Spreading the Lack of Wealth Around

November 13, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Suppose a company in these hard times has to cut its payroll by 10%. It has two choices:

• fire 10% of the workers
• fire nobody, but reduce everyone’s hours and pay by 10%

Asked about this, Larry Summers, a top economic advisor to Obama, said,

It may be desirable to have a given amount of work shared among more people. But that’s not as desirable as expanding the total amount of work.

This is a policy non-sequitur – how the work is divided is a separate issue from how much work there is. And as Paul Krugman points out today after quoting this line, we are not in fact making much headway on expanding the total amount of work. The question of distributing the work remains, and Summers was dodging it.

But in answering it, we should consider not just the effect on individuals. After all, if you look at it as an economist might, the overall impact of the two policies is exactly the same. But there's a more sociological view that also considers the effect not just on the sum of the individuals but on the institution as a whole.

The Summers quote and this problem reminded me of a talk given recently by the president of a private university. Like all such schools, its endowment had taken a big hit. Here’s what he said (I’m paraphrasing*):

Other schools put in a hiring freeze. That’s fine with the faculty who are there. The only ones who suffer are people they don’t know – the people who didn’t get hired. But we put in a pay freeze. That may have hurt each faculty member somewhat. But it allowed us to hire new faculty, and boy was this a good time to be hiring. With those other schools taking themselves out of the market with their hiring freezes, we were able to hire twenty absolutely top rate people that we might not have gotten otherwise.

Spreading the lack of wealth around benefited the students and the university as a whole. And in a non-financial way, it also benefited the faculty whose pay had been frozen.

And about those new faculty, he was right, at least according to my informant, a sophomore at the university. Last weekend, he went to a panel discussion that included one of them, and he was so impressed that he decided on the spot to try to take courses with her.


*I wish I could quote the lines verbatim. This president is just an excellent speaker – part scholar, part stand-up.

Comments Galore

November 11, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The previous post brought an unusually high number of comments for this blog, most of them not highly complimentary. But for the most part, the commenters and I agreed on the basic idea that was at issue. I phrased it offensively: using a gun to stop someone else from doing something you don’t like. There’s another way to phrase it. As I said in the original post, “Gun advocates put this in terms of self-defense.” Oh boy, did they. Check out the comments.

I also said that distrust of the government was a common theme. The comments also bear this out. At a minimum, commenters did not trust the government to protect anyone from criminals. They seem to distrust government in other ways as well.

So we agreed on what guns do. The smidgen of disagreement arises over whether guns galore is a good idea. The commenters seem to be united in their certainty. I am less so. I just have these gnawing thoughts that allowing anyone and everyone to buy this kind of weaponry might not be an unmitigated good. I don’t know the Texas law and how it works in practice, but my guess is that Hasan could have made his purchases even if he had not been in the military. If any disturbed, angry, jihad-minded nut could have walked into Guns Galore and come out armed to the teeth, that gives me cause for concern.

The problem is not that gun owners are “psychotic killers on power trips,” as one commenter interpreted my post. The problem is that psychotic killers on power trips have no trouble becoming gun owners. Their massacres, not to mention the individual shootings, are a very high price to pay.

Another commenter made a comparison with the UK. Here’s the most recent info I could find (here)

The murder rate in England and Wales has fallen to its lowest level in 20 years, with 648 homicides recorded in 2008/09 – 136 fewer than the year before. Home Office statisticians said the drop was "not a blip".

Annual crime figures published yesterday show the number of murders and manslaughters and infanticides fell to a level not seen since 1989.
There was a significant further fall in gun crime with the number of incidents involving a firearm down by 17% to 8,184. The number of fatal shootings fell from 53 to 38.

That works out to a rate of 1.4 - 1.5 murders per 100,000 population. The rate in the US last year was more than triple that – 5.4 per 100,000.

The CDC report mentioned by another commenter does say that there is not enough evidence to show that gun laws are effective in reducing violence. That may mean merely that the gun laws we have don’t really reduce the flow of guns, especially to those who are most likely to misuse them. Or, as the CDC says in a Rumsfeld-like utterance, absence of evidence for violence reduction is not evidence of the absence of violence reduction. The effect may be there, but the difficulties of doing this kind of research make it very hard to find.

Finally, one commenter wrote of guns as a means of “punishment to defectors.”

Guns are the means to--if necessary--to punish defectors (criminals) within a population of cooperators (law-abiding citizens) as a means of maintaining the trust required for other-wise costly altruism.

It's also a probably factor in out of control crime-rates in cities. Not so much the loss of altruism at the individual level, but the inability for local populations to maintain an ability to promote social norms regarding trust and altruism.

That’s an interesting point, and I have a vague memory of seeing some lab-experiment studies on it. I don’t know of any real-world data. (It may well exist, but I’m just not up on this literature.) Usually, it’s the government that punishes defectors. Where the government cannot fulfill that function, altruism and trust break down. But I don’t see how individual gun ownership – self-defense – replaces governmental control. The more likely solution to the government’s failure would be vigilantism – private, but collective, punishment of defectors.

Thanks for all the comments, guys. I hadn’t known about LiveJournal – what it is or how it works. I’ll have to check it out.

The Philosophy of the Gun

November 10, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Guns Galore. The name might be emblematic of the US as a whole, but it’s merely the name of the store where Maj. Hasan plunked down his $1,100 and walked out with his brand new
Hekstra FN Herstal 5.7mm and several 20-round magazines.


At first, I thought that gun control was irrelevant in this case because Maj. Hasan was member of the US Army, and no law could deny a gun to a member of that category. But I was wrong. The murder weapon was not an Army firearm. It was privately acquired. Maj. Hasan was able to get his gun because he was a member of another category for whom getting guns is rarely a problem: people in Texas (also a few dozen other states.)

Maj. Hasan may have been a Muslim first and an American second, he may have practiced an extreme form of a foreign religion, he may have been psychologically unstable. But in at least one way, he was as normal and American as Charlton Heston: he believed in the philosophy of the gun.

The philosophy of the gun is simple: if someone does something you don’t like, shoot them. If you can’t shoot that person, shoot someone like them.

If you don’t like abortions, shoot an abortion doctor . If you don’t like an anti-abortion protester , shoot him. If you feel wronged by people at work, go postal. If a woman has rejected you, shoot her. If you can’t find a woman who actually rejected you, shoot several women. Don’t like the kids in your school? Shoot them. Feel you’ve been dissed by someone from another gang, shoot them.

