Author, Author

November 16, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

 “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”

Apparently, many students are taking Dr. Johnson’s words to heart.

“Ed Dante” writes only for money. And unlike Dr. Johnson, he doesn’t even get his name on his work, just the cash. He works for a “research” company, writing papers for students and sometimes admissions essays for applicants. His article in the Chronicle is quickly making the rounds. It’s a sort of update of a similar article (pdf here) that appeared in Harper’s fifteen years ago: “This Pen for Hire,” by the similarly pseudonymous “Abigail Witherspoon” who worked for a similar company.
Some things haven’t changed much. The clients still include those who have insufficient English or more than sufficient cash, or both. Clients seek papers in all fields except perhaps the hard sciences – literature, history, hospitality, sociology, etc. The future teachers of America are still well represented. Seminarians didn’t appear in the 1995 article; now Dante gets lots of them:

I like seminary students. They seem so blissfully unaware of the inherent contradiction in paying somebody to help them cheat in courses that are largely about walking in the light of God and providing an ethical model for others to follow.

Rates have gone up. In 1995, students were paying $20 a page. Dante’s clients pay per project – $2,000 for a 20-40 page paper, which works out to $50-100 a page. The writer-company split is still the same – 50-50.

Some other things have changed. Witherspoon, writing in 1995, was ghosting pre-Internet. She had to go to libraries, and students often showed up in person to get “their” papers. Each page of the paper was stamped with the company name, so the student had to retype the essay, or pay someone to retype it – not a problem in the digital era.

Witherspoon also took more liberties, substituting her own leftish opinions for the conservative ones clients wanted. A request to “Show why immigrants are dead weight on the economy and take jobs away from us” became an essay on the INS’s unequal criteria for refugee status. Nobody complained, probably because, despite the required retyping, nobody noticed.
Both writers take a certain pride in their uncredited work, and both view academia with skepticism that spills over into contempt. Dante sees his services as a critique of university teaching. (“These students truly are desperate. . . .They need help learning and, separately, they need help passing their courses. But they aren’t getting it.”) Witherspoon’s resentment is mostly class-based, directed at those who are lazy, wealthy, and anti-intellectual:

When I’m alone in my room, in front of the computer and between the headphones, it’s hard not to write something good for myself and maybe even for the imaginary absentee professor or appreciative T.A., something that will last. But when I’m standing in the crowded Tailormade office, next to someone elegant and young and in eight hundred bucks’ worth of calfskin leather, someone who not only has never heard of John Stuart Mill and never read Othello but doesn’t even know he hasn’t, doesn’t even mind that he hasn’t, and doesn’t even care that he hasn’t, the urge to make something that will last somehow vanishes.

Find Friends, Lose Friends

November 13, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Random thoughts on “The Social Network,” which I saw last night:

1. The central irony (which nobody could possibly miss): Facebook is hugely popular because it lets people create and maintain friendships of all sorts. Yet the person who created it, when it comes to personal relationships, is utterly inept. Compounding the irony is that the missing piece is “relationship status.” That isthe element  that, when Zuckerberg thinks of it and adds it to the template, finally allows him to put Facebook online.

2. Boys. The source of energy for most of what happens in the film is the adolescent boy mentality. What eventually becomes Facebook starts when Zuckerberg creates a tournament variant of Hot or Not but with pictures of Harvard female students.


Women are objects for boys to rate rather than people they might interact with as human beings. It’s what we might expect from stereotypical computer nerds, but they are not the only ones who prefer this version of male-female relationships. The hits so numerous that they crash the system come mostly from Harvard boys.  We see the same mentality at the Porcellian, the exclusive Harvard final club Zuckerberg can’t get into, where the upper-class boys bring in girls by the busload. No doubt, some of these rich boys were graduates of prep schools where a similar mentality reigned.  (See this earlier post on the Landon School.)

3. Sorkin. Nobody comes close to Aaron Sorkin in writing dialogue for really smart characters. He did it on the West Wing, and he does it here. In several places in the film, I had the feeling I was watching a chess match where one player was thinking three moves ahead of me, the other five moves ahead. As consolation, I prefer to imagine that each of those ten or twenty seconds of dialogue took Sorkin half a day to write.

4. Lonely at the top – something of a cliche in American films. At the end of “Godfather I,” Michael Corleone has defeated his enemies, he has climbed to the top. A door closes, with Michael on one side, his wife on the other. He is estranged from his family (those who are still alive). He has no friends, only courtiers bowing to him. He does not look happy.

At the end of “The Social Network,” Mark Zuckerberg has settled accounts with his enemies. On the soundtrack, the Beatles sing, “Baby, You’re a Rich Man.” Zuckerberg is at the top. But, like Michael Corleone, to get there he has made a pact with the devil (Sean Parker, played by Justin Timberlake, shown in the inferno scene below), and he has screwed the person who had been his only friend. When Facebook logs its millionth subscriber, everyone else is celebrating, but Zuckerberg barely smiles.


5. Floor lamps? For your $45,000 a year at Harvard, you don’t get very good lighting in your room.

6. Capitalism. In the Wall Street Journal last June, Alex Tabarrok was muttering that “when it comes to the movies capitalism never seems to get a fair shake.” True, Hollywood does not turn out many pictures that show entrepreneurs creating, sustaining, and expanding a business.* And in most of these films, capitalists face moral dilemmas – if they didn’t, it wouldn’t be much of a story – and, like Zuckerberg in this film, they frequently make morally questionable choices in pursuit of business success.

As I noted at the time (here), I didn’t see why Tabarrok was puzzled, even dismayed, by this scenario.  Surely Tabarrok, an economist, would understand supply and demand.  Hollywood is supplying what the public is demanding. In seven weeks, “The Social Network” has grossed a very respectable $85 million – nowhere near “Jackass 3-D” of course, but several lengths ahead of “Secretariat.”

--------------------
*For my money, the best movie about business is still “Save the Tiger” (1973), which presents the moral and financial dilemmas of capitalism on a much smaller but probably more realistic scale.

Ashes and Allegories

November 11, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Firemen’s Ball,” (1967) was the last film Milos Forman made in his native Czechoslovakia. Many critics see the film as satire, a critique of communist society.  They credit Forman for his genius in being able to make the film at all, given the stodgy communist censorship that prevailed in the Soviet bloc at the time.

