Speak Roughly To Your Little Boy

January 18, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Amy Chua says that her recent book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is about her personal “journey” of change away from the “very strict Chinese parenting model.” But the Wall Street Journal op-ed page edit of her memoir reduces Chua’s journey to a one-dimensional promo for that extreme Chinese model. The WSJ selected those elements of Chua’s story that embody the current conservative world-view in the US. For example, the chief family virtues in this conservative model – for the children and the parents as well – are hard work and perseverance. The model also emphasizes goals rather than process; the “journey” is less important.  Still less relevant is the way the child feels about any of it. Finally, the tiger mom method places all responsibility on the individual and rejects the influence of external, situational forces.

The appeal of the Chinese model stems in part from our fear that America has become, in Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell’s phrase, “a nation of wusses.” Rendell was referring to the NFL’s decision to reschedule a football game in Philadelphia a few weeks ago when heavy snow made travel to the stadium dangerous and nearly impossible.

The Chinese are kicking our butt in everything. If this was in China do you think the Chinese would have called off the game? People would have been marching down to the stadium, they would have walked and they would have been doing calculus on the way down.

Rendell was joking, but the joke reflected our anxieties about ourselves vis-à-vis China.

The remedy for this wussiness, at least in the ideal WSJ family, is basically the parent-as-marine-drill-sergeant. The drill sergeant doesn’t “journey.” He barks that he wants results not excuses, my way or the highway, and similar bons mots. This model of child-rearing combines several elements of the conservative mentality: authoritarianism, intolerance of ambiguity, cognitive simplicity, and certainty.* Parents are always right, their rules are clear and absolute, and children should unquestioningly do what parents say.** Therefore, whatever parents do to enforce rules is legitimate and beneficial since it leads to the desired results. (Some of Chua’s methods will strike many readers as psychological cruelty if not abuse.)

Another virtue in the war on wussiness is Toughness. This means the rejection of emotions, especially “feminine” emotions like sympathy, as irrelevant or even detrimental to the task at hand. (Remember the right-wing reaction to “empathy”?) “Masculine” emotions that can be used for goal attainment are O.K. These include pride and anger, and perhaps even envy and greed (hey, four out of seven ain’t bad.)

This tension between toughness and kindness towards children is nothing new. The Lewis Carroll poem from Alice in Wonderland (1865) alluded to in the title of this post was itself a parody reaction to a popular poem of the time, “Speak Gently”

Speak gently to the little child!
Its love be sure to gain . . . .

And

Speak gently to the young, for they
Will have enough to bear;
Pass through this life as best they may,
’Tis full of anxious care!

The conflict is also reflected in the bimodal reaction over at Amazon, where Chua’s book is #6 on the bestseller list. In the end, I doubt that the book will have much lasting influence on child rearing here, though some parents will use it to justify what they were already inclined to do.

The stronger influence will run the other way; American culture will change Asian-American parenting. As Chua says, she was “humbled” (and presumably changed) by her 13-year-old. The Asian kids at my son’s high school (where they were about half the population) would often say, “Asian parents are crazy.” When these kids and Amy Chua’s kids become parents, they will probably not be quite so “crazy.”
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* For a somewhat controversial review of the literature on the conservative mentality, see this Psychological Bulletin article, which includes studies from other countries.

**This upends the usual American formulation, at least in movies and other fictions, where children are typically wiser than parents. (See my earlier post contrasting this configuration with the British version of childhood as seen in “Atonement.” Or this post on the non-authoritarian sitcom family.)

Mom and Apple Pie Sesame Noodles

January 17, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Amy Chua’s essay in the Wall Street Journal, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” has been getting a ton of attention.

When it comes to child-rearing, Americans seem forever to be seeking out expert advice. This used to be the province of print – books and magazine articles – but videos and TV shows are now in the media mix of advice for parents. This advice cannot be an “only in America” enterprise. Still, I would guess that we manufacture and consume more than our share.

Societies with a stronger sense of tradition would have less anxiety about whether they were doing it right. But in American culture, tradition usually loses out to rationality – effective means to desired goals. There seems to be a value on rejecting the ways of the previous generation (“I’m not going to make the same mistakes my parents made.”) Turning to experts for new ways of raising kids also fits nicely with American optimism and belief in progress. (“The new, improved child-rearing – get it now. Operators are standing by.”)

The trouble is that parents have many goals for their children – success/achievement, social skills and friendships, autonomy, self-fulfillment, proper behavior, happiness, and so on – for the immediate present and for various distances into the future. These goals are not in perfect harmony, and to get more of one good thing, you may have to give up another. Worse, even if parents could decide which goals they wanted to emphasize, they have precious little evidence, beyond the very short run, for the effects of one strategy or another. So we turn to those who claim to have some special knowledge, and the books and videos just keep on coming. “How can I make sure my kid is happy?” Or smart? Or successful? Or well-liked? If there were clear answers to these questions, we wouldn’t need another book.

So while these books purport to tell us how to raise kids, they also document the anxieties and ideologies of their authors and readers.

The Wall Street Journal article is a case in point. I refer to it as the “WSJ article” because the Amy Chua in that article is much different from the Amy Chua of the book. Here is the cover line Chua wrote for her publisher, Penguin.

This is a story about a mother, two daughters, and two dogs. This was supposed to be a story of how Chinese parents are better at raising kids than Western ones. But instead, it’s about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a thirteen-year-old.

But the WSJ article has no such change of mind, no ambivalence, no uncertainty. The Chua in the WSJ is the Tiger Mom, driving her daughters with a strictness that most readers will see as cruelty. And in the end, the WSJ Chua is triumphant. Her unrelenting demands and no-sympathy tactics vindicated, she remains convinced of the rightness of her approach. But that is far from the whole story. Here she is in an interview with Jeff Yang at SF Gate:

The Journal basically strung together the most controversial sections of the book. And I had no idea they’d put that kind of a title on it. But the worst thing was, they didn’t even hint that the book is about a journey, and that the person at beginning of the book is different from the person at the end -- that I get my comeuppance and retreat from this very strict Chinese parenting model.

It’s possible that Chua is kidding herself. Yang’s SF Gate post quotes someone on Chua’s “woeful lack of self-examination.” But he also says, “The book’s tone is slightly rueful, frequently self-deprecating and entirely aware of its author’s enormities.” Yes, enormities.

