Expensive Shoes, Good News

August 4, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Times this morning has a reassuring front-page story – the rich are spending, and prices don’t seem to matter all that much.

“If a designer shoe goes up from $800 to $860, who notices?” said Arnold Aronson, managing director of retail strategies at the consulting firm Kurt Salmon, and the former chairman and chief executive of Saks.

For the record, the negligible increase from $800 to $860 (a 7% increase) is actually larger than the 5% income tax increase Obama proposed on incomes over $250,000 (from 37% to 39%). This 5% increase would have wrought such disaster that Republicans, in the words of one of their leaders,* held the economy hostage to ensure that it would not happen.

Nordstrom has a waiting list for a Chanel sequined tweed coat with a $9,010 price. Neiman Marcus has sold out in almost every size of Christian Louboutin “Bianca” platform pumps, at $775 a pair. Mercedes-Benz said it sold more cars last month in the United States than it had in any July in five years.

Here’s why we should all be cheered up by the good fortune of those with large fortunes.

“This group is key because the top 5 percent of income earners accounts for about one-third of spending, and the top 20 percent accounts for close to 60 percent of spending,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Analytics. “That was key to why we suffered such a bad recession - their spending fell very sharply.”

You might think that the rich account for more spending because they have the bucks. The top 5% that accounts for one-third of spending also accounts for about one-third of income. Now Mark Zandi is a very smart economist, so I’m sure there’s some reason that it’s better for the economy when rich people buy luxury German cars than when the other 95% of us buy the things we buy.

So it’s good that the money is flowing to the top. It’s certainly not flowing to the rest of us.

The success luxury retailers are having in selling $250 Ermenegildo Zegna ties and $2,800 David Yurman pavé rings - the kind encircled with small precious stones - stands in stark contrast to the retailers who cater to more average Americans. [emphasis added]

How about shoes? One of these shoes is the Nieman Marcus $750 Louboutin Bianca mentioned above. The other is a Viviana by Mossimo, available at Target for $29.99

(Click on the image for a view large enough that you can read the writing inside the shoe
and see which one costs 30 times more than the other -- as if you really had to look.)

Apparently, it’s better for one rich woman to buy the Bianca than for twenty-five women of average income to buy the Viviana. But I’m not sure why.

*GOP Senate leader quoted in WaPo: “I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting,” [McConnell] said. “Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this — it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming.”

Open-minded or Just Outnumbered?

August 3, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Tyler Cowen links to a Financial Times article about Match.com and gives the money quote, which quotes the Match.com engineer:

“Conservatives are far more open to reaching out to someone with a different point of view than a liberal is.” That is, when it comes to looking for love, conservatives are more open-minded than liberals.

The article provides no data or details, but I wonder whether the Match brains take into account the numbers of liberals and conservatives in the pool. If conservatives are in the minority, it may be simple math that makes them appear more open minded. If they remain closed-minded, compared to their liberal counterparts, they will have less chance of success.

In addition, if the liberal-conservative ratio is way out of balance, even a random matching will make the conservatives seem more open minded. By analogy, suppose that a population is 90% orange and 10% purple. No matter how many orange-purple matches occur, the rate of linking up with someone of a different color will be much higher for the purples. Unless all matches are same-color, the purple minority will seem more “open-minded.”

The Match.com president herself says something that supports this idea that those with fewer kindred spirits wind up becoming more open-minded.

I might come in and say I’m looking for a nice Catholic guy between 30 and 40 who is non-married. But after weeks of looking at people, I might get an e-mail from a guy who has kids, and I might accept that.

Going to Extremes

August 1, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

In a recent post (here), I referred to George Packer’s short essay on the current standoff in Washington. Packer used Max Weber’s distinction between an “ethic of responsibility” and an “ethic of ultimate ends.” Or, in Packer’s words, “between those who act from a sense of practical consequence and those who act from higher conviction, regardless of consequences.”

Packer said that the Republicans came down on the side of ultimate ends and that they were now extreme in their emphasis on principles regardless of consequences.

A commenter objected to Packer’s choice of words and dismissed his take on conservatives as “caricature.” . But a recent Economist/YouGov poll (here, July 23) suggests that although Packer’s diction may have been undiplomatic, he was essentially correct about the difference between the Republicans and others, a difference that holds not just in Washington but in the electorate generally.

The poll asked.

If you had to choose, would you rather have a congressperson who...

• Compromises to get things done
• Sticks to his or her principles no matter what

Here are the results.

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

No other variables produced such large differences. Region, sex, age, and education yielded differences of at most a few percentage points. There was an 11-point gap between blacks and whites, High income respondents ($100K and up) were 17 points more likely to want compromise than were those with incomes less than $40K. These differences are dwarfed by the 36-point gap between Democrats and Republicans and the 45-point gap between Liberals and Conservatives. It’s also worth noting that the Independent/Moderates were much closer to the those on their left than to those on their right.

Readers of a certain age or readers of history may remember Barry Goldwater, GOP candidate for president in 1964, and his defense of principled “extremism.” Despite the reverence for Reagan that Republicans often proclaim, it’s Goldwater who may be their true guiding star.

Living in the Past/Future

July 30, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Last night, I saw Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris.” This morning I read Gabriel Rossman’s cold critique of an ABC poll that Robin Hanson recently discussed. It was about cryonics. Not so different, really.

Nostalgia is a longing for the past. From that feeling grows a set of ideas and beliefs – that the past was better than the present, more comfortable and comforting. Cryonics feels the same way, but about the future. We are frozen in the present and thawed in some warm, ideal future. (Is there’s a word for this future-nostalgia?)

“Midnight in Paris” is all about nostalgia. It is nostalgia. The main character Gil (Woody Allen in Owen Wilson’s body) is a writer on vacation in Paris with his fiancee. At the stroke of midnight, he is magically transported back to Paris in the 20s. He hangs out with Hemingway and the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein reads a draft of Gil’s novel-in-progress, he wins the heart of a beauty who has been posing for (and sleeping with) Picasso.

The scenes of Paris of the present are filmed in the very harsh light of day. Paris of the past is Paris at night, dark with romantic lighting. That’s where we want to be.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

Cryonics plays on the same idea, but it reverses the time line and replaces romanticism with science. The fantasy is the same – being transported to a much better world – but that world is in the future. There’s a group version of this fantasy – the dream of society setting up shop on some other planet or space station, starting a whole new civilization free from the frustrations of the world we actually live in.

In the end, “Midnight in Paris” suggests that the nostalgia it has been promoting is not only futile but false and impossible even on its own terms. The beautiful model, who lives in the 20s feels nostalgic about the Belle Epoque, and when she manages to travel back to that period – Toulouse, Gauguin, Degas – she find those artists to be nostalgic for the Renaissance.

Come to think of it, Woody Allen gave us a critique of the future-nostalgia fantasy as well – “Sleeper.”

It's the Demand, Stupid

July 25, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

It’s nice to have one’s ideas supported in unexpected places.

Last month, I speculated (here) on the reasons job growth has been so dismal. The Republicans explanation is that employers are reluctant to hire because they are “uncertain” about government regulation. My explanation was simpler: “If companies aren’t hiring, the real problem, I suspect, is not lack of certainty but lack of customers.”

