Applied Probability

 February 6, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Long-odds prop bets are sucker bets.  The odds that bookmakers offer are nowhere near the true probability.  But expected values matter only if you’re playing a large number of times, which is what the house is doing.  The bettor is betting just once, and 50-to-one odds sounds like a lot.

Take yesterday’s game. The odds that the first points of the game would be the Giants scoring a safety were 50-1.  That’s what the bookies offered.

But what is the true probability?  In the previous NFL season, there were 2077 scores, not counting point-after-touchdown.  Here is the breakdown (I found the data here).

• Touchdowns      1270
• Field Goals           794
• Safeties                    13

The probability of the first score being a safety by either team is 2064 to 13 or about 160 to 1.  The probability of the first score being a safety by a specified side is double that.  Even if that specified side is the Giants and their defense is twice as good as the Patriots defense, that still makes the probability at least 200 to 1.  The Las Vegas books were offering only 50 - 1, one-fourth of the correct odds.  So the expected return on a $1000 bet is $250 – a $750 loss.   What a ripoff.

Of course, not everyone feels duped.

Somewhere, someone is walking around with an I ♥ Brady t-shirt. 

HT: My colleague Faye Glass, though she tells me this picture is all over the Internet.

Guess Again

February 3, 2012

Posted by Jay Livingston

Prediction is hard, especially about the future, even the very near future. The New York Times that arrived early this morning reported the wisdom of the economic crowd.

A few hours later, the Times Website had this.

----------------------------------

February 3, 2012

U.S. Jobless Rate Falls to 8.3 Percent, a 3-Year Low

By MOTOKO RICH

The United States economy gained momentum in January, adding 243,000 jobs, the second straight month of better-than-expected gains.

The unemployment rate fell to 8.3 [emphasis added]
 -------------------------------------------------

The reported number was 80% higher.  The experts were off by 108,000 jobs.

Speaking of predictions,  I asked my students yesterday to predict the score of the Superbowl.  The class mean had the Giants winning 28 to 24 or 25, though no individual guess had those two numbers.  The bookmakers have it the other way – Patriots by 3.  We were closer to agreement on the under-over, which is 54 in Las Vegas, 52-53 in University Hall 3008.

If the final score is close to the class prediction, I may revise Monday’s lesson plan to include Galton and the Wisdom of Crowds (an earlier post on that is here).

This Goon for Hire

 February 2, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

In basketball, assaulting another player on the court used to be called, in ancient times, “playing dirty.”  In more up-to-date language, it is a gift bestowed. Jabbing an elbow into the another player’s face or clotheslining a player who is in midair is called “giving the hard foul.” 

Of course, you don’t want your starters fouling out.  So some observers believe that teams have specialists – designated hitters – who the coach sends in to do this giving.

To verify that the basketball goon is not a myth, Nick Jaroszewicz at the Harvard College Sports Analysis Collective looked at patterns of fouls in the major conferences of the NCAA (the “Big 6”).   He was looking for players who didn’t play many minutes but who did pick up a high number of fouls in their brief moments on the court.  He found nine.



Jaroszewicz notes that six of the nine are in the Big East.  He might have added, but didn’t, that five of the nine are white, a proportion well in excess of that race’s overall representation in these conferences.

Name It and Frame It

February 1, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross-posted at Sociological Images.)

It can take a while to find the right word.  But a mot juste may be crucial for framing a political issue. If you like the idea of men being able to marry men, and women women, what should you call the new laws that would allow that?

The trouble with “gay marriage” and even “same-sex marriage” is that these terms suggest – especially to conservatives – some kind of special treatment for the minority.  It’s as though gays are getting a marriage law just for them. 

At last, the gay marriage forces seem to have come up with a term that invokes not special treatment but a widely-held American value that’s for everyone – equality.  A bill in  New Jersey has been in the news this week, mostly because Gov. Christie says he will veto it.  The bill is a “marriage equality” law.

The governor is in a bit of a squeeze.  As a Republican with ambitions beyond New Jersey’s borders, he can’t very well be for gay marriage.  But if his opponents can frame the matter their way, he now has to come out against equality.  Which is why the governor continues to refer to the issue as “same-sex marriage.”* 

It’s like “abortion rights” or even “women’s rights.” A phrase like that might rally women to your cause, but if you want broader support, you need a flag that every American can salute.  I’m not familiar with the history of abortion rights so I don’t know how it happened, but those who want to keep abortion legal have managed to frame the issue as one of freedom to choose.   They have been so successful that the media routinely refer to their side as “pro-choice.”   To oppose them is to oppose both freedom and individual choice, principles which occupy a high place in the pantheon of American values.

It’s not clear that the “marriage equality” movement has been similarly successful, at least not yet.  I did a quick Lexis-Nexis search sampling the last week of the months January and July going back to 2007.  I looked for three terms

• Same-sex marriage
• Gay marriage
• Marriage equality

The general trend for all three is upwards as more legislatures consider bills, with big jumps when a vote becomes big news – that blip in July 2011 is the New York State vote.  But the graph can’t quite show how “marriage equality” has risen from obscurity.  That first data point, July 2007, is a 4.  Four mentions of “marriage equality” while the other terms had 25 and 50 times that many.  As of last week, “gay” and “same sex” still outnumber “equality,” but the score is not nearly so lopsided. 

Here is a graph of the ratio of “equality” to each of the other two terms.  From nearly 1 : 20 (one “marriage equality” for every 20 “gay marriages”) the ratio has increased to 1 : 3 and even higher when the discussion gets active. 