The WSJ edit tells the story so as to make it conform with the American conservative world view (more on this in another post). I guess that one moral of the story is that you should be wary of heavily edited excerpts on the WSJ editorial page. Or, as the book reports my classmates in fourth grade invariably ended, “If you want to find out what happens, you’ll have to read the book.”

Animated Speakers

January 12, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

When I teach, I rarely use the board. My handwriting is terrible, and for just about everything I say in class, I have a write-up that I post on Blackbloard with the ideas and evidence laid out systematically and all the key concepts and names in bold type. When I do write on the board, I often see student struggling to decipher the letters. I tell students not to worry about copying it all down. They can find everything written clearly and spelled correctly on Blackboard.

Underlying my casual attitude to the board is the assumption that I-write-you-copy ritual breaks the flow of thought. That’s also one of my objections to PowerPoint, especially if students focus on writing down what’s on a slide rather than thinking about what’s being said.

Who am I kidding? The only one whose thought gets broken is me. For students, a pause while I write on the board would give them a minute to think about the idea. Besides, I realize now that having a written version, even with no pause for reflection, reinforces and somehow adds to a lecture. I realize this thanks to RSA Animate. Watch even a minute or two of one of their animations. Here for example is Zizek on cultural capitalism.



The drawings don’t really add anything intellectually, and the words are just a shortened transcript of what Ehrenreich is saying. But the message coming simultaneously via two senses seems much more memorable. (The RSA site also has the video of Zizek on camera for the full half-hour lecture, for connoisseurs interested in side-by-side comparisons.).

I guess I’ll be spending the rest of winter break working on my marker skills.

Beach Blogging Bingo

January 8, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

The SocioBlog is heading for a week in the sun (I hope). Internet access may be dicey. If I do post, it will be from . . . well, I’ll let the Saxophone Colossus tell you. (Jazzers will know what I mean. Or click on the link for the classic track.)

Brands - Image and Reality

January 7, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

In yesterday’s post, I wondered what “brand equity” meant in higher education. I think I have a vague idea.

A school doesn’t just educate. A school is also a brand, and its graduates carry that brand regardless of the education they may (or may not) have gotten there. Juilliard, for example, was GLM’s top-ranked music school for brand equity (it was also twelfth in the list of colleges, just behind Wellesley, just ahead of Vassar).

I knew a Juilliard graduate, Brad, many years ago, back when I was a playground dad. Not many other men were there on weekdays. Often, it was just me and Brad (plus the moms and nannies), and we got to know each other. He had come from Boston with his saxophone, but at Juilliard he studied conducting. After graduating, he stayed on the West Side and eventually actually managed to land a job as conductor with a regional orchestra somewhere in New Jersey that did five concerts year. It didn’t pay all that much, but it allowed him a lot of free time, which was why he was one of the few other dads regularly at the playground in the afternoon.

One day as we were sitting on the bench, Brad asked me where I’d gotten my Ph.D. I guess we’d never talked much about higher education. Harvard, I told him. “I didn’t know that,” he said, surprised, “and I’ve known you all this time.”

“Don’t be impressed,” I said.

“But I am,” he said. From his voice and the look on his face, I could see that he meant it.I wanted to convince him not to be.

“Oh Brad,” I said, my voice rising in mock awe, “You went to Juilliard?! You must be this really great and talented musician. Juilliard – wow!” Or something like that. He laughed. “See what I mean?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. Then a pause. “But I’m still impressed.”

Brand Equity in Higher Ed

January 6, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Global Language Monitor has just released its rankings of colleges and universities (here). GLM ranks “brand equity.” No measures of faculty or student quality, no measures of cost, no graduation rates. Just “buzz.”

TrendTopper MediaBuzz utilizes a mathematical model that ‘normalizes’ the data collected from the Internet, social media, and blogosphere as well as the top 75,000 print and electronic media.

Those other rankings – the ones that look at the schools themselves – are biased.

GLM’s TrendTopper MediaBuzz Rankings actually removes all bias inherent in each of the other published rankings, since they actually reflect what is being said and stated on the billions of web pages that we measure.

Here are the top ten universities

1. Univ. of Wisconsin—Madison
2. University of Chicago
3. Harvard University
4. Mass. Institute of Technology
5. Columbia University
6. Univ. of Michigan—Ann Arbor
7. Cornell University
8. University of California–Berkeley
9. Yale University
10. University of Texas—Austin

And the top ten colleges

1. Davidson College
2. Occidental College
3. Williams College
4. Wesleyan University
5. Carleton College
6. Amherst College
7. Bucknell University
8. Oberlin College
9. United States Air Force Academy
10. Pomona College

The aren’t any surprises in the first list, except perhaps that four of the top ten are state schools (the “public option” when there’s a “government takeover” of education.) But with the colleges, I wonder what the nature of the buzz was. Is Occidental at #2 because Obama went there as a freshman? Why is Bucknell more buzzworthy than, say, Kenyon or Vassar?

I also wonder what brand equity means. In commerce, it adds value. It increases the price of a product or share of stock. What does it do for education?

Options and Adoptions

January 5, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

In “Knocked Up” and “Juno,” single women with unplanned, unintended, unwished-for pregnancies wind up keeping their babies (and presumably live happily ever after). As Ross Douthat says in this NY Times column on Monday, these films make abortion seem “not only unnecessary but repellent.” A few American films, very few, have taken a different view of abortion, notably “The Cider House Rules” and “Dirty Dancing.”*

There’s a third option to unwanted pregnancy – adoption. Douthat sees it as the bridge between infertility and unwanted pregnancies. The trouble, Douthat says, is that because of abortion, fewer babies are crossing that bridge.

Prior to 1973, 20 percent of births to white, unmarried women (and 9 percent of unwed births over all) led to an adoption. Today, just 1 percent of babies born to unwed mothers are adopted, and would-be adoptive parents face a waiting list that has lengthened beyond reason.

Instead, those babies are being “destroyed.”

This is the paradox of America’s unborn. No life is so desperately sought after, so hungrily desired, so carefully nurtured. And yet no life is so legally unprotected, and so frequently destroyed.