The Wall Street Journal, under the capable ownership of Rupert Murdoch, is not widely known as a lefty rag. But last week, they ran an article about this same question. Here’s the lede:

The main reason U.S. companies are reluctant to step up hiring is scant demand, rather than uncertainty over government policies, according to a majority of economists in a new Wall Street Journal survey. . . .

It continues:

In the survey, conducted July 8-13 and released Monday, 53 economists—not all of whom answer every question—were asked the main reason employers aren't hiring more readily. Of the 51 who responded to the question, 31 cited lack of demand (65%) and 14 (27%) cited uncertainty about government policy. The others said hiring overseas was more appealing.

Mr. Weber Goes to Washington

July 24, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

George Packer in The New Yorker (here):

The sociologist Max Weber, in his 1919 essay “Politics as a Vocation,” drew a distinction between “the ethic of responsibility” and “the ethic of ultimate ends”—between those who act from a sense of practical consequence and those who act from higher conviction, regardless of consequences. . .
.

Weber’s terms perfectly capture the toxic dynamic between the President, who takes responsibility as an end in itself, and the Republicans in Congress, who are destructively consumed with their own dogma. Neither side can be said to possess what Weber calls a “leader’s personality.” Responsibility without conviction is weak, but it is sane. Conviction without responsibility, in the current incarnation of the Republican Party, is raving mad

.
The image of Obama as weak, or at least too willing to give in to the Republicans, seems accurate to me. The Republicans appear not so much as “raving mad” but as intransigent and single-minded – less spending, no tax increases, no matter what.

I suspect that they are not as inflexible on this as they claim. They had no objection to very large spending increases when they were in the White House. Reagan, with the support of Republicans in Congress, increased Social Security taxes, and his closing of some tax loopholes and shelters was designed to raise the effective income tax on those who has used them. What the Republicans seem single-minded about is gaining power, as their Senate leader has said.

Read Packer’s article. It’s short, and its context for Weber is the story of a man trying to cope with problems of unemployment and health care.

For an earlier SocioBlog allusion to Weber's essay go here.

Apostrophes

July 22, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross posted at Sociological Images)


Changes in language seem to just happen. Nobody sets out to introduce a change, but suddenly people are saying “groovy” or “my bad.” And then they’re not. Even written language changes, though the evolution is slower.

Last weekend, I saw this sign at a goat farm on Long Island.

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

WER'E ??

I used to care about the apostrophe, but after years of reading student papers about “different society’s,” I have long accepted that the tide is against me. It’s like spelling a few hundred years ago – you can pretty much make up your own rules.

Sometimes the rule is fairly clear: use an apostrophe in plurals when leaving it out makes the word look like a different word rather than a plural form of the original. Change the “y” in “society” to “ies” and it looks too different. “Of all the cafe’s, I like the one with lime martini’s.”

Or these:


Technically, it should be "ON DVDS." But DVDS looks like it's some government agency (“I gotta go down to the DVDS tomorrow”) or maybe a disease.

It’s not always easy to figure out what rule or logic the writer is following. The little apostrophe seems to be plunked in almost at random. Not random, really. It’s usually before an “s.” But why does Old Navy say, “Nobody get’s hurt”?


There’s a prescriptivist Website, ApostropheAbuse.com, that collects these (that’s where I found the DVDS and Old Navy pictures). They’re fighting a losing battle.

Technology matters – I guess that’s the sociological point here. The invention of print and then the widespread dissemination of identical texts herded us towards standardization. Printers became a separate professional group (not part of the church or state), and most of them were in the same place (London). They had a stranglehold on published spelling.

Starting a few decades ago, anyone could be a printer. The page you are now reading might harbor countless errors in punctuation and spelling (though spell-checkers greatly reduce misspellings), but it looks just as good as an article in the Times online, and it’s published in a similar way (and to potentially as many readers – right)  .

And now there’s texting. It’s already pushing upper case letters off the screen, and the apostrophe forecast doesn’t look so good either. But what will still be interesting is not the missing apostrophe but the apostrophe added where, by traditional rules, it doesn’t belong.

I still can’t figure out WER’E.

Bought Sex?

July 20, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Did you buy sex last year?

You probably said no, even if you’re a man. But wait. First look at “The John Next Door” an article currently up at Newsweek (subhead: “The men who buy sex are your neighbors and colleagues”). It features a study by Melissa Farley called “Comparing Sex Buyers With Men Who Don’t Buy Sex”

No one even knows what proportion of the male population does it; estimates range from 16 percent to 80 percent.

Actually, a considerably lower estimate comes from the GSS.

PAIDSEX Had sex for pay last year: If you had other partners, please indicate all categories that apply to them. d. Person you paid or paid you for sex.

Here are the results since the GSS started asking this question..

(Click in the graph for a larger view.)

Not 16-80%, but somewhere around 5%.

Not to get too Clintonian, but it seems to depend on what the meaning of “sex” is. The GSS respondents probably thought that paying for sex meant paying someone to have sex. Farley’s definition was somewhat broader.

Buying sex is so pervasive that Farley’s team had a shockingly difficult time locating men who really don’t do it. The use of pornography, phone sex, lap dances, and other services has become so widespread that the researchers were forced to loosen their definition in order to assemble a 100-person control group.

So if you bought a copy of Playboy, you paid for sex. And if you looked at it twice last month, you are disqualified from the control of “men who don’t buy sex.”

“We had big, big trouble finding nonusers,” Farley says. “We finally had to settle on a definition of non-sex-buyers as men who have not been to a strip club more than two times in the past year, have not purchased a lap dance, have not used pornography more than one time in the last month, and have not purchased phone sex or the services of a sex worker, escort, erotic masseuse, or prostitute.”

I don’t have Farley’s data. If the control group of nonusers was 100, I assume that the user group n was the same – not really large enough for estimating the prevalence of the different forms of buying sex. How many had paid a prostitute, how many had looked at porn twice in a month? Some people probably think that there’s a meaningful distinction between those two. The implication of much of the Newsweek article is that they are all “sex buyers” and that they therefore share the same ugly attitudes towards women.

Shocked, Shocked

July 19, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Several teachers and administrators in Texas were shocked to learn of the report.
“That’s astronomical,” said Joe Erhardt, a science teacher at Kingwood Park High School in the Houston suburb of Humble, Tex. “I’m at a loss.”

From the New York Times article about a study of disciplinary procedures in Texas schools. Thirty percent of students had been suspended or expelled; with “in-school” suspensions included, the rate is 60%.

The great state of Texas has an incarceration rate higher than that of all but a handful of states. Since the Supreme Court started allowing death penalty laws in 1976, Texas has executed four times as many people as has the next most execution-friendly state. It accounts for nearly 40% of all executions in the US.

So why should anybody be surprised that Texas schools deal with kids by punishing them? Punitiveness seems to be a fairly strong element of Texas culture. Even before today’s report, it was well known that nearly all school districts in Texas allow corporal punishment. In 2006-07, the most recent year I could find statistics for, 49,000 Texas kids were paddled in school.