If the movement is successful, that upward trend should continue.  When you hear Fox News referring to “marriage equality laws,” you’ll know it’s game over.
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* Christie is usually politically adept, but he’s stumbling on this one.  He referred to a gay legislator as “numb nuts” (literally, that might not necessarily be a liability for a politician caught in a squeeze).   Christie also said that he’s vetoing the bill so that the matter can be put on the ballot as a referendum – you know, like what should have happened with civil rights in the South. 

I think people would have been happy to have a referendum on civil rights rather than fighting and dying in the streets in the South.

Several critics, including Numb Nuts, responded that, yes, Southern whites would have been happy to have civil rights left up to the majority.  African Americans not so much.  (If you’re looking for an illustration of Tocqueville’s “tyranny of the majority,” the post-Reconstruction South might be a good place to start.)  The analogy is obvious – race : 1962 :: sexual orientation : 2012 – even if it was not the message the governor intended.

Politicans and Actors, II

January 28, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

A post (here) a couple of days ago showed the fictional Larry Garfied, played by Danny DeVito, justifying Mitt Romney’s capitalism, and doing a better job of it than does Romney himself. 

Here’s another politician, Anthony Albanese, an Australian cabinet minister, delivering a politically charged speech.  Like Romney, he’s not all that bad.  But Michael Douglas, seventeen years ealier, shows him how Aaron Sorkin’s  lines should be delivered.



(For more information, see this Language Log post, which is where I found the story.)

Spinning 2.8%

January 28, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Yesterday’s news was that GDP growth in the fourth quarter of 2011 was 2.8%.  The Houston Chronicle played up the political import.

Is 2.8% GDP growth good news?
Texas Democrats say it is, Republicans say it’s a fluke

Good news about the economy is good news for the incumbents – Obama and the Democrats.  Bad economic news is good for the Republicans.  You would expect the liberal media elite to crow while the few brave conservative media stalwarts curbed their enthusiasm.  So Fox News, predictably, said that the 2.8% was “modest.” 

But that liberal bastion The New York Times gave the news a mixed review.  Recession fears were fading, but the 2.8% was “not enough to comfort the Fed.” 

But the Wall Street Journal led by accentuating the positive.

Steam indeed.

Meanwhile, at NPR, so often accused of “liberal bias,” 2.8% was Friday’s “Planet Money” indicator, and here’s what their correspondent Zoe Chace had to say about it.

I’m going to start by telling you what 2.8 is not.  It is not a recession.  But that’s pretty much the only good thing you can say about 2.8. 

Why aren’t these media spinning the story the way they’re supposed to?


(A post of two years ago (here) tried to show how political purposes shaped views of whether 3%, is a lot or a little.)

Paris - New York (bis)

January 26, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

“How do you say hipster in French?” I asked yesterday. Now I know.

 

Much thanks to le formidable Baptiste Coulmont (my main man / my name man), who steered me to the source, graphics designer Vahram Muratyan.  Here is the counterpart to yesterday’s map – French quartiers mapped onto New York geography.

Both are from Muratyan’s book Paris Versus New York – a Tally of Two Cities (more info and posters here).  You can also get several of these graphics as posters.  Like this

An exhibit will be opening soon (Feb. 2) at the Shop at the Standard in Greenwich Village (St. Germain-des-Pres).

Urban Ecology, Paris-New York edition

January 25, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

It was the sociologists in Chicago, not Paris or New York,  who gave us the notion of “natural areas” in cities.  Park and Burgess had a general model of ecological zones  – the concentric circles radiating from the city center.  Within these circles there might be more specialized niches – cultural enclaves whose distribution isn’t quite so predictable or consistent. 

Here are the niches of New York mapped onto the map of Paris.  The idea of the map is to point out the cultural similarities – Greenwich Village is like St. Germain, Williamsburg is like Buttes Chaumont (how do you say hipster in French?).

Geographically, there are some big differences.  In the cultural geography of Paris, Morningside Heights is far from Columbia University, and Astoria is next to Dumbo.  Not on the real NYC map. 

But it’s interesting how often adjoining areas in the real NYC are still close together when mapped culturally onto Paris.

(This jpeg is the version I copied (thanks to a tip from the the redoubtable Polly-Vous Français) from the FB page of Richard Thierry, where it has gotten a ton of comments.  My apologies for the small print that becomes illegible when you enlarge the image.  I couldn’t find a better version.)

UPDATE:  For more on this map, see the next day's post (here)

Shareholders vs. Stakeholders

January 24, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross-posted at Sociological Images)

Mitt Romney’s capitalism has come under attack – from fellow Republicans, of all people.  They’re pummeling him for his work at Bain Capital, his private equity firm.  “Private equity” became the term of choice when “leveraged buyout” acquired a connotation of nastiness, probably because many LBOs were in fact nasty affairs (“hostile” takeovers).

Romney is tall and good-looking with a full head of hair.  He speaks with no noticeable regional accent.  Danny DeVito is a photo negative of all that.  But as Lawrence Garfield,* a.k.a. Larry the Liquidator in “Other People’s Money” DeVito does a much better job in making the case for what Mitt did at Bain Capital.**  (The original title for this post was “Defending Private Equity – the Short Version.”) 