Douthat’s article got some strong reaction. Read the comments on the Times website. Or if you prefer blunt outrage, try Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon. She frames the question differently. You can’t just say, “Abortion bad, adoption good.” You have to ask: good and bad for who? Take that closing, somewhat mawkish line of Douthat’s. The mother who is “destroying ”the foetus is obviously not the person who “hungrily desires” it. Nor are the people involved in adoption equals. There’s a social class dimension. Douthat’s abstract prescriptions when applied to the real world mean this: because a middle-class white couple hungrily desires a child, a poor girl must carry her baby to term and give it to them.

to return to an era where being a sexually active, unmarried woman was de facto criminalized so that your labor could be forcibly extracted from you to benefit people who do a much better job than you of keeping up appearances.

Douthat sees the pre-Roe era as one of possibly troubled girls gratefully and happily giving up their happy babies to happy and grateful adopting couples. Marcotte is less sanguine. It was instead an era when

young white women . . . who turned up pregnant were forced to give birth to babies and forced into maternity homes where they were restrained and often subject to torturous behavior so they couldn’t resist when their babies were snatched from them against their wills.

Adoption, in the real world, is not such a simple solution. Maybe that’s why there are so few movies about it. I can’t think of any movies with adoption as an important element of the story. Surely there must be some.** [Update: See Tina’s comment.]

* My favorite American film with an abortion theme is “Racing With the Moon,” (1984) with Sean Penn, set in 1942 – a good film that nobody saw. For more on abortion in the movies see Stephen Farber at The Daily Beast last April.

** I think adoption does enter into soap operas and medical dramas like “Private Practice,” but usually with such complicated entanglements that the basic conflicts and problems of adoption get lost.

Inequality at the Threshold

January 2, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Economic inequality in the US has been increasing, but mostly because of sky’s-the-limit incomes at the top. The relative inequality among the rest of us, the bottom 95% or even 99%, has remained fairly stable. But the six-figure income of thirty years ago has become a 7- or 8- figure income today.

(Click on the graph for a larger view. The original, via Lane Kenworthy, is here. )

Tyler Cowen, in a recent article that’s been getting some attention, says that our biggest concern, morally and economically, should be with the elephantine incomes of people in the financial sector.

In short, there is an unholy dynamic of short-term trading and investing, backed up by bailouts and risk reduction from the government and the Federal Reserve. This is not good.

Today’s greedy Gordon Geckos game the system. As we saw in the 2008 meltdown and bailout, it’s heads they win, tails we lost. This view, though, turns out to be politically controversial. Blaming the system (unregulated speculation, no downside risk) and the greediest doesn’t sit right with conservatives.

But how then to explain the inequality at the top? By blaming those who are just not greedy enough.

Seriously. Reihan Salam at National Review Online reads Cowen’s article and homes in on a what Cowen calls “threshold earners . . . . someone who seeks to earn a certain amount of money and no more. If wages go up, that person will respond by seeking less work or by working less hard or less often.”*

Cowen also says that

any society with a lot of ‘threshold earners’ is likely to experience growing income inequality . . . If the percentage of threshold earners rises for whatever reasons, however, the aggregate gap between them and the more financially ambitious will widen. There is nothing morally or practically wrong with an increase in inequality from a source such as that.

Cowen doesn’t offer any evidence, probably because it would be very hard to measure the threshold attitude. Nor does he even guess as to how much inequality it accounts for. But Salam uses the idea to argue that when we look at the graph we should see not the outcome of an economic and political system. Instead, it’s a matter of personal preference – the personal choice not to earn as much as possible.

The measured stagnation in wages and to a lesser extent in compensation is thus seen as an artifact of political economy rather than a phenomenon that is driven in no small part by changing preferences.** [emphasis added]

For conservatives, the individual-preference model accounts for inequality at the bottom as well as at the top. They see unemployment, for example, as individuals choosing not to work. That, plus unemployment compensation – the princely $300 per week (“paying people not to work” in the words of The Wall Street Journal) that subsidizes the choice to avoid working. (As Dave Barry says, I am not making this up. See my earlier post on this is here.)

The trouble is that we don’t know much about threshold earners. As Salam says, “this has been a pretty darn un-rigorous discussion, as we’re talking about phenomena that are hard if not impossible to measure.”

Even so, I don’t see the logical connection between the threshold orientation and inequality. My first guess was that threshold earners would decrease inequality, not increase it. Andrew Gelman thought so too.

Both Gelman and Salam quoted a paragraph from Cowen’s article that begins

The funny thing is this: For years, many cultural critics in and of the United States have been telling us that Americans should behave more like threshold earners. We should be less harried, more interested in nurturing friendships, and more interested in the non-commercial sphere of life.

Cowen says that such cultural change will increase inequality. Again, we have no evidence. But when I read those sentences, I kept hearing the word that dare not speak its name – France. Or Europe generally. That’s where people spend less time working and more time enjoying life. (The French, on average, spend a full hour per day more than we do à table – and not just because their food is better.) Nearly all Europeans, on average, spend more of life in the non-commercial sphere. This mentality extends, or possibly even begins, in the upper reaches of the income scale. Yet European countries have much less inequality than does the US. As I recall, Tyler Cowen spent some time last summer in Germany, so I find it especially curious that in his article, he makes no cross-national comparisons.

*Anyone who took Sociology 100 knows that threshold earners. are nothing new. In The Protestant Ethic, Weber writes of the frustration of employers who try to get more worker output by offering piece-work incentives rather than a flat hourly wage. This strategy runs into

a peculiar difficulty: raising the piece-rates has often had the result that not more but less has been accomplished in the same time, because the worker reacted to the increase not by increasing but by decreasing the amount of his work. [The worker] did not ask: how much can I earn in a day if I do as much work as possible ? but: how much must I work in order to earn the wage, 2 ½ marks, which I earned before and which takes care of my traditional needs? [Chapter II, online here.]

Weber, lacking the vocabulary of modern economics, referred to these workers not as “threshold earners” but as “traditional.”

**The passive voice (“is thus seen as”) obscures Salam’s point – two points really. First, that the usual ways of measuring income inequality are not “useful,” and second, that what drives inequality is individual preference, in this case, preference for things other than income.

