Less for Your Money

March 21, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

What to do about snow days? That was one of the last items on the agenda at the half-day-long meeting of all department chairs. In coming semesters, we’ll probably get more weird weather, so what kind of advance arrangements should make?  Schedule more pre-exam-period reading days that can be converted to class days? Have teachers tockpile a few online classes?

“I don’t know about anyone else,” said one chair, trying to sound puzzled, “but so far none of my students have complained about the two missed classes.”  (OK, it was me.) There was laughter, though not an entirely easy laughter.

I continued:

I had two immediate mental associations when the topic came up. One was my brother. Long ago, I was talking to him about this problem or something similar He took out a blank piece of paper.  “Suppose this is your field, sociology.” Then he drew a square that took up less than half the page.. “And this is how much you know.”

“And this,” he drew a smaller square inside that one, “is what you can cover in a semester.”  It was beginning to look like an Albers print but without color.

“And this,” a still smaller square “is what your students can learn.”

I didn’t have to state the obvious implication:  as long as the what-they-can-learn square was considerably smaller than the what-you-can-cover square, what difference would a couple of snow days make?

“My other association,” I said, “was to Father Guido Sarducci.”

I was surprised by the number of people who seemed to get the reference.* At least they laughed.  And one woman I spoke with later (chair of Nutrition Sciences) did a very credible version of Fr. Sarducci’s accent.  She added that our business was one of the very few where the customers often wanted less for their money.

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* The bit became famous after Don Novello did it on SNL in the early 1970s. This version is from 1980, still early enough that the audience gets the Mickey Mouse Club reference.

 

Motivation and Incentives - Are the Rich and Poor Different?

March 19, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

Economic policies often rest on assumptions about human motivation. 

Rep. Ryan (Republican of Wisconsin): 

The left is making a big mistake here. What they’re offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul. People don’t just want a life of comfort. They want a life of dignity — of self-determination.

Fox News has been hitting the theme of “Entitlement Nation” lately. The Conservative case against things like Food Stamps, Medicare, welfare, unemployment benefits, etc. rests on some easily understood principles of motivation and economics.

1.    Giving money or things to a person creates dependency and saps the desire to work. That’s bad for the person and bad for the country
2.    A person working for money is good for the person and the country.
3.    We want to encourage work
4.    We do not want to encourage dependency
5.    Taxing something discourages it. 

Now that you’ve mastered these, here’s the test question:

1. According to Conservatives, which should be taxed more heavily:
    a.    money a person earns by working
    b.    money a person receives without working, for example because someone else died and left it in their will

If you said “b,” you’d better go back to Conservative class. A good Conservative believes that the money a person gets without working for it should not be taxed at all.*  

Not all such money, of course.  Lottery tickets are bought disproportionately by lower-income people.  If a person gets income by winning the PowerBall or some other lottery, the Federal government taxes the money as income. Conservatives do not object.  But if a person gets income by winning the rich-parent lottery, Conservatives think he or she should not pay any taxes.

What Conservatives are saying to you is this: working for your money is not as good as  inheriting it.** This message seems to contradict the principles listed above. But, as Jon Stewart recently pointed out (here), Conservatives apply those principles of economics and motivational psychology only to the poor, not to wealthy individuals or corporations.

Me, I’m with Rep. Ryan on this one. I think that the children of the wealthy would not at all mind paying considerable taxes on their inheritance. What abolishing inheritance taxes offers people is a full stomach (not to mention a full bank account, stock portfolio, a full house or two, etc.) but an empty soul. To repeat the Wisdom from Wisconsin: “People don’t just want a life of comfort. They want a life of dignity — of self-determination.”

Unfortunately, Conservatives want to take away that dignity and self-determination
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* Conservatives like to call the inheritance tax the “death tax” as though a person is being taxed for dying. But it’s not the deceased who is being taxed. It’s the lucky people who are given the money.

** Conservatives also favor lower taxes on other ways of getting money that are available mostly the wealthy and involve little or no work – gambling on stocks and more complicated derivatives for example.

Poverty – Race, Ryan, and Rhetoric

March 18, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

Poor Paul Ryan – he said what he really thought. That’s not always dangerous, but this time it was about why Black men don’t work, and Rep. Ryan’s explanation was that there’s something wrong with the men, their families, and their culture.

You can’t blame Ryan for his statement. His guard was down. He was among friends, being interviewed by William Bennett, a whale of a conservative. Bennett set the ball on the tee:

We’re setting records in terms of people not working. . . . There’s a cultural aspect to this . . . Boys particularly learn how to work. Who teaches boys how to work. . . . A boy has to see a man working, doesn’t he?

And Ryan took a swing:

Absolutely. . . . We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.

When a reporter (lauren victoria burke of Crew of 42 - here) later asked Ryan about the racial implications in his statement, Ryan first tried the standard dodge” “it was taken out of context.” Then he went for total denial:

This has nothing to do whatsoever with race. It never even occurred to me. This has nothing to do with race whatsoever.