Bain sometimes made money by bankrupting the companies it took over.  That’s creative destruction for you – first the destruction, then creation.    As Larry the Liquidator puts it***:

 You invested in a business and this business is dead. Let's have the intelligence, let's have the decency to sign the death certificate, collect the insurance, and invest in something with a future. . .
Take the money. Invest it somewhere else. Maybe, maybe you'll get lucky and it'll be used productively. And if it is, you'll create new jobs and provide a service for the economy and, God forbid, even make a few bucks for yourselves.

Romney’s critics talk about the people put out of work, the towns and communities eviscerated.  That’s where Garfield/Romney are on shakier ground.

“Ah, but we can't,” goes the prayer. “We can't because we have responsibility, a responsibility to our employees, to our community. What will happen to them?” I got two words for that - “Who cares?”

Larry the Liquidator is raising the issue of shareholders vs. stakeholders.  Stakeholders are all those people who are affected by a corporation.  To attract corporations, local governments sometimes offer goodies like tax breaks, regulation breaks, and even bagfuls of cash.  The localities defend these deals by saying that they will be good for the whole town, particularly for those who become employees or who sell goods and services to the corporation.  These people and the town generally will be stakeholders.  They all have a stake in the success of the corporation.

Corporations too often talk the stakeholder talk.  But when times get tough, they talk the shareholder talk – the talk that Larry does so well. And they walk the shareholder walk.  They walk out of town with the money from the sale of the company’s assets.

All this has implications for issues of trust, implications much too broad and deep for a simple blog post.  See this 1988 article by Andrei Schleifer and Larry Summers, “Breach of Trust in Hostile Takeovers.”

---------------------------
* Romney is a Mormon.  Larry Garfield is of no specified religion, though we can assume he is not a Mormon.  In the original play, he was Larry Garfinkle. For Hollywood purposes he became Garfield, just as did actor John Garfinkle.

** Conservapedia, as I’m sure Drek knows, rated “Other People’s Money” as one of the twenty greatest conservative movies.

*** For a transcript of Larry’s speech go here.  The original stage play is by Jerry Sterner, the screenplay by Alvin (Three Spidermans) Sargent.  I don’t know how much credit each gets for this speech.

 Big hat tip to Ezra Klein for the material here.
 

The Declining Significance of “Class”

January 23, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross-posted at Sociological Images)


What we don’t talk about when we don’t talk about class.  That was the title I wanted to use, but it was too long, and besides, there are already too many of these Raymond Carver variants. 

Class seems to have disappeared from public discourse, except for the Republicans’ insistence that to mention inequality at all is to engage in “class warfare.”* The only class we hear about, whether from politicians or the media, is the middle class.  Here, for example, are the results of  a Lexis-Nexis search of news transcripts in the previous month.

On TV news, the upper and lower class do not exist. 

So how do we talk about those at the top and bottom of society?  The discussion of inequality is now all about income.   While “lower class” and “upper class” had only three and four mentions, respectively, in this same period, income terms (high, upper, low, lower) numbered over 300. 

For some historical perspective, I looked at Google Ngrams for the frequency of class terms in books. 



The gap between middle and working is not so large here as in the graph of news transcripts.  But here too, the lower and upper class have been barely worthy of mention.  As for the historical pattern, class talk rises from the mid-1950s to about 1971.  If, as the Republicans claim, thinking about social class is an indicator of radicalism, maybe the 1960s were indeed a radical moment in US history. 

But after 1971, class discourses declines.  Class references in 2008 were only about half what they were at the start of the 1970s.

Ngrams also shows class talk being replaced by income talk, especially when we speak (or write) of those at the bottom.

The large gap between “lower class” and “lower income”in 1970 has dwindled to almost nothing.


The pattern for upper class is similar – a large decline in class talk, a much smaller decrease in income talk – though class references still outnumber income references.

From the media, you get the impression that except for a handful of people at the top and the bottom, there really is only one class in America – the middle class – and that the working class has faded into history.  Yet the GSS subjective social class item (“Which class would you say you belong in?”) gets the same results as it did in 1972: a roughly equal split between “middle” and “working” that accounts for 9 out of 10 Americans. 

----------------------------
*This strategy seems to have worked recently for Newt Gingrich in another field of endeavor.  When asked about his “open marriage” idea (Newt prides himself on being a man of big ideas), he said that to ask the question was despicable.  His multiple adulteries, and his request that his wife bestow her blessings on same was, I guess, just one of those things.  But to point them out was appalling. 

He added that questions like that made it “harder to attract decent people to run for public office.” Apparently so .

Put a Ring on It?

January 19, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Get married?  Or just live together?

Lisa Wade’s “Why I Am Not Married” post was one of the most popular Sociological Images entries of 2011.  It elicited over 100 comments – high even for SocImages. 

Lisa included a defense of her partner’s and her decision not to seek the state’s approval of their relationship.  The statement was personal (and courageous).  But the only systematic research cited was, I think, the Pew report on the decline in marriage in the US.

Clearly, fewer couples are putting a ring on it. Since 1960, the percent married has declined from 72% to just above half.  During this same period, the percentage of couples living together increased by a factor of ten.  Many of those couples eventually marry, and many break up.  Only about 10% remain living together unmarried for more than five years. (See the Annual Review article here.)

As you can imagine, there is much hand-wringing in certain quarters over the decline in marriage.  And indeed, some research supports the idea that marriage is the way to go – that married couples are healthier, wealthier, happier, less likely to break up, and just generally better.  (For an example of the pro-marriage view –  “Why Marriage Is Better than Cohabitation” – go here and probably lots of other places).  However, most of  these comparison studies are cross-sectional.  They compare the married and the cohabiting at a single point in time, so it’s hard to know what is causing what.  If we find that marrieds are happier, for example, we still don’t know whether it’s because marriage causes happiness or because happy people are more likely to marry.