Rich Sentiments

December 29, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

“I’ve been rich and I’ve been wealthy, and believe me, wealthy is better.”

It’s not exactly what Sophie Tucker said. But it does seem to me that although rich is better than poor, the word carries overtones of greed and selfishness — the unapologetic 19th century plutocrat blowing his cigar smoke in your face. Forbes still lays it on the line – “The 400 Richest People in America” – possibly because Wealthiest is too cumbersome for a magazine cover. But rich has been steadily going out of fashion. Here is the nGram for rich and wealthy since 1850.

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

A few months ago I had a post called “Blockheads” about the effects of raising income taxes on the rich. In a Times article, Greg Mankiw claimed that the increase from 36% to 39% would deter rich people from their productive work. I disagreed, and I used Mankiw himself – “a rich economist” – and his unpaid blogging (and underpaid Times writing) as an example. Rich was the word I used. I was trying to be blunt about the amounts of money rich people had and got; I wanted to avoid euphemism. After all, in “Fiddler” Tevye does not sing, “If I were a wealthy individual, Ya da deedle deedle. . .”

Had I been too negative, too snarky? Not long after, I got a message from Liquida.com alerting me to their “Sentiment Analysis.” I clicked and discovered that the overall mood of the post was “Very Good!” mostly because I’d used the word rich.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

Use poor a few times in a post, and Liquida will rate the mood as “Very Bad.” Needless to say, my post on the quarterback sneak had a “Very Bad” sentiment, but surprisingly, the recent post on Death Panels rated a “Good” sentiment. Some text analysis programs are better than others.

In any case, one of my New Year’s Resolutions is to uplift the overall mood of this blog, to reduce the level of snark and to be and nicer even when offering criticism. But I don’t think I’m going to rely on Liquida to help me.

A Public (Television) Affair

December 24, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

The sociologists of media/culture will tell us what’s going on here. But me, in my naivete, I did a double take when I saw the TV listings for WNET, the local PBS outlet for us liberal elitists.

(Click, click now, on the image for a larger view.)

Yes, PBS is showing “Jessica Simpson: Happy Christmas.”   Jessica Simpson in the PBS line-up.  As they say on Sesame Street, one of these things is not like the others.

I even checked the WNET website to make sure someone hadn’t pranked the Times. But there it is (“. . . guests Willie Nelson, pop sensation (and sister) Ashlee Simpson, and more. New tracks from Simpson's upcoming album . . .”) With Charlie Rose and Gwen Ifill joining Jessica to sing “The Little Drummer Boy.”

The Law of Ungraspably Large Numbers

December 23, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Been here long?

Gallup regularly asks this question:

Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings --

1. Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process,
2. Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process
3. God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so?

Here are the results:

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

For better or worse, Godless evolutionism has been rising steadily if slowly for the past decade – 16%, and counting. And “only” 40% of us Americans, down from 47%, believe that humans are johnnies-come-lately. Scientific fact is making some headway. But a lot of people still believe in something that’s just not true.

Andrew Gelman explains it in psycho-economic terms. The “belief in young-earth creationism . . . is costless.” What you hear from religion contradicts what you hear from science class in school. The cost (“discomfort” in Andrew’s terms) of rejecting one belief outweighs the cost of rejecting the other. That’s probably true, and it helps explain the popularity of the have-it-both-ways choice – evolution guided by God.

I think there’s something else – the law of ungraspably large numbers. For example, I know how far it is to California (3000 miles), and I even think I know how far it is to the moon (240,000 miles – and I’m not looking this up on the Internet; if I’m wrong, I’ll let my ignorance stand since that’s partly the point I’m trying to make). But once you get past that – how far is it to the sun or to Jupiter or to Betelgeuse? – you could tell me any number up in the millions or more – a number so wrong as to make any astronomer chuckle – and I’d think it sounded reasonable.

Those big numbers and the differences between them are meaningful only to people who are familiar with them. They are so large that they lie outside the realm of everyday human experience. The same holds for distances in time. Ten thousand years – that seems like a long, long time ago, long enough for any species to have been around. But “millions of years” is like those millions or hundreds of millions of miles – ungraspably large.

Since the number is outside the realm of human experience, it doesn’t make sense that humans or anything resembling them or even this familiar planet could have existed that long ago.

I suspect that it’s this same law of ungraspably large numbers that allows politicians to posture as doing something about “the huge deficit” by attacking a wasteful government program that costs $3 million. If I spend a few thousand dollars for something, that’s a big ticket item, so three million sounds like a lot. Millions and billions both translate to the same thing: “a lot of money” just as distances in millions of miles and billions of miles are both “a long way away.” The difference between them is hard to grasp.*

*How many such programs would the government have to cancel to cover the revenue losses we just signed on for by extending the tax cuts on incomes over $250,000? And if you think those tax cuts for the rich will pay for themselves or increase revenue, there’s a lovely piece of 1883 pontine architecture I’d like to show you for possible purchase.

Babel Phone

December 21, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

It gets harder and harder to separate reality from fiction – like those stories panelists on “Wait Wait” make up for the “Bluff the Listener” segment. Or the facts and fictional products or happenings that Kurt Andersen mixed together in Turn of the Century, and readers often didn’t know which was factual and which made up. That was twelve years ago. By now, reality has caught up, and some of those fictions are now fact. But maybe we’re at a point where sci-fi sometimes has to catch up with reality.

Thirty years ago, Douglas Adams imagined the Babel fish – instant translation available to all. Now there’s this, and you don’t have to stick it in your ear.


It’s like a magic trick,* or something out of Harry Potter – if Gryffindor had ever vacationed on the Costa del Sol. But it’s real – an app for your iPhone. Five bucks. (I’m not sure how many knuts that is.)

UPDATE, Dec. 30. Even David Pogue – David F***ing Pogue! – puts Word Lens on his ten-best-ideas list and says it is “software magic.”


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*I know it isn’t really all that amazing. Translation programs have been around for a while (and how sophisticated does it have to be to read simple signs?), so has character recognition. But, at least in this ad, it still looks like magic to me.

Death Panels

December 20, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

She was crying – a student in my ten o’clock class, sitting on a couch in the broad stairwell near the classroom. Her face was red, her body shook slightly. Another girl in the class was sitting next to her trying to comfort her. I stopped and sat down across from them.

