Summertime Blues

July 16, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Why hasn’t Marginal Revolution done a “Markets in Everything” post on summer school?

In the fall and spring semesters, universities are effectively a cartel. Students are in the same position as New York restaurants looking for trash haulers when the Mafia ran that show. If you’re a student at Anywhere U*, and you want to take a biology course, you can’t go to another school to take it. Well maybe you can, but you will have to make some special arrangement. But at least you don’t have to worry that the Provost is going to pull you aside to have a chat about kneecaps and baseball bats. Aside from that, to a great extent, each school is the company store.

Then, in the heat of summer, the cartel melts, and higher ed becomes a free market. Students can shop around, while schools scramble to compete and offer what the market demands. And here is what the market, i.e.students, want:

• online courses (i.e., courses where you don’t have to show
  up)
  
• courses that don’t interfere with summer vacation,
  which means
  
  • courses that last only a short time – three
    weeks or so
    
  • courses that end by mid-June or that don’t
    start until the second week of August
    
• courses that meet a requirement

In my department, we had to cancel four sections that require students to come to campus and actually be in a classroom with a professor. But an online course that fulfills a Gen. Ed. category and was scheduled in the “pre-session” (May 17 - June 3) sold out immediately. The in-person courses couldn’t compete with pajama courses – ours and those offered at other schools.

A market means competition and flexibility not just in scheduling but in pricing as well. A university nearby was offering a tuition deal – take one course at full fare, get a second course at half price.** They’re also charging an additional $120 fee for online courses, not, I suspect, because online courses are more expensive to run, but because it’s what the market will bear.

As technology increasingly loosens the bonds of time and place, and as students are free to move about the Internet, education will more resemble this summertime market. I have seen the future and it is summer school. These changes also mean that I need to revise my idea of what the university is all about. I’ve been clunking along with an outdated model, thinking of our enterprise as education. No doubt that goes on. Sometimes. But the better model is the economic one that sees teacher and students activity as commerce – not teaching and learning but selling and buying. Students aren’t getting an education so much as they are buying credits. And that’s what we’re selling.


*My favorite generic university name is the one coined by David Galef – U of All People.

** At least, this is what colleagues here told me. On the school’s website I could not find any specific offer, but the Website did have a link to “Summer Session, Discounted Tuition.”

Lies My Online Dating Partners Told Me

July 15, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

OK Cupid may not be the largest online dating site, but it has the best data analysis – not surprising since its founders are Harvard math grads. They use the demographic data their subscribers provide, and they can trace the paths of messages – who sends to who, who responds to who. Last week, Christian Rudder, one of the founders, posted some detective work they did to assess the truthfulness of their customers. For example, the height distribution of their male subscribers is about two inches to the right of the national distribution. Either the OK Cupid guys are an unusually tall bunch, or they were standing on tiptoe when they filled out the form. They don’t need Randy Newman to suspect that the shorter a guy is, the less interested women will be. And they’re right (up to about 6' 1") They may be liars, but they’re not fools. It’s not surprising that people stretch the truth and their height. But why would people on a dating site lie about their sexual orientation? Yet the OK Cupid analysts found a difference between reported and observed behavior, at least for those who put their orientation as “bi.” Less than 25% of men who claimed to be bisexual actually sent messages to both men and women.

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

More likely, they weren’t lying. My guess is that the younger men were using OK Cupid as place to cautiously explore their homosexual tendencies. Maybe they were truly bisexual and didn’t need a dating service to find women. Or maybe they were homosexual but hadn’t yet come to identify themselves as such. Rudder speculates that as gay men age into their thirties, they no longer need to claim that they are bisexual. But that still doesn’t explain why even among the older self-identified bisexual men, only about one in seven is looking for both male and female partners. The data on women do not show so dramatic a change with age. But as with the men, most women who identify themselves as bisexual send all their messages to either women or men, not both.

UPDATE, July 16:

There are lies, and then there are lies.

Hastings-Dobbs Ferry Patch, NY - Ardsley Internet Scammer Pleads Guilty to Grand Larceny via kwout

Prisons Then and Now – Plus Ça Change

le 14 juillet 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Bastille was a prison, and I assume that like most European prisons of the time, it was a miserable place. De Tocqueville’s ostensible purpose in visiting America a generation or so after the fall of the Bastille was to study our progressive prison system.


Some things change, some stay the same. The Bastille was torn down during the Revolution. Now the only prison still standing within the official Paris boundaries is the Prison de la Santé, built in 1867, and it was not much of an improvement.


On Bastille Day in 1944 an inmate uprising was brutally suppressed by the Vichy regime. Recently, a blogger at Invisible Paris, Adam, referred to its squalor as “Zola-esque” (that’s French for Dickensian). He saw it only from the outside, but an American reader who had visited her brother* there then wrote to Adam providing more detail.

Veronique Vasseur, the prison physician, told me that the cells were full of rats and lice. Suicide is rampant, and depression lurks in every crowded cell.