Gun advocates put this in terms of self-defense. If you have gun, you can defend yourself, your property, and your loved ones from people who are doing something you don’t like. Which is just another way of saying that if you don’t like what the person is doing, shoot them. The only difference is that such shootings might be legal.

The question is this: whose decision is it? Who gets to decide whether shooting the bad person is OK? Most societies restrict this decision to law enforcement, to agents of the state. If someone is doing something you think they shouldn’t be doing, something that should be stopped right now, you call the cops.* That’s true to a great extent in the US as well.

But distrust of the government is a theme that runs through US political culture. So we make it easy for any person to take that power literally into his (or her) own hands. The law might punish you afterwards, if you are still alive. But until then, you are the law, and the decision over the use of deadly force is yours. Gun manufacturers might just as well advertise: “We provide, you decide.”

Fortunately, most gun owners never shoot their guns at other people. The vast majority don’t use guns to express their anger or their religious and political beliefs. But for the small minority who do want to use guns in that way, wide open lies the door of Guns Galore.


* Police scholars will recognize this as Egon Bittner’s definition of the police.The title of his article “The Capacity to Use Force as the Core of the Police Role” states it formally. More colloquially, Bittner says that the police are who we call when “something ought not to be happening about which something ought to be done right NOW!”

Gemeinschaft and Ge-Sellout

November 7, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Gemeinschaft is usually translated as community. But, I tell my students, we use community in many ways that would have old Tönnies spinning (spönning?) in his grave. Sometimes it refers to the political boundaries of a town. It sounds better to talk about “the Hohokus community” than merely “people who live in Hohokus.” (Or does it? Maybe there’s nothing you can do with a name like Hohokus.)

We also use community to mean people who share some demographic characteristic. “The African American community.” Forty million people spread over the entire country hardly gets at the kind of Gemeinschaft Tönnies had in mind – a group based on mutual trust, on permanence, intimacy, personal involvement.

But what about this, taken from Friday’s New York Times story about an insider trading scheme? Traders used advance information on mergers and acquisitions to make millions of dollars. Some of the schemers were caught, pled guilty, and in turn sold out their former partners or employers. The arrests and charges are rolling in.

The charges, against 14 money managers, lawyers and other investors, followed the arrest last month of a hedge fund billionaire, Raj Rajaratnam, on charges that he had profited from inside information.

But here’s what caught my attention.

The complaints represent a significant expansion of a case that has gripped the hedge fund community.

What kind of community is this, I wondered, this hedge fund community?

Maybe it really is a Gemeinschaft-like world where everyone knows everyone else, like a family, like “Cheers.” What one person can say to another is determined by the individuals in the immediate situation, not by abstract, bureaucratic rules  – like the rules that prohibit insider tip-offs. Can we blame it on Gemeinschaft? I doubt it, but I haven’t searched the literature.

Are there any ethnographies of Hedgefundland?

Boinged

November 7, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

This blog has a small but select readership. I have data to back that up – at least the part about small. I use Google Analytics to track the number of visits. On Monday, the counter seemed to go haywire. When I checked it late in the afternoon, the number of visits was about 600,.

The mystery was soon solved since Google Analytics also shows where people had linked in from*. In this case it was Boing Boing. It had listed my post with the four charts on healthcare costs, and the hits just kept on coming. By day’s end, the total was nearly 2600. That’s what being Boinged will do.


The effect wears off quickly, though not as quickly as the euphoria.

*Google Analytics is not entirely trustworthy on this. It showed a dozens of referrals from a site for forums devoted exclusively to discussions of the Mazda Miata. Also several from a site which has items only about the making of wooden boats.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Meltdown

November 3, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

“The financial system nearly collapsed,” he said, “because smart guys had started working on Wall Street.”

Calvin Trillin in an op-ed in the Times a couple of weeks ago, supposedly quoting some guy he meets in a bar. But Trillin was writing as a humorist, not a reporter (he does both very well), and I strongly suspect that his informant in the midtown bar was just something he made up for laughs, from the 1950s Brooks Brothers clothes to the theory about the financial debacle.

The theory goes like this: Wall Street used to be run by guys who got into decent schools because of family; they finished in the lower third of the class. Nice guys, not especially bright, and, by current standards, not especially greedy. (A certain ex-president comes to mind.) But when Wall Street started offering insanely high payoffs, the really smart guys got in – the math majors from MIT, physics Ph.D.s from CalTech.

“Did you ever hear the word ‘derivatives’?” he said. “Do you think our guys could have invented, say, credit default swaps? Give me a break! They couldn’t have done the math.”

And how did that lead to calamity?

“Why do I get the feeling that there’s one more step in this scenario?” I said.

“Because there is,” he said. “When the smart guys started this business of securitizing things that didn’t even exist in the first place, who was running the firms they worked for? Our guys! The lower third of the class! Guys who didn’t have the foggiest notion of what a credit default swap was. All our guys knew was that they were getting disgustingly rich, and they had gotten to like that. All of that easy money had eaten away at their sense of enoughness.”

Funny, right? It interrelates some stylized facts that aren’t really related – math geniuses replacing pleasant college grads; the spread of greed; Wall Street collapsing. That’s what humor writing often does – stretches the plausible till it becomes unrealistic. And besides, the theory fits only one instance – the current one.

Generally speaking, you don’t turn to NBER* papers for a good chuckle or for confirmation of humorous speculation. I doubt that Calvin Trillin has a stack of these papers on his nightstand. I certainly don’t. But via a link at Brad DeLong’s blog) I found this abstract of one published last December:

We use detailed information about wages, education and occupations to shed light on the evolution of the U.S. financial sector over the past century. We uncover a set of new, interrelated stylized facts: financial jobs were relatively skill intensive, complex, and highly paid until the 1930s and after the 1980s, but not in the interim period. We investigate the determinants of this evolution and find that financial deregulation and corporate activities linked to IPOs and credit risk increase the demand for skills in financial jobs. Computers and information technology play a more limited role. Our analysis also shows that wages in finance were excessively high around 1930 and from the mid 1990s until 2006. [emphasis added] --Thomas Philippon and Ariell Reshef, “Wages and Human Capital”

The same thing was going on in the 1920s too. Wall Street jobs were skill intensive, complex, and highly paid. And look what happened in 1929.  ’Taint funny McGee.