As for the effectiveness of suspension and expulsion

“We see so many kids being removed from the classrooms for disciplinary reasons, often repeatedly, demonstrating that we're not getting the desired changes in behavior,” Thompson [one of the authors of the report] said. “When we remove kids from the classroom, we see an increased likelihood in that student repeating a grade, dropping out or not graduating. We also see an increased likelihood of juvenile justice involvement.” (From the Houston Chronicle)

Will the report affect state and school policies. Maybe. But I suspect that this will be another instance where values (ideas about what is good) shape beliefs (ideas about what is true). If cultural values hold that punishing bad behavior is right, people will cling to the belief that punishment is also effective, i.e., that it reduces bad behavior. People who cherish these ideas will dismiss the evidence from this report and others as wrong or irrelevant. If they refer to these studies, they will be careful to put the word in quotation marks. You might have to pay attention to a study, but you can ignore evidence from “studies.”

Tough Situation

July 19, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Coming in October: a conference on Jersey Shore Studies. It had to happen, right? But at the University of Chicago?? Where have you gone, Allan Bloom? (HT: Scott McLemee, who has more to say on the subject at Insider Higher Ed.)

Despite very pleasant vacations last summer at Barnegat Light and Ocean Grove, I haven’t managed to watch much of the TV show. But I did take notice back in May when my favorite newspaper ran a story about a video posted by the father of Mike “the Situation” Sorrentino. Apparently, Sorrentino père has little good (and much unprintable) to say about Sorrentino fils.

The rift between the father and son started when, according to the elder Sorrentino, when his son ignored his plea for help with his medical expenses.

“I’ve been a diabetic for 25 years and my insurance was running out and I called up my son and said, ‘Listen, Mikey, I'm between jobs right now, can you help me out?’ I don’t want to lose my health coverage.”

Only in America, I thought.

Not “only in America” could a talented fellow like The Situation rise from modest circumstances to an esteemed position of wealth and fame

Not “only in America” could a father and son have a serious falling-out over money.

And certainly not “only in America” would a father make disparaging remarks about his son’s companions and co-workers.

But only in America, among wealthy, industrialized nations, would a diabetic, regardless of his son’s lack of filial financial piety, not be able to obtain the necessary treatment.

That situation, of course can be remedied. But the remedy is one form or another of what the Republicans still like to call a “government takeover” of health care. Unfortunately for Mr. Sorrentino,* that won’t happen in the US for another year or more at the earliest. And if the Supreme Court runs true to form, it might not happen for decades.

*According to a story at Trendbuzz a month later, Sorrentino the elder had switched to a cheaper diabetes med, and thanks to the side effects he wound up in the emergency room.

Too Much Goverment Spending on Schools?

July 14, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

A comment on an earlier post raised the question of whether “rich Republicans . . . pay so much for their kids' education but don't want to pay for the education of poorer children .”

Neither that comment nor the response to it had much to do with the substance of the post itself (which was about the ways in which the SAT might be biased). It was a tempest in the shot glass that is the Socioblog and not of much relevance, so I said nothing.

But just now I read this WaPo story saying that the Minnesota government shutdown is going to be resolved. It looks like the Mark Dayton, the Democratic governor, caved. Here’s the relevance:

• Rich Republicans: “Dayton reluctantly acceded to Republican demands not to raise any taxes . . Dayton {had] wanted to include a tax increase on the state’s top 2 percent of wage earners.”
• Paying for public education: “The plan would balance the state’s budget by cutting programs, delaying state aid to local school districts . . .”

So the Republicans would rather delay aid to schools than allow a small tax increase on the very rich.

It’s only one case, but I also did a quick-and-dirty rummage through the GSS, specifically the question of government aid to education. Here’s the breakdown by party and income.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

In the highest income groups, the percentage of Democrats and Independents saying “too much” is zero. Among Republicans, 8.8% and 12.7%.

The good news (good if you think that cutting education spending isn’t going to do much for educational results) is that not many Americans think we are spending too much. Most think we’re not spending enough. Who are those folks who think that the government is overspending on public education? Republicans, especially rich Republicans.

Like a Virgin – Whatever That Was

July 13, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Virginity has mattered as far back as we can tell. It is introduced in Genesis . . . and is mentioned repeatedly throughout the Hebrew Bible.

So says Yale psychologist Paul Bloom in his recent book How Pleasure Works. But Bloom’s “as far back as we can tell” ignores most of the evolution of the human species.

Bloom is certainly no creationist who believes that our species dates back only a few thousand years and is no older than the people in the Bible. He believes in evolution, and one of his arguments about how pleasure works is that evolution accounts, in part, for what we find pleasurable.

Pleasure draws upon deep intuitions . . . it is smart, and . . . it is evolved and universal and largely inborn. [my emphasis]

Culture and society, in Bloom’s view, matter only in that they vary the foods that feed these largely inborn hungers.

Belgian chocolates and barbecued ribs are modern inventions, but they appeal to our prior love of sugar and fat.

Since the importance of virginity goes back “as far back as we can tell,” it must be like the love of sugar – largely inborn. In that same chapter on sex (you couldn’t very well write a book called How Pleasure Works and not have a chapter on sex), he writes,

The obsession with virginity is one of the ugliest aspects of our sexual psyche.

I could be wrong; Bloom is, after all, a Yale professor – smart and well-educated – and the book jacket has accolades from heavy hitters like Steven Pinker. But if the obsession with virginity, like the taste for fat and sugar, is hard-wired  by evolution, it must have been with us since our earliest days on the savanna. But unfortunately, Bloom’s truncated history (“as far back as we can tell”) ignores most of our time on this planet.

For a few hundred thousand years, we humans lived as hunter-gatherers – small, egalitarian bands, nomadic and with fluid membership . And not much concern for virginity. The societies that prize virginity are agricultural and pastoral. They have been around for only the past 15,000 years or so. Agrarian societies may seem like the “real” humans, but that’s only because they account for all of our recorded history. Pre-literate hunter-gatherers left no accounts detailing their canons of morality.*

So maybe the concern with virginity is not inborn or universal but just a patriarchal blip in a much longer history, a fad that captured our imaginations for a few thousand years and fit well with other ideas but is now fading. As societies move from agricultural to industrial or post-industrial modes, people come to regard virginity as something like the horse-drawn plow – a curious, antiquated instrument that might have been important to people once upon a time but is not really of much use today at the office. Even in an advanced country like the US, you can still see the link between agrarian life and the value on virginity.  It is in the regions closest to their agrarian past (and present) where people are likely to see virginity as a necessary sign of virtue.

Also, even in the agrarian era, just whose obsession with virginity was this anyway? My guess is that women were and are far less obsessed than men. If you want to argue that the obsession is part of the sexual psyche that evolved over millennia, you would have to show how the male and female brain evolved differently with regard to this very specific idea that virginity is of paramount importance.

So when I read that sentence about the obsession with virginity being part of “our sexual psyche,” I am tempted to ask, “What you mean ‘we,’ patriarchal agrarian?”

---------------------
*Update. True, we have no information about the morals of humans who lived long before the dawn of recorded history. But we do have accounts of hunter-gatherers in the past few centuries, and these do not provide much support for the idea that virginity has always been a universal and eternal obsession.

