” said Adele.

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(Earlier posts on Coulmont’s bac data are here (Jacques and Diane) and here (Jordan, Ryan, . . Back of the Bac)

Whose Stutter Is This Anyway?

August 11, 2020
Posted by Jay Livingston

A few years ago the American Sociological Association gave its Award for Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues to This American Life. The name of the award in this case is a bit off the mark. We gave them the award because they provide so much great material for our classes. Sean Cole’s piece “Time Bandit” in their most recent episode, for example, is pure Goffman.

“Not then, men and their moments. Rather, moments and their men,” says Goffman in the introduction to Interaction Ritual. In eleven words, he summarizes his “dramaturgical” approach to interaction. But I don’t think that we realize how radical this view is. Much of it is not radically different from our everyday thinking about interaction. Concepts like impression management, audience segregation, backstage areas and the rest merely shine a light on what we are already dimly aware of. In a course I taught long ago, an undergrad assigned Presentation of Self commented, “Goffman has a keen sense of the obvious.”

What’s radical about Goffman is that he sees even everyday interactions as bounded by the scenario for that interaction. Most of us, by contrast, think about what we’re doing as unscripted,, Nor do we think we are creating structures and rules that constrain ourselves and others. In a few formal settings — highly predictable scenes like a church service or a school classroom — we might realize that we are following the outlines of a script. Or in a long and deep relationship, we might feel limited by its history, a history that we and the others involved have created. But from Goffman’s perspective, even in fleeting encounters, we are all in it together. In moments of embarrassment, for example, the gaffe becomes part of our situation regardless of who committed it.

The central figure in “Time Bandit” was Jerome Ellis. He has a “glottal block” stutter, and he says of the stutter what Goffman says about embarrassment: it becomes a property not of the stutterer but of the situation.

Here is a transcript.

JEROME ELLIS: Sometimes I refer to it as “my stutter,” but sometimes I refer to it as “the stutter.”

SEAN COLE: The stutter.

JEROME ELLIS: Because to me, stuttering is not bound to my body, that it is a phenomenon that occurs between me and whoever I'm speaking to. I like to think of it like it's something that we share.

SEAN COLE: And when Jerome's in a conversation with someone, he stutters partly because the burden to talk smoothly is only on him.

JEROME ELLIS: Exactly, exactly. One way of saying that's like, oh, he's stuttering. But there's another way that's like, there is a stutter happening, you know.

SEAN COLE: And we are both contending with it.

JEROME ELLIS: Exactly.

SEAN COLE: And his talk at The Poetry Project was that on a grand scale. That's what he wanted-- for each of us to shoulder a little of the weight of the stutter that was happening.

The Poetry Project is a marathon of performances — poetry, dance, music, stand-up — over 150 performers, so there’s a time limit of 2-3 minutes. Ellis’s performance, which is excerpted in the clip (you can hear the difference in sound quality) was a plea that stutterers be allowed more time.

Stuttering also illustrates many of Goffman points in Stigma. This next clip shows the dilemma about disclosing a stigma or using different strategies to hide it. Listen to it, don’t just read the transcript.

jl2109 · Disturbance

SEAN COLE: : And it wasn't fear, he says. He does have a lot of fears in his daily life — taking too much of someone’s time, not being able to order at Shake Shack when there’s a line behind him. But this wasn’t that. If he was afraid of anything, it was falling back on the tactics he usually uses to get around a stutter — synonyms, for example, swapping out a word he’s blocked on for one that’s easier to say. He didn’t want to do that on stage.

JEROME ELLIS: : And I didn’t realize that until now, that I think that was the primary fear. And I did do that like two or three times, and I regretted it afterwards.

SEAN COLE: : Do you remember which words you did it on, by any chance?

JEROME ELLIS: : Yes. To their customers with — So there’s the Portuguese word — With.
distúrbio*
distúrbios na temporização —

which I had literally translated to — in my text, I translated it — translated it — translated it — translated it — translated it — translated it to just — to “disturbance.” And as you just saw, that word still is like very hard for me to say. So what I did in the performance was —
Customers with —
I said, “breaks.” —
breaks —
Breaks in the timing and fluency of speech.
--in the timing and fluency of speech.

