The Playing Fields of Landon

June 13, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

“LANDON SCHOOL expects its students to become young men of character and integrity – men who behave honorably in all of their actions and relationships with others.”

Landon is the fancy private school for boys where some “rising freshmen” – boys of fourteen or fifteen – created a sports fantasy league, complete with a website where they posted information on candidates they could draft. The trouble was that the sport was sex, the candidates were girls, and the object of the game was to score points – the boys planned to throw parties, invite the girls, and rack up points for each type of sexual contact. (WaPo story here.)

The school undoubtedly sees the boys as betraying its ideals – all that stuff on its Website about character, honor, respect, true brotherhood, and the rest. The boys’ fantasy sex league was the antithesis of these virtues.

Or was it? Maybe it was just a variant form of them.

If the continuum is from honorable to dishonorable, from respectful to disrespectful, or from good character to bad character, then yes, what the boys did was the opposite of the school’s principles.

But what if you think about it as two different ways of relating to other people? In World One, your relations with people are governed by Important Principles. The object of any interaction is to measure up, to score points for yourself and your team by behaving on the basis of those principles. Other people are more like objects in this game, objects towards which you behave honorably or respectfully or sexually, depending on the principles set forth by your team (or school or society). The important thing is to be true to your code or your school.

In World Two, you relate to other people as people. Interactions are guided by a kind of mutuality, by what makes you and the other people involved feel good or bad. You try to understand others, to know a lot about them and their reactions, and you act on the basis of this empathic knowledge. In this world, good character and honor are much less relevant concepts.

The first world works well in large organizations where most people are more or less strangers to one another. The second may be more appropriate to relationships among people who are closely and personally connected. Personalized relationships in business and government bring corruption and unfairness. But you can get just as awkward a misalignment when you force universalistic principles, even noble ones, on personal relationships. Even if, like the Beach Boys, you are being true to your girl just like you’re true to your school, you are relating not to her but to an abstract ideal – trueness. Worse, abstract principles, whether honor or virginity pledges, may prove to be brittle when they come up against sexual urges or other powerful human feelings.

In earlier comments ( here and here), I let slip my doubts about justice. Now, I’m questioning honor and character. There must be something wrong with me, but here’s what I mean. The trouble with these virtues is that they allow men (these are typically masculine virtues) to treat other people in the most inhumane ways. Take honor, for example. In a decent society, the phrase “honor killing” would be incomprehensible. But when we hear it, we understand immediately what it means. We may not always approve of the specifics – a man killing his sister because she was raped. But we get the idea, probably because we’re familiar with other defenses of honor that we do deem legitimate even though we realize that people may well wind up being killed. Death – either yours or the other guy’s – before dishonor.

If I wanted to arrange social life so that boys would exploit girls as sexual objects, how would I go about it? First, I would segregate boys from girls for most of the important parts of daily life lest the boys get to know the girls as people. Second, I would have the boys focus on abstract principles, and I would emphasize that these principles are more valuable and worthwhile than are fallible, frustrating human relationships. My Website would have statements much like the one at the top of this post.

On the other hand, if I wanted to avert that exploitative mentality, I might do everything possible to get boys and girls together in very ordinary circumstances. My Website might say something like:

The Livingston School expects boys and girls to hang out together a lot and learn to enjoy one another’s company. Character, schmaracter.

Creative Destruction and Schools

June 11, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Charter schools seem to be all the rage. Even the Obama administration likes them. Now New York state is more than doubling their numbers.

Charter schools are a pet project of conservatives, who see them as a way to weaken teachers unions. Mayors, maybe even in liberal places like New York City, may feel the same way. Conservatives also like charters because these schools are, at least in principle, based on competition. Charters are run by private entrepreneurs, not public monopolies. Schools are competing, since they have to compete to attract students. Within a school, the principal can reward good teachers and fire bad ones, so teachers are forced to compete.

In the classic Adam Smith model, when suppliers compete and consumers can choose, products get better and prices come down. As more suppliers enter the marketplace to compete, the strong survive, the weak become the debris of “creative destruction.” But the consumers are better off. That’s certainly true for many products – like the computer that you are reading this on (probably not a Kaypro). But with charter schools, the effect may be reversed. The first ones may be the best. Then, as states make it easier for more educational entrepreneurs to get into the game, schools of lesser quality may come on line.