If the movie is allegory, it’s about the mistrust, dishonesty, cruelty, and above all incompetence built into the state bureaucratic system. The firemen, with their committees and bickering and attention to silly aspects of the ball, can’t seem to do anything right. At one point, there’s an actual fire at an old man’s farmhouse, but the fire engine gets stuck in the snow, and there’s no water pressure, and the house burns down. The only help the firemen can offer the old man is to suggest he keep warm by moving his chair closer to the fire. Then they thoughtfully turn the chair around so he doesn’t have to watch his house burn down.



I hadn’t thought about “Firemen’s Ball” in a long time, but my son e-mailed to ask if he should go see it when it was shown at his university’s film series.

Could there be a similar allegory about American capitalism? Socialist collectivism can lead to bad outcomes. But what about individualized and privatized systems? Could the rules of such a system result in a man’s house burning down while firefighters on the scene did nothing?



This incident happened over a month ago, and it got much coverage in the media and the blogosphere. But as far as I know, nobody saw a parallel with “Fireman’s Ball,” perhaps because Forman’s film was so different in one important respect. It was fictional.

If you see “Fireman’s Ball,” be sure to get the version with Forman’s own spoken introduction in English. When the movie was released in Czechoslovakia, he says, 40,000 firemen resigned in protest. So he explained to them that the movie was not really about firemen and that “the firemen in the film are merely symbols of the whole society.” This, he says, made the firemen “peaceful and happy.” Then Forman adds for the movie audience, “But the film is about firemen.”

Forman says this almost with a wink, so in the end you don’t really know if he intended the movie to be a simple story, poignant and funny, or whether he was going for  larger meanings.  Maybe it is, as he says, just a story about firemen. But as with the Tennessee fire, the intent of those who created the story has little to do with whether that story can serve as a more general commentary on the society.

Negative Thinking

November 10, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Supreme Court round-up:

Refused to overturn a lower court decision that failed to deny that government does not have the right to refrain from excluding unstated principles that do not have . . . .

OK, I’m exaggerating. But multiple negatives are confusing, as I’ve noted before (here). How else to explain Glenn Beck’s saying that Nouriel Roubini agrees with him about inflation (transcript excerpts and video here)? Despite a low rate of inflation, Beck insists that Weimar is just around the corner, especially with the Fed’s recent “quantitative easing” (QE2).

Prices are going through the roof. Basic cost of living, food, clothing, energy, is all going up. And there will be a QE3 and QE4. . . . Leading economist Nouriel Roubini, he tweeted this: . . . : “QE2 will be followed by QE3 and QE4 as QE2 will fail to revive the real economy and to prevent deflationary pressures.” There you go.

Beck seems to think that Roubini is saying that QE2 will lead to inflation. In fact, Roubini is saying just the opposite, but he phrases that idea with a double negative: will fail to prevent deflation. It’s possible that the negative connotation of deflation also added to Beck’s apparent confusion.

As for evidence about inflation, forget official indices, Beck says, and forget the experts (except those that Beck thinks agree with him). “When will we start listening to our own guts, and to common sense?”

I couldn’t fail to disagree with him less.

Boom Box Illusion

November 10, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Three-dimensional illusions can be public art and can even have practical uses.

This one – audio tape to boom-box tape player – is art, artifice, for art’s sake. No sociological content, but it’s just so cool.



A video with more detail on how it was done is here.

(HT: Richard Wiseman)

Who Are the Felons in Your Neighborhood?

November 8, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Do most of us know the crime statistics for our neighborhood?

In a comment on the previous post, Bob S. asked, “If people knew how many index crimes were in their neighborhoods, do you think there would be more involvement in handling the issues before governmental interference?”

The point of my post had been that our estimates of crime are impressionistic, and those impressions are much more affected by the appearance of a neighborhood than by numbers on the police books. The “signs of crime” – abandoned cars and buildings, tough-looking groups of kids, garbage strewn on the sidewalk, etc. – are visible, and you can see them every day. When I was in the crim biz and the newspaper would publish crime statistics once or twice a year, I’d note the numbers for my precinct, and I’d clip the article and file it. A week later I wouldn’t remember whether robberies or other crimes in my neighborhood were up or down from the previous year.

That was before the Internet. Now, some cities make their crime data easily accessible. Here, for example are the crimes known to the police for the last six months in the area of Boston where my niece lives.

(Click on the image for a larger view. Or go here .)

A is for Assault, B for Breaking and Entering, R for Robbery, T for Theft, and so on. You can select the time period, and you can click on an incident for more detail.

Houston too has a user-friendly site. You choose the area of the city you want. The map shows and describes the boundaries, and it lists the zip codes in that “beat.” Another click takes you to a list of all crimes in any month you choose – type of crime and address.

At the NYPD Website, you can get data by precinct for the seven Index crimes for the most recent week. If there’s an option for other time periods and details about location, I couldn’t find it.

If you're interested, try your own city. Googling the city name and “police department” will get you there. Then see what kind of information you can get about your neighborhood.

Then there’s Bob’s question about knowledge of crime and ideas about the role of government. I don’t have good data at hand, but my guess is that most people still see crime as a matter for government, especially when crime rates are high. Individuals and businesses may adopt preventive measures, but when crime becomes a public issue, most people look to the government and its agencies – the police and courts. When people are afraid – of crime, terrorism, communism, drugs, illegal immigration, etc. – they look to the government for protection. When people think that crime rates are rising, they’re willing to grant more power to the state. It’s only when they perceive the government as incapable of protecting them that they turn to vigilantism and other non-state protection schemes. Even then, they see their activity as supplementing government action, not replacing it.

Taking Less Serious Crime Seriously

November 5, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

City Keeping Minor Crimes Under Radar

That was the headline on a front-page, above-the-fold story Tuesday’s Times. It reported that since 2002, the city and police department have stopped providing the data to the state, or presumably to just about anyone else. The NYPD readily publishes its data on “serious crime” or what the FBI calls Part I crimes.* These are also known as the “Index” offenses because they supposedly serve as an index or indicator of general levels of crime. But in addition to these seven or eight crimes (depending on whether you count arson), cities also keep statistics on Part II crimes. Here’s a page from the Phoenix Police Department report.

(Click on the image for a larger view. Or go here for the original.)