*National Bureau of Economic Research

Top of the Charts

November 2, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

In case you wondered about what we in the US pay for health care compared with those unfree unfortunates who suffer under various forms of socialized medicine, here are some graphs showing the advantages of what Republicans here tell us is “the best health care system in the world.”

The graphs are from the International Federation of Health Plans. I’ve selected only four – to show the relative costs* of

• an office visit
• a day in the hospital
• a common procedure (childbirth without complications)
• a widely used drug (Lipitor)

(Click on a chart to see a larger version.)

You can download all the charts here, but be warned: it gets boring. We’re number one in every chart, at least in this one category of how much we shell out.

Since we have the best health care in the world, this must mean that you get what you pay for. Our Lipitor must be four to ten times as good as the Lipitor that Canadians take.


*Udate: As Phenompbg says in his comment below, these amounts are what providers are paid by governments or other insurers, not what the patient pays, which in many Eurpean countries is essentially nothing. See the footnotes for the tables in the original document. Or look at the comments on this at Boing Boing, a discussion which is remarkably civil (do they monitor comments?).

Hat tip: Ezra Klein.

It’s Your Funeral

November 2, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Current funeral fashions . . . illustrate the sad truth that, as a society, Americans are no longer sure what to do with our dead.” So says theologian Thomas Long in an All Souls’ Day op-ed in the Times.

He mentions some of these fashions:

coffins emblazoned with sports logos; cremation urns in the shape of bowling pins, golf bags and motorcycle gas tanks; “virtual cemeteries” with video clips and eerie recorded messages from the dead; pendants, bracelets, lamps and table sculptures into which ashes of the deceased can be swirled and molded.

If you don’t believe him, take a look on line, here for example.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

But the source of this diverse emporium of funeral stuff isn’t our uncertainty over what to do with our dead. Instead, it rises at the intersection of two cherished American ideals: capitalism and individualism.

The American tendency to turn ceremonial occasions into commerce is certainly not news. As Robert Klein said of Washington’s Birthday (back when there still was a Washington’s Birthday and not the generic Presidents’ Day), “I’m sure the father of our country would be pleased to know that his birthday is being honored with a mattress sale.”

Even our most solemn moments, funerals, are opportunities to cash in, as was noted long ago by two Brits – Evelyn Waugh in a comic novel (The Loved One, 1948), and Jessica Mitford in a book of serious reporting (The American Way of Death, 1963).

The combination of capitalism with our value on individualism and freedom of choice gives us in funerals what it gives us in everything from automobiles to breakfast cereal: a wide variety of products.

The loser here is tradition. But tradition has never held much power in the US. “Because that’s the way we’ve always done it” doesn’t win many arguments here, especially not when it goes up against rational utilitarianism (“but it would be cheaper and quicker to do it this way”). Tradition is also losing out to self-fulfillment and self-expression. Tradition emphasizes the community – past, present, and future – over the individual. It links the individual with past generations and future generations. In most societies, funerals emphasize the primacy of the group and celebrate the deceased as a member of that group, whatever his particular individual quirks might have been.

The new look in funerals celebrates the individual for precisely those things that made him an individual – his particular interests – even though these have nothing to do with the traditions of the community.

One family asked for a memorial service on the 18th green of their father’s favorite golf course, “because that’s where dad was instead of church on Sunday mornings, so why are we going to church,” Mr. Duffey said. “Line up his buddies, and hit balls.” Another wanted his friends to ride Harleys down his favorite road, scattering his ashes. [From an article in the Times four years ago.]

The same trend has transformed other religious events like confirmations (“Select a confirmation party theme that celebrates the guest of honor’s hobbies or passions”) and of course, bar mitzvahs.

a beach themed party will put everyone in a tropical mood. Decorate with orange, pink and green lighting and maybe even some tiki torches! String tiny lanterns across the ceiling and use brightly colored flowers in vases for the centerpieces. Everyone will enjoy a limbo contest especially when it’s played along with some Hawaiian music.

(And I was worried that the previous post’s picture of a Weimaraner wearing a tallith and yarmulke might have been seen as sacrilegious. What was I thinking?)

Trick or Treat

October 31, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Lisa over at Sociological Images has been giving a lot of thought to her Halloween costume. And everyone else’s. One of the themes she notes is the ethnic caricature: Asian, Mexican, Indian, Middle Eastern, etc. There’s a “Rapsta” child’s outfit. And costume companies even have outfits for dogs.

(Click on the image to see a larger version.)

(Note that the above costume is in the “Religious Gifts” section of the Website.)

The other theme is Sexy, especially in female costumes. I was going to say “women’s costumes,” but as Lisa and many other commentators have pointed out, even the costumes for pre-teen girls are often sexualized – fishnet stockings and the like.

During the recent (and future) flap over Roman Polanski, there was some talk of the idea that while American attitudes categorically condemned sex with younger teenagers, Europeans were less absolute, more tolerant. I don’t know whether that assessment of sexual mores is accurate, but you certainly wouldn’t know it by looking at the Halloween costumes on sale here in the US. Not only are costumes for girls sexualized, but as Lisa notes, the costumes for adult females include sexualized versions of young girls. The sexy schoolgirl is probably the classic example, though this year she is joined by her classmate from Hogwarts.

But you can also now find Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, Alice (from Wonderland), Little Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks, a generic Girl Scout, and probably others.

I wondered if a French costume site would have similar costumes. Admittedly, this is not thorough research, but everything listed under enfant>fille was Disney-pure. Perhaps the French draw the line between enfant and adulte at a lower age. But in the costumes for women, I didn’t find the variety of sexualized pre-teens that Lisa found at the US site. One Little Red Riding Hood, one Gretel, and one schoolgirl, as opposed to the dozens of variations at the US site.

The French site did have several different nun costumes. This fits with the strategy of sexualizing a status that in reality is usually unsexy: soldier, police officer, nurse, pirate, witch, angel, etc. Or even sponge (bottom left).

(Click on the image to see a larger version.)

Note the price of the Bob l’Éponge Sexy costume, more than twice the nun. Must be the licensing fees. (The Olive Oyl costume – not shown, and not sexy – goes for 79€.)

