“Frances Ha” and Those Narcissistic Millennials

May 28, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Frances Ha,” the new movie by Noah Baumbach is basically “Girls” in black and white.  Twenty-seven year olds in Brooklyn. They move from one relationship to the next searching for a good one and never quite finding it.  The same goes for jobs and especially for apartments.* Fluidity rules. For the girls at least, only their friendships have something suggesting permanence, importance, and intensity.

Most of the reviews of the film were favorable, but at the New York Film Critics Circle, Armond White (here) would have none of it.

It offers an obnoxiously self-satisfied portrait of a young white New Yorker–played by Greta Gerwig–running out her parent’s stipend, roommating with other New York hipsters, sometimes skipping the pond to Paris, all the time pursuing her goal to be a professional dancer, even though she demonstrates no aptitude for it.

White tears into Baumbach’s “warped values,” values that White says also permeate Baumbach’s “detestable” movie “The Squid and the Whale.”  What really galls White are the concerns and desires of the characters in the film.

Maybe you have to be a Mumblehattan elite to love this kind of self-love.

I wouldn’t pay such attention to this obscure review except that it embodies a much more widely held view of “millennials” like the characters in this movie. They are narcissistic, they won’t work hard for the things they want but instead feel entitled to them. “They really do seem to want everything, and I can't decide if it’s an inability or an unwillingness to make trade-offs.”  “Their attitude is always ‘What are you going to give me,’” says a manager of human-resource programs.  (These quotations are from a WSJ distillation (here) of The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation Is Shaking Up the Workplace by Ron Alsop.

A Facebook friend of mine says much the same thing

 My work in HR teaches me daily that the younger generations entering the workforce are dripping with this undeserved sense of entitlement (not all, of course).        

A business researcher says,

Nearly 70 percent of survey respondents think Millennnials are lazy and uninterested in their jobs. What’s more, 55 percent of Millennials agree.

This moralistic hand-wringing about the younger generation – even when the hand-wringers are not so old themselves (my FB friend is 33) – reminds me of the song “Kids” from “Bye-bye Birdie,” a musical that opened more than a half-century ago.**

Kids!
I don’t know what’s wrong with these kids today! . . .
Kids!
They are disobedient, disrespectful oafs!
Noisy, crazy, dirty, lazy, loafers!
While we’re on the subject:
Kids!
You can talk and talk till your face is blue!
Kids!
But they still just do what they want to do!

The perception of millennials as “lazy” or “uninterested in their jobs” or doing only the things they want to do may not even be generally true of most of these twenty-somethings.  So the complaint probably tells us more about the complainers than about the objects of their contempt.  The complaint comes down to this: Frances Ha, Hannah Horvath, and their real-life counterparts are willing to forgo financial rewards in order to spend more of their time doing (or at least looking for) something personally meaningful. And for some reason, in the view of theses critics, that’s just wrong.  Those who castigate them seem to be saying, “For years, I spent forty or more hours a week at a job I disliked, making myself miserable so that I could make a lot of money. You should choose to make yourself miserable too.”

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* You could even say that “Girls” and “Frances Ha” are really about the New York rental market.  In a 2007 post, I said that most American films are “about” Success in the same way that British films are “about” The Class System. Even if the characters do not discuss them explicitly, these ideas and structures (Success, Social Class) shape the actions and reactions of the characters in the way that grammar shapes their speech.The same goes for the NYC housing market.

** This post from years ago offers a more complete explanation of the moral nostalgia that this song is satirizing. 

Small-time Gamblers

May 24, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

Someone on the Internet is wrong. I just can’t believe it’s Mark Kleiman. 

I made my usual argument that (in rough numbers) 80% of the users of almost any drug use it moderately, take no harm from it, and do no harm to others, but that the other 20%, who use more than is good for them, account for 80% of the consumption and an even larger fraction of damage to themselves and others. . .  Since the industry that sells the drug (or offers other potentially habit-forming services such as gambling) will always be financially dependent on dependent problem users, while the public interest is in serving the desires of non-dependent non-problem users while minimizing the number of dependent users.

Mark surely knows about drugs and alcohol.  And the distribution of other activities (serious crime, for example) may be even more skewed than 20-80.  But gambling – at least casino gambling, is different. It didn’t use to be, but it is now, and I’m not sure why it changed.