The Times couldn’t find anyone at the NYPD to justify the policy. The story does quote a City Council member who was trying to force the issue. “They basically said the public can’t handle this information.” (Apparently Jack Nicholson was on duty when she asked.)

I myself don’t know what to make of Part II numbers. Some of these less serious crimes are important, not for any direct harm that they cause but for their impact on people’s general sense of fear or safety. That feeling is not much related to rates of serious crime (murder, robbery, car theft, etc.). These crimes usually occur where few people can see them. Our sense of safety is far more affected by visible but less serious crime and even things that are not crimes. Abandoned cars, run-down buildings, street prostitutes, drug dealers, and gangs – we read these as signs of crime. These are the true index offenses – they are our indicator of how safe a neighborhood is.

The trouble is that statistics on these offenses are much more driven by what the police do than by what the offenders do. An increase in drug offenses on the books probably means that the police have decided to crack down on that crime. Look at the Phoenix data. Has there been virtually no illegal gambling in Phoenix in the last decade? Did DUIs really double from 2006 to 2008?

Cracking down on these signs of crime is the whole idea behind the “broken windows” approach. In its original version, the idea was that if the police got tough on “disorder” and “quality of life” offenses, more serious crimes would also decrease. I haven’t kept up with the research on this, but my guess is that “broken windows” enforcement has at best a modest impact on crime, but it goes a long way towards making people feel safer.


* Recently, some researchers have raised doubts about the accuracy of the NYPD’s statistics. See previous posts here and here.

Ignoring Good News

November 2, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’m writing this before the polls close, but like everyone else, I expect this to be an anti-Obama election. And like most people, I think the reason is the economy. But . . .

• Obama has lowered taxes for almost all Americans.
• Most of the TARP money for Wall Street has been recovered, and the country will make about $16 billion in profits from it.
• The economy has grown by 3% in the past year, the Dow and S&P are up for the year.

In thread on a previous post, there was some discussion about ignorance – what people know, and what they think they know but are wrong about. A Bloomberg poll today showed that most people

• believe taxes have increased
• think the TARP money has disappeared down the drain (or into the bankers’ pockets)
• think the economy has been shrinking

The ignorance on these items is, of course, greater among Republicans. But many Independents and Democrats also share the erroneous perceptions.

Why? The head of the company that did the poll blames the Democrats for their failure to communicate the good news. My guess is that it’s more like a halo effect, or what Bruce Oppenheimer (political science, Vanderbilt), quoted in the article, calls “a dark cloud.”

The halo or cloud is the overall global impression that people form. From that general perception they deduce the specifics. If your overall impression is that the economy sucks, then you'll guess that anything that has to do with the economy is going the wrong way – taxes going up, the economy shrinking, the big bad bankers getting away with robbery, etc.

Oppenheimer thinks that the dark cloud is unemployment. True, no doubt. I suspect that real estate – home values and sales – also plays a part. It’s not just that people pay more attention to bad news than good. But the information on TARP, growth, and even taxes is more remote. Taxes you pay only once a year. Does anyone make close comparisons of the deductions in their check stubs from last year? TARP – would anyone have first-hand knowledge of that?

But if you own a home, you might know about its value. And you can see empty, unsold houses with the naked eye, “For Sale” signs lining the streets like Burma-Shave signs. Unemployment isn’t just a number like 9.5%. If you’re out of work, or if you know people who can’t find a job, it’s right there in the room with you, and you just might not care all that much about GDP numbers or the stock market.

Update: I heard about this survey only today. Turns out it was released three days ago and covered in a few places including WaPo and NPR. That same day, David Dayen at FireDogLake had the same reaction that I did today. Or as he put it, the survey showed “that Americans don’t pay attention to CBO or NBER reports or watch C-Span very often.”

Signs of Reason

October 31, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

It’s Halloween, and I feel sadly deficient for my lack of knowledge of the zombie. I think I missed about 80% of the allusions in Gabriel’s post, just as I did last year. But then this picture from the Jon Stewart rally turned up in my inbox.


I wasn’t there, but what I’ve heard and seen does convince me that sanity is possible. The event was sort of a meta-rally – a rally about rallies – delightfully devoid of anger, hyperbole, paranoia, demonization, and self-righteousness.

I confess, I had to look twice at the Biblical citation.


Many more on display here.

Atheists in Foxholes on the Campus Battlefield

October 28, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

We all know that conservatives on campus have it rough.

outnumbered by liberals by 3 to 1 even in fields known to be relatively conservative, such as economics, by more than 5 to 1 in moderate fields such as political science and by 20 to 1 or more in many fields, such as sociology and anthropology.

The numbers are cited by Richard Redding in a recent op-ed in LA Times and other newspapers (including yesterday’s Star-Ledger, which is where my colleague Arnie Korotkin found it and brought it my attention.)

If you’re a conservative like Redding, what do you see as the solution? Surely you would not be in favor of affirmative action, forcing schools to hire more conservatives to the faculty and admit more conservatives to the student body. That tramples on the sacred rights of the individual. If you oppose affirmative action based on demographic characteristics (race, sex), you would oppose it even more strongly when it’s based on ephemeral qualities like political orientation.

But no. Redding is all for affirmative action for conservatives, and he defends it on the same grounds that liberals defend affirmative action for minorities and women. It makes for greater “educational benefits.”

Campus conservatives like Redding (he’s a dean and professor at a law school) feel as though they’re in a foxhole (a FoxTVhole?), and they’re giving up their affirmative action atheism. Now they believe.

Conservatives also oppose campus speech codes. These are well-intended, they argue, but by trying to assure that feelings are not hurt, these codes trample on freedom of speech. From the conservative view, if the minorities and women on campus feel intimidated by other people’s free speech, that’s too bad. They’ll just have to man up.

But another part of Redding’s argument is very similar to the speech-code rationale. He cites a survey of students which found that “most did not think it entirely safe to hold unpopular opinions on campus . . . . conservative students feel alienated . . . conservative students lack academic role models.” Apparently, when the feelings of conservatives are involved, it’s time for action – affirmative action.

On the Money

October 26, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the previous post, I suggested that Americans were much more likely to name streets after military heroes than after luminaries in other fields as the French do.* As Denis Colombi noted in his comment on that post, the French don’t ignore their military victories. But in looking for people to name things after, they cast a wider net.