Determining cause and effect requires longitudinal analysis – following couples over time.  A new study by Kelly Musick, to be published in the Journal of Marriage and the Family, did just that, looking at data from the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH).  She tracked data on marrying and cohabiting couples over six years.  Here’s her conclusion as reported in a National Council on Family Relations press release (they publish the journal).

We found that differences between marriage and cohabitation tend to be small and dissipate after a honeymoon period. Also while married couples experienced health gains – likely linked to the formal benefits of marriage such as shared healthcare plans – cohabiting couples experienced greater gains in happiness and self-esteem. For some, cohabitation may come with fewer unwanted obligations than marriage and allow for more flexibility, autonomy, and personal growth.

Civil Rights and American Conservatism

January 17, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

With all the tributes to Martin Luther King, it might be difficult to remember that in his lifetime, Americans were not always so aligned with Dr. King and the goals he worked for.


In August, Gallup (here) published some of their polling from the 1960s. The contrast with opinions today, when only 4% are unfavorable, is remarkable.

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

(Note: these results include all races.  The data for whites only would surely show a higher percent unfavorable and a lower percent favorable.)

Except for 1966, the total favorable and unfavorable are fairly close.  (The change in 1966 is a result of King’s opposition to the Vietnam war.  He was right about that too.)  But of those with strong opinions, the “highly unfavorables” always outnumber the “highly favorables.” 

The unfavorables weren’t just those rabid Southern whites so familiar from the historical news footage. The same ideas could be found among seemingly temperate, sophisticated, and intellectual conservatives. Affable Ronald Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. 

In 1957, William F. Buckley, Jr. supported the suppression of black votes in the South

The central question that emerges . . . is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes – the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.  (The full article is excerpted by Brad DeLong here.)

That was before the rise of the Civil Rights movement.  Six years later, when Dr. King had come to prominence, a black church in Birmingham was firebombed.  Four young girls died.  Here is how Buckley’s National Review responded.

The fiend who set off the bomb does not have the sympathy of the white population in the South; in fact, he set back the cause of the white people there so dramatically as to raise the question whether in fact the explosion was the act of a provocateur – of a Communist, or of a crazed Negro. Some circumstantial evidence lends a hint of plausibility to that notion, especially the ten-minute fuse (surely a white man walking away from the church basement ten minutes earlier would have been noticed?). And let it be said that the convulsions that go on, and are bound to continue, have resulted from revolutionary assaults on the status quo, and a contempt for the law, which are traceable to the Supreme Court’s manifest contempt for the settled traditions of Constitutional practice. [emphasis added]

The suggestion that the firebombing was committed by “a communist or a crazed Negro” is a fantasy of pure desperation and wish-fulfillment.  Note also NR’s concern for “the cause of white people.”  As for the church bombing, the beatings, the tortures, the murders, and other acts of terrorism (“convulsions” as the NR calls them), committed against blacks and civil rights workers, just blame it all on the Supreme Court. 

All this would be laughable if the events were not of such grave importance and if the commentary were from some obscure, racist corner.  But National Review, then as now, was the main voice of intellectual conservatism. 

Eugene Volokh, in an appreciation of Buckley (here), notes that it wasn’t until the late 1960s, after the passage of the major civil rights laws and probably after the King and RFK assassinations, that Buckley and NR finally gave up defending segregation.  Volokh also says, approvingly,

Buckley tried very hard to create a genial and friendly image for conservatism as opposed to one that projected anger, intolerance, and rage.

Michael Harrington made the same observation but phrased it somewhat differently:

William Buckley is an urbane front man for some of the most vicious emotions in this country.

Governing and Creative Destruction

January 12, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Mitt Romney’s work at Bain was basically “creative destruction” – capitalism, rational and ruthless, making money by reforming or trashing businesses.* No Bain, no gain.  Romney emphasizes the creative part; his critics emphasize the destruction.  But is any of this relevant to the Presidency? 

Nearly a year ago, I expressed my skepticism (here) about business executives’ claims that their business skills would transfer to their government work.  I contrasted these claims with this more realistic self-assessment by a former pimp, who, in an interview with Sudhir Vankatesh,  was asked how his skills in that job might transfer to legitimate work.

You learn one thing [as a pimp]:  For a good blow job, a man will do just about anything. What can I do with that knowledge? I have no idea.

 Will Wilkinson at The Economist blog asks the skills-transfer question about Romney.

Even if Mr Romney's firm did in the end create more jobs than it killed by increasing the allocative efficiency of the market, what does this have to do with the tasks facing a president?

Wilkinson’s answer is Yes.  He quotes Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry**  to the effect that what a president does “is also very similar to what a private equity investor does in a buyout: analyze the business, decide on a strategy and hire, retain (and fire) managers.”

This seems a bit of a stretch.  Look at Obama’s difficulties in putting his policies (analyses and strategies) into effect.  Even in his hiring of managers (i.e., making appointments), Congress has thwarted him.

George W. Bush ran for president touting his own business credentials and, once in office, styled himself “the CEO president.” Unlike Obama today, Bush had the benefit of a co-operative Congress.  But the outcomes of the CEO presidency don’t seem to have been so wonderful.   The last president before Bush to have been successful in business was the wealthy peanut farmer Jimmy Carter.

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*Those corporations, presumably, were people too, my friend.  But capitalist efficiency and profits required that friends be fired and businesses bankrupted, while Bain made out like bandits.

