Meanness and Means

April 2, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

On March 27, the Times ran an op-ed by David Elkind, “Playtime is Over,” about the causes of bullying:

it seems clear that there is a link among the rise of television and computer games, the decline in peer-to-peer socialization and the increase of bullying in our schools.

I was skeptical. Had there really been an increase in bullying? Elkind offered no evidence. He cited numbers for current years (school absences attributable to bullying), but he had no comparable data for the pre-computer or pre-TV eras. Maybe he was giving a persuasive explanation for something that didn’t exist.

I sent the Times a letter expressing my doubts. They didn’t publish it. Elkind is, after all, a distinguished psychologist, author many books on child development. As if to prove the point, three days later, the big bullying story broke. An Irish girl in South Hadley, Massachusetts committed suicide after having been bullied by several other girls in her high school. The nastiness had included Facebook postings and text messages.

I guess Elkind was right, and I was wrong. Bullying has really exploded out of control in the electronic age.

But today the op-ed page features “The Myth of Mean Girls,” by Mike Males and Meda-Chesney Lind. They look at all the available systematic evidence on nastiness by teenagers – crime data (arrests and victimizations), surveys on school safety, the Monitoring the Future survey, and the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance. They all show the same trend:

This mythical wave of girls’ violence and meanness is, in the end, contradicted by reams of evidence from almost every available and reliable source.

Worse, say the authors, the myth has had unfortunate consequences:

. . . more punitive treatment of girls, including arrests and incarceration for lesser offenses like minor assaults that were treated informally in the past, as well as alarmist calls for restrictions on their Internet use.*

This is not to say that bullying is O.K. and nothing to worry about. Mean girls exist. It’s just that the current generation has fewer of them than did their parents’ generation. Should we focus on the mean or on the average? On average, the kids are not just all right; they’re nicer. Funny that nobody is offering explanations of how the Internet and cell phones might have contributed to this decline in meanness.

*For a recent example, see my post about criminal charges brought against young teenage girls for “sexting,” even though the pictures showed no naughty bits.


UPDATE: At Salon.com, Sady Doyle argues that Lind and Males looked at the wrong data.

Unfortunately, cruelty between girls can't really be measured with the hard crime statistics on which Males and Lind's argument relies. . . . Bullying between teenage girls expresses itself as physical fighting less often than it does as relational aggression, a soft and social warfare often conducted between girls who seem to be friends. You can't measure rumors, passive-aggressive remarks, alienation and shaming with statistics.

She has a point. While most of the evidence Males and Lind cite is not “hard crime statistics,” it does focus on overt violence. But Doyle is wrong that you can’t measure “relational aggression.” If something exists, you can measure it. The problem is that your measure might not be valid enough to be of use.

If Doyle is right, if nonphysical bullying hasn’t been measured, that doesn’t mean that Males and Lind are wrong and that bullying has in fact increased. It means that we just don’t know. We do know that physical violence has decreased. So here are the possibilities.

1. Physical and nonphysical aggression are inversely related. Girls have substituted nonphysical aggression for physical aggression – social bullying has increased.
   
2. Less serious forms of aggression usually track with more serious forms (nationwide, the change in assault rates runs parallel to the change in murder rates). So we can use rates of physical aggression as a proxy for rates of bullying – social bullying has decreased.
   
3. Physical and nonphysical aggression are completely unrelated, caused by different factors and in found in different places – the change in social bullying is anybody’s guess.

You Got Truffles, My Friends

April 2, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

I first tasted truffles at Vivarois, a three-star restaurant in Paris. The first course was a paté chaud de becasses, warm woodcock paté – roughly equal sized chunks of woodcock and truffle under a golden pastry crust. The second course was a ragoût d’homard, the literal translation lobster stew hardly does it justice – medallions of lobster and similarly sized slices of truffle in some delicate pink sauce with tarragon and cognac.

Truffles show up frequently in the dishes at these fancy restaurants. But why?

The Veblen answer is simple – conspicuous consumption. Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, 1889. Rich people spend their money conspicuously – in a manner so that others will know they are rich.

Truffles are expensive. They grow underground, usually near oak trees. They cannot be cultivated. The supply is limited to what nature provides (and what the truffle pigs and dogs can find), so the price remains high, very high. Good fresh truffles go for about $500 a pound.

Rich people like truffles, goes the Veblen line, because eating truffles announces to the world (or at least to yourself and those at your table) that you are rich. That’s also why rich people like lobster. Lobster meat runs upwards of $40 a pound.


A more Bourdieu-esque taste of the truffled lobster stew would discern not so much the display of crude financial capital but of cultural capital. In the world of three-star restaurants, food is art. Eating is certainly not the practical matter of allaying hunger and gaining nutrition. As Bourdieu says, it’s about form, about the “aestheticization of practice,” and about the “opposition between the easy and the difficult.” You’re not just eating a good meal; you’re appreciating difficult art, an appreciation possible only for those with sufficient cultural capital.

If only we could do an experiment – vastly increase the supply of truffles and lower the price. It may not happen right away, but an article in the Times holds out some hope. Biologists have decoded the truffle genome and discovered that truffles are sexual.

The precious fungi had long been thought to lead an asexual existence, but Dr. Martin and his colleagues have found that they have two sexes, or mating types.

How much longer before they will be forced to mate in captivity? When that happens, I suspect they will cease to be essentials for the hautest of haute cuisines. The restaurants that serve the rich will move on to some other rare and expensive foodstuff.