The girl’s father was dying. He had been diagnosed many months ago, and the doctor had recommended a treatment available at only one hospital. But the hospital was not “in network,” and the insurance company had refused to cover the costs. The family was not at all wealthy – the girl was paying tuition with what she could scrape together from her job and loans – so that was that. Now the cancer had spread. It was inoperable, and his in-network hospital had sent him home with some liquid morphine and Dilaudid.

I told her not to worry about taking the final exam. We’d make some arrangement.

* * * *
I see Sara Palin is still using the “death panel” line (see her recent WSJ piece). Back when she introduced it, Politifact gave it their most flagrant false rating (“Pants on Fire”) on their Truthometer. But when you’ve come up with a catchy phrase that your base responds to, why not keep using it?

At the time, I wondered why Obamacare proponents didn’t point out that we already had death panels – not the fantasy ones in the imagination of Palin and her peeps, but real ones staffed by the insurance companies. “Recission,” the insurers called it – rescinding a policy on whatever pretext they could come up with when the patient’s bills threatened to run to real money. “Recission” sounds so much nicer than “death panels”; it has a precise, almost surgical ring to it.

The Democrats, even when they exposed the policy, continued to use the industry’s term. Insurance executives testifying to Congressional committees all said that recission is a minor matter, a distraction, since it affects only half of one percent of policy holders. Several bloggers later pointed out what was wrong with this math (my earlier post with links is here). But even at face value, it’s daunting. Half of one percent is five per thousand. If one-third of the population has health insurance, that’s 100 million. Five per 1000 is 5,000 per million, times 100 is half a million people.

I assume that this recission rate is lifetime, not annual. It’s not a huge number, especially if you translate it into that small-sounding percentage. So you really don’t have to think about it – not until you’re on your way to class, and you see a girl weeping for her dying father, and you still can’t get that image out of your head.

Word Count

December 17, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Google’s new tool is too cool. It tracks the word count of any word or phrase in “lots of books” going back as far as 1800 if you like. And it’s fast. An instant reading of the Zeitgeist.

The rise and fall of sociology tracks with the discourse of social class.

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

Want to confirm your impression about the rise of soccer?

In some cases, it’s hard to figure out the relation between what’s in “lots of books” and what’s happening in the real world. The decline in “robbery” in books starts 15 years ahead of the decrease in robbery in the real world. And as robbery in the streets starts to decline, its representation on the page starts to rise. Go figure.

Warning: this is a real time-suck, at least it was for me today when I first discovered it.

The Sneakiest Sneak

December 16, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston
You’ve probably seen this variant of the quarterback sneak – it’s gotten millions of hits on YouTube, and it’s been reported on broadcast TV. If not, take 30 seconds and watch it.

It isn’t really sneaky. In fact, it’s brazen. And it brings us tonight’s word: Definition of the Situation.

It’s Intro Sociology, W. I. Thomas. When you are in a situation, you need to know what’s going on.
You need to know what that situation is - a date or just coffee between friends, a formal class or a relaxed discussion, etc. The definition tells you who you are; it tells you who the others in that situation are (lover, student, friend, etc.). It tells you what you should do. The definition of the situation is all about roles and rules.

Faced with an unfamiliar situation, you look around for a definition, and the usual strategy is to take your cues from others, especially those who seem to know what’s going on – people with competence or authority in that situation. That dependence on the definitions of strangers has been the basis of many Candid Camera stunts and social psychology experiments, where the strangers are acting not with kindness but with deception and manipulation.

In this middle-school football play, the quarterback and center do something unusual for someone in those roles. They don’t violate the official rulebook, but their behavior is outside the norms of the game everyone knows. What’s going on? Has the play begun? The defense looks around to the others for their cue as to what to do. They see the offensive line motionless in their stances, seemingly waiting for the play to start. They see their own teammates too looking uncertain rather than trying to make a tackle. So nobody defines the play as having started. But it has. Only when the quarterback, having walked past eight definitionless* players, starts running do they arrive at an accurate definition, and by then, it’s too late. Touchdown.

UPDATE: Although W.I. Thomas coined the term definition of the situation, what the video dramatizes is really closer to Goffman’s use of the term

it will be in his interests to control the conduct of the others, especially their responsive treatment of him. This control is achieved largely by influencing the definition of the situation which the others come to formulate, and he can influence this definition by expressing himself in such a way as to give them the kind of impression that will lead them to act voluntarily in accordance with his own plan.

— from the opening section of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

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* Someone does offer a definition – the coach of the team on offense This play immediately followed a 5-yard offsides penalty on the defense. Now the coach of the team in white yells at his quarterback that it should have been a 10-yard penalty and he should walk off another five yards. The quarterback starts to do so, and none of the defense remembers at first that only referees, not quarterbacks, can respot the ball for a penalty.

Welfare (and Wal-Mart) at the Eleventh Hour

December 14, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Do poor people make unwise decisions – decisions that may have caused their poverty, decisions that aggravate that hardship? In the thread of comments on the previous post, there was some speculation that many of the poor, perhaps even a majority, were making these kinds of bad choices, perhaps because they were ignorant or, more likely, because they lacked the proper virtues and because government welfare allowed them to do so. In any case, the argument continues, the Heritage Foundation has told us that the poor in America are well-housed, well-clothed, and well-fed.

Maybe it’s time to go back to Wal-Mart. Three months ago Bill Simon, the Wal-Mart CEO spoke at a Goldman-Sachs Retail Conference, and some of what he said got picked up in the popular press – NPR’s “Planet Money,” Salon, and elsewhere. He talked about

an ever-increasing amount of transactions being paid for with government assistance.

And you need not go further than one of our stores on midnight at the end of the month. And it's real interesting to watch, about 11 p.m., customers start to come in and shop, fill their grocery basket with basic items, baby formula, milk, bread, eggs, and continue to shop and mill about the store until midnight, when electronic -- government electronic benefits cards get activated and then the checkout starts and occurs. And our sales for those first few hours on the first of the month are substantially and significantly higher.

And if you really think about it, the only reason somebody gets out in the middle of the night and buys baby formula is that they need it, and they've been waiting for it. Otherwise, we are open 24 hours -- come at 5 a.m., come at 7 a.m., come at 10 a.m.