SAT, GPA, and Bias

July 8, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

(Cross-posted at Sociological Images)

Is the SAT biased? If so, against who is it biased?

It has long been part of the leftist creed that the SAT and other standardized tests are biased against the culturally disadvantaged - racial minorities, the poor, et. al. Those kids may be just as academically capable as more privileged kids, but the tests don’t show it.

But maybe SATs are biased against privileged kids. That’s the implication in a blog post by Greg Mankiw. Mankiw is not a liberal. In the Bush-Cheney first term, he was the head of the Council of Economic Advisors. He is also a Harvard professor and the author of a best-selling economics text book. Back in May he had a blog post called “A Regression I’d Like to See.” If tests are biased in the way liberals say they are, says Mankiw, let’s regress GPA on SAT scores and family income. The correlation with family income should be negative.

a lower-income student should do better in college, holding reported SAT score constant, because he managed to get that SAT score without all those extra benefits.

In fact, the regression had been done, and Mankiw added this update:

Todd Stinebrickner, an economist at The University of Western Ontario, emails me this comment: “Regardless, within the income groups we examine, students from higher income backgrounds have significantly higher grades throughout college conditional on college entrance exam . . . scores.” [Mankiw added the boldface for emphasis.]

What this means is that if you are a college admissions officer trying to identify the students who will do best in college, as measured by grades, you would give positive rather than negative weight on family income.

Not to give positive weight to income, therefore, is bias against those with higher incomes.

To see what Mankiw means, look at some made-up data on two groups. To keep things civil, I’m just going to call them Group One and Group Two. (You might imagine them as White and Black, Richer and Poorer, or whatever your preferred categories of injustice are. I’m sticking with One and Two.) Following Mankiw, we regress GPA on SAT scores. That is, we use SAT scores as our predictor and we measure how well they predict students’ performance in college (their GPA).

(Click on the image for a larger, clearer view)

In both groups, the higher the SAT, the higher the GPA. As the regression line shows, the test is a good predictor of performance. But you can also see that the Group One students are higher on both. If we put the two groups together we get this.

Just as Mankiw says, if you’re a college admissions director and you want the students who do best, at any level of SAT score, you should give preference to Group One. For example, look at all the students who scored 500 on the SAT (i.e., holding SAT constant at 500). The Group One kids got better grades than did the Group Two kids. So just using the SATs, without taking the Group factor (e..g., income ) into account, biases things against Group One. The Group One students can complain: “the SAT underestimates our abilities, so the SAT is biased against us.”

Case closed? Not yet. I hesitate to go up against an academic superstar like Mankiw, and I don’t want to insult him (I’ll leave that to Paul Krugman). But there are two ways to regress the data. So there’s another regression, maybe one that Mankiw does not want to see.

What happens if we take the same data and regress SAT scores on GPA? Now GPA is our predictor variable. In effect, we’re using it as an indicator of how smart the student really is, the same way we used the SAT in the first graph.
Let’s hold GPA constant at 3.0. The Group One students at that GPA have, on average, higher SAT scores. So the Group Two students can legitimately say, “We’re just as smart as the Group One kids; we have the same GPA. But the SAT gives the impression that we’re less smart. So the SAT is biased against us.”

So where are we?

• The test makers say that it’s a good test - it predicts who will do well in college.
• The Group One students say the test is biased against them.
• The Group Two students say the test is biased against them.

And they all are right.


Huge hat tip to my brother, S.A. Livingston. He told me of this idea (it dates back to a paper from the1970s by Nancy Cole) and provided the made-up data to illustrate it. He also suggested these lines from Gilbert and Sullivan: And you'll allow, as I expect
That they are right to so object
And I am right, and you are right
And everything is quite correct.

Records and Performances

July 6, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

(A personal rant. If you are not interested in language or horse racing, read no further.)

One of these things is not like the others.

1. “He’s a guy with a track record that's beyond reproach.” (Nationals GM Mike Rizzo speaking about Davey Johnson as manager. USA Today, June 27)
2. The decision to publish was made easier by Ritter’s proven track record as a songwriter. (Steven King reviewing a book by Josh Ritter, NYT July 3)
3. Members of the House don't have a very good track record in primary campaigns. (Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight NYT blog on Michelle Bachman, June 23, a post called “Handicapping the Republican Field..”)
4. That’s what the OLC is good at, and what it has a long track record of doing on war powers. (Ruth Marcus on the Office of Legal Counsel, WaPo, June 22)
5. He walked a 20-kilometer race in Finland in 1:23:49.39 . . . just nine seconds off the U.S. men's 20K track record, which, as it happens, is held by his coach. (An article on racewalking, USA Today, June 24)
6. That No. 1 finish extends Pixar’s perfect box-office track record - all 12 of its feature films have opened in first place. (NYT article on “Cars 2,” June 27)
7. G.M.’s track record for making cars people want has not exactly been inspiring. (Joe Nocera, NYT, June 26)

One of these things uses “track record” in its original and logical sense. Can you guess which one is not like the others by the time I finish this post?

In the previous post about history, I said that horseplayers use the past performance charts to handicap the horses – i.e., to assign each horse a probability of winning – and decide which horse to bet on. “Past performances” are the details of each horse’s performance in previous races. It’s a lot of information.

Here’s an excerpt of the past performances for the horses in the first three post positions in this year’s Belmont Stakes. (A tutorial on how to read past performances is here.)

(Click on the image for a slightly larger view. Or go here and click on this same image for the full thing at readable size.)

After the race, horseplayers become historians. They go back to the same past performance charts to find the information that explain why the winner won (and why their horse finished out of the money).

The term “track record” also comes from horse racing. It indicates the fastest time for a given distance at a given track. The track record allows you to compare the performances of horses that have been running at different tracks.

For some reason, beginning in the late 1960s, “track record” spread far beyond the track.


The results were disastrous. Now, just about everybody except horseplayers – i.e., just about everybody – says “track record” when they mean “past performances.”

In the examples above, only #5 uses “track record” as it should be used (pardon my prescriptivism). Nate Silver (#3) even calls his blog post “Handicapping the Republican Field.” For Godssakes Nate, if you’re going call what you do “handicapping,” use the language of handicapping correctly.

It’s possible that this use of “track record” differs slightly from “past performances” and that the speaker is referring to someone’s record in some particular bailiwick, some metaphoric “track.” But in nearly every case, there is no other “track” that it could possibly be confused with. The added word “track” is totally unnecessary. Go back and read the sentences above, mentally removing the “track.” Go ahead, I’ll wait.

A simple “record” instead of “track record” retains all the meaning. And to my ear, once you remove the distraction of “track,” the sentences are clearer.

Why do people need to misuse the beautiful and precise language of horseplayers? Maybe they think that using a racing term gives their persona a dash of risk and romance, the roguish and the raffish. But inevitably, they get it wrong.

History and Horse Races - Run Only Once

July 5, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Here’s sentence from a New York Times op-ed by David Greenberg last week.

Modern Republican isolationism began with the 1919 battle over joining the League of Nations, when Senate Republicans, led by so-called Irreconcilables like William Borah of Idaho, killed the deal - even though without American guidance, European affairs were doomed to explode again.