And that was one that I didn’t like that I did that. What I wanted to do was what I — I just did with — with you, is just wait.

SEAN COLE: : Wait for the word.

JEROME ELLIS: : Wait for it. But it was especially-- especially D’s, they can be really painful.

SEAN COLE: : Wow.

EROME ELLIS: : So that’s why I avoided that one. And I was frustrated with myself. As soon as it happened — like “breaks” to me, it doesn’t capture what I wanted to capture.

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*This is an imperfect transcription. There is another sound before distúrbio, but my Portuguese is very limited, and I could not figure out what it might be.

It was this moment, his speech blocked at the same word over and over again, that brought home what he had said before — that the stutter becomes part of the situation. It becomes our stutter. For while I was listening, I kept suggesting alternative words. I thought that the “t” of “to” was the problem. “Translated as. . .” I said out loud.

Social facts, says Durkheim, include thoughts, feelings, and actions that have the strange quality of being properties of the situation, not just of the individual. Here I was, at home by myself, listening to an event that I had not attended and that had taken place at least a year ago. Yet that situation was co-opting what seemed like my very personal reactions. And the stutter — not Jerome Ellis’s stutter, but the stutter — was an crucial part of that situation.

These Truths, These Untruths, These Really Big Numbers

July 21, 2020
Posted by Jay Livingston

If a number just doesn’t sound right — it’s way too big or way too small — you’d better double-check. That’s the warning sociologist Joel Best has been giving us since 1990, if not before, when he looked at claims that the number of children abducted by strangers annually was 50,000. Way too many.

And now we have distinguished historian Jill Lepore, author of the recent best-selling history of the US These Truths. In a recent issue of The New Yorker, in her article “The Invention of the Police” (here) she says this:

I’m using a screenshot of The New Yorker’s online version only to show that as of this writing, more than a week after its initial publication, this passage remains unchanged. The text reads:

One study suggests that two-thirds of Americans between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four who were treated in emergency rooms suffered from injuries inflicted by police and security guards, about as many people as the number of pedestrians injured by motor vehicles.

This number, two-thirds, does not sound right. I have been in NYC emergency rooms — in the city’s high-crime years and in its low-crime years. Never did it look like two-thirds of the people there had been roughed up by the cops. The study Lepore cites (by Justin Feldman, here ) used data from 2001-2014. In that 14-year period, 683,000 young people (15-34) turned up in emergency rooms after being hit by the police or security guards, roughly 50,000 a year. That’s the numerator.

The denominator is the total number of emergency room visits by this age group. My estimate is about 30 million a year.* Obviously, 50,000 out of 30,000,000 is not two-thirds. It’s less than two-tenths of a percent.

What happened? Isn’t The New Yorker the publication that made “fact check” part of our everyday language?

Louise Perry (here) has an explanation of how Lepore and the fact checkers at The New Yorker misread the numbers and prose in Feldman’s article.

But it’s not clear where Lepore got the ‘two-thirds’ figure from. Possibly she misunderstood a line from from the paper itself, which includes the finding that 61.1% of people injured by police fell into the 15-34 age bracket. Or from the Harvard press release, which reports that: Sixty-four percent of the estimated 683,033 injuries logged between 2001-2014 among persons age 15-34 resulted from an officer hitting a civilian.

That’s the “how.” Perry also thinks she knows the “why”: “political bias.” Liberal, anti-police bias. Of course, it’s impossible to get evidence for this idea. The magazine and the writer have politically liberal views. Maybe the fact-checkers do as well. But it’s impossible to get evidence that their politics caused their misreading of the data.

So as long as we’re speculating without evidence, here’s my explanation (I’m not necessarily rejecting the politics explanation, just maybe adding to it): writing and reading about big numbers. It’s not easy to write up statistics in a way that is unmistakably clear. A reader not familiar with the territory can easily take a wrong turn, especially when that territory takes the shape of large numbers. If I told you that before the current pandemic, emergency rooms in the US saw about 3 million people a year, that might sound reasonable. I mean, three million seems like a really big number. But it’s only one- tenth of the actual number.