Happy Halloween

A Sell-by Date for the Tax Breaks

October 30, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Maybe you missed yesterday’s special section on Wealth and Personal Finance in the New York Times. Maybe you didn’t need to read articles like

• “Exotic Bets to Hedge a Portfolio”
• “Foreign Bonds Provide a Buffer . . .”
• “ . . . Keeping the Heirs Quiet”
• “For Equestrians, a Buyer’s Market in Horses”

Maybe you wondered who those articles were for. If so, you could have opened to page 8, to this chart, which is not to be missed, especially by those who might have thought that the benefits of the Bush tax cuts were broadly distributed and didn’t go just to the very rich.

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

The people in that big, blue circle, that’s who those article are for. The top 1%, the folks (to use a Bushian locution) yes, the folks who take down over $ ½ million a year and more, much more, and had their taxes reduced by nearly as much, those are the folks the Times must have had in mind with this special section. (Full article by David Cay Johnston here.)

When the Bushies bestowed this largesse upon the wealthy, they had to make it look a little less devastating to the federal budget, so they wrote in an expiration date – the end of 2010. The Bushies and their friends probably expected the Republican domination of all three branches of government to continue in perpetuity, so that when the time came, the tax breaks would be extended. They also expected that the economic strategies of tax cuts and deregulation would usher in an era of permanent prosperity rather than the worst economic period since the 1930s.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Republican paradise, and it now looks as though the sun will set on these tax breaks. Nearly a decade of the government going deep into debt in order to give you fistfuls of money as though it were trick-or-treat candy is not such a bad deal. But now . . .

What’s a poor millionaire to do? Buy another horse? Another house? Hedge the portfolio? Or might the heirs be quieted more with foreign bonds? Decisions, decisions.

Dithering and Talking Points

October 28, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Daily Show calls itself “a fake news show,” but it often does what the “real” news shows won’t. It documents how what people on news shows try to pass off as “spontaneous and unrehearsed” (as the opening of Meet the Press used to put it) is really planned and scripted at Talking Points Central. The Daily Show will give a quick montage of clips in which different people on different shows all use the same unusual word or phrase.

Last night it was “dithering.” A series of right-wingers, culminating in Dick Cheney, all accuse President Obama of “dithering” on Afghanistan.

(The Daily Show does not allow me to embed the video. But click here and slide to the 8:30 mark.)

It was just like the old days, when The Daily Show would string together clips from Bush Administration figures and right-wing commentators all using the same key words. But then, the statements all came on the same day, so the central direction was obvious. (I mean, it was obvious to Daily Show viewers, not to viewers of “real” news programs.)

The popularity of dithering may be more a case of contagion than planning. Note the dates of the O’Reilly and Cheney clips, more than two weeks apart.

Dithering is not a frequently used word. Lexis-Nexis shows only 27 instances in TV news transcripts for the first nine months of the year. The first use in connection with Afghanistan comes on September 24 – on Australian ABC, but the speaker was from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. So it’s likely that dithering represented one idea of how to attack Obama. That idea took hold.

Over the course of the next month, dithering begins to reverberate. Republican senators use it in hearings in early October, TV news people bounce it back, and right-wing commentators start yodeling it loudly.

They are changing the rationale for why we are in Afghanistan. What’s really going on here is a dither, a big dither, indecisiveness. (William Bennett on CNN, Oct. 18)

And finally the Cheney quote on Oct. 21 that is echoed in every news story about that speech.

The White House must stop dithering while America’s forces are in danger.

Quite possibly, Cheney’s speech was written by someone at the American Enterprise Institute or someone else in that neo-con circle. Still, I don’t see the dithering as a matter of “talking points” distributed by the RNC. Instead, it’s an example of what I mentioned in yesterday’s post – a word (dithering, issues) that spreads because it just sounds “right,” at least to certain people.

I expect that the dithering life cycle will be mayfly brief. Issues to mean problems was slower to catch on, and it may hang around for a good while.

Houston, We Have an Issue

October 27, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

When did problems become issues?

I remember when an issue was a point of contention, something people disagreed about, like the issues in a political campaign. Now, an issue can be just another difficulty, or what we used to call “a problem.”*

This morning my orthopedist told me that he too has “shoulder issues,” especially when he’s under stress and unconsciously tenses his shoulders. I wanted to say that I didn’t have issues, I had pain, and that the pain was a problem.

But I didn’t. Not enough time. This doctor works fast, and talks fast. “Trap strain” was his diagnosis, and it took him about as long to make it as it took you to read this sentence.

I and everyone I’ve mentioned it to think that issues started among psychotherapists. Patients’ problems became “issues.” (“You seem to have an issue with women you perceive as powerful.”) Those patients were disproportionately educated and wealthy; more of them also might have worked in the media. A Robert Weber New Yorker cartoon shows two parents as their infant child in a highchair throws food wildly all over the kitchen. The caption: “He has some food issues.”

He has some food issues.

That was in 1999, and apparently issues was fresh enough to be funny to New Yorker readers and their therapists. But I suspect that it was already late in the day and that the term was already filtering out into much broader use. I doubt that the magazine would publish that cartoon today. Last May, their “Ask the Author” page contained the sentence, “There are allergies, peculiar diets, and all sorts of food issues.” And nobody was chuckling.

So it all starts with psychotherapy and the media elite, to use a term of denigration popular on the right (George W. Bush used to pronounce it as a single word – “medialeet”). It then flowed downward and outward, much like fashions in names and clothing. To repeat an anecdote I used in an earlier post on language, only few years after that cartoon appeared, I heard a burly jock, a former defensive lineman for the Jets, talking about the team’s prospects in the upcoming season. “Well, the Jets have right tackle issues.”

At least, that’s my guess. But I need some some evidence. If I were a linguist, I’d know how to track these changes. I tried Lexis-Nexis, searching for “has an issue.” But Lex thought I was just kidding about the has, despite my using quotation marks, and it returned everything with the word issue.

I wish I could figure out how to solve this problem. Or do I mean how to resolve this issue?

--------------------
*Issue as a point of contention is not the earliest meaning of the word, but it does go back to at least the early 1500s. My OED, admittedly not a recent edition, does not even mention the problem sense of the word.

Wisdom and Crowds, One More Time

October 25, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the early months of this blog, I had some posts about The Wisdom of Crowds. The argument that James Surowiecki makes in his book of that name is that the collective wisdom of the general public, at least those who are interested in some topic, is superior to that of a few experts. (See this post for an example).