The overall evidence on charter schools is hardly cause for conservative rejoicing. The well-done studies find that most of them do about as well (or as badly) as public schools at improving kids’ test scores. A few do better; a larger number do worse. More to the point, the charters that do outperform publics are those in states and cities where they face strong resistance (mostly from unions). In places where charters have had an easier time, they tend to do worse than publics. And where there’s money to be made by entrepreneurs, there’s also the risk of outright fraud.

Poor -- Better Off Here Than in Scandinavia?

June 10, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Like many liberals, I had always thought that the poor in the US, those at the bottom of the income ladder, were worse off than their counterparts in Europe, especially the Scandinavian countries.

Wrong, says economist Price Fishback in a guest post a couple of weeks ago at Freakonomics. He argues that the standard measures of social spending are inadequate, and that if you do the math his way, the US, Denmark, and Sweden are very similar.

Is the U.S. safety net a better system than the universal Nordic programs? Many Nordic people seem to prefer theirs, and many Americans seem to prefer ours. Despite the difference in approaches, the striking feature here is that the amounts spent per person in the population are not that different.

OK, forget the fatuous comment about what people prefer. People don’t know enough about foreign systems for these preferences to mean much. And even if the amounts spent are similar, the important question is who gets what? Are we liberals totally wrong about how these countries treat the poor?

No. Lane Kenworthy has an excellent analysis too long to summarize here. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, take a look at both articles. (Kenworthy has links to more formal versions of Fishback’s work). The short answer is that in the US, a much smaller net portion of social spending actually benefits the poor. Also, a standard measure of deprivation finds 13% of people in the US reporting deprivation, more than twice the percentage in Sweden and Denmark.

Class Distinction on Paper

June 9, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Lisa at Sociological Images has a wonderful post about “post-World-War-I men’s magazine covers.” She compares them to today’s men’s magazines and finds that both “emphasize control over oneself and the conquest of women.”

The goals are similar but the lad mags of today choose different means to move toward those goals. The old vintage mags get there via “tests of strength, cunning, and fighting ability.” The Maxims do it via consumption: “the right exercise, the right products (usually hygiene or tech-related), the right advice on picking up women and, well, the right women.”

Lisa’s comment is typically perceptive. But she skips over a class dimension, one that would have been clear to readers back then but which is now more attenuated, a distinction based on education, occupation, and the quality of the paper.

(Click on the image for a slightly larger view.)

Neither Lisa nor her source specify the years for these covers, but my guess, based on the cover price (25-35¢), is that they are from the early fifties. That was also the time when a young Frank Zappa might have been furtively reading them and seeing teaser titles like “Weasels Ripped My Flesh.” (The yellow circle around the title is my own addition. Older Zappa fans might not otherwise notice it. If you missed the reference, click on the Zappa link.)

The large class distinction 55-60 years ago was still the classic split between blue collar and white collar, working class and middle class, pulps and slicks. Man’s Life and the other men’s magazines were all pulps. Their intended audience – the blue-collar, working class man – could choose from among several of these (see Lisa’s post for covers of Male, Real, Men’s Conquest, and the rest). Women too had a variety of pulps – magazines devoted to romance, “true stories” of celebrities, or confession.

(Click on the image for a slightly larger view.)

But slick-paper magazines for women (the middle-class and the aspiring) also abounded. They covered topics like fashion, homemaking, and beauty. Several of them are still around today (Vogue, Woman’s Day, Glamour, etc.)

But for the educated, middle-class man – the guys on Mad Men circa 1960 – there were almost no magazines. Esquire, and that was about it. Other than that, they could read the news magazines like Time or general interest slicks (Life, Look, The Saturday Evening Post).

Then came Playboy. It was Hefner’s genius (or luck) to create a magazine for this untapped market. The Playboy message back then was much the same as the one Lisa identifies in today’s lad mags – having the right products, ideas, and tastes. (Hefner and Bourdieu are singing the same song, just to a different chart. And it should be noted that Hef’s right-hand man was a sociologist, A.C. Spectorsky.)

Playboy hit the newsstands in 1953. The next year brought men that other staple of the slicks – Sports Illustrated. Sports magazines had been around, but they were all on pulp paper.  Sports Illustrated was to Sport what Playboy was to Man’s Life. And both slicks were incredibly successful.