That’s what happened with lobsters in the US, though in reverse. Now lobster is a delicacy. But in the early days of the republic, lobsters were plentiful, and consequently they were poor people’s food.

In Massachusetts, some of the servants . . . had it put into their contracts that they would not be forced to eat lobster more than three times a week. (Maine source here.)

Truffles in abundance would no longer be special. The appreciation of dishes cooked with truffles would be open to all, it would be easy, not difficult; it would no longer mark the difference between a gentleman and a bum (with a capital B and that rhymes with T . . .).

Truffles in fact are very much like garlic – a strong and distinctive flavor that can be added to just about any dish except desserts. But foodies don’t go all rapturous just because the chef has blessed some dish with generous amounts of garlic.

Art – Reality and Roth

March 30, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

I don’t know a lot about the sociology of art. But one thing that’s interesting about art is that art is artificial. That means there’s a special relationship between audience and artist. They have an unspoken agreement that it’s all a lie, that it isn’t real. But at the same time, they have to pretend that it is real.

Magicians make a big show of making things disappear or reading minds. They wave their hands in a big flourish or furrow their brows in deep concentration. But we know they’re just pretending. They don’t come right out and say, “This is just a trick – the vase of flowers didn’t really disappear, and I can’t really read your mind.” But we know that’s the deal, the same way we know, without being told, that the actors playing Romeo and Juliet don’t really die.*

Novelists, too, admit that they are telling lies. They make up characters, give them made-up names. Alexander Portnoy (he of the complaint) is a fiction, a character invented by Philip Roth. But in later novels, Roth went on to create a character, Nathan Zuckerman, who was very much like Roth and had even written a book much like Portnoy’s Complaint. Roth was deliberately blurring the line between author and character, between reality and fiction.

In Operation Shylock, he smudged that line even further. The novel is subtitled, “A Confession,” and its narrator is a novelist named Philip Roth. Yet another character in it is a man who goes around claiming to be Philip Roth and propounding political ideas that are at odds with those of the real Philip Roth. Well, not the real Philip Roth the author, but the “real” Philip Roth the narrator of the novel. Or are those two the same?

And now life is imitating art. A fictitious Philip Roth is saying things that the real Philip Roth disagrees with. As Judith Thurman reports in the current New Yorker, a right-wing Italian tabloid published an interview with Roth by freelancer Tomasso Debenedetti in which Roth said he was “disappointed” with President Obama. Asked about this by another Italian journalist (for the respectable and more leftish La Repubblica), Roth said he’d never heard of Debenedetti or the tabloid and that the statement was “completely contrary to what I think. Obama, in my opinion, is fantastic.”

I suppose there’s a satisfying irony here – Roth’s own meta-chickens coming home to roost – but he’s not the only one. Debenedetti also published an interview with John Grisham, whose novels stick closely to the conventions of fiction. That interview too was critical of Obama. And it was entirely made up by Debenedetti.


(I have a personal association between Roth and sociology. I was in grad school when the first chapter of Portnoy’s Complaint was published in the premiere issue of New American Review, a journal formatted as a drugstore paperback – same shape, same size – but with articles and fiction inside. I got a copy at the newsstand and had barely started reading it when it was time for a class with Talcott Parsons. I sat there in the auditorium, keeping the book discreetly below the level of the seat in front me, trying to read the story and listen to the lecture at the same time – an impossible task. It was Portnoy or Parsons. I think I made the right decision, but a few of my classmates wondered just what it was that Parsons was saying that I found so amusing.)**

*Magicians resent performers who claim to have real magical powers but who are, in reality, just doing magic tricks – people like self-proclaimed psychic Uri Geller. In those cases, magicians will do what they would never do otherwise – expose the secrets of the “psychic’s” tricks.

** UPDATE, July 20. Our library has . New American Review volumes on the shelf, and in checking yesterday, I discovered that it was issue #3, not #1. The excerpt from Portnoy was the first piece in that issue, and it began with this sentence: “Did I mention, Doctor, that when I was fifteen I took it out of my pants and whacked off on the 107 bus from New York?” No wonder Parsons lecturing on Weber lost out.

The Envelope Please . . .

March 27, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

. . . . and please let it be a thick one.

It’s the other collegiate March Madness. Acceptances and rejections are going out to high school seniors.

The Wall Street Journal had an article last week about very successful people who were rejected by their first choice (which was mostly Harvard). It was a feel-good article, or more accurately a don’t-feel-bad article. See, even if you don’t get into your first choice, you can still become fabulously wealthy and famous. Look at Warren Buffett, Meredith Viera, Ted Turner, Tom Brokaw, et. al.

That’s what we social scientists call anecdotal evidence – examples. Examples exemplify, they don’t prove. On the other side, you could just as easily paraphrase Sophie Tucker: “I’ve been accepted, and I’ve been rejected. And believe me, honey, accepted is better.”

There may be actually be some systematic evidence showing that when you control for other success-related factors like ability, it doesn’t much matter which college you go to. But I’m not at all sure about this, and if such evidence exists, the WSJ did not cite it.

As for assuaging the pain, I wonder if stories about Brokaws and Buffetts help as much as does talking with others around you. At the high school my son attended, the kids have a “Wall of Rejection” where they tape their 8 ½ x 11" pieces of bad news. The kids see all the others they know – even the smart ones – who got the same thin envelope. And unless a kid believes strongly that he’s the next Warren Buffett, the news about classmates may be more comforting than knowing about celebs.

I blogged this a couple of years ago – I’m not too ashamed to be recycling my garbage. Go here for the story, some pictures, and a great letter one of the kids wrote.