** Gobry is not exactly Romney’s biggest fan – “a fundamentally dishonest liar with obvious contempt for his fellow citizens.”

UPDATE Jan. 13.  Paul Krugman in today’s Times (here) draws a conclusion similar to mine though for a different reason:  business strategies that are good for company profits are far different from economic policies that will be good for a country.  :

Making good economic policy isn’t at all like maximizing corporate profits. And businessmen — even great businessmen — do not, in general, have any special insights into what it takes to achieve economic recovery. 

Krugman also skips over Bush and Carter as businessman-presidents.  

the last businessman to live in the White House was a guy named Herbert Hoover.

Vacations

January 11, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

One of these signs is what I typically see in New York.  The other is what I saw in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, where I’m spending a brief vacation (and not spending much time on the Internet).

The Mexican sign is the one on the right.

Cabo seems to exist only for the sake of American tourists.  When I travel, I usually like to to get a sense of how life is lived in another country.  That’s not what you get in Cabo.  All livelihoods here are related to the tourist trade – the restaurants and gift shops, the time share complexes, the pharmacias selling Viagra and Cipro.  It feels like being in some amalgam of a theme park and a colonial enclave.

See What Turns Up in an Ad for Glue

January 6, 2012

Posted by Jay Livingston 

 
This is a wonderful glue commercial, and it dates back 20 years.  But I doubt that you will ever see it on ar anything similar on American television.  It runs 1:20, and ads here are only thirty seconds.

(HT: S.A Livingston)

Myths That Move Us (and That Bus)

January 3, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Supportive Community is one of America’s most cherished myths.  By “myth,” I don’t mean that Community is some Gorgon or unicorn, a beast with no existence in reality.  Observers of the US going back to de Tocqueville have been impressed by our community spirit.

Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations . . . . The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society.  (DIA, II, 5)

The supportive community  is a myth in the sense that it represents an ideal – it is a story that we love to tell ourselves about ourselves.  When the story is true, so much the better.

Last week, David Brooks devoted his column  to such a story. A woman from a small town in Louisiana was diagnosed with cancer, and “the entire town rallied around her,” with fund-raising cookouts and concerts to pay for her medical care.  It’s all very touching and genuine, and Brooks uses it as an appeal to “communitarian conservatism.”

A much better known version of the myth is the television show “Extreme Makeover Home Edition.”  Each week brings us a needy but deserving family, usually in a suburb or small town, almost never a city.  Often, the family has been stricken by death, disease, or disability, but not despair.  Always their house, despite their best efforts, is a shambles.  The TV team comes in, sends the family on vacation (usually to Disney World – it’s an ABC show), and begins work on the centerpiece of its largesse, a new home. 

It’s the modern counterpart of the 1950s “Queen For a Day,” but with two important differences.  First, the sad story is always a family, not an individual. And second, the story always involves the community. Neighbors, co-workers, and others tell the camera what wonderful people the family are and how much they’ve given to the community. During the construction of the new house hundreds of people – a sort of town team wearing identical t-shirts and hard hats – turn up to help.

The show’s signature moment comes when the family is brought back from vacation.  With the hundreds of neighbors (we assume that they are neighbors and not ringers brought in by ABC) in their matching t-shirts and hard hats, the family stands opposite the new house, but their view is blocked by a large bus. “Move that bus! Move that bus!” everyone chants. 

The bus moves, the family runs to the house and goes through it room by room gasping “Oh my God.”

The stories David Brooks and ABC tell are heart-warming indeed. They show us at our best. They are our myth. But there are other stories.

On Sunday, “This American Life” reran a story about a woman who believed the myth.  She has lived in the same town, on the same block, for forty years, but she is approaching seventy, and she turned to the community seeking people who would help in caring for her autistic son, now 39, after she has died or become unable to look out for him. The short answer is that nobody volunteered. But take two minutes and listen to the entire excerpt, especially if you’re not familiar with  “Extreme Makeover Home Edition.”

The point is that myth is not a substitute for policy.  Not everybody who gets cancer is beloved by others in their town.*  Not every needy family, not even every virtuous and deserving needy family, is beloved by ABC  – and besides, the show has been cancelled.   These stories are one-offs, and we do ourselves a disservice to think that the myth represents workable solutions to our large-scale problems – problems like the millions of people without health care or affordable housing or jobs.**

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* To quote my own tweet, only in America do we need fund-raisers for people who become ill. I recall one “Extreme Makeover Home Edition” family which  had been impoverished by medical costs and needed treatment they could no longer afford.  Both parents were employed as public school teachers.  In no other wealthy country would these people not be able to afford health care.

** Wrong thinking is a frequent theme on “This American Life.” (See this earlier SocioBlog post for another example.) A few years ago, NPR began a series called “This I Believe,” short essays by hundreds of different people stating their “core values.”  (The archive now has over 100,000 such essays.)   That prompted “This American Life” to run an episode called “This I Used to Believe.”

Here's host Ira Glass in an interview.

But the fact is, a lot of great stories hinge on people being wrong. In fact, we've talked as a staff about how the crypto-theme of every one of our shows is: “I thought it would work out this way, but then it worked out that way.”

Detective Can

December 31, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

The NYPD doesn’t record all the crimes that victims report.  That’s the shocking news on the front page of this morning’s Times (here).