In other posts, I framed the issue as The Wisdom of Crowds vs. The Smart Money, and I wanted to see how the contest played out on the gridiron. Well, not the gridiron exactly, but in the betting about what went on there. My thesis was that the bookies (The Smart Money) were better at predicting outcomes than was the general public. (See here and here.)

Today, the NFL offers us two games that will provide more evidence. In the Steelers-Vikings game, the bookies made the Steelers a 4-point favorite. Since the beginning of the week, the public has been backing the Vikes. Three-fourths of the money has been bet on Minnesota. Usually, that would drive the line lower as bookmakers tried to make Steeler action more attractive in order to balance their books. But instead, the line has gone up to 6. Even with their books heavily weighted with Viking bets, the bookies seem to be asking the public to bet still more on the Vikes.

The Jets-Raiders game later this afternoon has a similar discrepancy. Jets opened as 7-point favorites. Public money came in on the Jets (about two-thirds of all action), but the line went down. Most books have it as 6 ½ or even 6, and it may go even lower by 4 p.m.

In both games, the bookies were responding not to the wisdom of the crowd but to the wisdom of a small number of sharp bettors, i.e, smart money.

If you follow the smart money, take the Steelers minus 6 (less, if you can find it) and Oakland plus as many as you can get (one online book still has them at 7). On the other side, the crowd, in its wisdom, 1) loves Bret Favre, and 2) doesn’t see how anyone can ever bet on the Raiders.

Sociologists, of course, will back the team whose head coach was a sociology major. Go Steelers!

(Mike and Ben having a chuckle over a basic flaw in Parsons' Social System.)

UPDATE: The Steelers won and covered, thanks to a couple of turnarounds by the defense. Twice, the Vikings looked certain to score only to have the great Bret Favre fumble or toss an interception that the Steelers returned for a TD. The smart money on the Raiders didn't look so smart. The Jets won easily, 38-0.

Culture, Relativism, and Bank Ads

October 23, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The word values has become pretty much the property of conservatives, who take an absolutist position. Values tell us what’s right and wrong, and by God some things are just wrong. Abortion, gay marriage, Al Qaeda. And some things are just right. The War on Terrorism, Freedom, Democracy.

This view is neatly summed up in William Bennett’s phrase “moral clarity,” which stands strong against the wishy-washy liberal view called moral relativism. Sheesh, don’t get conservatives started on moral relativism. Here’s a guy on Glenn Beck’s show:

a certain segment of society who has been indoctrinated with a certain moral relativism. . . . And it quite frankly puts our civilization in danger.

Here’s Bill Bennett himself:

Most Republicans believe there are such things as objective values, things we can arrive at through reason, and discussion, and experience, and faith . . . A lot of liberals are still suffering from the relativism of the '60s and '70s. [Nice word choice – “suffering.”]

But for the past year HSBC has been banking on cultural relativism with their Different Values ad campaign.

Some of the ads give a pair of value-laden words (good, bad) with a picture for each. Then the pictures are switched. Papaya - good; chocolate cake - bad. Or is it the reverse? Same words, different pictures.



Other ads show the same picture, but with different value labels. What idea is triggered by this old convertible – Freedom? Status Symbol? Polluter?

(Click on the image for a larger view, and read the relativistic ad copy.)

(I especially like this one. Is having four kids the self-indulgence that comes with privilege, or is it sacrifice?)

The idea, neatly summed up in the tag line of the original ads is, “different values make the world a richer place.” OK, let’s forget about the intentional double meaning of richer. And maybe we should temporarily ignore the hypocrisy of HSBC, having gobbled up local banks, now coming out as the promoter of local values.

What the ad illustrates – and this is how I’ll use them in class next week when we start talking about culture – is the idea of culture as a “meaning system.” What something means depends on the culture of the people interpreting it – as in the shaved head ad.
Those interpretations are based in experience, and the experiences we have depend on where we are in the society – as in the computer/baby ad.


Or the carpet ad.


(Can we still call them “Oriental” rugs? I guess it depends on our culture. But if we can’t call them Oriental rugs, what are they?)

UPDATE. A few hours after I posted this yesterday, I went to Brooklyn for dinner with friends. Getting out of the subway, I glanced back at the skyline of Manhattan, the island much glorified (by some), much vilified (by others), and much gentrified. Then I started up Montague St., and one of the first things I passed was an HSBC bank with this ad inside.

Service Without a Smile

October 20, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Jenn Lena links to a site where DJ s tell stupid-club-patron stories.

dude: got any Jurassic Five?
dj: it's a Brit pop night tonight, so it wouldn't really fit in
dude: ok, what about Nirvana?
dj: Nirvana are American
dude: oh, I see. then how about The Smashing Pumpkins?

Waiters tell similar stories about diners. The blogger at Waiter Rant managed to get his blog published as a book. Teachers tell stupid-student stories. RateYourStudents, is payback for RateMyProfessors, but the tone is different, more like the DJ s’ and less like advice on who to avoid. Doctors probably tell stupid patient stories; they just don’t do it on the Internet.

People in most service occupations, it seems, have stories about the stupidity of those they serve. The dudes or blondes, students, customers and occasionally the employers are inevitably ignorant, and exasperating. They are also often selfishly inconsiderate. And they don’t even realize it.

Why do we tell these stories? They seem to have a defensive quality, as though the self is threatened , for in most cases the moral of the story is, “I deserve better.” They are literally self-serving. They serve to defend the self. The threat to self is especially acute when the clients have some power and can make demands. Most of the DJ stories, like the one above, involve requests. Ditto for waiter stories. But even when control over one’s work is not an issue, even when the client has almost no power, as with teachers and doctors, people need to distance the self from the implications of the situation.

When we sit around and swap these stories, we are telling ourselves that we are in the business of creating pearls, and we do create them. But the demands of our job require us to cast them before swine (or, as we say now, before H1N1).

Times They Are a-Changin'

October 16, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

There were several empty seats when I got to class yesterday, so I asked the students if it was still early. A couple of them flipped open their cell phones.

Doesn’t anybody have a watch? I remembered all those mornings when my son went off to high school, and I would see his wristwatch lying on the dresser. “Aren’t you taking your watch?”

“No.”