Whose praises do we sing? Follow the money. If you’re an American, you know the greenback line-up: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Hamilton, Jackson, Grant, Franklin.

How surprising to go to France and see a bill like this – something you would never have seen in the US. (You won’t see it in France any more either, now that the Euro reigns.)


An artist (Delacroix) and bare breasts.

Or this:


A female scientist, Marie Curie, and her husband Pierre.

Or this.



Voltaire, a writer remembered chiefly as a satirist. Why not a Mark Twain bill for the US?

Who else filled the bill? Eiffel, Cézanne, Saint-Exupéry, Hugo, Molière, Racine, Voltaire, Debussy . . . .


* We do sometimes confer these naming honors on artists. I myself attended a primary school named after the great composer Stephen Foster.

Sociologists in the Street

October 21, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

My wife was reading Comfort Me With Apples, a memoir by foodie Ruth Reichl. “When she got to Paris, she stayed in an apartment on the rue Auguste Comte. Do you know where that is?”

Not only did I not know where, but much to my embarrassment as a sociologist, I didn’t even know that such a street existed. I checked the map and discovered that it runs along the south edge of the Jardin du Luxembourg.


I have walked through the Jardin a few times, butI never noticed a street sign with the name of the man who coined the term sociology. Of that I’m positive.

Here’s a photo taken in 1870, barely a decade after Comte died.


For a more recent and elegant view, go to Flickr (here -- I’m honoring the photo copyright and not reprinting it). Or go to Paris . . . after this retirement-age thing is settled).

The French name streets after sociologists (several other cities in France have rues Auguste Comte), philsophers, writers, composers, et. al. American tastes run to other areas. I grew up on MacArthur Drive, which came just after Eisenhower Drive and Wainwright Drive in our peaceful town.

I doubt that a US city will ever have a sociologist street. Just about every city in the US has a Park Street (or Park Place or, in the city where I live, Park Avenue), and I suppose we can take some secret pride in this, even though the link to sociology is coincidental.

Pleasant Surprises

October 18, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Technology gives us greater control over our lives. You can decide who you want to be with, ignoring the people in the same room with you and instead texting or IMing your friends. You can get the movies, shows, or music you want, untethered from the arbitrary schedules and playlists of media outlets. In Tyler Cowen’s title phrase, you can Create Your Own Economy.

The price we pay for control is surprise. You can’t tickle yourself. You can’t surprise yourself.*

Last Saturday in Central Park, I was watching the singer who sets up with his guitar at the western edge of the boating pond. His name is Dave Ippolito, and his repertoire is what you’d expect from a guy with only an acoustic guitar – James Taylor-Dylan-Elton Johnish stuff, plus his own songs – and people sit on the bench and the grassy slope to listen.

Nearby, on a spit of land that juts out into the pond, there’s a open area with a gazebo, and in the warm weather, wedding couples often take photos there. If the wedding party is small enough, they can have the ceremony there.

Last Saturday, a couple had just done their wedding at the gazebo, and to leave the park they came walking up the paved path, crossing in front of Dave. He stopped singing. “Wait a minute,” he said, “did you guys just get married?” They nodded. “Here. I’m going to play something just for you, and you can have your first dance right here. OK?” They looked at each other, then at the wedding party trailing behind them on the path, and they agreed. He segued into “Can’t Help Falling in Love With You,” and the couple danced.


Then Dave invited the others in the wedding party to dance, and soon the path on that side was filled with well-dressed couples.


At the end of the song, Dave said, “C’mon, anyone who wants to, you guys on the grass, everyone dance. He started another tune. And there we were, the wedding guests in their nice clothes, the rest of us in our jeans and sneakers.

Weddings are usually carefully planned – the guest list, the clothes, the flowers, the music, the food – and scheduled fairly tightly so that everything goes well. But I wonder what that couple and their guests will remember about their wedding day. Will it be all those elements they planned? Or will it be the ten minutes of surprise, when, on their way out of the park, they were dancing to music they’d never expected and with other couples they’d never met?**


*You can’t give yourself a surprise party. Usually, when people say that they surprised themselves, it means they tried something new and unpredictable – that is, they gave up control and predictability. And giving up that control allowed them to discover something new and positive about themselves.

** I also wonder whether this is an “only in New York” kind of surprise. Is there something about the city, where diverse sets of people intermingle in the same space, that makes for more of these spontaneous moments?

Blockheads

October 12, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

“No man but a blogger ever wrote, except for money.”

What Dr. Johnson actually said was “blockhead,” but what’s the difference?

Is money the only motivation to produce? Greg Mankiw seems to think so. Mankiw was a top economics adviser in the Cheney-Bush administration. He probably thought that tax cuts for the rich were a good idea ten years ago, and he still thinks they’re a good idea

In a column in the Business section of last Sunday’s New York Times, Mankiw uses himself as an example to illustrate the disastrous effects of allowing the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy to expire, raising that rate the three points from 36% to 39%, and resurrecting the tax on large sums of inherited money.

Suppose that some editor offered me $1,000 to write an article.

Then Mankiw does a little magic – like the magician who starts holding one ball in his fingers out soon winds up with many.

30 years from now, when I pass on, my children would inherit about $10,000.

But then come the taxes.

Without any taxes, accepting that editor’s assignment would have yielded my children an extra $10,000. With [the proposed Obama] taxes, it yields only $1,000

But ah, if we keep the Bush tax cuts for the rich . . .

Taking that writing assignment would yield my kids about $2,000. I would have twice the incentive to keep working.

Other bloggers (Brad DeLong and Kevin Drum, for example) have criticized Mankiw’s math and economics. What I’m curious about is the assumption that rich people do what they do only or mainly because of the money.

Maybe you are looking forward to a particular actor’s next movie or a particular novelist’s next book. Perhaps you wish that your favorite singer would have a concert near where you live. Or, someday, you may need treatment from a highly trained surgeon, or your child may need braces from the local orthodontist. Like me, these individuals respond to incentives. (Indeed, some studies report that high-income taxpayers are particularly responsive to taxes.) As they face higher tax rates, their services will be in shorter supply.

Should Mankiw really be using himself as an example? If Mankiw’s work output is merely or mostly a response to economic incentives, why is he writing this column at all? The Times paid him considerably less than $1000. I would guess about a third less, but whatever it was, it’s pocket change compared to what he makes from his books, and it’s probably much less than he could have made had he spent the same amount of time consulting.

