Trickling Down in the UK

August 12, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

An essential tenet of the creed of free-market economics is that the success of capitalists benefits everyone. The wealth created eventually flows through the entire society. Some nonbelievers scoff at this notion. They see not a flow but a trickle.  And sometimes even the trickle doesn’t trickle all the way down.

Tom Forth tweeted this graph showing how inequality and the income of the poor in the UK changed under the different governments since 1964. Each dot represents a year. To trace the chronology year by year, connect the dots. Years of the Conservative government are in blue, Labour in red (a reversal of the US color convention). 

(Click on the graph for a slightly larger and perhaps clearer view.)

In the Thatcher years, inequality as measured by the Gini index increased greatly increased, from about 0.26 to 0.34.  No surprise there given the Conservative ideology of Less government spending, more tax cuts. As Wikipedia says, “Thatcherism claims to promote low inflation, the small state, and free markets through tight control of the money supply, privatisation and constraints on the labour movement. It is often compared with Reaganomics in the United States. . . .” 

The UK economy as measured by GDP grew, though on the whole, the growth in the Conservative Thatcher years was no greater than it had been under the Labour governments of Harold Wilson. 

Clearly, the Thatcher years were very good for those at the top. But did the rising tide lift the boats of the UK’s poorest, the bottom 10%? Barely, according to Forth’s graph. Their annual income went from about £6100 in 1979 to about £6300 a decade later.The line on the graph moves upward vertically (the Gini co-efficient), but on the Income axis, it moves hardly at all.

By contrast, under the Labour government of Tony Blair, the Gini index of inequality changed little – a little up, then a little down – and the income of the poorest 10% grew from £6600 to about £8500 (adjusted for inflation). When inequality stopped increasing, the poor did much better.

The Donald and The Women

August 10, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

There’s so much to say about Donald Trump and about the reaction to Donald Trump. So it seems trivial to focus on one little word – “the.” But I found Clyde Haberman’s tweet fascinating.

The word Trump used was not “great” but “phenomenal.” [Added, 8/12: And the preposition he used was to, not for.] Either way, the point is that “I’d be phenomenal for to the women” is different from “I’d be phenomenal for to women.” But why? Why is that definite article so important? In many languages this distinction would never arise.

In English, “for the women” has always been the less common, at least according to Google n-grams.

In 1850 the “for women” appeared about twice as frequently as “for the women.” By 1965 that ratio had increased to about 8:1. Then came the resurgence of feminism. In 2000, that ratio had risen to more than 20:1.  True, the women’s movement did pay attention to language, but it focused on nouns – firefighter instead of fireman, for example – and honorifics (it’s Ms., not Mrs. or Miss).  I doubt that anyone was writing articles about articles.

What Haberman is suggesting, I think, is that when you add “the” to a demographic group and speak of “the women” or “the Blacks,” you are separating them from the rest of society.  Without the definite article, they are included. To say, “In our society we have Blacks, Jews, women. . . . .” implies that they are all part of our group. But, “We have the Blacks, the Jews, the women . . . .” turns them into separate, distinct groups that are not part of a unified whole.*

I don’t know why. But that’s the way it sounds to my ears.

UPDATE, August 12:  At Language Log Mark Liberman, who is a real linguist, agrees with me about the use of “the” here, but points out that I ignored the larger context of Trump's comments, which he provides in both audio and transcript. True. I was not interested in how Trump actually feels about women. I was not interested in whether or not he would in fact be phenomenal for them.  I was interested only in the linguistic question of how “phenomenal for women” differs from “phenomenal for the women.” 

The comments on Liberman’s post are worth reading.

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

* Among Jews of earlier generations, the cardinal question that might be asked of any issue was “Ist gut fuer yiddin?”  Translated as “Is it good for the Jews?” it suggests a lesser degree of integration and assimilation. There are “the Jews,” and there are the others (“the goyim”).  But “Is it good for Jews?” reduces the barrier. They are people who happen to be Jewish, not a special and separate group.