I know very little about dinosaurs. If you told me they went extinct 10 million years ago, I would think, Yeah, that’s a long time ago; it sounds about right. If you told me that they went extinct 200 million years ago, I’d have the same reaction. Sounds plausible. But a paleontologist would wonder how I could be taken in by such obvious untruths.

Yes, it’s possible that The New Yorker’s fact-checkers were so eager to stick it to the police that they let an “obvious” mistake slip by. But it’s also possible that they just didn’t know how to parse these claims about the data, and because some of the numbers were large and others (ED visits) still larger and unknown, they just seemed reasonable.

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* This a rough and quick estimate. The average 15-34 population over those years was in the range of 30-35 million. This site shows rates of ED use by age group. Unfortunately, the age groups are Under 18 and 18-44. So I estimated on the low side.

Statues and Heroes — Looking Back From the Future

July 13, 2020
Posted by Jay Livingston

Woodrow Wilson was a straight-up racist. No doubt about it. Yet in 1948, Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, which started up in 1930, added his name, making it the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. It has taken Princeton until now, seventy-two years later, to dump him. WTF? What changed, and why did it take so long?

What changed, of course, is that racism, especially the racism of institutions, has finally become a central issue in the national conversation. The civil rights movement in the 1960s brought big changes in the law, but it never had mass demonstrations as widespread and sustained as those of the last several weeks. Until now, racism, even though it was generally recognized as wrong, was not as salient an issue. Critics may have pointed out Wilson’s racism, but for Princeton, it just wasn’t that big a deal, certainly not big enough to warrant removing his name.

It’s hard to understand how Princeton could have let something so wrong slip by for so long. But Nicholas Kirstof’s column in yesterday’s New York Times (here) points the way towards understanding that failure even if we do not condone it.

As we pull down controversial statues and reassess historical figures, I’ve been wondering what our great-grandchildren will find bewilderingly immoral about our own times — and about us.

Which of today’s heroes will be discredited? Which statues toppled? What will later generations see as our own ethical blind spots?

I believe that one will be our cruelty to animals. Modern society relies on factory farming to produce protein that is inexpensive and abundant. But it causes suffering to animals on an incalculable scale.

It’s hard to imagine the moral climate of the year 2090. As Yogi said, prediction is very hard, especially about the future.* But suppose that Kristof is right. Suppose that seventy years from now the progressives (or whatever they are calling themselves) are tearing down the statues of Obama and Ruth Bader Ginsburg or demanding that the John Lewis School of Civil Rights change its name — all because these one-time heroes ate meat, often two or three times a day!

If we could speak to the protestors, would we tell them, “Wait. These were good people, the best. Back in 2020, we didn’t realize how cruel and how disastrous for the planet meat production was. We didn’t apply 2090 moral codes to animals.”

Their reply: “Yes, that’s precisely the point. Your morality was wrong, and we are not going honor those who lived by it. What’s painful to admit is that we waited till now to take these long overdue actions. After all, we’ve known all along that these people were straight-up meat eaters.”

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* Comparison with the future, like prediction, is very hard. But it can be useful, especially when people use the much easier comparison with the past in a misleading way, for example to argue that poor people today are not really poor. See this post from 2015.

Ahmad and Miles

July 7, 2020
Posted by Jay Livingston

(I’m a few days late with this one. Ahmad turned 90 on July 2.)

“When people say Jamal influenced me a lot, they're right.” Miles Davis, Miles, the Biography

But mostly, people don’t say that, and they don’t realize how great the influence was. There’s the musical style of course. In the 1950s, when beboppers were playing as many notes as possible in a measure, Ahmad was allowing for much more space, an approach that also suited Miles.

There was also the choice of tunes. When I was in junior high school, I got a copy of the Miles’s album “Milestones.” One of the tracks is “Billy Boy” — no horns, just Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe. The liner notes said, ‘Miles has an ear for a pop tune ("Billy Boy").’ I agreed. What a neat idea to import this folk tune (not a “pop tune”) into jazz.

I was an ignorant kid. I didn’t know then (and most people still don’t) that the musician who brought it into the jazz world was not Miles. It was Ahmad Jamal. The 1958 Red Garland arrangement on “Milestones” is nearly identical to Ahmad’s 1952 recording — the intro and outro, the added bridge, the block chords with octaves in the right hand.