So I took a survey. How many of you don’t wear a wristwatch? They all raised their hands (and bare wrists) except for one student, and even she wasn’t wearing hers that day. It’s all cell phones. “The new pocket watch,” said one student. I suggested he ought get a chain and waistcoat.*

It looks like the wristwatch is another generational marker, soon to go the way of the typewriter.
But a wristwatch isn’t just for telling time. It’s jewelry, it’s conspicuous consumption. A friend who worked at Canyon Ranch (an expensive spa) told he had witnessed a small misunderstanding there. One client (rancher? camper?) had mistaken another as an employee. The one who felt he’d been slighted thrust out his arm at the other man. “That’s a five thousand dollar Rolex,” he announced.

Cell phones are democratizing. Yes, some cost more than others, but the top of the line phone, the best phone, the iPhone, is within reach of most people. The most expensive model I could find online today costs $750. And the cheaper iPhones look just like the expensive ones.

Watches, on the other wrist, have limitless potential as status markers. That Rolex would be put to shame by even a low-end Patek Phillipe, like this $16,000 model (which looks strikingly like a Timex I used to own.)

Or this De Bethune with a MSRP of $95,000.


But why not get something really good like this Blancpain? It’s only 250,000 (the website didn’t say whether that was dollars or euros. If the latter, multiply by about 1.5. But if you have to do the math, you probably can’t afford it anyway.)

*I also told him of the line I heard Woody Allen use on the Johnny Carson show ages ago. Woody took out a pocket watch as if to check the time, and Carson admired it. “My grandfather,” said Woody somberly, “on his deathbed,” he paused, “sold me this watch.”

Taking an Incomplete in Religion

October 13, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

In comments on my “Christian Is Not a Religion” post, Man of Letters says that minority and majority perceive things differently. Stephen Colbert’s, “I don’t see race” nicely illustrates the idea that privilege, when it’s working well, is invisible, especially to the privileged. Nonwhites may find it harder to unsee race.

The privileged position (white, male, etc.) is the default setting. As with default settings for machines or software, most people don’t even notice that these settings exist. After a while, the default setting just seems to be the “natural” way, the way things are. The default also comes be seen not just as the way things are but as the way things should be. To say that male is the default setting for sex implies that other settings, female for instance, are, well, faults. Being male is right and natural; it’s what we all should be doing. Women just aren’t as good at it.*

A similar set of assumptions seems evident in Justice Scalia’s idea that it is “outrageous” to think that the cross honors only Christian war dead. In Scalia’s view, even if you’re not a Christian, the cross is still for you. And if you don’t feel honored by that cross, well maybe there’s something wrong with you. In Scalia’s case, these ideas still seem to be unexamined assumptions. Others make the case more explicitly. Theologian Ann Coulter, among others, says that in relation to Christians, Jews are “uncompleted” or “unperfected.” When Jews are completed and perfected, they will be Christians.

Jews, given their centuries-long experience with others seeking to perfect them, may understandably be less than enthusiastic about Ms. Coulter’s beneficence.


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

*This assumption has been the basis of TV sitcom plots going back to “I Love Lucy.” Lucy tries to do something that men usually do (for example, working or having a job), only to fail hilariously.

The New York Walk - High Line Edition

October 11, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Our semi-annual New York walk yesterday took a different route from any previous walk. We hit the High Line, the elevated train tracks that had long fallen into disuse and that the city converted into a pedestrian walkway. Here’s a before-and-after.

(Click on the picture for a larger view.

If you give people in the city a place to walk, they will. The High Line is fairly narrow, as you can see, and not all that long. But people walk up and walk back, even though there are not a lot of things to do – no shops or displays to look. But people stop and take photos of one another. Here’s part of our group.

(George, Paulo, Joe)

Our itinerary was briefer than in previous years. It included another recent New York innovation – the conversion of several blocks of midtown Broadway into a pedestrian area, with chairs. We had lunch at the Chelsea Brewing Company at Chelsea Piers, which was offering a menu of about 30 locally brewed beer, ale, and stout.

But the New York Walk is about walking. Especially on the High Line, I was reminded of the passeggiata, the non-utilitarian walk that Italians take after dinner, strolling about town talking and looking at the other people who are strolling and looking. Italians may be more aware than New Yorkers that they themselves are the attraction, what others have come out to review. But in either case, walking for no purpose but to look at other people is a pleasure afforded almost exclusively by cities. It is to New York’s credit that it recognizes this special urban possibility and has tried to enhance it.

Christian Is Not a Religion (and Jews Have a Cross to Bear)

October 9, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the flap over Sonia Sotomayor’s gender and ethnicity, when the right went nuts over her “wise Latina”comment, I noted (here) the invisibility of dominant characteristics.

White male is the default setting. White is not a race, male is not a gender. Only blacks, Hispanics, and others have race. Only women and gays have gender.

I should have added that usually these are invisible only to the whites and the males. I also should have added that, in the US at least, Christian is not a religion.

From Wednesday’s New York Times

As the Supreme Court weighed a dispute over a religious symbol on public land Wednesday, Justice Antonin Scalia was having difficulty understanding how some people might feel excluded by a cross that was put up as a memorial to soldiers killed in World War I.

“It’s erected as a war memorial. I assume it is erected in honor of all of the war dead,'” Scalia said of the cross that the Veterans of Foreign Wars built 75 years ago atop an outcropping in the Mojave National Preserve. “What would you have them erect?...Some conglomerate of a cross, a Star of David, and you know, a Muslim half moon and star?”'

Peter Eliasberg, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer arguing the case, explained that the cross is the predominant symbol of Christianity and commonly used at Christian grave sites, not that the devoutly Catholic Scalia needed to be told that.

''I have been in Jewish cemeteries,'' Eliasberg continued. ''There is never a cross on a tombstone of a Jew.''

There was mild laughter in the packed courtroom, but not from Scalia.

“I don't think you can leap from that to the conclusion that the only war dead that that cross honors are the Christian war dead. I think that's an outrageous conclusion,” Scalia said, clearly irritated by the exchange. [emphasis added]

Just as white is the universal race (in the eyes of whites) and male the universal sex (in the eyes of males), Christianity is the universal religion. The Times writer says that Scalia did not need to be told that the cross is the symbol of Christianity. But Scalia says that it’s “outrageous” to think that the cross honors only Christians. In other words, the Christian religious symbol is the universal religious symbol . . . at least in the eyes of Christians like Scalia. I think Justice Ginsburg might disagree.

UPDATE. The Times this morning published a letter which says, in part, “The cross does not represent ‘establishment’ of a particular religion. It is a simple, and neutral, recognition that those honored were, by an enormous margin, Christians.” The writer, Ron Holdaway, is a retired judge in Wyoming.