But if you are there at midnight, you are there for a reason.

This snapshot of Wal-Mart at midnight doesn’t quite fit with the widespread and tenacious the image of the poor as drug addicted, lazy, heedless spawners of children that they won’t even feed a bowl of cereal to in the morning, all supported by a cushy welfare system that subsidizes their profligate, unwise, and unvirtuous ways.

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

Shortage of jobs was also two to four times more likely than these other causes to be voted as “not a cause of poverty.”

The survey was done in 2001. Perhaps the current high rates of unemployment, especially long-term unemployment, have changed perceptions about the poor and the causes of poverty (though probably not at the Heritage Foundation).

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).

Performativity?

December 2, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

They didn’t have performativity back when I went to school, so I don’t really know what it is. Is this an example?

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

Full article here.

Via Brad DeLong, and all over the blogosphere today, even though it’s originally from 1974.

Citizen Kanye

December 1, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

I wish I knew more about the economics of the music business.

At first glance, it looks like Kanye West’s decision to sell his new album for $3.99* at Amazon is putting pride ahead of profit. Zach Baron at the Village Voice says that Kanye did it only because of the swift sales success of another album, “Speak Now,” by, oh, what was her name? You know, that one at the VMA.

There’s money, and there’s competitive, striving megalomania. (I can’t believe I am the first person to come up with the pun in the subject line of this post. But if someone else did put it out there, Google’s algorithm places it far down on the list.) In some areas, striving and ego go together like a horse and carriage. At the financial houses (Goldman Sachs, et. al.), they say that those multi-million dollar bonuses are not about the money and what it buys. The dollars are just a way of keeping score. You want a $20 million bonus because the guy at the next desk got $18 million.

But apparently, in the music business, at least for the top stars, what you keep score with is not dollars but sales, regardless of the economics.

the rush toward ever lower pricing . . . pushes the consumer cost of an album ever closer to that terrifying price point: free. Nobody in the industry wants that, let alone a guy poised to sell something in the neighborhood of a million records over the next week.

It’s like the old joke about the businessman who has cut his price so low that he’s losing $2 on every item he sells. When asked how he can do that, he says, “We’ll make it up in volume.”

I guess Kanye’s beautiful, dark, twisted response would be, “We’ll make it up in ego.”


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* Now, after the first week surge, the download price has gone up to $4.99.




HT: Tyler Cowen for the link to the Voice.

Searching for Consistency

November 30, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Our department secretary flew to California last week. She said that the security lines at JFK zipped right along. Neither she nor her husband nor any of the other travelers minded the new search procedure, nor did it cause any delays. Why then did the media give so much coverage to the TSA and its antagonists during Thanksgiving week?

Pure politics. All the fuss is coming from the right. But as Ross Douthat said in his New YorkTimes column on Monday, if George W. Bush had been in office when the scanner policy came down, the same people who are whining about Big Government violating the Constitution and trampling on Privacy and Freedom would be draping the scanning machines in Old Glory.

Here’s an example of reaction on the right.

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

Had Bush been President,* Drudge would have been saying that only terrorists and their allies would want to resist the TSA. And the photo would show not a nun but Osama bin Laden or the Shoe Bomber.

Douthat also guesses that liberals would have opposed the new scan and grope procedures if Bush were President. Possibly, but they certainly wouldn’t have made as much noise about it. Even now, lefty bloggers are not extolling the TSA as the thin line keeping Al Qaeda bombs from our planes. And Obama and Napolitano sound conciliatory (“Sorry, folks, but we have to do this”) rather than patriotic, pugnacious, or protective in the GOP style (“Which is worse, being patted down or blown up? Take your pick.”)

The right and left also divide over who should be searched. Conservatives favor racial profiling; liberals oppose it. But racial profiling too raises the problem of political consistency – not all by itself, but when it sits down next to Affirmative Action. As Elvin Lim wrote in Faster Times (the day before Douthat’s column in the slower Times),

It seems, then, that one can either be for race-based profiling and affirmative action, or against both. What is problematic is if one is for one but not the other.

But doctrinaire liberals and conservatives split their preferences – for one and against the other.

My guess is that most liberals are for race-based affirmative action but against racial profiling, and most conservatives are against race-based affirmative action but for racial profiling.

Lim also thinks that the consistency problem is thornier for conservatives.

For the conservative who is against race-based affirmative action but for profiling, the problem is stickier. Almost every anti-affirmative action argument I have come across turns on the principle of formal equality: that discrimination on the basis of race is wrong, no matter what the policy intentions may be. [Lim’s italics]

Greater equality and opportunity is a policy intention, so is air safety. If you’re a conservative and, like Steven Colbert, you don’t see color, if you’re for color-blind hiring and college admissions, then you should be for color-blind everything, including airport screening.

Another part of the conservative dilemma might be that conservatives have a lower tolerance for ambiguity. They prefer “moral clarity” – adherence to a simple principle. So while in practice they will hold tight to their inconsistent positions on racial profiling and affirmative action, they’ll have a harder time dealing with the cognitive dissonance.

* In fact, Bush was President when the photo Drudge used was taken. It’s from 2007. But it was of a nun being patted down, and I guess Drudge found it just too good to pass up. (See here.)

Cooler Than Other Majors

November 29, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

What can you do with a BA in sociology? Ask Mike Posner, whose album “Cooler Than Me” has been in the top 10 world wide and in the US.

(Click on the image for a larger, readable view.)

The money quote (the red underlining is my own addition): “According to Posner, his sociology study has helped with his music.”

The above is from Undercover, which also has a video interview. (and does not know how to spell Clive Davis’s name).


HT: Global Sociology via a Social Psych tweet.

Sunday Traffic

November 25, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

It’s Thanksgiving, and that means football on television.

The NFL games are probably not something the Pilgrims had in mind, but they have become part of the tradition. I don’t know if turkeys have gotten bigger, but the NFL line-up has expanded from one game to two and now three. The games span eleven hours of TV time, with a short break between the afternoon and evening games (assuming no overtime). No matter when the meal is served, there’s a football game on. So I wonder whether the television is complementing the family-and-food part of the holiday or competing with it. In economists’ terms, are these goods complementary or supplementary?