I’ve read sentences like this hundreds of times – I’ve probably written some myself. But last week, I had been reading Everything is Obvious* (*Once You Know the Answer) by Duncan Watts, and I got stuck on doomed. “European affairs were doomed to explode again.”

Were they? Was the explosion inevitable? And was the absence of US guidance a necessary cause of the explosion?

It certainly seems that way. We know that Europe exploded in war twenty years after that 1919 decision by the US to stay out of the League. But we know that only in retrospect. At the time, there may have been several other equally plausible outcomes.

It’s like saying that the 2011 Belmont Stakes was “doomed” to be won by Ruler on Ice. True, he did win. But before the start of the race, there were many other plausible outcomes, most of them more likely. If the same race were held tomorrow – the same twelve horses running on a similarly sloppy track – would Ruler on Ice inevitably win? I doubt it. (If he were again 24-1, I might be tempted to put a small bet on his nose, but I wouldn’t be at all confident of collecting.)

The trouble with history is that, like the 2011 Belmont, it’s run only once. And after it’s run, historians and op-ed writers do the same thing that horseplayers do after a race: they go back to the Racing Form, the past performances, and pick out the information nuggets, often pebble-sized, that account for the results. Sometimes they even add their own speculation as fact. A horseplayer might say that Ruler on Ice would also have won the Kentucky Derby if only he’d been entered, a statement for which we have zero observations. An op-ed writer might say that the US presence in the League of Nations would have prevented World War II, a speculation based on a similar number of observations.

Watts suggests a different way of looking at history. Here, for example, is his take on the surge in Iraq. In the fall of 2007, the US upped its Iraq force by 30,000 troops. By the next summer, violence had substantially decreased. Conclusion: the surge worked. It reduced the violence.

Or did it?

Many other things happened between the fall of 2007 and the summer of 2008 as well. Sunni resistance fighters, seeing an even greater menace from hard-core terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda than from American soldiers, began to cooperate with their erstwhile occupiers. The Shiite militia – most importantly Moktada Sadr’s Mahdi Army – also began to experience a backlash from their grassroots, possibly leading them to moderate their behavior. And the Iraqi Army and police forces, finally displaying sufficient competence to take on the the militias, began to assert themselves, as did the Iraqi government. Any one of these factors might have been at least as responsible for the drop in violence as the surge. Or perhaps it was some combination. Or perhaps it was something else entirely.

We can’t know because history is run only once.

Ideally, we should be able to go back, examine our variables, look at the possible scenarios, and assign each outcome a probability. Maybe the outcome that did happen would have a lower probability than others, and we would wind up saying that what happened was a fluke or at least improbable. But that’s not what we do.

Rather than producing doubt, the absence of “counterfactual” versions of history tends to have the opposite effect – namely that we tend to perceive what actually happened as having been inevitable.

As I was reading this part of Watts’s book, I kept thinking of Hans J. Morgenthau, the great political scientist. This was many years ago, perhaps during Vietnam, and after Morgenthau’s analysis, typically thoughtful and insightful, someone in the audience asked him what we could expect as the outcome. In his elegant, German-accented English. Morgenthau said,

Well, the answer to that is that I am a professor, not a prophet. I cannot tell you what will happen. I can only tell you why what did happen was absolutely bound to happen.

Will Ruler on Ice beat those same horses again? Will another surge reduce violence? Maybe, but don’t bet on it.

Whose Declaration Is It Anyway?

July 4, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Mark Kleiman complains that the old Fourth-of-July custom of reading the Declaration of Independence “seems to have virtually disappeared.”

In a post three years ago, I reported that the custom was still alive and well in liberal Lenox, Mass. (Here’s the photo, the full post is here.)


Patriotism has usually been a value waved about by conservatives, especially when they are in power. But this was 2008, and after seven years of Bush-GOP rule, the liberals were starting to play Capture the Flag, a game they had been mostly sitting out of for decades.

When they are out of power, conservatives put their dissent-equals-disloyalty rhetoric back in the closet. The Declaration is an anti-government document. So I expect that we will see it read at many gatherings of the Tea Partistas. They have been calling Obama a tyrant for a while now, so they will be whistling and stomping their feet at every mention of tyranny and taxation. They’ll especially like the line about the “multitude of new offices.”

I wonder if they will feel uncomfortable (as the Lenox liberals did) at the negative tone in the references to “domestic insurrections” (i.e., slave rebellions) and “merciless savages” (native Americans).

Hush Little Baby

July 1, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

The parenting style of Mrs. Scavolini (not her real name), our next-door neighbor, was different from that of the other moms in the upper-middle-class, mostly WASP suburb where I grew up .

“I’m gonna kill you,” we would hear her scream at her kids, who for their part were often screaming at one another as well. “I’m gonna kill you.”

“But she never does,” sighed my mother.

It’s the recent flap* over Go the F**k to Sleep that takes me back across the decades to Mrs. Scavolini, with her shrill voice and her orange hair (and this was in an era when nobody had orange hair).

From the CNN website**

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

"Imagine if this were written about Jews, blacks, Muslims or Latinos," says Dr. David Arredondo. He is an expert on child development . . .
The irony, says Arredondo, is that the people buying the book are probably good parents.

It’s not an irony. It’s the whole point.

I haven’t read Go the F**k to Sleep, but it seems like one of those books you don’t have to actually read. The title says it all. The book is a satire of middle-class niceness and civility. It reveals the inconvenient truth that despite that niceness, kids can sometimes be a pain, and even good, kind, thoughtful, nice parents run out of patience. They’d like to explode at their kids, but they know they shouldn’t, just as know they shouldn’t denigrate Jews, blacks, Muslims, or Latinos. So they don’t flip off their kids and tell them to go the fuck to sleep. But they’d still like to, and maybe they even think it might be justifiable. That’s why the book is a best-seller.

Forbidden truth informs good satire’s jest –
What oft is thought but has to be suppressed.

OK, it’s not Pope, but you get the idea. You have to be what Dr. Arredondo calls a “good” parent to know the tension that makes the book title funny.

Mrs. Scavolini would not have gotten the joke.

* See the post and comments at Scatterplot for example.

** If you like the on-screen juxtaposition of this book and the caption about fungal disease among bats, you’ll find similar ironies here . (On many of these, an ad is covering the caption, so you have to click on the “x” to close it.)

The Fashion Report – Names Edition

June 27, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross-posted at Sociological Images)

In Sunday’s Times, David Leonhardt, who usually patrols the economics beat, looks at fashions in baby names (here). His primary focus is the rapid decline in old-fashioned names for girls. The “nostalgia wave” of Emma, Grace, Ella, and other late-nineteenth-century names, he argues, is over.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

Well, yes and no. Sarah and Emma may be in decline, but the big gainer among girls’ names is Sophia, an equally nostalgic name that was last popular at the turn of the twentieth century. Isabella, too, (third largest gain) follows the same trend line. Besides, the nostalgia for old names was selective. Emma and Grace may have come back, but many other old-fashioned names never became trendy. One hundred years ago and continuing through the 1920s, one of the most popular girls’ names in the US was Mildred. (You can trace the popularity baby names at the Census website.)