That was in 1994. A few years later, Dr. Vasseur published an exposé of conditions in the prison. According to the story in the Times,

Skin diseases were rampant because showers were only available twice a week, though temperatures sometimes soared to more than 100 degrees in cramped cells holding four prisoners each.

Inmates stuffed their clothes in the cracks in their cells to keep the rats out, and most of the mattresses were full of lice and other insects. Some of the weaker prisoners, Dr. Vasseur came to understand, had been turned into slaves by their cellmates.

But what caught Adam’s attention in the letter from the woman who had visited the prison was this paragraph:

There were many international prisoners there awaiting extradition to their countries. Remarkably they all felt that extradition to the US would be the least desirable outcome, and they were correct. La Sante is unsanitary, and frightful looking - terribly crowded and unhealthy, but somehow civil.

Some things stay the same – French prisons perhaps. Some things change – in 1830, America was the country whose prison system a young idealistic Frenchman might hope to learn from. Today, our prisons have such a bad reputation that even prisoners in a disease-ridden, rat-infested French prison want to avoid extradition here.

No 21st-century de Tocqueville will be coming to the US to pick up pointers about prison reform.

* According to the Website supporting him, the brother, John Knock, was caught in a marijuana sting. He was extradited to the US. He pled not guilty. He was convicted, and sentenced to “2 life terms for conspiracy to import and distribute marijuana, and 20 years for conspiracy to money launder.” He was a first-time offender.

Economics Made Simple - Unemployment Version

July 11, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Economics, as Tyler Cowen says, is “really, really, really . . . hard.” But there are simple versions of economics, and I don’t mean just Father Guido Sarducci’s five-minute- university version (this earlierSocioblog post has a link to Fr. Sarducci).

Here’s a letter from the New York Times arguing that current proposals to extend unemployment benefits will actually increase the unemployment rate.

The more government subsidizes unemployment, the more people will indulge in it for longer periods of time.
--Ryan Young, Washington, July 6, 2010
The writer is a journalism fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

When I read this, I assumed the writer was some smug, smart-assed kid (what is a “journalism fellow” at CEI anyway?) who had learned one or two principles in Econ 101 and had no sense of how real people think and act – people who have lost their jobs and are scraping by on $300 a week in unemployment benefits (the US average).

A couple of days later, the Wall Street Journal ran a full op-ed by Arthur Laffer, a well-known economist and not a kid, saying the same thing.

The most obvious argument against extending or raising unemployment benefits is that it will make being unemployed either more attractive or less unattractive, and thereby lead to higher unemployment.

Economists sometimes clarify principles by using simplified models. Here’s Laffer’s explanation of the effects of unemployment benefits.

Imagine what the unemployment rate would look like if unemployment benefits were universally $150,000 per year. My guess is we'd have a heck of a lot more unemployment.

Marx (or somebody) said that differences in degree eventually become differences in kind, but Laffer doesn’t think so. He is arguing that a few more weeks at $300 is just a smaller version of $150,000 a year for life.

He provides some evidence in this graph (note the compassionate title):


According to Laffer, the graph shows that “since the 1970s there’s been a close correlation between increased unemployment benefits and an increase in the unemployment rate.” [emphasis added]

Correlation is not cause. In fact, what I see in the graph is that the increase in benefits almost always follows the increase in unemployment. That’s exactly what would happen now. Unemployment goes up, people can’t find work, and Congress increases the amount or length of benefits. There is a correlation, but the cause goes the other way.

I have heard many politicians argue that because unemployment is high, we need to extend benefits. It’s much rarer to hear people say that they have chosen not to work because that $300 a week is just too tempting.

From Cheney to BP

July 9, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

When did the BP oil disaster (11 people killed, untold environmental damage) begin? The explosion occurred in April 2010.

But in 2001, one of the first things Dick Cheney did when he became president vice-president was to convene a task force on energy. The process was so important that the government refused to tell the public who was on the task force or who they were consulting. After all, in a democracy, it makes no sense to let the people know what the government is doing or who they’re doing it with.

The task force did produce an energy policy and a document that contains this prescient bullet point:

• Advanced, more energy efficient drilling and production methods:
— reduce emissions;
— practically eliminate spills from offshore platforms; and
— enhance worker safety, lower risk of blowouts, and provide better protection of groundwater resources

Nine years later, those chickens came home to roost, feathers drenched in oil.

There’s probably some larger sociological point here, maybe about how industries “capture” regulatory agencies, though capture suggests that there was some actual struggle going on. With the Cheney-Bush administration, that would be like saying that a rich kid “captured” the extravagant birthday presents he’d been whining for. In both cases, it would be technically more accurate to use the term gift .

(HT: Eric Alterman )

Writing Contest

July 8, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

The InsideHigherEd table of contents listed:

Provost Prose
And the winner is . . .

I hadn’t read Ed in a while, so I thought they must have been running a contest with faculty submitting actual sentences from memos from their provosts.

Turns out, “Provost Prose” is a column written by an actual provost (Herman Miller of Hofstra), and his prose is surprisingly clear, readable, and non-bureaucratic. The column in question was about Hofstra’s Teacher of the Year award and whether a winner should be allowed to repeat, threepeat, etc., hence the title of the column.