Yet he still wrote the article. And I bet he would have written it even if the Times hadn’t paid him a cent. I base my bet on past performances: on his blog, Mankiw averages about five posts per week, all of them unpaid. In the 1990s, the top tax rate was 40%, and in early 1980s 50%. Did Mankiw work less hard back then?  When the Bush tax cuts kicked in, did he rush to pick up more consulting gigs?

Is money the reason that rich people – movie stars, rock stars, fancy surgeons, rich economists – continue to work? And will that 3% increase in their marginal tax rates make them slack off? If the tax cuts expire, will the hedge fund guys leave the office at 4:30 in the afternoon because it’s just not worth it to trade a few more swaps and derivatives? They already have more money than they know what to do with, yet they work long hours to make more.

Last night, Brett Favre, age 41, threw the 500th touchdown pass of his career. If the Bush tax cuts on the rich had expired a year ago, would Favre have retired (I mean really retired) and not played this season?

Exchange Rates

October 10, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Viviana Zelizer has a new book coming out in a week: Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy (or what’s left of the economy). I got an e-mail about it from Amazon. They’ve got me pegged.

Will I spend $23.62 for the book? If I thought rationally about money, I would consider what else that $23.62 could buy. But nobody thinks about money with perfect rationality. Dollars are fungible, but not completely so. They have a different value in different sectors of life and do not always flow easily from one sector to another. Exchange rates between sectors are idiosyncratic and rarely specified.

I was reminded of this yet again by Jacob Avery’s recent paper on poker players. Is it rational to bet an amount greater than your weekly paycheck on the turn of a card or the outcome of a baseball game? It’s irrational only if money is perfectly fungible from the world of gambling to the world of everyday living. But it isn’t.

The gamblers I knew would frequently say that “gambling money” was “sacred.” In other words, there was such a thing as gambling money, and it was different from other moneys. It fell under a different set of rules and valuations.

Here’s a slightly different example though also from the world gambling. It’s from a “This American Life” show originally broadcast in November, 2003.* The reporter is Mary Beth Kirchner.

This 2:20 excerpt is from a story about a limo driver in Las Vegas. He is a good blackjack player. Yet he will leave the table, where he’s making a bundle, so as not to miss the peak hours for catching fares, even though these will net him less money than blackjack:



Here’s a transcript from the last part of the clip:

JOE: I was playing about like $2000 a hand. And I told the doorman, “If you get a good ride, like to the golf course, come and get me,” y’know, like $75. Anyway, he came up to the table and told me, “Hey, I got a ride” Seventy-five dollars. The people in the pit, they all think I’m nuts, y’know. I just stopped.. I left, I took my money, and I ran down to take the guy for $75, and there I am playing two grand a hand.

I try to separate the two. One has nothing to do with the other.

MARY BETH: I don’t understand that.

JOE: I know. Nobody does.

 MAURY BETH: Do you understand it?

JOE: I don’t. I just. . . .Gambling to me is gambling, work is work.

Nobody understands it? Viviana Zelizer does. So do most people, at some level. They know that their treatment of dollars is not universalistic They just don’t write books about it.


*This is my first try at embedding an audio clip. If it doesn’t work, you can go to the full This American Life podcast (here): The story begins at about the 23 minute mark. The part I excerpted here begins at about 33:20.

Size Matters

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The New York Walk

October 6, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

We had our semi-annual (or is it annual?) Sociology New York Walk on Saturday. We started at the flea market on W. 39th St., where one of the vendors had a box of typesetters sorts and slugs. I should have taken a picture since in class the previous week I had mentioned the Gutenberg revolution, and many of the students had no idea what movable type was. The Gutenberg era was a nice five and a half centuries while it lasted, but it’s over. Gutenberg is now a large source of e-books, fee of charge and free of metal. Those movable-type letters are quaint relics that you find in a flea market not far from the old Lucky Strikes placard.

We walked over to Grand Central Station. The Whispering Gallery is always a crowd-pleaser. After lunch at the food court (so much better than the typical mall food court), we took the subway to Astor Place and wandered the Lower East Side – gentrification happening as you watch. A community garden on Avenue B was having a harvest festival, with barbecue and salads (pay what you like) and a trio playing Indian-style music, and it was like walking back into the sixties.

It was a beautiful day, and there was much more to see and eat and drink. Join us next time.

Here we are. The picture on the left is just outside the Library at 42nd and Fifth. The one on the right is down on the Lower East Side.

(Click on the picture for a larger view.)

Leave the Name, Take the Accent

October 2, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

In a post a while ago, I said that it seemed to me that far fewer actors are changing their names. Not like the old days, when Margarita Carmen Cansino became Rita Hayworth. I was reminded of this again reading the obits for Tony Curtis, born and raised in the Bronx as Bernie Schwartz.
If a kid named Bernie Schwartz today wanted to be an actor, would he change his name? It’s a ridiculous question, of course. Nobody these days names their son Bernie. Bernard is barely in the top 1000 names for boys. When Curtis, er I mean Schwartz, was born, it was #46.

He may have changed his name, but he never lost his accent, as the obits were quick to point out, quoting famous lines like, “"Yondah lies the castle of my fad-dah,” which Snopes says is for real, from “The Black Shield of Falworth.” The obit and NJ.com has a version from a different film, “ Son of Ali Baba”: “Dis is duh palace ah my fadda, an’ yonda lies duh Valley ah duh Sun.”

You wouldn’t hear that today. My impression is that although actors now retain their ethnic names, they lose any ethnic or regional accent they might have, at least they do if they want to play big roles. With comedy roles and character parts, a regional accent adds “color” even if it’s the wrong color. (Cab drivers in movies often have a working-class New York accent, even if they are driving their cab in Chicago or Atlanta.) But if you want to be a star, it’s best to be able to sound like a generic, unplaceable American.

Maybe that has always been true; maybe even fifty or seventy years ago, Curtis would have been a glaring exception. Can you think of stars from whatever era who, like Curtis, spoke with an identifiable ethnic or regional accent yet played roles outside of those boundaries?

Rock the Casbah? - The Clash of Civilizations

October 1, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Henry at The Monkey Cage linked to this article (his ironic subject line: "this will change a lot of people’s minds"). It’s behind a paywall, but if anyone wants to ante up and then report on the method and sample, we impecunious (or just cheapskate) bloggers would be mucho grateful.