Blood, Danger, and Power

August 9, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

In a post “Trainwreck and Taboo” about Amy Schumer’s humor (here), I mentioned that some conservative men have a taboo-like reaction of disgust at her jokes about menstruation. Of course, the anthropology literature documents that such a reaction is widespread, especially in pre-industrial, agrarian and pastoral societies.

The Gopcanda observe powerful menstrual taboos.  Women’s menstrual blood is thought to have much dangerous power. A women in her menstrual period, according to Gopcanda thinking, can become deranged and especially likely to direct her fury at males. Therefore women may not speak publicly of the menstrual blood. And men may not speak of it at all. If a man overhears a woman mention it, he runs in embarrassment to his fellows, and together they initiate the ritual of shaming the woman.  As for the men, they may freely denigrate women – and they often do – and they strictly enforce the constraints on women. But if a Gopcanda man even utters the taboo word referring to menstrual blood, he may be seen as unfit for responsible roles in the tribe.         — Alvin St. Joigny, “Taboo and Power Among the Gopcanda” JPMS, 2002.

Compare that with today’s newspaper

Donald J. Trump’s suggestion that a Fox News journalist had questioned him forcefully at the Republican presidential debate because she was menstruating cost him a speaking slot Saturday night at an influential gathering of conservatives in Atlanta. It also raised new questions about how much longer Republican Party leaders would have to contend with Mr. Trump’s disruptive presence in the primary field.         — Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman. “Hand-Wringing in G.O.P. After Donald Trump’s Remarks on Megyn Kelly,” New York Times,  Aug. 8, 2015

Covers and Cover-ups

August 8, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

The title of Martin Haskell Smith’s new book pretty much tells you what it’s going to be about: Naked at Lunch: A Reluctant Nudist’s Adventures in the Clothing-Optional World. The blurb on the author’s website adds:

Naked at Lunch is equal parts cultural history and gonzo participatory journalism. Coated in multiple layers of high SPF sunblock, Haskell Smith dives into the nudist world today. He publicly disrobes for the first time in Palm Springs, observes the culture of family nudism in a clothing-free Spanish town, and travels to the largest nudist resort in the world, a hedonist’s paradise in the south of France. He reports on San Francisco’s controversial ban on public nudity, participates in a week of naked hiking in the Austrian Alps, and caps off his adventures with a week on the Big Nude Boat, a Caribbean cruise full of nudists.

Note that the author is “Haskell Smith,” not “Smith” as he would be in the US (for example, see this LA Times story).  In American sociological writing, C. Wright Mills is “Mills.” In the UK, he’s “Wright Mills.”

But there’s another interesting cultural difference – the book jacket.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

The US edition lets us peer through the letters to see the author – yes, that’s really Smith, or Haskell Smith (his head is in the “A”) – sitting on a beach chair, perhaps poolside on that Caribbean cruise, wearing only his glasses, his laptop atop his lap covering what Brits might call his willie, which in any case would be covered by the white space between the “L” and “U.” 

The UK and Australia editions are even more circumspect.

Michael Bywater in The Literary Review  compares the UK and US covers.

So that's the naked author, with his whacker and his Mac, and this is his book about nudists and what they’re like and what the hell they think they’re doing. So, not unreasonably, the book is categorised as social science. In the USA. But not here. Here in Britain, there’s no nude author. The cover is whimsical, cartoony: there are little pink blobby people, sunbeds, a swimming pool and a very tanned woman with a poodle and a tent. And here in Britain, the category is travel writing.

And what of Australia? No hint of nudity. Without the title, the cover would be completely misleading. Perhaps the Aussie graphics designers thought that since the title conveyed so much information, they were free to go for an adolescent, Freudian joke.

(Other SocioBlog posts on covers and culture are here and here, and for the messages that covers convey, go here for a post on a child guessing the content of literary classics just from their covers.)