But there should be an academic prose competition – like the Bulwer-Lytton awards. I used to collect particularly opaque gems of the genre, full of bureaucratic vagueness, but I must have deleted the file. Maybe some other more widely read blog would run the contest. Only authenticated memos from authenticated administrators. One hundred word maximum. All entries become the property of the blog. Offer not good where prohibited by law. Eyes on your own paper, turn off all cell phones, no flash photography, and if you have cellophane-wrapped candy, open it now.

Hot and Cold

July 6, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

How hot is it? It’s so hot that even though I know next to nothing about global climate change, I’m doing a post on it.

When there was a heavy snowstorm back in Februray, and the Fox news geniuses were saying that this snowstorm was burying all notions of global warming, I embedded a Daily Show clip pointing out the idiocy of using this single bit of anecdotal evidence.*

So instead of pictures of thermometers with three-digit temperatures today, here are two simple graphs from Climate Progress showing more systematic, long-term evidence on hot and cold.





*Jon Stewart should also have pointed out that the temperatures weren’t especially cold for February. There was just a lot of snow.

The Real America

July 5, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

I was thinking yesterday about Sarah Palin’s famous phrase, “the real America.” I was thinking about it at the parking lot at the beach, where, as we were unloading the car, a fortyish man wished my family a “Hyeppy Fourth of July,” as he passed, then went back to speaking Russian with his group. The beach itself had a diversity that I usually take for granted, at least when I’m not thinking about “the real America.” The Dominicans and Koreans and blacks, the Indian women in their beach saris, the older guy with a gold “ ח י” dangling on his pale chest, the Chinese families – they are the America I live in, and they seemed very real. So did the traffic jam as we inched along the Cross Island Parkway on the way home, and so did the all the thousands of people standing on the West Side Highway who came out of their apartments into the heat to watch the fireworks on the Hudson.

They are all real, but they’re not Palin’s “real America” and I think I know what she means: “real” in the sense of “ideal” – not a utopian, unattainable ideal, but one that actually exists.

A history teacher in my high school asked us who we thought of as the “typical” Mt. Lebanon student. The kid who got by far the most votes was the quarterback and captain of the football team, a High Honor Roll student who went on to Yale. He was real, but he was not typical. Even in my bell-curve-ignorant adolescence I knew that much.

In my own way, I too conflate the real with the ideal, and maybe you do too. I think that if you want to see the real me as a teacher, you should have been in class that day two semesters ago, when I presented the material so compellingly, and all the students were into it, asking questions, and suddenly getting it (also laughing at my jokes and making their own). Those other hours – the ordinary ones and especially the dreary ones – they’re not the real me.

I wonder if the millions of us sitting in traffic, on our way to a job in some Dilbert cubicle, are thinking that this is not the real America and not the real me. The real America is Palin’s real America, and you can read it in the names of our cars. But somehow the real America of those Sequoias and Comanche Explorers, Tahoes, Scouts, and Trail Blazers got trapped in this traffic jam on the Parkway in the same way that a transsexual might feel trapped in a man’s body although he is “really” a woman. In grad school, I knew a guy who was certain that he was “really” an NBA power forward trapped in the body of a Jewish 5' 10" math grad student.

As Palin herself acknowledged, in her dictionary “real” meant “best.” Here’s the longer version:

The best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.

Palin’s “real America” – Norman Rockwell, but with guns and NASCAR – does exist, and for many it’s an attractive picture. The trouble lies in thinking that those other Americans are not real or, as Palin says, are not sufficiently pro-America, and therefore do not have a legitimate right to govern, a view that seems fairly common among the Tea Partiers. The other trouble comes when you try to use that vision as a basis for policy.Those Norman Rockwell pictures have nothing in them about trillions of dollars in highly leveraged CDOs or the complicated politics, ethnic and violent, in the foreign lands we invade, or any of the other problems that government – real government – has to deal with.

Company Ways

July 1, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

“How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” was on TMC Tuesday night in honor of the centenary of Frank Loesser’s birth. The Broadway show opened in 1961, sort of a musical comedy version of William H. Whyte’s 1956 best-seller The Organization Man.


Loesser’s musical was light satire; Whyte’s book was sociology. But the message of both was that corporations were places that demanded nearly mindless conformity of all employees. Or as Mr. Twimble tells the ambitious newcomer (J. Pierpont Finch), “play it the company way.”

FINCH:When they want brilliant thinking / From employees
TWIMBLE: That is no concern of mine.
FINCH: Suppose a man of genius / Makes suggestions.
TWIMBLE: Watch that genius get suggested to resign.

Conformity was a topic of much concern in America in those days, in the popular media and in social science (as in the Asch line length experiments). Today, not so much.

the Organization Man, if he ever existed, is dead now. The well-rounded fellow who gets along with pretty much everyone and isn’t overly brilliant at anything sees his status trading near an all-time low. And all those brilliant screwballs whose fate Whyte bemoaned are sitting now on top of corporate America.

So wrote Michael Lewis in Slate 1997.