In the old days, casinos too relied on “whales” – the high rollers who gambled large amounts on table games like craps, roulette, and blackjack.  Casinos saw the slot machines as diversions for the whale wives or whoever – small-time customers dropping in their pennies, dimes, and quarters and pulling the handles. 

That was then.  Now, the larger part of casino revenue comes from not from the few but the many – the smaller-time folks playing the slot machines.  The whales still matter.  The average table brings in 15-20 times as much money as each slot machine, even when you factor in the table’s larger capacity.*  (Tables are communal; slots are a solitary vice.)

Perhaps as early as the mid-70s but certainly by the mid-80s, casinos began increasing the number of machines relative to the number of tables.

(The differences in absolute numbers are so great, I used a secondary Y-axis for the tables.  Take note of the axis scales.) 


The ratio of slots to table games increased from about 20:1 to more than 30:1.

Among casual or infrequent gamblers and in newer gambling venues like Pennsylvania, the slots account for an even larger share of the house take.  But even on the Las Vegas strip, the traditional feeding area of the whales, slot machines still account for nearly half (45%) of revenues. 

Why did casinos shift their bets from the few whales at the tables to the myriad krill at the slots?  Slots are not whale-friendly. They don’t handle large and varying bets. But aside from that, they have several advantages for the casinos. Slot machines

• work a 24/7 shift
• can’t cheat the house
• can’t cheat bettors
• don’t call in sick
• don’t have drug and alcohol problems
• don’t join unions
• don’t require health benefits
• don’t get arguments from bettors

The time-line suggests that the shift to machines had something to do with competition from other states. The first non-Nevada casino opened in New Jersey in 1978. Starting around 1990, other states started to get in on the action. Or maybe the success of these other casinos revealed a previously neglected or uncourted population – a population that the casinos could easily accommodate. 

To go back to Mark Kleiman, for whatever reasons, the gambling market does not share the inequalities of drug and alcohol markets, where the heavy users far outweigh the long tail of the distribution.  True, some of those small-time players at the slot machines may be problem users. And many of the high rollers at the tables may be problem free (as Book of Virtues whale William Bennet claims to be. But in the overall distribution of gambling revenues, things are more evenly shared between the whale and the tail.

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* Data on Nevada come from a UNLV site (here)

Dismissing Durkheim . . . and Sociology

May 23, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

There it was again, the rejection of sociological thinking – not because it’s wrong or because it offers no effective policies, but just because it doesn’t make people feel better. 

A Newsweek article on suicide makes the obligatory hand-wave:

Sociologists in general believe that when society robs people of self-control, individual dignity, or a connection to something larger than themselves, suicide rates rise. They are all descendants of Emile Durkheim, who helped found the field in the late-19th century, choosing to study suicide so he could prove that “social facts” explain even this “most personal act.”

That’s 58 words in a 6600-word article, not so much a shout-out as a mumble-out.   I exaggerate.  The article does cite sociologists Julie Phillips and Sherry Turkle, and it tosses around statistics about suicide rates by age, sex, race, and birth cohort.  Still, the paragraph that starts with sociology and Durkheim ends with this curt dismissal of sociology because it cannot play to people’s feelings by predicting individual cases:

But when someone’s son dies by suicide and the family cries out for an answer, “social facts” don’t begin to assuage the pain or solve the mystery. When a government health official considers how he might slow down the suicide problem, “society” is a phantom he can’t fight without another kind of theory entirely.       

That other theory, needless to say, is focused on individuals, and the center of the article is a psychologist, Thomas Joiner, whose first job was to identify– and quarantine! – those who would otherwise kill themselves. 

He got to regularly look suicidal people in the eye, only this time he did so knowingly, as a therapist, and with a decision to make: which of these people were risks to themselves? Under Texas law he was allowed to lock people up if they were.

The article gives no data on whether Joiner was actually able to pick out the truly suicidal.  I would guess that he had a Texas-size false-positive problem. That problem comes with trying to predict and change individual behavior.  It is much more socially beneficial and accurate to think in terms of predicting and changing rates of behavior.