“The lack of recent Jane Austen movies has probably played a role,” says Leonhardt, though he’s probably joking. Not only is Emma still in the top five, but I suspect that films of that persuasion appealed more to the prejudices and sensibilities of post-childbearing women. But the media do have an impact. In Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner showed how fashions in names often trickle down. The Sophias and Isabellas become stylish first among the upscale and educated; it may be several years, even decades, before they became more widely popular. But the media/celebrity channel can bypass that slow trickle. As Leonhardt says, how else to explain the boom in Khloe?

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

Similarly, Addison, the second biggest gainer, may have gotten a boost from the fictional doctor who rose from “Gray’s Anatomy” to her own “Private Practice.” In the first year of “Gray’s Anatomy, the name Addison zoomed from 106th place to 28th. The name is also just different enough from Madison, which had been in the top ten for nearly a decade. Its stylishness was fading fast among the fashion-conscious.

Madison herself owed her popularity to the media. She created a big “Splash” soon after the film came out. As Tom Hanks says in the scene below, “Madison’s not a name.” [The clip will start at the beginning of relevant part of the scene. For purposes of this post, it should stop at 3:23, after the punch line (“Good thing we weren’t at 149th street.”). But I couldn’t figure out the code to make it stop.](Update: Disney has forced YouTube to remove this clip. See the footnote* for a transcript.)




At the time, the Hanks character was correct. Before “Splash” (1984) Madison was never in the top 1000. The next year, she was at 600. Now she has been in the top ten for nearly fifteen years, and at number two or three for half those years. (There have not yet been any Madisons in my classes. I suspect that will change soon.)

Boys’ names seem governed by somewhat different rules, with less overall variation, though recent trends are towards names with a final “n” (four out of the five big gainers in the chart above) and Biblical names.

These recent changes in girls' names aren't about nostalgia. Name trends are like fashion trends, they come and go. And, like fashion, name trends can be media driven, especially now that media can short-circuit the slower class diffusion process.

* Transcript of the relevant segment of the Splash clip:

Hanks: I'm going to have to call you something in English, because I can't pronounce -
Hannah: What - what are English names ?
Hanks: There's millions of them, I guess. Jennifer, Joanne, Hillary. . . .: Names, names. Linda, Kim .Where are we? [Cut to close up of Madison Ave. street sign] Madison.
Elizabeth, Samantha --
Hannah: I like Madison.
Hanks: Madison's not a name. [ a beat] Well, all right. Madison it is. Good thing we weren't at 149th street.

Cupidity

June 29, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

A year ago, I wrote post a called “Lies My Online Dating Partner Told Me.” It was based entirely on a blog post at OK Cupid, the free online dating service – “The Big Lies People Tell in Online Dating” (here). I wondered how people feel when they find out that the person they are dealing with on screen may be hiding important truths.

Now I think I know. And my online dissembler is OK Cupid.

If the dating sites had a mixer, you might find OK Cupid by the bar, muttering factoids and jokes, and Match.com in the middle of the room, conspicuously dropping everyone’s first names into his sentences. (Nick Paumgarten in an article on dating sites in this week’s New Yorker.)

OK Cupid would also be surrounded by a gaggle of sociologists waiting for the blogger side of OK’s personality to emerge again. The no-pay site (they make their money from ads) was founded by four Harvard math majors. (“We do the math to get you the dates,” says their logo.) Christian Rudder was the one who did the blog, and every so often he would post wonderful graphics from the research he could do on the millions of messages that hopeful people sent through their Website. Often his charts and findings found their way into other blogs (including this one) as well as the mainstream media.

The New Yorker article has a long section on OK Cupid. It includes the factoid that around Valentine’s Day this year, Cupid was bought for $50 million by Match.com.

You won’t see that information on the website. Nowhere does it say, “OK Cupid is a wholly owned subsidiary of Match.com.” You also won’t find Rudder’s blog post less than a year before that deal, “Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating.”* It begins

Today I'd like to show why the practice of paying for dates on sites like Match.com and eHarmony is fundamentally broken, and broken in ways that most people don't realize. . . I intend to show, just by doing some simple calculations, that pay dating is a bad idea; actually, I won't be showing this so much as the pay sites themselves, because most of the data I'll use is from Match and eHarmony's own public statements. [emphasis in the original post]

It’s an excellent critique and caveat. But OK Cupid voluntarily removed it as courtesy to their new masters. I feel as though the hip, carefree spirit I’d been chatting with turned out to be a life insurance salesman.

* OK could remove this post from their site, but they could not expunge it completely from the Internet. You can find an archived copy here. It’s still worth reading.

Oh, and if you're not sure of the definition of the word that is the title of this post, you ought to look it up, especially if you're going to be taking the SATs..

Cocktail Umbrellas and Invisible Pens

June 27, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

How many gas stations are there in Mexico City?

At an ASA long, long ago, I went to a session on jobs outside of academia. One speaker – I can’t remember his name – spoke about getting a job as a consultant. The job interview, he said, was not going to be like what we expected. “You’re not going to be asked much about your vita or your research. Instead, they might throw a question at you like: How many gas stations are there in Mexico City?” And unlike students that aren’t paying attention in class, you probably shouldn’t say, “Could you repeat the question?”

No, they didn’t have a client who was going to be motoring around Mexico City and was worried about running on empty. Instead, they wanted to see both your general knowledge and your strategies for getting an answer. Maybe you have some idea of the population of Mexico City. Then you have to estimate how many of those people have cars. But what is a reasonable ratio of gas stations to cars? Or is there another strategy?

In any case, some companies are still at it.

• Argus Information: How many traffic lights in Manhattan?
• Gryphon Scientific: How many cocktail umbrellas are there in a given time in the United States?
• Towers Watson: Estimate how many planes are there in the sky.
• Google: How many basketballs can you fit in this room?

These were reported by Glassdoor.com based on information passed along by job seekers. These questions, and others, have been reported at HuffPo , Shine (Yahoo) , and elsewhere.

Some of the questions are looking not for imaginative calculation but imaginative problem-solving

• Goldman Sachs: If you were shrunk to the size of a pencil and put in a blender, how would you get out?
• Procter & Gamble: Sell me an invisible pen.
• Diageo North America: If you walk into a liquor store to count the unsold bottles, but the clerk is screaming at you to leave, what do you do?
• VWR International: How would you market a telescope in 1750 when no one knows about orbits, moons etc.?

Some are just math or logic puzzles with only one correct answer.

• Jane Street Capital: What is the smallest number divisible by 225 that consists of all 1’s and 0’s?
• Goldman Sachs: Suppose you had eight identical balls. One of them is slightly heavier and you are given a balance scale. What’s the fewest number of times you have to use the scale to find the heavier ball?
• Google: You are climbing a staircase. Each time you can either take one step or two. The staircase has n steps. In how many distinct ways can you climb the staircase?

And some are personal, even (from an academic perspective) to the point of being nosy.

• Pottery Barn: If I was a genie and could give you your dream job, what and where would it be?
• Merrill Lynch: Tell me about your life from kindergarten onwards.
• Kiewit Corp.: What did you play with as a child?