Here’s the abstract. I wonder if Rodney Stark was one of the peer reviewers. Probably not.

Islam and Large-Scale Political Violence: Is There a Connection?

M. Steven Fish sfish@berkeley.edu
Francesca R. Jensenius
Katherine E. Michel
Abstract

Are Muslims especially prone to large-scale political violence? From Montesquieu to Samuel Huntington, prominent modern analysts of politics have regarded Muslims as unusually inclined to strife. Many other observers have portrayed Islam as a peace-loving faith and Muslims as largely pacific. Yet scholars still lack much hard evidence on whether a relationship between Islam and political violence really exists. Precious few studies adduce empirical evidence on whether Islamic societies are actually more or less violent. This article assesses whether Muslims are more prone to large-scale political violence than non-Muslims. The authors focus neither on terrorism nor on interstate war. Instead, they investigate large-scale intrastate violence. The article makes three contributions. First, it offers useful data on Islam and political strife. Second,it investigates whether Muslims are especially violence prone. Relying on cross-national analysis, the authors find no evidence of a correlation between the proportion of a country’s population that is made up of Muslims and deaths in episodes of large-scale political violence in the postwar period. Third, the authors investigate whether Islamism (the ideology), as opposed to Muslims (the people), is responsible for an inordinate share of the world’s large-scale political violence. They find that Islamism is implicated in an appreciable but not disproportionate amount of political violence.

Guarding Against Symbols

September 28, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

A mosque at Ground Zero in New York is already a reality. Sunday’s “Sixty Minutes” report on the controversy showed dozens of Muslims praying in a room of the building that now stands on the contested tract of the proposed Islamic Cultural Center. “Sixty Minutes” did not report on the anguish these daily prayers were inflicting on the souls of the dead or even on their living relatives and friends.

The mosque, as many have noted, is not exactly “at” Ground Zero. It’s a couple of blocks away, and you can’t see it from Ground Zero. But that’s not the point. The point, for the opponents, seems to be pollution. Anything that is at all connected with The Terrorists must be kept far enough away (just how far is never specified) so as to prevent any kind of symbolic contact.

Something similar is going on with the proposed Flight 93 memorial in Pennsylvania. Back in 2005, a jury of family members, local leaders, and designers reviewed proposals and selected a winner. Now, there’s a big protest.

The problem, I think, was not in the design – a circle set in the naturally occurring bowl of land, one segment of the circle planted with trees, a tower with wind chimes.
It would have been built and unremarked if the authors had given it a different name, say “The Arc of Embrace.” But it was called “The Crescent of Embrace.”

Maybe you didn’t see it when you looked at the graphic. But, like priests trained in ferreting out all traces of sin, keen-eyed observers have discerned the unmistakable Muslim symbol, the crescent, lurking here. Look at this side-by-side that’s been circulating in the right blogosphere, with frequent suggestions that the similarity (I mean identical sameness) was intentional.

If you didn’t see it, that just shows how successful the terrorists have been in hiding their evil influence.

This emphasis on purity is part of the Us-vs.-Them mentality. They are out to destroy Us. We must constantly be on our guard. And any hint of Them, no matter how slight or symbolic, is a threat and must be rooted out.

Who is Them? In this clash of civilizations, Them is all of them. In America, you can’t come right out and say “Arabs” or even “Muslims.” So you have to be against “the Terrorists.” The vast majority of Muslims worldwide, and nearly 100% of American Muslims, are not terrorists. But that distinction is no more important today than it was when George W. Bush convinced most Americans that invading Iraq was a good way to fight Al Qaeda.

I just wonder why South Carolina decided to become a haven for terrorism.

I’m America, and So Can You

September 25, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Some political columnists seem incapable of acknowledging that their own views are just that – their own (e.g., I don’t trust Obama). Instead, they prefer to attribute the opinion to “the public,” or “the country,” or even more immodestly “America” (“America doesn’t trust Obama.”)*

Here’s David Brooks in yesterday’s Times:

The public seems to be angry about values. The heart of any moral system is the connection between action and consequences. Today’s public anger rises from the belief that this connection has been severed in one realm after another. . . . What the country is really looking for is a restoration of responsibility.

I guess he never went to anger management or couples therapy, where they tell you to make “I statements” (“When you text at the dinner table, I feel ignored,”). Instead, it’s, “When you text at the dinner table, America feels ignored.”

I had thought that the restoration the country was looking for was more economic than moral, but then what do I know? I assume that Brooks has some evidence about what’s really on the public’s mind, but he’s keeping it to himself. So I rounded up the usual suspects – Gallup, Pew, etc. (“When you say the public feels some way, I check out the polls.”)


The entire category, for that last bar was “Ethics/moral/religious/family decline; dishonesty.” The proportion of people mentioning any one of those as the top problem was 3%.

It also turns out that while the subprime/CDO/CDS/MBS collapse had a huge impact on how Americans felt about the economy, it didn’t much affect their opinions of the country’s morality, opinions which were pretty low to begin with. Americans take a dim view of other Americans’ morality.

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

Gallup did not ask specifically about the “responsibility” that the country is so concerned about. But the question was open-ended, and of the 76% who thought that values were getting worse, 7% mentioned something along the lines of “people not taking responsibility for their own behavior.” Seven percent of 76% is 5%

To sum up, only 3% of American think that morality is the top problem. When asked directly about morals, only 5% point to responsibility.But David Brooks says that what the country really wants is responsibility.

Who you gonna believe – David Brooks, or your lyin’ polls?

--------------------
*This observation is not original with me. But I cannot remember who to tip my hat to. I think it was either one of the Monkey Cagers (but which one?) or Henry at Crooked Timber. The title of this post is a direct rip-off of Steven Colbert.

Living In the City

September 23, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

“In the one block from the subway stop to your building, I saw a greater diversity of people than I see in my town in a year.” My brother lives in central New Jersey, in a town with not much racial diversity. “It’s like living in a Methodist wedding,” he once said. He doesn’t come to New York very often.