That’s one version. I don’t really know if the corporate climate is different today (where’s an OrgTheorist when you need one?). No doubt, “brilliant screwballs” can find save haven in corporations, at least in areas that require technical brilliance, and some may wind up at the top. But I wonder how such quirkiness survives in other areas like sales. Barbara Ehrenreich, in her recent book Bright-Sided, looks at corporations today – with their motivational speakers and “coaches” – and sees the same old demand for cheerful, optimistic obedience, especially in this era of outsourcing and downsizing.

The most popular technique for motivating the survivors of downsizing was “team building” – an effort so massive that it has spawned a “team-building industry” overlapping the motivation industry. . . .
The literature and coaches emphasize that a good “team player” is by definition a “positive person.” He or she smiles frequently, does not complain, is not overly critical, and gracefully submits to whatever the boss demands.

Or as Frank Loesser put it,

FINCH: Your face is a company face.
TWIMBLE: It smiles at executives then goes back in place.

Here’s the whole song from the 1967 film version:

The movie has another uncanny resemblance to today. The costumes and even the sets look like “Mad Men” – not surprising since both are set in the New York corporate world of the early 1960s. But there’s more. In the Broadway show and then the musical of “How to Succeed,” Robert Morse (Finch), rises to become head of advertising. Fifty years later, in “Mad Men,” Robert Morse (Bert Cooper) is the head of an advertising agency. (And he’s still wearing a bow tie.)

I asked my son, a “Mad Men” watcher, to look at the 1967 movie and try to identify the actor playing Finch. He couldn’t, at least not without a hint or two.

Methods Fraud - Right and Left

June 30, 2010

Two links:

1. Fox News used a really, really deceptive graph to make job loss data look even worse than it really is. Media Matters has the story.

2. Research 2000, a polling firm, may have been faking its data. Kos, who has been relying on their polls, has a long post detailing the tell-tale signs – things people would do if they were trying to make their polls appear to follow random sampling. (Makes me feel a bit more confident of my own criticism of a Research 2000 poll.)

UPDATE, July 1: I had thought that the Kos/Research 2000 story was just for those interested in technical matters (sampling, data distributions) and maybe political blogs. But the both the Times and WaPo and perhaps other newspapers have stories about it today.

Rich and Richer, Dumb and Dumber

June 28, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities ran the CBO data on income and published a report showing the huge increase in inequality since 1979, especially in recent years (the data go up to 2007 – full report here). It’s the people at the top – the default swappers and hedge funders – who’ve been making out like bandits, while the rest of us limped slowly along.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

The graph shows percent changes. How much is that in American money?

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

We all knew this. But I’m still surprised that supposedly intelligent people can still attribute it all to individual factors. Yes, individual differences in ability account for individual differences. But they don’t make for huge changes in the overall distribution
.
But here we have Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit, one of the most widely read bloggers in the known universe (especially the conservative universe), reprinting the comment of a reader at a tax blog that posted the data.

A reason for the “wealth or income gap”: Smart people keep on doing things that are smart and make them money while stupid people keep on doing things that are stupid and keep them from achieving.

People who get an education, stay off of drugs, apply themselves, and save and wisely invest their earnings do a lot better than people who drop out of school, become substance abusers, and buy fancy cars and houses that they can’t afford, only to lose them.

We don’t have an income gap. We have a stupid gap.

Glenn calls it “the comment of the day.”

In 1993, the average household in the top 1% was making 36 times the income of a household in the lowest fifth. In the next 14 years, those top guys worked really hard while the poor apparently sold their diplomas to buy crack and Escalades, so by 2007 the gap had doubled. The richest now made 72 times the income of the poor.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

The funny thing is that for a few years (1984- 1983 1993) the rich-poor gap was decreasing. It must have been all the cocaine those bond traders were doing.

The commenter is right – there may be a stupid gap. But it’s the gap that Durkheim suggested long ago. Some people look at “social facts” – large differences between one time or place and another – and try to explain them in terms of individual facts. Other people seek an explanation in social facts – facts about the society, facts which individuals have little power to change.

(HT: Mark Kleiman)

American Exceptionalism

June 27, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

Dutch Treatment

June 26, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

My doctor poked and prodded, told me there was probably nothing to worry about but wrote prescriptions for couple of additional tests. The whole thing took a good 15 minutes.

At the checkout counter, they told me that I owed $425. I don’t know how much of that I’ll get back from the insurance company.

That same day, the Commonwealth Fund posted an update of its comparisons of healthcare quality and costs in seven countries. As in previous years, the US finished last on the overall rankings and in several of the subcategories. As for cost, literally the bottom line, we’re Number One.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

The Netherlands won this healthcare world cup. And as Erik Voeten at The Monkey Cage writes, it’s not just about insurance. He was in the Netherlands, where, as a visitor, he had no insurance.

Last summer, I had to bring my daughter to a Dutch doctor. Not only did I succeed in seeing someone that same morning but the cost [was] less than my regular co-payment in the USA, even though I have no insurance in the Netherlands and had never seen that doctor before.