If someone’s son dies in a car crash, it might “assuage the pain or solve the mystery” to find out who was to blame – which driver was drunk or momentarily distracted or whatever.  It’s much less comforting to look at aggregate rates.  But when you do, you just might notice that crashes are frequent on this one stretch of road or that crashes are more likely to be fatal in cars without airbags or seatbelts.  Those “social facts” lead to structural policies that can reduce the overall numbers. 

In fact, the absolute number of highway deaths in the US in 2012, despite a 5% increase over 2011, was  lower than at any time since the early 1950s.  The rate per vehicle-mile has fallen by 80% since the 50s and 60s.  Most of that decrease – tens of thousands of saved lives each year – came not from identifying fatality-prone drivers but from changing the structure of roads and cars.  We don’t know which individual lives were saved.  We just know that there were a lot of them.

Not Your Grandfather’s Anti-Fluoridation Movement

May 22, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Fight Mental Health.”  The gag bumper sticker from decades ago was funny because of the double-take you did to realize what it literally meant. 

Yesterday, the citizens of Portland, Oregon voted No on fluoridation (a news story is here). I had thought that questions about fluoridation had been settled long ago, and that most Americans had made their peace with water that reduced tooth decay.  But the issue never really went away.

The “fight dental health” movement is no joke.  But the constituents and ideology have changed somewhat.  Here’s what it was like back in the day.

In Seattle, Washington, in 1951, for example, the anti-fluoridation committee drew support from Christian Scientists, a few dentists, health food operators, and fervent anti-Communists.*               

Those fervent anti-Communists seemed awfully worried about boundaries – the boundaries of the nation and the boundaries of the body.  McCarthy and his followers seemed less troubled about external threats – the military might of the USSR – than about internal ones.  Actors, directors, writers, schoolteachers and others – Americans all – had to be rooted out lest they insinuate an alien ideology into our unsuspecting brains.  

The anti-Communist imagery reminds me of Animorphs, a series of books once popular among grade-school kids (or at least among the one who lived in my house).  The series premise is that aliens from outer space have come to earth, but only the Animorphs -- our quintet of teenage heroes – knows about them.  The worm-like alien creatures, Yeerks, threaten to take over the country not by force but by stealth – taking over our minds.  A Yeerk slips into the porches of a victims ear, slides inside, and swift as quicksilver wraps itself  around the victim’s brain.  To others, the victim appears unchanged, an ordinary American citizen, but he is now under the control of the evil aliens.

As with Animorphs, so with fervent 1950s anti-Comnunists. Three months ago (here), I quoted Gen. Jack Ripper of “Dr. Strangelove”:

It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hard-core Commie works.

 Gen. Ripper and the Animorphs are fictional.  But they’re not far-fetched.

During the 1950s, Golda Franzen, a San Francisco housewife, became the leading exponent of the idea that fluoridation was a “Red conspiracy.” She predicted that fluoridation would produce “moronic, atheistic slaves” who would end up “praying to the Communists.” Franzen's warnings, echoed by such groups as the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan acquired particular salience during the anti-communist fevers of !he McCarthy era. For his part, C. Leon de Aryan, editor of an antiSemitic publication in San Diego, described the spread of fluoridation as a plot to “weaken the Aryan race” by “paralyzing the functions of the frontal lobes.”

 Maybe the Yeerks too wrapped themselves around the frontal lobes.

The mood of the anti-fluoridation forces today in Portland seems different, at least according to the WSJ account, more lighthearted (they have a film called “An Inconvenient Tooth”) and perhaps more concerned with filtration than with infiltration.  Rock musicians, not usually known for rigid boundary maintenance, participated. Local bands – the Dandy Warhols, the Guantanamo Baywatch – were part of the opposition.  On the other side, the Decemberists, who rock globally, were acting locally in favor of  fluoridation. 

The purity-of-essence argument still has exponents, but they do not look at all like the anti-Communist Jack Rippers of the 1950s.  Their quest is not for freedom from insidious foreign influence but for what is “natural.” (A major organic food vendor was on board.)  I would guess that they prefer acupuncture and herbal remedies and don’t want their children inoculated.  I would also guess that even with Portland’s water still uncontaminated by fluoride, they drink only bottled natural spring water.

But the dominant non-medical theme seems to have been “choice.”  The government should not force you to do things without your consent, even if those things are good for your health.

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* From Donald R. McNeil (1985) “America's Longest War: The Fight over Fluoridation, 1950 —” (full text behind a paywall here.