For the Red Garland version, listen here.

Miles also often gets credit for making “On Green Dolphin Street” part of the standard jazz repertoire thanks to his 1958 sextet recording. It’s a great recording, but Ahmad was the one who clued the jazz world in to the potential of this movie-soundtrack tune. The same sequence is true of “Surrey With the Fringe On Top”: first Ahmad, then Miles, then everyone.

Ahmad did have one huge hit, an album that became a best seller even outside of the jazz world: “Live at the Pershing” (1958). The track that got played over and over again on the radio back then (and often now) is “Poinciana,” another tune that Ahmad hauled out of the “unlikely for jazz” bin.

Here he is at age eleven – Fritz Jones in Pittsburgh’s Hill District.

Texas and Messes, Then and Now

July 5, 2020
Posted by Jay Livingston

How can you get Texans to do something that is inconvenient and brings them no direct benefit but will benefit the general society?

Today’s New York Times had this story on page one, above the fold.

How do you get Texans to wear masks and to stay out of bars? Pubic health orders apparently won’t work, even if they carry $250 fines. As a Lubbock County commissioner told the New York Times, “We’re some of the nicest people in the entire world. But as soon as you make demands and tell them they’re going to do something, you get a different response: You don’t get to tell me what to do.”

Nor will appeals to self-interest and personal safety. These people don’t feel ill at all, and are they sure they know how to take care of their own health.. The statistics don’t seem all that alarming. A large majority of these people will not get COVID, and most of those who do will not have severe symptoms. You might as well tell them that those guns they keep at home are more likely to kill or wound a family member (accident, suicide) than to ward off criminals. Besides, masks carry a political message that’s almost as clear as a MAGA hat. They are part of the culture war Trump is waging. Going maskless has become a way to taunt those on the other side. Besides, maskless is macho. Masks are for the fearful.

In addition, the economic benefits of “opening up” are immediate and clear. The costs from a huge increase in COVID-19 lie in a far less visible future.

We’ve been here before, and by “here” I mean the problem of individual inconvenience versus collective benefit. By “here” I also mean Texas. The problem was not as serious as COVID-19 — highway beautification vs. littering. How could you get people who didn’t give a rat’s ass about highway beauty to stop tossing their empty beer cans out the pick-up truck window?

I wrote a blogpost about it in 2009, reposted in 2017. But it’s relevant once again.

* * * *

The guy you were trying to reach was Bubba, the classic red stater – fiercely individualistic, anti-government, macho. Bubba was also a slob, and probably proud of it. You couldn’t appeal to self-interest since it’s in Bubba’s self-interest to chuck his garbage out the window. Even hefty fines (and they are hefty) would work only if you could catch litterers often enough – unlikely on the Texas highways.

The best way in was Values. But how? “Don’t be a Litterbug, Keep Your Community Clean” would be too nice, too feminine or babyish, and, like “Pitch In” too collectivist. Instead, Roy Spence and Tim McClure at the Austin ad agency GSD&M had the Texas DOT go with chauvinism – Texas chauvinism. Spence and McClure were the ones who had distilled the target audience down to the Bubba stereotype, and the idea they played on to reach Bubba was not that littering was ugly or wrong or costly, but that it hurt Texas. And thus in 1985 was born one of the most famous and effective campaigns in the history of advertising.

With its double meaning of “mess,” it captured Bubba’s patriotism and pugnacity. The bumper stickers were soon everywhere. The TV ads featured famous proud Texans. One of the early ones (so early, I can’t find it on YouTube) featured Too-Tall Jones and Randy White, two of the toughest dudes on the Cowboys defense, picking up roadside trash.

JONES: You see the guy who threw this out the window, you tell him I got a message for him.

WHITE: (picks up a beer can): I got a message for him too.

OFF-CAMERA VOICE: What’s that?

WHITE: (Crushes the beer can with one fist). Well, I kinda need to see him to deliver it.

JONES: Don’t mess with Texas.

Litter in Texas has been reduced by 72%, the campaign is still going strong a quarter-century later, and McLure and Spence have a book about it. My source was Made to Stick by the Heath Brothers (no, jazzers, not those Heath brothers), Chip and Dan.