A bit of history.  In 1950, the number of burglaries in New York jumped by 1400% 1300%.  The entire increase was attributable to one man, and he wasn’t a burglar.  He was the chief of police.  We’re not talking here about actual  burglaries, of course, just burglaries recorded by the police.

Prior to 1949, the policy on most reported burglaries was “canning.”  The victim would report the crime, the police would listen, and then “refer the case to Lieutenant Can.”  For reasons I cannot remember, the chief of police issued an order ending, or greatly reducing, that policy. As a result, the next year, New York had fifteen fourteen times as many burglaries.  (Something similar happened with robberies in Chicago in the 1980s thanks to pressure form the FBI, which gathers statistics for the Uniform Crime Reports.)

What if a similar directive were issued today?  The official numbers will rise, but everyone will know that this reflects a change in policy, not a change in safety. The trouble is that in the long run, there’s a sort of law of thermodynamics entropy eroding full reporting.  Police reap no rewards for reporting more crime.  Precincts or cities that report more crime may feel the wrath of the brass, the media, or the citizens.  Rewards flow to areas with less crime, and NYPD chiefs will compare precinct with precinct, and they will compare this month with last month.  Under these conditions, precinct commanders feel pressure to have lower crime numbers, and if the criminals and victims won’t cooperate in that effort, theres always Detective Can or his current equivalent.

Honesty and accuracy are nice in principle, but Compstat is what matters.

Technology – Old and New

December 31, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

A Ddulite is the opposite of a Luddite.  According to Mark Palko, who coined the term recently, a Ddulite is someone with a “preference for higher tech solutions even in cases where lower tech alternatives have greater and more appropriate functionality.”   

Andrew Gelman can see the Ddulite logic though he himself doesn’t even have a cellphone. 

 It can make sense to switch early (before the new technology actually performs better than the old) to get the benefits of being familiar with the new technology once it does take off. 

David Pogue, who writes the tech column for the Times, is probably a Ddulite.  He gives one of his year-end Pogie awards  to a projector, but not because it projects well – all projectors project – but for this beauty part:

The Pogie award-winning feature here, though, is a customizable start-up screen. You can add . . . an “if found, please call” message . . . . When the projector turns on, this start-up message is the first thing that appears.

Frankly, an “If found, please call” start-up message should be available on every cellphone, music player, tablet, laptop and remote control.

For years now, I have installed my own “If Found” technology on my cellphone, my MP3 player, my camera, and my laptop.  Admittedly, it’s old technology, but it works remarkably well.

I rarely send anything via snail mail.  But thanks to various charities (especially Amnesty International for some reason),  I have hundreds of these address labels.  I finally found a use for four of them.

I doubt that I’m in line for a Pogie

A Teachable Moment

December 29, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross posted at Sociological Images)

This ad illustrates some sociological idea, something I could use in class. I’m just not sure what it is.  (You may have already seen it. It’s been around on the Internet for a few months.)



Yes, it’s a beer commercial, not a documentary, not “reality.”  But the couples are real and unscripted – like the victims in a “Candid Camera” bit (or the subjects in some social psychology experiments).  Real and unscripted too is our reaction as viewers.  I don’t know about you, but after the ad was over, I realized that I had shared something of the couples’ anxiety at being different and hence excluded.  The bikers are neutral, maybe they are even silently hostile, so when they suddenly became accepting, my sense of relief was palpable.  I laughed out loud. 

So sociological point one is that we are social animals.  Excluded we feel fear, accepted and included we feel comfort.  Point two is that laughter is social.  Here (and in many other situations) it’s a kind of tension-meter.  There ad had no joke that I was laughing at.  It was just a release from tension.  No tension, no laughter.

The ad also illustrates “definition of the situation.”  The rigged set-up shatters the couples’ standard definition of going to the movies. They are anxious not just because they are different but because they nave no workable definition and therefore no clear sense of what to do. 

Finally, the ad raises the issue of stereotypes.  Stereotypes may actually have some general statistical accuracy.  The trouble is that the stereotype converts a statistical tendency to absolute certainty.  We react as though we expect all members of the stereotype to be that way all the time or most of the time.  Is it reasonable when you see 148 bikers to be fearful even to the point of leaving (I think some of the couples didn’t take the available seats)?  You don’t need to have read Hunter S. Thompson  to know there is some truth in the image of bikers as above the mean on violence.  But in a theater where you find them quietly awaiting the movie? 

What other sociological ideas does the ad suggest?

If You’re Going to Use Anecdotal Data, At Least Choose the Right Anecdotes

December 26, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston


For instance isn’t proof.  So goes the old saying (Yiddish? Navaho? Confucian?).

Every semester in every course, I tell students that although anecdotal data can be useful for illustrating a general truth, a few selected cases don’t prove anything.  So the argumentum ex anecdotum (pardon my made-up Latin) bothers me, especially when it comes from a social scientist.

Here’s a letter in today’s Times.

Ian Ayres and Aaron S. Edlin write, “It would be bad for our democracy if 1 percenters started making 40 or 50 times as much as the median American.”

Are Bill and Melinda Gates a great threat to democracy? Jeff Bezos? Oprah Winfrey? Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg? I fail to see how those who have amassed great fortunes in America threaten American democracy.

They do not plot coups or finance fascist militias. They do, however, give lots of money to wonderful charitable and educational organizations.

I think much of the animus toward the enormous success of such people is rooted in jealousy. “It’s not right that some people should make so much more money than I do” is the spiteful feeling behind much of the opposition to the 1 percenters.

Russ Nieli
Princeton, N.J., Dec. 20, 2011
The writer is a lecturer in the politics department at Princeton.