Rep. Ryan was using here a rhetorical device known as “a lie.”

The context for the Bennett interview was Ryan’s recent report on poverty programs, particularly those that encourage “dependency” rather than work.  Nor did Ryan embellish or add relevant ideas that were left out of the quote. So the statement was perfectly in context. As for race, the term “inner city” is so often to mean Black that it can’t even be considered a code word; it’s a synonym.

When burke (in a West-Wing-like walk-and-talk) pointed out the racial implications, Ryan suddenly remembered that poverty and unemployment were not purely inner city problems

This isn’t a race based comment. It’s a breakdown of families, it’s rural poverty in rural areas, and talking about where poverty exists — there are no jobs and we have a breakdown of the family.

Ryan’s second thoughts are accurate.  In fact, rates of poverty are higher in rural areas than in metro areas.  The difference is slight in most regions, probably because metro areas have so many people who are not poor. But in the South, the rural-urban difference is unmistakable.

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

As several others have pointed out, it was only when Ryan’s image of poverty expanded to include rural Whites that his explanation expanded to include what should be obvious – the lack of jobs.  We can't really know the implicit associations in Rep. Ryan’s mind.  But it certainly looks as though they go like this:  Why are inner-city Black people poor? Because of their culture – they haven’t learned the value of work. Why are Whites in Appalachia poor? Because there are no jobs.



HT: Eric Volsky at ThinkProgress for the graph.

(An earlier version of this post had Ryan as a Senator. He is in fact a Representative. What could I have been thinking.?)

Jazz and Rap, White and Black

March 16, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Dave Brubeck Was The Macklemore Of 1954,” wrote Patrick Jarenwattananon, NPR’s jazz blogger (here), after Macklemore’s post-Grammy text apologizing to Kendrick Lamar.

Sixty years earlier, Time magazine put Dave Brubeck on the cover, and in 1954 being on the cover of Time was a big deal. Brubeck’s quartet  was on tour with the Duke Ellington orchestra at the time, and Brubeck felt, as did many others, that if any jazzer was going to be on the cover of Time, it should be Duke. (Time put Ellington on the cover two years later.)

Jarenwattananon hears in these stories a recurrent motif in American popular music:

Both also fit into a longstanding narrative in American popular music. White musicians play music of black community origin. Then, buoyed by systemic privilege, they enjoy mainstream success prior to the black artists they were initially inspired by. And they attempt to allay the guilt by deferring to said black trailblazers.

That’s almost certainly true of Brubeck. His popularity owed much to Whiteness. It wasn’t just that Brubeck himself was White. His music was White. (The frequent criticism of Brubeck among jazzers was that he didn’t swing – a valid criticism.*) In the early 50s, he set out to popularize his music by touring colleges, and in that era, college campuses were nearly all White. That success enabled him to move from a small label (Fantasy, with its translucent wine-colored records) to Columbia. His first record for that label was  “Jazz Goes to College.”

But the Brubeck and Macklemore stories are different in some important ways.  Jazz, unlike rap, has never had widespread appeal, especially among Whites.  So the audience for jazz à la Brubeck was a lot bigger than the audience for what Black jazz musicians, including Ellington, were playing. If Time was looking for someone emblematic of the surge (tiny though it was) in the popularity of jazz, Brubeck was the likely candidate.  Besides that, Time is a news magazine, and in 1954, Ellington  was not new; Brubeck was.

Does any of this apply to Macklemore?** He works in a genre that, even in its least White forms, is already popular among Whites. The White audience for rap is huge.*** Also, it’s not as though the White media have been ignoring Black rappers. Many a Grammy had been awarded to Black rappers before Macklemore. But in 1954, only one other jazz musician of any color had been honored with a Time cover. That honoree was Louis Armstrong.

Others who know more about rap and the Grammys than I do can correct me, and obviously it depends on who votes.  But my impression is that Macklemore’s Grammy did not have so much to do with “systemic privilege.”  Nor do I think he won because he “enjoy[ed] mainstream success prior to the black artists [he was] initially inspired by.”

Hat tip to a regular reader and erstwhile copy editor of this blog for referring me to the NPR story.
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* To swing is a term that defies precise definition – perhaps the difference between swinging and not swinging amounts to a matter of microseconds in the length of notes and perhaps the choice of tonalities – but jazzers know it when they hear it. And when they don’t.

** I know almost nothing about Macklemore and his music – only that our sartorial preferences run to similar sources. Fuckin’ awesome.

*** You frequently hear the claim that the rap audience is  70-75% White.  The  WSJ’s “numbers guy” Carl Bialik checks it out as best he can (here) and concludes, “Conventional wisdom, for once, turns out to be mostly correct – with the caveat that there’s a lot we don't know about race and rap sales.”