I did come across some research on one good that does compete with the NFL. The data-heads at Tube8.com looked at the number of visits to their site from various NFL media markets, especially on bye weeks, the one week in the 17-week season that each team gets to rest. What do the fans do on Sunday if the home team isn’t playing? Or maybe I should ask, What don’t they do if the team is playing?

The Tube8 statisticians looked at the numbers of visits they got from NFL cities on three types of Sundays:

• The average Sunday
• Sundays during football season
• Sundays during football season but when the home team had a bye

Here are the results for five cities. (There are 32 NFL teams. I couldn’t put them all on a graph that fit on one screen.)

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

As the graphs shows, football takes a bite out of Tube8's traffic. What kind of traffic is that, you ask. I should have mentioned that Tube8 is a porn site – so NSFW that I’m not even hyperlinking it. (I check these things out so that you don’t have to.)

On average, an NFL game reduced Tube8's traffic by about 18%. When the home team had a bye, traffic was down, but only by 10%. Some guys will take pigskin over skin no matter who’s playing.*

All NFL cities showed this same pattern. For some teams (New York, Green Bay), the Sunday-to-Sunday differences were barely noticeable. In others (Kansas City, Seattle, San Diego), they were twice the average. (Deadspin has the numbers for all 32 franchises.)

In any case, whatever pleasures you’re indulging in today, Happy Thanksgiving.

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*I wouldn’t make too much out the raw numbers on visits or say that one city is more porn-minded than another since I don’t know the size of the area that Tube8 (or their source, Google Analytics) defines as “Seattle” or “Pittsburgh” or wherever.

HT: Victor Matheson at The Sports Economist.

Whole Lot of Cheatin' Going On

November 23, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Some of Jenn Lena’s students plagiarized. She says she feels “angry, disappointed, and sad.” I’ve felt the same way.

She also posts a video of a management teacher at UCF who discovered widespread cheating on an exam. Two hundred students out of 600 used advanced copies of the exam questions, probably from a publisher’s test bank.

The students were dishonest, of course. But when so many students cheat, cheating begins to look less like a personal defect and more like a rational response to a situation. The elements of that situation are all too familiar: large anonymous classes, multiple-choice tests, pre-packaged test banks from the publisher, and other things you can probably think of. What these create is a tacit agreement all around that the map (a score on a test) is more important than the territory (what the student actually knows or can do).*

My grad school’s language requirement is a good example. To pass it, I had to take a standardized test (ETS, I think). I could have cheated – gotten someone else to take the test for me, copied from another test-taker, sneaked notes or books into the exam – and as long as I didn’t get caught, I would pass the test even if I couldn’t understand a word of French. I didn’t cheat. I filled in the little scantron ovals, and even though I could speak, read, and write French at only the simplest level, I filled in enough of the right ones to pass. To conclude that I knew French was a travesty. But the school looked only at the map, not the territory. Their message was hard to miss: “We don’t care whether you really know French; just pass the damn test.” As long as the map looks o.k., we’ll ignore the territory.

At Brandeis the language exam was different. I was an undergraduate there, and a sociology grad student told me about it. “You go to Everett Hughes’s office. He gives you a piece of paper with a reference for an article in some French journal and says, ‘Go read this article. Come back, and we’ll talk about it.’” No map, all territory. And impossible to cheat on.

Now it’s Thanksgiving, and final exams are almost upon us. What is it that I really want my students to able to do? Choose the right answers on multiple-choice items that they have no advance knowledge of? Does that resemble anything that they might encounter outside of a college course? In real life, if the answer to a question is at all important, we want people to have that question in advance. We want to find out what they think and how they think and how they can use what they know.

UPDATE, Nov. 24: Timothy Burke at Easily Distracted had a much more thorough and wide-ranging reaction to the UCF cheating incident. The true function of management courses and programs, he says, is not so much education as it is “a pre-screening device that saves employers the effort of having to consider an almost infinitely large pool of possible candidates for managerial or professional jobs. . . . . In that context, it’s hardly surprising that students would cheat.”

* Students of semantics will recognize this formulation as a variant (if not a distortion) of Korzybski’s dictum, “The map is not the territory”

Onward Christian Soldiers

November 20, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Bryan Fischer is policy director for the American Family Association – “family” meaning “right wing Christian” – and he’s upset about the trend in Medal of Honor winners. They’ve all heroically saved their fellow soldiers – nothing wrong with that. But why no medals for soldiers who kill a lot of people?

We have become squeamish at the thought of the valor that is expressed in killing enemy soldiers through acts of bravery. We know instinctively that we should honor courage, but shy away from honoring courage if it results in the taking of life rather than in just the saving of life. . . . When are we going to start awarding the Medal of Honor once again for soldiers who kill people and break things so our families can sleep safely at night? [Full article is here.]

It’s easy to make fun of this mentality. People of a certain age might be reminded, especially around Thanksgiving time, of “Alice’s Restaurant.”

(Go ahead, click and listen for ten seconds.)

But Fischer’s perception is probably accurate. We are indeed reluctant to glorify slaughter, even when it’s our enemies that we are slaughtering. But why? I have a few guesses.

• Make defense, not war. After World War II, the Department of War rebranded itself as the Department of Defense. Since then, we have sent our troops to make war on lots of countries around the world, and have in fact killed a lot of people, but we always claim to be acting in self-defense. Slaughtering the other side is offensive. We now prefer defense, and saving your fellow soldiers is defensive.

• No big deal. Using the tools of modern warfare is not so obviously an act of heroism. Killing lots of the enemy is too easy, what with modern bombs and missiles and other weaponry. Besides, these weapons also often kill an embarrassing number of civilians. But saving people who are under fire is much more difficult, hence more heroic.
• Goal attainment? Killing lots of people doesn’t win wars – at least not the kinds of wars we’ve found ourselves in these past 50 years. We killed a million Vietnamese, and we still didn’t win. By contrast, the payoff of saving your fellow soldiers is self-evident.