Not only does Princeton Lecturer Nieli rely solely on anecdotal data, but at least two of the four people he mentions clearly illustrate the point he is denying -  that with great wealth comes the potential for great political power.  Does anyone think that Michael Bloomberg, whatever his skills in politics, would have become mayor if his income were that of a lecturer at Princeton?   If money really makes no difference in politics, if we all had equal power based only on our one vote per person, why do politicians spend so much time raising so much money?

Or take the recent legislation in California to apply the state sales tax to Internet sales.  It was pretty clear that one citizen of the state of Washington, Jeff Bezos, had vastly more influence on the legislation than did any citizen of California.  It’s also clear that Mr. Bezos was lobbying not for what was best for the people of the Golden State but what was best for Amazon.

I won’t bother to comment on Lecturer Nieli’s professional assessment of the psychological motivations (jealousy, spite) of those who oppose great inequality.
 
Perhaps Mr. Nieli lectures to his Princeton students that huge disparities in citizens’ power are true to the spirit of democracy.  But then again, I’ve never known Princeton to be careful in its choice of lecturers.

Jay Livingston was a lecturer in the psychology department at Princeton.  (True fact.)

A Christmas Repost

December 25, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Economists, says Dan Ariely (WSJ article here), have a problem with gift giving.  It does not fit into their models.  It is supremely irrational.  Some economists write as if they are actually offended by it, as though gift giving is literally unnatural, a violation of human nature.  But if there is a “natural” economy, it is not an economy based on rational self-interest.  It is the gift economy.  Gift economies precede even barter economies.  The rationalized market we take for granted is an economy-come-lately.

Matt Yglesias in Slate  has a take similar to Ariely’s. He also has some suggestions for gifts. 

Even I said something along the same lines two years ago, and I’m reposting it.  If stores and radio stations can recycle the same old songs (including “mine”) every Christmas, and television can give us the same Christmas specials, why not?

--------------------------------------------

What was in those boxes we unwrapped and opened today? Gifts, most people would say.

But according to a Grinch-famous 1993 economics article by Joel Waldfogel, those boxes were also crammed with “deadweight loss” – the difference between what the giver paid for the book or bauble and what it was actually worth to the recipient.

Waldfogel surveyed Yale undergrads and concluded that “between a tenth and a third of the value of holiday gifts is destroyed by gift-giving.” Destroyed. That $40 sweater you gave to your cousin’s husband – you destroyed $10 of its value.

Here’s the key question Waldfogel put to his Yalies about gifts they’d received: “If you did not have them, how much would you be willing to pay to obtain them?”

By this method, a really good gift would mean a high deadweight loss. For example, I would never pay more than $40 for a sweater for myself. No sweater to me is worth more than that. But suppose a good friend bought me a really, really nice $200 sweater. I love that sweater. I love it precisely because it’s an extravagance I never would have allowed myself. But the most I’d be willing to pay for it is $40. So according to Waldfogel, my friend destroyed $160 (80%) of the sweater’s value.

When I first heard about the Waldfogel study, I thought it was a bit of self-parody – like those jokes about engineers , where the engineer sees everything in terms of the concepts of his profession and thus misses the point. (Waldfogel, for example, refers to the “inefficiency” of gift-giving, as though the point of gift-giving were efficiency.) But Waldfogel wasn’t kidding. He just published a follow-up book, Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays.

In fact, gift-giving has become increasingly rationalized and efficient. Children write letters to Santa specifying what they want; brides and grooms have bridal registries that do the same. Cash and gift cards are becoming more popular as gifts. There is no doubt that gift-giving is an economic exchange, and it would be silly to pretend that economic value has nothing to do with it (it’s the thought that counts). But it’s equally silly to think that it gifts are only economic and that they have no social meaning.

MERRY CHRISTMAS

Taking Pictures or Making Pictures

December 24, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross-posted at Sociological Images.)

Ethnographers worry that their mere presence on the scene may be influencing what people do and thus compromising the truth of their studies.  They try to minimize that impact, and most of their reports give detailed descriptions of their methods so that readers can assess whether the data might be corrupted.

Photojournalists also claim to be showing us the truth – “pictures don’t lie” – but they compunctions about influencing the people in their photos.  Here for example is a photo taken in Israel by Italian photographer Ruben Salvadori.  (This is a screen grab of a video, hence the subtitles.) 

The defiant Palestinian youth, the flames of the roadblock – it’s all very dramatic.  But it is far from spontaneous.

Salvadori studied anthropology, and he is well aware that observers influence what they observe.  But editors want “good” photos, not good ethnography.  So observer influence is an asset, not a problem.

If you point a tiny camera at somebody, what is he going to do?  Most likely, he’s going to smile or do something.  Now imagine this enlarged with a group of photographers. That show up with helmets, gas masks, and at least two large cameras each, and they come there to take photos of what you do.  So you’re not going to sit there twiddling your thumbs.

No, the youths don’t twiddle their thumbs, not with the photogs on the scene.  Instead, they burn a flag.

There relationship is symbiotic.  The photogs want dramatic images, the insurgent youths want publicity.  Of course, even with the Palestinians youths and the Israeli soldiers, when the action gets real, nobody is thinking about how they’ll look in a photo.






(The full 8-minute video of Salvadori talking about photography in the combat zone was posted at PetaPixel back in October, though I didn't hear about it until recently.)

Factor Loading

December 20, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Does my newsdealer know something I don’t?