The key is that the Dutch have an extensive system of family doctors, who generally operate a practice from their homes with minimal administrative assistance. These family doctors provide basic health care, do house visits, and are the gatekeepers for (more expensive) specialized care.

House calls. Does anyone out there in the US remember house calls?

Stuff and Nonsense

June 22, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Divorce among the wealthy can provide us with a tray of financial delicacies that usually aren’t passed around. In today’s Times, Andrew Ross Sorkin gives us a taste of the goodies coming out of the divorce of Elon Musk, a co-founder of PayPal who says he is now broke. Well, rich-people’s broke – he’s out of cash.

He subsists, according to court filings, on $200,000 a month and still flies his private jet.

But with rich people, it’s not about the money. I know that because I heard Maria Bartiromo a few weeks ago on NPR promoting “her”* book, The 10 Laws of Enduring Success.

Success is a feeling that we get to when we feel content. So I spoke with people like Jack Welch . . . and I asked them all about this so-called stuff in their lives and then I asked them, is that what success is? And so many people told me that purpose, knowing what matters, is so important, because it puts things into perspective for you.

In Jack Welch’s 2002 divorce trial, we learned about the “so-called stuff” – the things that purpose put into perspective for the GE CEO. (Source here.)

In the affidavit, Jane Welch claimed that her husband’s retirement package allowed him unfettered use of corporate jets (a perk valued by an expert as being worth $291,677 a month). He also had a company-owned apartment overlooking Central Park, a limousine, a cook, free flowers, country-club memberships and a charge account at Jean Georges restaurant. He was also entitled to top tickets at the Metropolitan Opera, tennis tournaments such as Wimbledon, and for games played by the Knicks, Yankees and Boston Red Sox. The affidavit revealed that he didn’t even pay for his laundry.

And that’s the retirement package – what he gets after he stops working for GE.

* Written “with” Catherine Whitney. Ms. Whitney’s name is right there on the cover, though in much a smaller font than Bartiromo. Many with-ers wind up on an inside page among the acknowledgments – in the withness protection program.

Distinction on the Velvet Rope

June 21, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

What do you do if you got an undergraduate degree from Yale, and your sociology PhD. from Harvard, and you’re on the faculty at the Kellog School of Management at Northwestern? You get a job as a cigarette girl and coat-check girl, of course. At least, that’s what you do if you’re Lauren Rivera and you want to do research about how people read the signs of status. And to do that, you have to gain the confidence of the guys on the velvet rope.

Bourdieu did surveys to see which tastes carried greater capital. Lauren Rivera watched distinction in action. She looked at who did, and who didn’t, get in the door at an “exclusive Manhattan nightclub” (Bungalow 8? Marquee? The Box? C’mon Lauren, you can tell us.)


It isn’t just about how much money you have. It’s about who you are, though obviously the gatekeepers don’t want to admit someone can’t pop the $600 for a bottle of Cristal. They assess identity by the company you keep and what you’ve spent that money on.

Social network mattered most, gender followed. For example, a young woman in jeans stood a higher chance of entrance than a well-dressed man. And an elegantly dressed black man stood little chance of getting in unless he knew someone special.

Know someone. Or know someone who knows someone. If you’re a guy, bring attractive women—ideally younger women in designer clothes. Don’t go with other dudes. And doormen are well versed in trendiness, so wear Coach, Prada, Gucci—but don’t show up in a nice suit with DSW shoes.

(Full disclosure: 1. I had to look up “DSW shoes.” I thought they were something like NSFW shoes. 2. I admire sociologists who do research on nightlife (David Grazian is another). I just wonder what they do about that 8:30 class the next morning.)

The Kellog Schoo’ls story about this research is here.

HT: Robin Hanson

The Market for Corporate-Bashing

June 19, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Why is Hollywood so anti-capitalist?

Marginal Revolution’s Alex Tabarrok was fretting about that question in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago. Alex loves capitalism (“the most humane and productive economic system the world has ever known”), so he’s miffed that American movies frequently make capitalists the heavies. Why does Hollywood refuse to show capitalism in its true, wonderful glory?

His explanation begins with a psychological analysis of the people who make the movies – writers and directors. They have, he says, a deep personal resentment of capitalists. They see capitalists as forcing them to sacrifice their art on the altar of commerce.

Capitalists work hard to produce what consumers want. . . . . filmmakers need capitalists for financial support, and so their resentment toward capitalists is especially strong.

Capitalists are nice, hard-working folks. Filmmakers are spiteful ingrates.

Ben Stein, too, thirty years ago, was struck by the anti-business leanings of writers that the media business was lavishly rewarding. Stein put it somewhat differently.

The Hollywood TV writer . . . is actually in a business, selling his labor to brutally callous businessmen. One actually has to go through that experience of writing for money in Hollywood or anywhere else to realize just how unpleasant it is. Most of the pain comes from dealings with business people, such as agents or business affairs officers of production companies and networks.

Hard-working writers, nasty capitalists.

I don’t know whose version is closer to the truth, Stein’s or Tabarrok’s. Both are economists,* both vigorously pro-capitalist. The difference is that Stein has actually worked as a writer in Hollywood.