(The Pottery Barn question stands out as different from all the others. It seems much nicer. If I were choosing a place to work based on these questions, I'd have to go with Pottery Barn, unless it’s a trick question. Besides, I have a good idea of what the company actually sells.)

Which eminent (or even not-so-eminent) sociologists would have done well in an interview like this? Which would have had a hard time?

Sports as Life

June 25, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the previous post, I questioned whether sports teams are a useful analogy for broader spheres of life, at least when it comes to affirmative action.

After I posted it, I tried a different thought experiment: suppose that sports really were life. Imagine a world in which the most important factor determining where you stand is your achievement in sports. If you’re a good athlete, on the starting team, the world is yours. If you’re on the bench but getting some playing time, you’re still OK. But if you’re not good enough to make the team, your chances in life are pretty bleak.

Let’s call this world High School.

Suppose you’re a white parent, and your kids are in a high school where whites are in the minority, maybe a quarter of the population. Suppose that your kids are not athletic enough to get on any of the teams. The high school is especially sports minded Sports determine how kids are treated, whether they are accepted and respected or looked down or ignored – and not just by the other kids but by the teachers, the administrators, everybody. Kids’ chances for success in other areas, their ability to have the good things in life, maybe even their physical and emotional health – all these depend on making the team.

Your kids try, but they can’t quite get there. Maybe it’s because they didn’t play all that much when they were in grade school and just never developed the skills. For whatever reason, your kids and most of the other white kids fall on the low end of the sports distribution. Always low in the status hierarchy, your kids are miserable – unhappy, discouraged, possibly resentful.

If this were really high school, you could tell them, “It’s only a few years.” But remember, our imaginary high school is not just school; it’s a world. It’s the world. It’s not just four years; it goes on and on. It’s life.

Would you go to the coach and ask him to cut your kids a break? I mean, they might not be quite as good as the others, but given the chance, they can do a credible job. Would you try to organize the other white parents to get the school to change its policies on how the varsity is selected? Remember, your kids and most white kids are excluded from the good things in the school; to the extent that the non-whites notice them at all, the white kids are looked down on. Nobody wants anything to do with them.

Might you suggest that the attitudes and ideas of the majority non-whites might be improved by having more white kids on the teams with them? Might you also argue that playing with the better players might even improve the white kids’ game? Would you want the school to put some more white kids on the team even if it meant that a slightly more skilled non-white was kept off?

Or would you say that the only thing that counts is the ability to bring the ball up the floor, drive the lane, and stuff the ball through the hoop? If the other kids can do it better than your kids, even if it’s only slightly better, then it’s only right that your kids continue to live their second-class existence.

Hypocrisy or “Tacit Knowledge”?

June 23, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross-posted at Sociological Images)

Is a university admissions office the same as the basketball team? Should selecting an entire student body for the college be like selecting players for the varsity?

Remember that kid at UC Merced, the one who argued that the graduated income tax was like redistributing GPA points? He found students who supported a graduated income tax and programs for the poor but who wouldn’t sign his petition to redistribute GPA points from the A students to those with lower GPAs. None of the students could articulate, on the spot, their reasons for not signing the GPA petition (assuming that he didn’t edit out any who did offer a reasonable explanation). (My earlier post on it is here.)

He’s baaaack. This time he’s asking students to sign a petition for affirmative action in sports – specifically to give preference to whites trying out for the team. Get it? If you support affirmative action in college admissions but not in sports, you’re a hypocrite. As before, students support one use of race preference but not the other, and as before none can give a convincing reason. The students all say, “It’s different,” but they can’t explain why.*

(To save time, I’ve set the video to start near the end – most students say the same thing. To see the whole thing, just drag the slider back to 0:00.)



Nyahh, nyahh – you’re for preferences for blacks where they’re a minority but against racial preferences for whites where they are the minority. You’re a hypocrite.** Either that, or your thinking has been muddled by liberal ideas, which is pretty much the same thing, isn’t it?

The video concludes with the dictum that college admissions and sports should be the same. “Race-based preferences are wrong.” Ah, moral clarity.

Is college really the same as a sports team? They are certainly different in their consequences. If you’re a student now, in the coming years when you apply for a job, will HR ask you if you played varsity? Maybe. But unless the job you’re applying for is power forward, your answer won’t matter very much. But HR will absolutely want to know if you have a college degree. And your answer will matter. A lot.

Sports and school are different in another important way. Schools seek out minorities more for the sake of campus diversity than for the benefit of individuals. Yale probably gives preference to applicants from Montana or Mauritania over those form Manhattan. (Yale also might give preference to a power forward if the team this year is short of guys who can work the low post.) The purpose of this admissions policy is not to benefit Montanans (or power forwards) but to provide other students with the experience of living with a diversity of people (and to provide the basketball team with the right diversity of skills).

That same goal of demographic diversity does not apply to the competitive teams or the glee club or orchestra for that matter because those groups have a much more narrowly defined task. It’s that difference in purpose, rather than the difference in which race gets helped, that underlies the responses in the video. Take those same liberal students who support admissions policies that bring more blacks to campus; ask then if they would also support race-based preferences to get more blacks into crew, the glee club, or the chess team. I’m sure they would say no. As in the actual video, they would probably be unable to explain why giving preference to African Americans is acceptable in admissions but not acceptable in activities.

They’ll say that the two are different, even though they can’t immediately explain why. Does that make them hypocrites, natural or un-?

The next time someone shoves a microphone in your face and asks for a justification for some distinction you make, smile at the camera and say, “As Michael Polanyi wrote in The Tacit Dimension, ‘we know more than we can tell,’ an insight that Richard Nisbett later developed with much social science evidence in his book Knowing More than We Can Tell.” See if you make it into the YouTube clip, or into Robin Hanson’s blog.**


*I had assumed that the petitioner and his camera people were students at Merced. But in this new video, he’s at UCR.

** As with the previous video, Robin Hanson, on whose blog Overcoming Bias I found both, files the students’ attitudes in the folder marked “natural hypocrisy.”

Fooled Again

June 21, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a 40-year-old married American man living in Edinburgh.

Six weeks ago, I posted something about values as legitimations. The post was an analysis of an incident recounted by “Amina Arraf” who blogged as A Gay Girl in Damascus. Thuggish government agents come to arrest her. Her father intervenes and persuades them to leave.

A week ago Gay Girl was exposed as a hoax.* The blog was the creation of one Tom MacMaster, who quite possibly has never set foot inside Syria and who was blogging from Scotland. (Gawker’s report of the story is here.)

I take some comfort in knowing that many others were taken in. And sociologists much wiser and more distinguished than I have analyzed scenes from fiction and used them to illustrate sociological ideas. Of course, they knew that their source material was fiction.

I should get on my knees and pray that I don’t get fooled again. But I probably will.

*I missed the exposing of the hoax and would have remained ignorant of the truth were it not for Dan Ryan’s post in his blog Sociology of Information.