Newsstands arrange their magazines by category.  There are shelves for Women’s Fashion, Sports, Travel, etc.  One of the newsstands at Penn Station had this interesting grouping.

Investors Business Daily and the Daily Racing Form. Hmmm.

Was I Sleeping in Econ 101?

December 20, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Joe Nocera covers the business beat for the Times, and he’s now a regular on the op-ed page.  I’m sure he knows more about economics than I do.  But I was puzzled by the opening of today’s column about Fannie Ma and Freddie Mac

In their heyday, these strange hybrids — part corporation, part government agency — were the biggest bullies in Washington, quick to bludgeon critics who dared suggest that their dual missions of maximizing profits while making homeownership affordable for low- and moderate-income Americans were incompatible.

Apparently, Nocera agrees with the critics who thought those dual missions were incompatible.  Maybe I was doing my James Franco impersonation in Econ 101, but isn’t that the basic idea of free-market capitalism – that companies seeking to maximize their profits will make more stuff available at lower prices for buyers? 

If those missions are incompatible, then capitalism is a very wrong-headed idea.  But if Nocera is right, if powerful corporations pursuing profits do not always bring benefits to consumers, maybe we need to rethink anti-government, anti-regulation models and policies that treat Bank of America and Exxon-Mobil as though they were the local bodega.

(Nocera also says of the bullies, Fannie and Freddie, “they essentially wrote most of the legislation that affected them, which they larded with loopholes.”  Much the same could be said of the banking and energy behemoths, especially when Republicans are shaping the legislation.)

Do You Hear What I Hear? Maybe Not.

December 18, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

As I’ve said before (here), the question the researcher asks is not always the question people hear.   That’s especially true when the question is about probabilities.

Here, for example, is the ending of a fictional vignette from a recent study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Richard found a wallet on the sidewalk. Nobody was looking, so he took all of the money out of the wallet. He then threw the wallet in a trash can.

Is it more probable that Richard is
    a. a teacher
    b. a teacher and a rapist

Since the category “a teacher” necessarily includes teacher/rapists as well, the correct answer is “a.” But many people choose “b.”  The study used this “conjunction fallacy”* to probe for prejudices by switching out the rapist for various other categories.  Some subjects were asked about atheist/teachers, others about Muslim/teachers, and so on.  The finding:

A description of a criminally untrustworthy individual was seen as comparably representative of atheists and rapists but not representative of Christians, Muslims, Jewish people, feminists, or homosexuals.

Andrew Gelman, a usually mild-mannered reporter on things methodological, had a post on this with the subject line, “This one is so dumb it makes me want to barf.”

What’s really disturbing about the study is that many people thought it was “more probable” that the dude is a rapist than that he is a Christian! Talk about the base-rate fallacy.

Maybe it would settle Andrew’s stomach to remember that the question the researchers asked was almost certainly not the question people heard.   What the researchers pretend to be asking is this:

Of all thieves, which are there more of – teachers or rapist/teachers? 

After all, that is indeed the literal meaning.  But it’s pretty obvious that the question people are answering is something different:

Which group has a higher proportion of thieves among them – all teachers or the subset rapist/teachers?

The researchers say they weren’t at all interested in demonstrating the conjunction fallacy.  They were just using it to uncover the distrust people feel towards atheists.  What they found was that when it comes to dishonesty, people (specifically, 75 female and 30 male undergrads at the University of British Columbia) rank atheists at about the same level as rapists.

But why resort to such roundabout tricks?  Why not ask the question directly?**

Who is more likely to steal a wallet when nobody is looking?
    a.  an atheist
    b. a rapist
    c.  neither; they are equally larcenous

Or:

On a seven-point scale, rank each of the following on how likely they would be to steal a wallet when nobody is looking:

•     an atheist: 1   2   3   4   5   6   7
•     a Christian: 1   2   3   4   5   6   7
•     a rapist: 1   2   3   4   5   6   7
•     etc. 

Instead, they asked questions that they knew would confuse nearly anyone not fluent in the language of statistics and probability.  I wonder what would happen if in their “who do you distrust” study they had included a category for experimental social psychologists.***

---------------
*  Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky pretty much invented the conjunction fallacy thirty years ago with their “Linda problem,” and Kahneman discusses it in his recent book Thinking Fast and Slow.  To get the right answer, you have to ignore intuition and make your thinking very, very slow.  Even then, people with no background in statistics and logic may still get it wrong.

** The authors’ presentation of their results is also designed to frustrate the ordinary reader. Each condition (rapist/teacher, atheist/teacher, homosexual/teacher, etc.) had 26 (or in one case 27) subjects.  The payoff was the number of errors in each group.  But the authors don’t say what that number was.  They give the chi-square, the odds ratios, the p’s and the b’s.  But they don’t tell us how many of the 26 subjects thought that the wallet snatcher was more likely to be an atheist/teacher or a Christian/teacher than to be merely a teacher.

*** The JPSP is one of the most respected journals in the field, maybe the most respected, influential, and frequently cited, as I pointed out here.

Graphic Design the Fox News Way

December 13, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

The best way to lie with statistics, says Andrew Gelman, is just lie.  This graph from Fox news is a visual version of that.  It’s published at Flowingdata.com via Media Matters.

The numbers are correct, but the Foxy graphmongers are making up the Y-axis as they go along.  The 8.6% of November is higher than than 8.8%, 8.9%, and maybe even the 9.0% of the first three months of the year.

Or maybe it’s an optical illusion.


[HT:  Max Livingston]