A bit too rational I know. Fischer’s explanation is more cultural: our squeamishness, he says, is part of the “feminization” of American culture. He doesn’t elaborate, so maybe his explanation for the trend in medalling is really just sticking a label on it. (Lisa Wade, at Sociological Images, has already blogged about the gender assumptions involved in this idea.) But I have a broader speculation. What Fischer sees as feminization might be part of a slow evolution out of our agricultural past.

The virtues Fischer likes – among them, honor and bravery and the willingness to kill several members of your own species – are (I’m guessing here) part of a package of sentiments that developed along with agricultural/pastoral civilizations beginning maybe 15,000 years ago. Before that, in our several hundred thousand years as hunter-gatherers, we humans probably had little use for these qualities.

These manly virtues become important in large, unequal societies – especially patriarchal ones – that the agricultural revolution engendered. Even in the US, those manly and military virtues were much more a part of the agricultural South than the commercial, industrial North. They still are, as Richard Nisbett’s research shows. A disproportionate number of our troops are from rural and Southern regions.

If Fischer wants an example of his ideal, he might look to the pre-industrial sentiments of the jihadists, who are not at all squeamish about killing.* Thoroughly unfeminized, they broadcast videos of themselves beheading people, they have no qualms about slaughtering civilians to achieve their goals, and they go in for public executions in large stadiums. When honor requires it, they readily slit the throats of their daughters and sisters.

We in the West are further along in the transition out of agricultural society and into industrial or even post-industrial society. But it’s only been a couple of hundred years, and these mentalities are slow to change, especially when the costs and benefits are not starkly clear. I wonder how many centuries or millenia of early agricultural civilization it took to instill the mentality of manly virtues. And even then, as now, many people still didn’t get it, preferring a less heroic and less rewarded life, removed from the manly glories of honor and conquest, bravery and bloodshed.

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*To support his call for the return of manly killing, Fischer seeks support in the Bible, particularly in the New Testament and the teachings of Jesus. It’s the old “Kill a Commie for Christ” idea. I’m not much of a Biblical scholar, but it seems to be he’s looking for blood in all the wrong places. The Hebrews of the Old Testament should be much more to his liking. But he’s stuck with his Christianity, so he squeezes Jesus for any drop of righteous conquest that might be there.

Received Wisdom

November 18, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Athletes can be refreshingly honest – refreshing if you’re used to listening to interviews with politicans, celebrities, or other types who worry about their popularity. I remember Charlie Rose asking Reggie Miller some tough questions (this was a few years ago when Miller was still playing for the Pacers). They were the kinds of questions I expected would get either evasive, vague answers or the usual received-wisdom cliches. But Miller was informative, and he said what he thought.

Derrick Mason is a wide receiver, and a good one, for the Baltimore Ravens. Before that he was with the Titans. Last week, in an interview for the Baltimore Sun, he refused to shovel the usual feel-good drivel.

The question was about sports journalists who “write stories about how the success of a professional sports franchise can uplift a city, and inspire its residents in difficult times.”

Here, in part, is Mason’s answer:

I don't think there is any truth to it. When you're winning, honestly, people are excited. But it's not going to do any good for jobs. It's not going to bring General Motors, Chrysler and Ford back. . . .Even in New Orleans. People said when the Saints won the Super Bowl it would regenerate the economy down there in the city. For a time being, it did help the city. But New Orleans is still in the same situation . . . That uplifting is gone.

If Mason is as sharp on the field this Sunday as he was in the Sun last week, I’d take the Ravens and lay the ten points, broken pinky and all. (Besides, the Panthers have covered at home only once this season; they haven’t covered much on the road either.)

He also has some nice things to say about Nashville. Full interview is here.

HT: Dennis Coates.

UPDATE Saturday morning: The betting public seems to have drawn similar conclusions from this interview. Eighty percent of the action in this game is on the Ravens, and the bookies have moved the line up to 11 or 11 ½. Given my contrarian tendencies (see earlier post and links here), I should stay away from this one or even fade the Ravens.
UPDATE II. The Ravens won 37-13, covering the spread thanks to two late defensive TDs. Mason caught three passes for 42 yards.

Politics as a Nasty Vocation

November 17, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Politics, as Weber said, inevitably involves a tension: “the attainment of ‘good’ ends” comes at the price of “using morally dubious means.”

Earlier in this blog (here), I put it in terms of cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is really the close cousin of Hypocrisy — changing your perceptions to make them square with your larger ideas. Cognitive Dissonance went to grad school; Hypocrisy chose religion and politics.

Secret recording is morally dubious, to say the least, as we have seen recently here in New Jersey. When a Rutgers student committed suicide after two other students streamed video of him in a romantic encounter with another male, Gov. Christie was quick to say that the secret taping was a violation of conscience. “I don't know how those two folks are going to sleep at night, knowing that they contributed to driving that young man to that alternative.” (Was it a violation of the law? Christie, whose previous job was US Attorney, said that he would leave it up to his attorney general.)

Now another secret taping has emerged. According to Bob Braun, who’s been covering education for the Star-Ledger since anyone can remember, a young man followed a special ed teacher, Alissa Ploshnick, into a bar,

bought drinks for Ploshnick and began asking about tenure. Ploshnick talked about how difficult it was to fire a tenured teacher. She said some things she shouldn’t have said. She quoted someone else as having used a racial obscenity, the so-called “n-word..”

All the while, he was secretly videotaping, and Ploshnick’s comments are part of an anti-union web video, “Teachers Gone Wild.”

Gov. Christie’s goals include the weakening of the union. But what about the morally dubious means? Did the governor deem this secret taping a violation of conscience?

Christie recently praised O’Keefe’s secret taping of Ploshnick and others and said: “If you need an example of what I’ve been talking about for the last nine months — about how the teachers union leadership is out of touch with the people and out of control — go watch this video.”

The dissonance goes further. The person whose privacy or confidentiality you violate should be someone who deserves it. But Ploshnick doesn’t seem like such a bad person or teacher. In 1997,

Alissa Ploshnick risked her life to save the lives of a dozen Passaic schoolchildren. She threw herself in front of a careening van to protect her students and landed in the hospital with broken ribs, a fractured wrist, a badly bruised pelvis and glass cuts in her eyes. She could have died. . . . She says she spent $9,000 of her own money on school supplies for her students, made sure a child in her class made his dental appointments by bringing him there and was just asked to be a godparent to the child of another student.