As his quintessential anti-capitalist, Tabarrok singles out James Cameron, director of the two highest grossing films ever, “Titanic” and “Avatar.”

Despite his commercial success, Mr. Cameron is a notorious corporate basher.

That sentence, especially the word despite, makes sense only if you assume that success is antithetical to corporate bashing. Tabarrok is an economist, I’m not. My knowledge of the field barely extends past what you get at Father Guido Sarducci’s “five minute university” – “supply ana demand.” But I would think that the success of “Avatar,” “Titanic,” and the rest tell us that Cameron is supplying what consumers are demanding, and apparently, that’s corporate-bashing.

* Some people have questioned Stein’s economics perspicacity, especially after his August 2007 New York Times column in which he dismissed concerns about the subprime collapse: “these subprime losses are wildly out of all proportion to the likely damage to the economy from the subprime problems.”

Economists With Trembling Hands

June 18, 2010.
Posted by Jay Livingston

Economist Bryan Caplan blogs today about “trembling hand perfect equilibrium,” a concept he learned as an economics grad student and which he now finds “genuinely enlightening.”

It explains, for example, why imposing harsh punishments for small infractions isn't nearly as smart as it seems . . . The trembling hands concept also explains the value of trying to exceed others’ expectations. In the real world, it’s not smart to apply the minimum acceptable level of effort, or pay others the smallest amount you can get away with.

Doing your best work, paying people decently, and imposing rational penalties for infractions – all possible only if you understand “trembling hand perfect equilibrium,” at least if you’re an economist.

And they say that sociology is the discipline that takes common sense and packages it in fancy, abstruse language.

No Sex Please, We're Committed

June 17, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Note, July 2011. I have substantially rewritten this.)

Why do conservatives object to sex? Not all sex, of course. Sex in marriage is O.K., especially if it’s for purposes of procreation. But any other sex, no good.

If you asked conservatives why they favored abstinence and hated promiscuity, they would probably say that it makes for a better, more civil society. They might also say that limiting male sexual impulses is better for women too. Some of the would toss in something about God and the Bible, so some people would explain the position on abstinence as part of a general political/religious conservatism. 

The evolutionary psychologists have a different answer: conservative views on sex are a “reproductive strategy.” In the battle for passing along the most genes, conservatives have adopted a “committed strategy” (abstinence, then monogamy). But that strategy is threatened by the “promiscuous strategy.” No wonder conservatives want others to be abstinent.

I was reminded of this abstinence issue when I followed a Robin Hanson link to this article about attitudes towards drugs and sex. The researchers, Kurzban, Dukes, and Weeden, start from a finding about attitudes towards drugs. If you want to guess someone's position on drugs, don’t ask whether they are Republican or Democrat.  Ask what they think about non-marital sex.   As a predictor, sex ideology (Sociosexual Orientation Index) overwhelms political ideology. But why? Why should sexual attitudes be so important? More to the point, why should sexually conservative people care what others do sexually or pharmacologically? Here’s the evol-psych answer:

Efforts to limit recreational drug usage flow in large part from attempts by committed reproductive strategists to reduce levels of sexual promiscuity because promiscuity interferes with committed strategies.

It seems like a silly interpretation to me. But, like Freudian interpretations that similarly attribute motives that the people involved would deny: it’s hard to refute. What kinds of evidence might the evolutionists accept as disconfirming it?

Also, there are elements of sexual conservatism that seem not to fit with the evol-pscyh model. Sexual conservatives oppose gay marriage. But if these “committed strategists” wanted to get an edge, they would support gay marriage.  They would want their promiscuous gay rivals to get married and live in non-gene-transmitting gay marriages. Conservatives also oppose abortion. But if their heterosexual rivals got pregnant, shouldn’t conservatives want them to abort the fetuses rather than passing along those non-conservative genes?

It seems more plausible that what’s at stake is not the transmitting of conservative genes to the future; it’s political dominance in the present. Having your sexual morality, and not the other guy’s, enshrined in law is like having your flag flying on the state capitol, or having your language designated the official state language, or having a law “defending” your kind of marriage, or having your religious symbol used as a generic grave marker. It signifies that this land is your land, it’s not the other guy’s land.

Everything Old Is New Again

June 14, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Remember this?



Don't laugh. This is for real.



Note that it comes complete with manual carriage return. It’s available here – buy it, get a DIY kit, or send in your favorite typrewriter, and they’ll customize it.

(HT: J. R. Lennon at Ward Six.)

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.

News Flash - Sociological Prose

June 8, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Some jokes never get old, at least not at True/Slant, where Conor Friedersdorf has a pretty good parody, “What if sociologists wrote the news?”

Untangling Race & Gender from Catastrophic Incidences of Corporate Exploitation In Semi-Natural Ecosystems: A Case Study     . . . . attention is largely focused on efforts to plug the oil well undertaken by British Petroleum, a corporation founded in imperial Britain to exploit the oil resources of people of color.     It is not insignificant to cleanup efforts, however, that even today BP’s leadership lacks adequate gender diversity, its board of directors being made up of fourteen persons, only one of them who self-identifies as a female, and all of whom earn significantly more than the median income in Louisiana, Alabama, and even the relatively privileged residents of coastal Florida.

