Feed the Poor? - Maybe Not

December 10, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the US, conservatives (and others) often see social problems as matters of morality, often individual morality. (See my partly facetious 2007 post about urinals and splashing as a moral issue.)

A video clip of Kate O’Beirne of the National Review has been circulating through the leftward regions of the blogosphere. Speaking at the conservative Hudson Institute, O’Beirne complained about the sacred-cow status of breakfast and lunch programs in the public schools.

what poor excuse for a parent can’t rustle up a bowl of cereal and a banana? I just don’t get why millions of school children qualify for school breakfasts unless we have a major wide spread problem with child neglect. . . .You know, I mean if that’s how many parents are incapable of pulling together a bowl of cereal and a banana, then we have problems that are way bigger than… that problem can’t be solved with a school breakfast, because we have parents who are just criminally… ah… criminally negligent with respect to raising children.

(View the brief clip here.)

Many comments on the left have deplored O’Beirne not just for her cold lack of sympathy with the poor* but for her ignorance of the pressures poor people face. However, from the moralistic viewpoint, she may be right: a parent should feed a kid at least a banana and a bowl of cereal. But what if many parents don’t give their kids even a minimum breakfast. What should the government do?

For conservatives, even ostensibly reasonable ones like David Brooks, the big problem is this: how can we instill virtue in the lower social orders? The conservative solution usually takes the form of punishing the poor for their unvirtuous behavior, an approach whose success over the past few centuries, has often been hard to discern. O’Beirne, for example, hints at criminalizing the breakfast-less household. Although this would be morally comforting to those of us who pour out the Wheaties every morning for our kids, I wouldn’t put much faith in it as cost-effective policy.

But if you frame this as a practical problem – kids not getting nutrition – you don’t have to be a genius to figure out the solution: go to a place with a lot of those kids (i.e., school) and feed them.

*An impression that is strengthened by listening to her in the video rather than just reading the transcript.

Around the House — Going the Extra Mile?

December 7, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Here’s this week’s Car Talk puzzler.

A woman and her husband frequently go walking together. On one particular day, however, they walked side by side, one never getting ahead of the other. They walked for an hour. At the end of the hour, the woman says, "That felt good. I think I walked four miles. The husband responds, “Oh, I walked much farther than that. I’m sure I walked five or six.”

How could that be?

I think I know the answer Tom and Ray are looking for. But the social survey answer is this: Husbands and wives often differ in their perceptions of how much the husband does. Men think they go further in some areas than their wives think the guys go.

The GSS asks husbands and wives how much of the housework they do and how much their spouse does. Here are some tables based on the 1972-2006 GSS.

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

I realize this is just a quick-and-dirty bit of research. But I’ll clean it up. Honest

Social Psych

December 6, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Social psychology, in graduate school, turned out to be much different from what my undergrad teachers had led me to believe. I was expecting Goffman, Erik Erikson, the Meads (George and Margaret). Instead, grad school took me to the world of the social psych experiment.

At the time, I thought it was all trivial and manipulative. I said as much at the time. The intellectual forebears of experimental social psychology, it seemed, were “Beat the Clock” and “Candid Camera.” (Those too young to remember the former can find clips on YouTube. Here are some screen grabs.)

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

I was joking, of course, and I made this observation only to a few fellow students, not faculty. But now, I have just come upon a paragraph by Phil Zimbardo,* reflecting on his own famous experiment and that of Stanley Milgram:

Only after Stanley died did I become aware of our mutual admiration for Allen Funt, creator of Candid Camera. I consider Funt to be one of the most creative, intuitive social psychologists on the planet. For 50 years he has been contriving experimental scenarios in which ordinary people face a challenge to their usual perceptions or functioning. He manipulates situations to reveal truths about compliance,conformity, the power of signs and symbols, and various forms of mindless obedience.**

Bud Collyer, eat your heart out.

*From Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm, Thomas Blass, ed., 2009.

** For another view on “mindless obedience” in experiments, see this earlier post.

A Real Death Panel

December 3, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

The death panel is not Obama’s. It’s in a state dominated byRepublicans – the governorship and a 2-1 majority in both houses.

Effective at the beginning of October, Arizona stopped financing certain transplant operations under the state’s version of Medicaid. Many doctors say the decision amounts to a death sentence for some low-income patients . . . .

Francisco Felix, 32, a father of four who has hepatitis C and is in need of a liver, received news a few weeks ago that a family friend was dying and wanted to donate her liver to him. But the budget cuts meant he no longer qualified for a state-financed transplant.

He was prepared anyway at Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center as his relatives scrambled to raise the needed $200,000. When the money did not come through, the liver went to someone else on the transplant list.

Full story on page one of today’s New York Times (online here).