That was during the day. When New Yorkers go home, their neighborhoods become more homogeneous. Here’s a map that Eric Fisher posted, based on the cartography of Bill Rankin.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, Orange is Hispanic, Gray is Other, and each dot is 25 people. To help you get oriented, I’ve made Central Park yellow. The truly diverse neighborhoods are out in Queens – Astoria, Jackson Heights.

If you think we’re living in post-racial America, or if you’re curious about racial patterns in where people live, you must take a look at Eric’s Flickr site. He has created similar maps for 102 cities, so you’ll probably be able to find yours. His maps also have a flash function that identifies the neighborhoods as you mouse over them, so you might even see your neighborhood by name.

HT: Peter Moskos

Just Enough For the City

September 21, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

A New York Magazine cover in the late 1960s showed a fortyish man – pudgy, grey suit, white shirt, striped necktie – sitting on the sidewalk holding out a tin cup with a few pencils in it. A sign around his neck said, “I MAKE $80,000 A YEAR, AND I’M BROKE.”

At the time, $80,000 was about 8 times the national median, the equivalent roughly of $400,000 today. The point was that the “ordinary” expenses of ordinary New Yorkers ate up a lot of money. To be barely middle class, you had to be rich.

That cover came to mind because of the recent dust-up in the blogosphere set off by a post by Todd Henderson, a Chicago law professor. Henderson was complaining about the Obama tax proposal – to keep cuts for all but the rich, i.e, those earning more than $250,000. Henderson didn’t say how much his income was, but he did say

• that paying for mortgages, student loans, children’s education (private schools), and other expenses leaves him no room for luxuries.
• that he already pays $100,000 in taxes
• he certainly does not feel rich

Like most working Americans, insurance, doctors’ bills, utilities, two cars, daycare, groceries, gasoline, cell phones, and cable TV (no movie channels) round out our monthly expenses. We also have someone who cuts our grass, cleans our house, and watches our new baby.... [W]e have less than a few hundred dollars per month of discretionary income. We occasionally eat out but with a baby sitter, these nights take a toll on our budget. . . . [This is from an e-mail Henderson, or someone claiming to be him, wrote to Brad DeLong that DeLong reprinted.]

Henderson took a lot of flak. But there’s much to be said for his point, which is the same one that New York Magazine was making 35 years ago. Although these conclusions are not what Henderson intended, they still seem valid:

• there is such a thing as society
• society exerts pressure on people to spend their money on certain things
• some of these are things which, if you could not afford them, you would feel that you were not a member of your society or social group
• when income rises, so do these social “necessities.” Henderson sees private schools, two cars, and home ownership as necessities, not luxuries 

New York Magazine had the good sense to make the point with a touch of irony that Henderson utterly lacked. His sin was not that he feels strapped despite an income of $400,000 or more. It was that he seemed to have no feeling for the lives of those who earn half that, or those who have a merely average income ($50-60K), or those who scrape by on much less than the average.

As I recall, the New York Magazine story sketched out budgets for three different income levels. None of them, even the highest ($80K) left room for much in the way of savings or luxuries. A few years later, the great Stevie Wonder’s great album “Innervisions” came out, and I thought of writing a lyric based on its great song “Living For the City” (and I’m serious about all those “greats”). Here’s a slightly updated excerpt:

Six rooms on Central Park, the house out by the ocean.
He works at Goldman Sachs, he needs that next promotion.
His son’s at Yale, his daughters go to Brearly.
He only makes four hundred thousand yearly,
And it’s just enough, just enough for the city.

And so on.

Update: Since I started composing this post, Henderson has removed his original post “because my wife, who did not approve of my original post and disagrees vehemently with my opinion, did not consent to the publication of personal details about our family.” (Full retraction and apology here, but you can still find links to his original, now deleted post. Or try waybackmachine.)

I don’t know Henderson at all, and I hesitate to draw inferences about his character. But his new post adds to my original take – that he might be a decent and well-meaning person but that perhaps he is a bit short on self-awareness. He just doesn’t seem to realize how what he says will be seen by others – others like people with average incomes, others like his wife.

Update, September 2019.  In the original version of this post, for the information on the New York Magazine cover and Innervisions, I was relying on memory, and I said that they came out around the same time. I also did not have an image of the magazine cover. I recently found that cover. It was not from the 1970s, as the original post said, but from 1968. Innervisions dropped in 1973. I have changed the text, correcting for these errors, and I have put strikethrough on some of the incorrectly remembered details of the magazine cover, which I have now also included.

Another Year

September 18, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’m supposed to be reflecting on my sins of the past year, but the SocioBlog came on line in mid-September four years ago. So at bloggiversay time, I’m also allowing myself a bit of narcissistic reflection, going back over the year’s 180+ posts. There are some, no doubt, that I should be atoning for. But here, in no particular order, are ten I liked.* I’ve added some topic tags in parenthesis, but there’s no real logic or theme to the list – sort of like the blog itself.

1 Christian Is Not a Religion (and Jews Have a Cross to Bear) (hidden assumptions and invisible privilege)
2 It’s Your Funeral (US culture)
3 The Playing Fields of Landon (values)
4 Frisks and Risks (Crime)
5 Mitch Miller – Producing Hits (organization of culture)
6 Rich and Richer, Dumb and Dumber (economics)
7 Sandbox Sociology (nature/nurture)
8 It’s Your Decision (US culture)
9 The Real America (social psychology)
10 Summertime Blues (academics)


*I was tempted to include my post on truffles only because it used my own photo from a truffle marché, not something I grabbed off Google Images. The post on The Real America is on the list mostly because I liked the phrase about Sarah Palin’s real America as “Norman Rockwell, but with guns and NASCAR.”

More XBox, Less Crime

September 16, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Crime was down in 2009. When the preliminary data came out four months ago, newspapers ran headlines like

• Crime Rates Fell in '09 Despite Economy (NYT)
• Why is crime down, in spite of the recession? (CSM)

The idea that unemployment leads to crime hasn’t had much support from the data. Criminologists have known this for a half century or so. But everyone else won’t let it go.* Apparently, the idea just too appealing. The logic is clear and simple: people who are out of work will commit crimes to get the money they need.

But that’s not the way it works. If there is a link between unemployment and crime, it is indirect. More important, it works not at the individual level, but at the neighborhood level. Neighborhoods with persistent high unemployment will have higher rates of crime, but not because jobless people are turning to illegal sources of income (though no doubt some are), but because people in those neighborhoods cannot exercise the necessary informal social control; they cannot ride herd on the teenagers.