And so on. It’s nothing new, but even an old joke is funny if you’ve never heard it (or written it) before.* And from Friedersdorf’s photo, I’d guess it was only a few years ago that he was taking Soc. 101.

Also, it’s good to be reminded of the excesses and shortcomings of our prose and our ideas. Of necessity, some professional writing is going to be arcane – a convenient shorthand for insiders but opaque to those unfamiliar with the concepts and arguments. Still, when you read over something you’re about to put out there for students, the public, or even other sociologists, it’s useful to ask, “Does this sound like a parody?”

-----------------------------
*Speaking of old gags that are funny to the young, True/Slant also has a story from failblog about the U of Utah student newspaper’s year-end prank – farewell editorial columns set so the layout spells naughty words.

This Is Not About Sex

June 4, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Today’s Washington Post has a nice article about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. It’s by Peter Moskos, who ought to know. His father, Charles Moskos, was a military sociologist – the man who coined the phrase. The point of Peter’s article is that for his father, DADT wasn’t just some abstract rule or impersonal policy recommendation; it reflected his own feelings about sexuality.

My father believed in something that seems quaintly old-fashioned today: sexual modesty. He didn’t like being confronted with anybody’s sexuality, gay or straight.

He wasn’t going to ask, and he didn’t want to be around if somebody told.

I get the impression that a similar squeamishness is what underlies the current opposition to proposals to scrap DADT and allow gays to serve openly. The difference is that Charles Moskos was willing to admit it. The opposition today usually talks not about sex but about “good order and discipline” or “readiness.”

I remember Dale Bumpers’ speech defending Bill Clinton against impeachment. The impeachment came in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, but what Clinton was charged with was lying under oath. The charge was perjury and obstruction of justice, but as Bumpers told the Senate,

H. L. Mencken said one time, “When you hear somebody say, ‘This is not about money’– it’s about money.” And when you hear somebody say, “This is not about sex” – it's about sex.

I can’t help thinking that behind all the arguments about “unit effectiveness” and the like, what motivates these opponents is a kind of prudishness, a feeling of uneasiness about sexuality– maybe their own but certainly that of others, especially if those others are homosexual.

Counting the Un-askable and Un-tellable

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

The Family Prediction Council

June 2, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Family Research Council came out last week with a report warning us about the dangers of allowing gays to serve openly in the military. The author, Peter Sprigg makes two predictions:

1. Welcoming open homosexuality in the military would clearly damage the readiness and effectiveness of the force—in part because it would increase the already serious problem of homosexual assault in the military. [emphasis in original]

“Clearly damage?” It remains to be seen what the damage, if any, would be. Allowing homosexuals in the military doesn’t seem to have damaged the readiness and effectiveness of the Israeli army. As for an “already serious problem,” it consists of about 150 homosexual assault incidents reported last year in a military population of 1,450,000.

2. If the current law against homosexuality in the military is overturned, the problem of same-sex sexual assault in the military is sure to increase. [emphasis in original]

Sure to increase? Most of these assaults are unwanted gropings. Maybe if homosexual men and women were allowed to use their words, a privilege now afforded only to straight soldiers, the number of these sexual assaults might decrease.

Suppose that heterosexual men were prohibited from asking a woman if she might be interested in a romantic encounter. How might they find out? They can’t ask, and she can’t tell. What’s left? Fondle, caress, grope, perhaps, and see how she responds.


But the organization is not the Family Prediction Council, and Sprigg has in fact looked at some evidence. More on that tomorrow.

Situational Narcissism?

May 30, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Chris Uggen links to an article showing that celebrities score higher on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory.* I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that celebrities are narcissists. But the study is a vindication of the standard psychological view of personality and role: what’s inside a person’s head (personality) leads them to behave a certain way and to seek out roles and situations that allow for them to express their personality traits.

The sociological version reverses the order. Situations (roles) come first. Roles demand certain behaviors. If you stay in some role, you continue to do those things. But you also develop a set of ideas and feelings that are compatible with those behaviors. In other words, the situation demands the behavior, and the behavior affects what’s inside your head.

The example I often use in class is extroversion, a trait that appears on just about every personality test. “I’ll bet you that I can go into every classroom in this building,” I say, “and without giving a single personality test, I can predict which person in the room will be the most active, both verbally (talking) and physically (moving around).”

College professors aren’t generally known as an unusually extroverted bunch, but if you spend your time on teaching at least a couple of courses every term, you had better get used to doing the talking. And most of us do.

The narcissism study contradicts this sociological idea.

Our analyses fail to show any relationship between NPI scores and years of experience in the entertainment industry, suggesting that celebrities may have narcissistic tendencies prior to entering the industry.

And who are these narcissists?

Reality television personalities had the highest overall scores on the NPI, followed by comedians, actors, and musicians.