Misunderestimating

June 21, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

There it was again, this time in a report from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee quoted today without linguistic comment by David Brooks:

The unintended consequences of pumping large amounts of money into a war zone cannot be underestimated. [emphasis added]

Usually I know what the writer means, but this time I had to go back and reread Brooks’s column up to that sentence. Yes, the committee meant the opposite of what it was literally saying. Literally, the sentence means that even if you think that there are zero unintended consequences, that’s still not an underestimate. No matter how low the estimate, you still cannot underestimate.

When I first mentioned this logical error (here), I hadn’t realized how prevalent it was. Today, Googling “cannot be underestimated” returns 2,070,000 pages, and I would guess that at least 2 million of them are like the one Brooks quotes.

A couple of those pages, though, are from Language Loggers, who have two explanations.* One is that the speaker means to say “should not be underestimated” rather than “cannot be underestimated.” Nice try, but it seems unlikely that people are thinking “should not” but saying “cannot.” Is there any other linguistic context in which people frequently confuse those two phrases? Offhand, I cannot think of any (or do I mean, I should not think of any?).

More likely is our inability to grasp multiple negatives. Putting things in the positive makes them much easier to understand. A simple single negative is also clear. But, beyond that, as I remember from algebra and multiplying polynomials, keeping track of those minus signs gets tricky. Sentences, especially in a government report, should not be written so that nobody can fail to misunderstand them.

That still leaves unanswered the question as to why we so often prefer to phrase things in the negative. As I said in that earlier post, I especially try to avoid negative phrasing when I’m writing True-False and multiple-choice test items. It’s unfair to students to require them to answer False when that means negating a negative

Brooks’s column, as you might guess, was about the contrary effects of all the money the US is now spending in Afghanistan. Did Brooks also, in the Bush-Cheney years, write about the unintended consequences of the billions spent in Iraq? The number of his columns on that topic cannot be underestimated.

-------------------
* Ben Zimmer summarized these earlier this year in his New York Times Magazine language column (here).

Corporate Altruism?

June 20, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

I do not have a very sophisticated theory of the firm. I have never taken a business course, and, I must confess, I have never read Ronald Coase.* But I wonder how sophisticated a theory of the firm we need to be skeptical when corporations lobby for huge tax breaks saying that these will allow them to create jobs. Which is what they are doing. Corporations are asking us to buy a theory of corporate altruism.

US-based companies have bales of cash profits overseas, and they are now asking for huge tax breaks to “repatriate” all that glorious black ink. They will use it, they say, to create jobs here in the US.

Corporations and their lobbyists say the tax break could resuscitate the gasping recovery by inducing multinational corporations to inject $1 trillion or more into the economy, and they promoted the proposal as "the next stimulus" at a conference Wednesday in Washington, D.C.

"This is about creating jobs, expanding U.S. businesses and strengthening American companies," said Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, who introduced such a measure this spring.

Really? How about this theory: Corporations are not in business to create jobs. They are in business to make money – money for the people who own the shares and money for the executives who run the show (and often own a hefty sackful of those shares or options). If they have to create jobs to do that, fine. But if they can do that without spending money creating jobs, even better.

We’ve been here before, so I guess you could classify this under “Fool me once . . . .” A front page article in the Times today (here), gives the details. In 2005, as part of the “American Job Creation Act,” the Bushies gave US corporations a similar “repatriation holiday” (yes, that’s what it’s called). And oh what a holiday celebration there was.

While the tax break lured 800 companies into bringing $312 billion back to the United States, 92 percent of that was used for dividends and stock buybacks, according to the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research. The study concluded the program "did not increase domestic investment, employment or research and development."

The law forbade the use of repatriated funds directly for executive compensation or stock buybacks, but companies found plenty of ways around it. "Fungibility is one of my favorite words," [said Jay Schwartz, who in 2005 was head of Merck's international tax department].

Shareholders and executives made out very well, thank you. But none of those ex-pat dollars went to employee wages or to hiring. Some companies actually cut jobs.

A few years later, something similar happened in the bank bailout. The government gave the banks a ton of money with few strings attached. The bankers, rather than sending that money into the economy, used it first to shore up their own balance sheets and bonuses. (“Fool me once again. . . .”) Senators held hearings to register their shock and dismay at the bankers’ priorities and low level of altruism. And now, three years later, some of our lawmakers like Rep. Brady (quoted above) are still pushing that good old theory of corporate altruism.

* I’m not even sure how to pronounce his name.

Repo Men

June 19, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

“We will take America back.”

Rick Perry was here in New York Wednesday, and that was the rousing line he used to close his speech. It’s a frequent meme in Perry’s presidential campaign and on the right generally.

To talk about taking America back raises the question: whose country is this anyway? Since the late 19th century, the right wing has often put forth the idea that the US is their country and that it is being threatened if not actually destroyed by these other groups – more recently arrived, urban, ethnic, darker. In Sarah Palin’s famous phrase, these others are not “the real America.” (An earlier post on this is here.)

When Republicans are out of power – outvoted by these less real Americans – their rallying cry is, “Take back our country.” Our country, not theirs.

A comment on a recent post pointed out that “take back America” has also been used by the left, for example in the summer 2007 Take Back America Conference. I hadn’t remembered this conference, and I just didn’t recall the left as crying “take back” as regularly as does the right. Was I a victim of selective perception and confirmation bias?

Fortunately, Lexis-Nexis is less prone to these cognitive biases. To compare, I searched for the following phrases:*

Take back our country
Take our country back
Take back America

I used two time periods starting nearly two years before an election and ending on Nov. 6 after the election:

• Republicans in power (leading up to the Democratic victory of 2008)
• Democrats in power (leading up to the Republican victory of 2010)

Here’s the final tally

• Republicans (2009-2010) 2645
• Democrats (2007-2008) 1647

I also calculated the daily averages for calendar quarters.

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

Up until about six months before the election, there’s no difference. But at the top of the stretch turn (or when it’s gun lap time, depending on your preference in sports), when the election comes into view, the Republicans swing into full take-back mode. In 2008, the Democrats had endured seven years of GOP/Bush rule, and by mid-2008, it was clear that things in the US were not going well under Bush. We might have expected the Democrats to pound the take-back theme. But they didn’t.**

But in 2010, with Obama in office for little more than a year, the Republicans were clamoring for their supporters to take America back, presumably from the Democratic usurpers.

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*I left out “Take America back” (sorry, Gov. Perry) because the citations were a mixed bag. Too many of them were “take America back to the 1930s” or similar phrases that had nothing to do with who the country rightly belonged to. These references occurred far less frequently than the other three phrases, but I wasn’t going to read through the several hundred of them in order to pick out the relevant ones – not for just one lousy blog post.

** True, the Democrats had won the Congressional election of 2006, but the “take-back” theme was not part of that election either. The comparable numbers for the last two periods on the graph are 1.4 and 0.9.

The Big Time

June 16, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’m now officially on the masthead at Sociological Images, which has a less select readership than does this blog. (By “less select,” I mean that they get 25,000 - 50,000 hits a day.) Most of my posts there will also be cross-posted here, but not all. My post there today was an updated recycling of a SocioBlog post of 3-4 years ago, so I didn’t bother to repost it here. It’s about urinals. If you’re interested, you can find it here.