Anyway, here’s the graph from the UCR.


The decline is real – not just a CompStat-inspired suppression of data by the police. Murder and motor vehicle theft are the two most accurately counted crimes, so we can take those changes pretty much at face value; robbery too. So what’s going on?

I don’t know. But Lawrence Katz has an interesting explanation – video games. Those wild kids, instead of going out and stealing actual cars,** are playing Grand Theft Auto. Their behavior is more virtual, also more virtuous.

(David Leonhardt, back in May, discussed this and linked to some research on a similar effect of movies in his Times Economix blog.)


*Not quite everyone. Conservatives like the idea that crime is unrelated to economics. They see crime as a product of bad people with bad morals. Crime rises when insitutions that instill morality (church, family) decline; and crime falls when those institutions gain strength. I suspect that conservatives also reject the economics-crime link because it implies there are no social costs, the government need not do anything about unemployment and poverty.

** Also, cars have become harder to steal thanks to various technological advances – criminologists call this “target hardening.” Car theft is becoming a crime better left to professionals.

HT: Mark Kleiman

Mosques, Danger, and Purtiy

September 14, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Marty Peretz concluded his recent anti-Muslim rant with this.

I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.

This is blatantly wrong. Freedom of speech and the free exercise of religion are not privileges that the government grants to “worthy” people and faiths. These are the rights of everyone, rights that the government is Constitutionally bound to protect.

Nine days later, after a New York Times column had called him out on it, Peretz realized his error and issued an apology. But how could someone who has spent his life writing about government, mostly US government, even teaching about it at Harvard, compose and publish that sentence in the first place?

Peretz was writing to decry a Times editorial that called for tolerance, specifically for the proposed Islamic cultural center and mosque, the one that is to be built a couple of blocks away from Ground Zero.

When it comes to the mosque, and to anything related to Islam these days, it seems that we are no longer in the realm of rational political discourse – discussions of policies and their effects. We are in symbolic territory, the realm of Purity and Danger. For Peretz and those of a similar mind, danger is paramount. He speaks of

anxiety about the dangers of Islamism, and anger at the refusal of certain politicians and commentators to adequately grasp those dangers,

Danger calls for a hardening of boundaries and a mentality of Us vs. Them. We need to be sure that everyone on our side is with us and that we have cast out all impurities, i.e, those whose loyalties are the least bit suspect. So Peretz refers to

Muslim or Arab interests or their commitments to foreign governments and, more likely, to foreign insurgencies and, yes, quite alien philosophies.

and

the increasing number of both naturalized and native-born citizens who enlist in the Islamic terror networks of our time, here and abroad.

As the Times says, this thinking equates all of Islam and all Muslims with terrorism. Or in Peretz’s words,

the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood.

My only consolation is that we’ve been here before. Other religions and other ethnic groups have been similarly vilified and feared. You can probably go back through US history and find language that sounds like what we now hear from the Tea Party and Peretz and the rest, with feared alien agents not Muslims but Catholics, Jews, Italians, Irish, Chinese, and many others. But despite the antipathy of “real Americans,” these groups became mainstream, no longer the objects of fear and suspicion. You can even find some of them at Tea Party demonstrations or writing anti-Muslim screeds for right-wing publications.

The Peretz phrase I find most ominous, I think, is this one:

Frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims.

Ominous because when we say that some group thinks life is cheap or doesn’t value human life the way we do, it’s often prelude to our killing them in very large numbers.

Divanalysis

September 10, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Quantitative methods for cultural analysis.

Jay Caspian Kang at The Awl:

. . . my crack team of consultants, statisticians and graphic designers have assembled DIVA-OFF 2010, a highly scientific (we used computers!) evaluation of the greatest divas of the past twenty-five years. A list of divas was evaluated on eleven levels of diva-ness, and, because each diva characteristic is not created equal, we scaled the values in the hopes of creating an aggregate diva number that will serve as a reference point for future generations.

Here, for example, are the results in the Hand Gestures category:

Admittedly, rater subjectivity may be a factor:

Of all the diva characteristics, Hand Gestures is the most open to personal preference. I certainly don’t like Celine’s slow-motion-deodorant-commercial hand gestures, but who am I to tell your mom that they aren’t cool? And while I always liked how Mariah would point out the notes in her runs, I can also see why your mother might find this to be a bit show-offy. One thing your mother and I can agree on, though: Carrie Underwood will never ascend to diva status because of her awful, awful work in this category.

Read the whole post (unless, of course, you’re a big Jordin fan), and watch the accompanying videos (with the sound off for the Hand Gestures).

Victims and Blame

September 9, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Blaming the victim.” William Ryan wrote the book and coined the phrase forty years ago to characterize explanations of poverty that ignored large social and economic forces and instead looked only at the behavior of poor people. If only they would anticipate the consequences of their choices in education, work, and family, theorized the victim-blamers, they would make other choices and rise from poverty. (My post on a very recent example is here.)

Now Courrier International, a Paris weekly with the tagline “L'anticipation au quotidien” takes blaming the victim to a new level. Here’s the English language version.


DesignTaxi comments:

In the latest instance, Saatchi & Saatchi France used an image of the New York skyline with a shorter twin towers, two airplanes flying innocuously over the buildings. The tagline? “Learn to anticipate”.

HT: Polly, who, hélas, is no longer in Paris and not blogging so much.

Jesus, American Style

September 8, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

American Christianity has transformed the church and even Jesus into something that would have appalled the real Jesus and his followers. That’s the sermon David Brooks was preaching in the Times yesterday. Megachurches for congregations mirror the mega-houses and mega-SUVs for individuals.

Brooks’s inspiration is the recent book Radical: Taking Back Your Faith From the American Dream by David Platt, himself once the pastor of megachurch (N = 4300) in Alabama.

Today, however, building budgets dwarf charitable budgets, and Jesus is portrayed as a genial suburban dude. “When we gather in our church building to sing and lift up our hands in worship, we may not actually be worshiping the Jesus of the Bible. Instead, we may be worshiping ourselves.”

Sound familiar? Mr. Brooks, Rev. Platt (2010), meet M. Durkheim (1912):

[Religion] is a system of ideas with which the individuals represent to themselves the society of which they are members . . .God is only a figurative expression of the society .