What a persuasive choice of words. Neutral! Neutral is good (by Polonius). The old neutral cross.

That saying, “It’s Sinatra’s world, we just live in it,” is funny when it’s about Ol’ Blue Eyes. But when it’s changed to “It’s Christianity’s world; we’re just allowed to live in it,” it loses much of its humor.

(As for Judge Holdaway, I picture my grandmother, were she alive: “Holdaway, Ron Holdaway,” she muses, rolling the name around in her mind, looking at it from different angles for several seconds. Then, “Doesn’t sound Jewish.”)

Losing a Teachable Moment

October9, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Bureaucracy was the topic in class yesterday, and a student had a wonderful anecdote. The trouble was that I couldn’t figure out what it was an example of. I still can’t.

Here’s the story.

She needed a copy of her birth certificate, and eventually she found the right government building and the right office, only to find a sign on the door saying that the person she needed to see was away for a one-day seminar. She went home and returned the next day. Same sign.

Maybe the person was late in getting back. When she came back a third day and the same sign was still there, she went into another office to find out what was up.

Another worker explained that the person in that office was off for a week vacation, but they didn’t have a sign that said that. The only sign they had was the one-day seminar sign. So that’s what they posted.

There are some lessons to be learned here – don’t believe everything you read, close enough for government work, etc. Beyond the practical implications though, I had the feeling that story also illustrated some more general sociological concept or principle. But whatever that might have been, it was, and still is, hidden someplace in the shadows.

Any ideas? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Before It’s Too Late . . .

October 6, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Act now — while there’s still time.

A Preference for Bad News

October 4, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Brad Wright links to an article by Rod Dreher claiming that “our news media, through heavily biased reporting and analysis, are turning significant numbers of American voters against religious conservatives.”

I was skeptical that the media have this power. The “media elite” may be secular, and their views may be be at odds with those of conservative Christians. But the only evidence Dreher gives that their politics influence viewers is the finding that people who watch more TV news are more likely to think that “Christian fundamentalists are ideologically extreme and politically militant.” That’s probably because extremism of any stripe is what gets on the news. Or maybe it’s because it’s true, and people who pay more attention to the news have a more accurate view of what’s happening.

Besides, Dreher goes on to maintain that the US is still a religious nation with a populace that generally takes a dim view of nonbelievers. That contradicts his main point. If we are still religious, even after decades of our media being dominated by secularists, their anti-Christian influence must be very weak. So why get all worried? Why pay so much attention to the beliefs of the people who write the news?

Then on Friday, David Brooks echoed my sentiments, not about religion but in reference to the right-wing media. Limbaugh, Beck, and the rest, he said, make a lot of noise, but their ability to change votes is minimal.

Now I found myself in the position of Dreher. Although I had scoffed at Dreher’s idea that the secularism of US newsrooms was swaying the country, here I was, insisting that Limbaugh and Fox TV had to be having some effect. But why did I react that way? Why would we (Dreher from one side, me from the other) insist that the people we didn’t like were so influential?* Why wouldn’t we take comfort in the idea that they were, as Brooks says, like the Wizard of Oz – seemingly large on screen, but in reality small and powerless behind the curtain?

At first, I was reminded of the joke my mother told me long ago about the old Jew who subscribed to the newspaper of the American Nazi Party. His neighbors were appalled. “You should read the Jewish Daily Forward” they insisted. “Why do you read that garbage?”

“If I read the Forward, what do I see? Jews killed in Germany, pogroms in Russia, anti-Semitism in Poland, Jews persecuted everywhere. If I read the American Nazi paper, what do I see? Jews control the government. Jews own all the banks. Jews have all the money. . . .”

My second thought was that our preference for bad news – our insistence that our enemies must be having some nefarious impact – was yet another instance of what Lindesmith called the “evil-causes-evil assumption.” If something is evil, it must have evil consequences. This assumption must be a very powerful indeed. Even when faced with the possibility of good news – that our enemies are ineffectual – we’ll cling to our assumption and keep reading the bad news in the Forward.


* I’m referring here to my initial gut reaction. In fact, Brooks doesn’t provide much convincing evidence that the right-wing voices go unheeded. He cites only one systematic study of the absence of a Limbaugh effect, but that study was focused on one narrow issue – Rush’s urging Republicans to cross over and vote for weaker candidates in the Democratic primaries.

My Message Is Heard

October 1, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

In yesterday’s post about the Polanski case, I predicted that some people would make an argument that his prosecution would deter child rape.

No doubt, some people will argue that the case, especially because Polanski is famous, will “send a message”

The Times must have been listening. Here’s a letter from this morning’s paper.

Robert Harris asks who benefits from the arrest of Roman Polanski, more than three decades after his admission of having had sex with a 13-year-old girl in Los Angeles. The answer is society and all children at risk of becoming victims in the future.

Even if Mr. Polanski succeeds in negotiating his immediate freedom, the fact of his being made to answer before a court would be salutary.

It would send a message about the seriousness of such crimes, rather than the “who cares” message that Mr. Harris sends (and that the three French presidents, who, Mr. Harris reports, have dined with Mr. Polanski, also send).

I’ve already voiced my skepticism about these messages (here). I suspect that while the court’s action may have some effect on the feelings of the partisans on both sides of this debate, its impact on sexual crimes against children will be nil.

Justice and Crime in the Same Sentence?

September 30, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Roman Polanski case – or more accurately, the reaction to it – should serve as a reminder that ideas about punishment are usually less concerned with its effect on criminals than its effect on non-criminals. We want crime policies that make us feel good, regardless of their effect on crime. We call this “justice.”

Some of Polanski’s supporters argue that he has suffered enough. Critics like Gautham Nagesh caustically shred that logic, arguing implicitly that no, he hasn’t suffered enough, he should suffer more. And while those on both sides, especially the Nageshes, claim to be concerned about child rape, nobody has anything to say about how what happens to Polanski will affect actual child rape. That’s partly because nobody really knows, but mostly because what’s at issue is not crime; it’s justice.

Polanski committed his crime thirty years ago and since then has, as far as anyone knows, committed no others. The idea that sending him to prison now will prevent crime by incapacitating or rehabilitating him is out of the question. It’s also hard to argue that punishing him now will deter other potential child rapists. No doubt, some people will argue that the case, especially because Polanski is famous, will “send a message,” but there’s no evidence that what happens to Polanski will have any effect. Besides, if Polanski is so important, why have these people not been urging his arrest and extradition for the last few decades?