I can’t argue with the first category. Who but narcissists – from the Jersey Shore to Orange County – would want to put their lives on display to millions of strangers? Also, the producers of these shows seem to select the most obviously narcissistic applicants. (It may also be that the reality-show celebs, with their extreme narcissism and brief careers, account for the lack of relationship between NPI scores and length of time in show biz.)

Then there are the comedians. The psychological view of them is obvious. But narcissism, at least one aspect of it, comes with the job. I hadn’t thought about this, but shortly after I read Chris Uggen’s post, I happened to listen to a performance by Mike Birbiglia at The Moth. It’s mostly about his sleepwalking, but he ends with this brief observation about a career in stand-up.

To be a comedian, you have to go on stage, those first few years, and bomb. And then walk off stage and think, “That went great.” Because otherwise, you’d never get on stage the next night. You would just think, “Human beings don’t like me.”

You can go here to listen to the entire story. The above quote comes at the 14:00 mark.)


* For an online version of the NPI, go here. But be warned, you’re not going to like it. The test offers only two choices for each item, and even if both are a bad fit, you have to choose one. Here is a sample:

I can read people like a book	People are sometimes hard to understand.
If I feel competent I am willing to take responsibility for making decisions	I like to take responsibility for making decisions.
I just want to be reasonably happy.	I want to amount to something in the eyes of the world.

UPDATE: Lisa at Sociological Images also posted about this (here), complete with the graph that compares different occupational groups. She also adds an update, based on a comment on her post, noting that the differences in many cases are statistically significant but not large.

A Conscientious Objector in the War on Kiddie Porn

May 28, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Five years, mandatory minimum, even for a first conviction. The crime? Possession of kiddie porn. When we Americans don’t like something, we’re very good at enacting harsher and harsher penalties, often as part of a “war.”

As in the wars on drugs and crime, some federal judges, though, are now trying to skirt or challenge these war-on-kiddie-porn laws. A New York Times article last week focused on one federal judge, Jack Weinstein, who worries that the mandatory sentences “destroy the lives” of men who pose no real threat to society.

Today, the Times printed some reader responses.

Judge Weinstein. . . . does not believe that those who view images of child sexual abuse are a threat to children. But of course they are! If they did not provide a market for such images, then children would not be abused to produce them in the first place.
– Kathryn Conroy . . . clinical social worker and executive director of Hedge Funds Care, Preventing and Treating Child Abuse

Ms. Conroy is correct about one thing – if you can kill demand, supply will dry up. But do harsh sentences in fact have an effect on either the demand or the supply? Ms. Conroy merely assumes that they do and provides no evidence. According to the Times, in the last ten years, sentence severity for possession has quadrupled. Has anyone assessed the impact of these laws on the production, distribution, or possession of kiddie porn? Is there evidence that the laws have reduced demand?

A law professor, Audrey Rogers, in her letter, focuses on the issue of harm. And she has evidence

Studies by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children show that more than half of defendants charged with possession of child pornography molested or attempted to molest children.

If you look at the actual study, you see that Rogers is playing fast and loose with the data. This was a study of people arrested for possession. About half of these cases were discovered through investigation of other crimes, usually molestation or attempted molestation. So what Rogers should say is not that those charged with possession are also molesters but that molesters are also charged with possession. Is it really surprising that child molesters also own kiddie porn?

But what about the men whose arrests began as possession cases? Here’s what the report says: “84% of cases involved CP possession but investigators did not detect concurrent child sexual victimization or attempts at child victimization.” The authors of the report see 16% as “a high rate.” But it’s not “more than half.”

Rogers continues,

This correlation belies Judge Jack B. Weinstein’s opinion that those who view child pornography present no threat to children.

The key word here is correlation. Correlation is not causation. Any freshman who has taken a basic sociology or social science course knows that. Did the porn make them more likely to commit actual molestation? And would making kiddie porn inaccessible reduce their crimes?
That was the assumption of the anti-porn slogan from the 1980s, “Pornography is the theory; rape is the practice.” It’s a fairly simple hypothesis: more porn, more rape. Or in the case of children, more kiddie porn, more child sexual abuse.

Again, I don’t know the evidence, but my impression is that technology – first VCRs, then the Internet – has greatly expanded access to porn both adult and child.* Victimization statistics on rape, where most victims are adults, show a more or less steady decrease since the late 1970s, though the UCR (“crimes known to the police”) show a slight increase to about 1990. Since the early 1990s, while the Internet burgeoned, both victimization and police reports show a sharp decrease.

I don’t know if we have any good data on rates of child molestation, and I can think of many reasons why good data would be hard to get. But my impression is that there has not been a burgeoning of these crimes that parallels the expanded availability of child pornography.

But the results aren’t really so important, are they? Once we have identified an evil and launched a war against it, what seems to matter to the warriors is keeping up the good fight. The actual outcome seems to be a secondary consideration. After all, you can’t give up a war against evil, at least not until you have identified some other evil to occupy your attention.


* The stats for this Socioblog still show the occasional visitor who got here by Googling “naughty pictures of 15 year olds,” though apparently Google’s algorithm has a date variable that now puts us far down on the list.