Often, the justice-seekers claim to be proxies for the victim, especially in murder cases. They demand the death penalty, carrying signs that say things like “Justice for Jessica,” though Jessica, unfortunately, no longer walks this plane to enjoy the justice that will come from the execution.

The Supreme Court has agreed with this use of the justice system as a vehicle for personal feelings. Victims and relatives may now make “victim impact” statements that affect sentencing. Unfortunately for the justice-seekers in the Polanski case, the victim herself is on record as wanting no further punishment for the criminal. In fact, she issued a statement that the further pursuit of the case is hurting her and her family. So, as with the “justice for Jessica” types, it’s clear that the feelings the justice-seekers are concerned with are their own.

Arguments about justice are fine for a case in the headlines. That’s probably why the case is in the headlines – it’s a vehicle for justice, a vehicle that we can all ride on and try to steer in the direction we like. The trouble arises when we use these cases and our reactions to them as the basis for policies on sentencing, and when we think that the sentences that satisfy our sense of justice will also bring less crime.

What’s New, Pussycat?

September 29, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Lisa at Sociological Images linked to some in-house research reported on the blog of OK Cupid , an online dating site. I assume that OK works like Match.com – you look at people’s profiles; if you’re interested, you send them a message. Maybe they respond, or maybe they ignore you.

At OK Cupid, about two-thirds of the messages get no response.

The Cupidologists did a content analysis of 500,000 messages to find out what increases or decreases that rate. For example, should you compliment the person on their appearance?

The red bars heading south show response rates below the 32% average. Tell someone she’s sexy, and you’ve cut your chances in half. Messages containing the word “hot” (regardless of context – even if it was about the weather), decreased the chances of response from 32% to 25% (probably not about the weather). The authors say that this finding applied to both sexes but that men were much more likely to use these terms. OTOH, non-physical compliment words (green bars) can raise your chances by a few percentage points. (BTW, netspeak terms in messages killed ur chances of a response.)

And the term had the biggest positive effect?


“You mention.” In other words, “I actually read what you wrote in your profile.” Or, “I’m interested in what you said, not just in how you look.”

I wonder whether something similar applies in face-to-face first encounters – i.e., pick-up lines. Of course, when you see someone in a bar, the only information you have is their appearance. You don’t yet know about long walks on the beach.

Salutations aren’t pick-up lines, but the OKers do say that greetings made a difference. A message that began, “How’s it going?” was more than twice as likely to get a response as “Hi.”

OK also has other research reports (e.g., “Rape Fantasies and Hygiene By State”), but these are based on surveys of their clients. The sample is large, but there may be problems of representativeness.)

Kill and Maim — But Please, No Violence

September 26, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Times this morning has an article about Najibulla Zazi – the guy who was buying all that peroxide and nail polish remover in order to make bombs. (“I have a lot of girlfriends,” he told an employee of the Beauty Supply Warehouse who had asked him about the large quantities. In the context of what we now know, the line sounds like something out of a Monty Python sketch.*)

The Times is trying to “explain his embrace of violence.”

The trouble is that although we think that “violence” is a quality of the act, the way we usually use the word shows that whether an act is violent depends on who does it and why. To destroy the World Trade Towers killing 3000 people, that’s violence. But what about bombing Baghdad in shock and awe. Nobody in this country ever refers to that as violence.

The Times article provides another example:

Friends said that Najib later came to love videos on YouTube that featured Zakir Naik, a physician in India and a prominent speaker on Islam. Dr. Naik has been a controversial figure among Muslims and has been criticized for endorsing polygamy and Islamic criminal law, wherein the hands of a thief are chopped off, calling it “the most practical.” . . .

Dr. Naik does not preach violence . . .

I thought that cutting off someone’s hands was an act of violence. Naive me. But then, I also thought it was violent to kill a person. But you never hear capital punishment referred to as “violence” except by a few death-penalty abolitionists.

So if Zazi was, as is alleged, planning to bomb Yankee Stadium or Penn Station, he probably didn’t consider it violence.

The word has taken on a sort of tribal quality. Violence is what “they” do to “us.” If we do it to them, or if it’s justifiable in some other way, it’s not “violence.”

* Maybe one with the B&B with Mr. Hilter.

Philosophy — Child's Play*

September 24, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

I think that in no country in the civilized world is
less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States.

So wrote deTocqueville 175 years ago. Perhaps the converse is also true – that in no country is more attention paid to philosophy than in France. (Or is that the obverse? the transverse? the freeverse? I’d know if I’d ever taken a course in philosophy or logic, which, like a good American, I haven’t.)

I cited this French penchant for philosophy in a post a couple of years ago, where I also quoted Adam Gopnik’s speculation that French magazines might have “theory checkers” – he might just as well have said “philosophy checkers” or “logic checkers” – the way American publications have fact-checkers. “Just someone to make sure that all your premises agreed with your conclusions, that there aren’t any obvious errors of logic in your argument, that all your allusions flow together in a coherent stream—that kind of thing.”

It seems that in France, kids are weaned on philosophy. It’s as though they go straight from breast milk to Descartes (and St. Emilion). Here’s a photo taken by the wonderful water colorist Carol Gillott and posted on her Paris Breakfasts blog.



It’s from a display at the Paris Salon de Livre. The books, by Oscar Brenifier, are philosophy for kids. Savoir, C’est Quoi? Le Beau et l’Art, C’est Quoi? Moi, C’est Quoi? And so on.

The cover of Savoir, C'est Quoi promises “Six questions for juggling with ideas and looking behind appearances.” Questions like, “How do you know the universe exists?” and “Is it important to think [réfléchir]?”

In France, it seems, it’s important for kids to be exposed to ways of thinking like a grown-up, thinking seriously. In the US, we remain suspicious of philosophy, the love of thinking for its own sake.**


* The title is a variant on a cookbook for kids by Michel Oliver, La cuisine est un jeu d'enfants. Translating it as Cooking is Child’s Play just leads to too many obvious puns, especially now with “Julia and Julie” in the theaters. Like philosophy, cooking is something the French take seriously, and they convey that attitude to their children.

** Not completely. I should add that Montclair State for many years has had the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children.