Show, Don’t Tell

March 23, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Can the mood of a piece of writing be graphed?

For his final project in Andrew Gelman’s course on statistical communication and graphics, Lucas Estevem created a “Text Sentiment Visiualizer.” Gelman discusses it on his blog, putting the Visualizer through its paces with the opening of Moby Dick.

(Click on an image for a slightly larger view.)

Without reading too carefully, I thought that the picture – about equally positive and negative – seemed about right. Sure things ended badly, but Ishmael himself seemed like a fairly positive fellow. So I went to the Visualizer (here)  and pasted in the text of one of my blogposts. It came out mostly negative. I tried another. Ditto. And another. The results were not surprising when I thought about what I write here, but they were sobering nevertheless. Gotta be more positive.

But how did the Visualizer know? What was its formula for sussing out the sentiment in a sentence? Could the Visualizer itself be a glum creature, tilted towards the dark side, seeing negativity where others might see neutrality? I tried other novel openings. Kafka’s Metamorphosis was entirely in the red, and Holden Caulfield looked to be at about 90%. But Augie March, not exactly a brooding or nasty type, scored about 75% negative. Joyce’s Ulysses came in at about 50-50.

To get a somewhat better idea of the scoring, I looked more closely at page one of The Great Gatsby. The Visualizer scored the third paragraph heavily negative – 17 out of 21 lines. But many of those lines had words that I thought would be scored as positive.

Did the Visualizer think that extraordinary gift, gorgeous, and successful were not such a good thing?

Feeling slightly more positive about my own negative scores, I tried Dr. Seuss. He too skewed negative.

What about A Tale of Two Cities? Surely the best of times would balance out the worst of times, and that famous opening paragraph would finish in a draw. But a line-by-line analysis came out almost all negative.

Only best, hope, and Heaven made it to the blue side.

I’m not sure what the moral of the story is except that, as I said in a recent post, content analysis is a bitch.

Gelman is more on the positive side about the Visualizer. It’s “far from perfect,” but it’s a step in the right direction – i.e., towards visual presentation – and we can play around with it, as I’ve done here, to see how it works and how it might be improved. Or as Gelman concludes, “Visualization. It’s not just about showing off. It’s a tool for discovering and learning about anomalies.”

Race and Tweets

March 20, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Nigger* is a racially charged word. And if you sort cities or states according to how frequently words like nigger turn up from them on Twitter, you’ll find large differences. In some states these words appear forty times more often than in others. But do those frequencies tell us about the local climate of race relations? The answer seems to be: it depends on who is tweeting.

In the previous post, I wondered whether the frequency of tweets with words like bitch, cunt, etc. tell us about general levels of misogyny in a state or city. Abodo.com, the Website that mapped the geography of sexist tweets, also had charts and maps showing both racially charged tweets (with words like “nigger”) and more neutral, politically correct, tweets (“African Americans” or “Black people”). Here are the maps of the two different linguistic choices.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

West Virginia certainly looks like the poster state for racism – highest in “anti-Black” tweets, and among the lowest in “neutral or tolerant” tweets. West Virginia is 95% White, so it’s clear that we’re looking at how White people there talk about Blacks. That guy who sang about the Mountaineer State being “almost heaven” – I’m pretty sure he wasn’t a Black dude. Nevada too is heavily White (75% , Black 9%), but there, tweets with polite terms well outnumber those with slurs. Probably, Nevada is a less racist place than West Virginia.

But what about states with more Blacks? Maryland, about 30% Black, is in the upper range for neutral race-tweets, but it’s far from the bottom on “anti-Black” tweets. The same is true for Georgia and Louisiana, both about 30% Black. These states score high on both kinds of tweet – what we might call, with a hat-tip to Chris Rock, “nigger tweets” and “Black people tweets.” (If you are not familiar with Rock’s “Niggers and Black People,” watch it here.) If he had released this 8-minute stand-up routine as a series of tweets, and if Chris Rock were a state instead of a person, that state would be at the top in both categories – “anti-Black” and “neutral and tolerant.” How can a state or city be both?

The answer of course is that the meaning of nigger depends on who is using it.  When White people are tweeting about Blacks, then the choice of words probably tells us about racism. But when most of the people tweeting are Black, it’s harder to know. Here, for example, are Abodo’s top ten cities for “anti-Black tweets.”

Blacks make up a large percent of the population in most of these cities.  The top four – Baltimore, Atlanta, and New Orleans – are over 50% Black. It’s highly unlikely that it’s the Whites there who are flooding Twitter with tweets teeming with “nigger, coon, dindu, jungle bunny, monkey, or spear chucker” – the words included in Abodo’s anti-Black tag.** If the tag had included niggas, the “anti-Black” count in these cities would have been even higher.

All this tells us is that Black people tweet about things concerning Black people. And since hip-hop has been around for more than thirty years, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Blacks use these words with no slur intended. When I searched Twitter yesterday for nigger, the tweets I saw on the first page were all from Black people, and some of those tweets, rather than using the word nigger were talking about the use of it.  (Needless to say, if you search for niggas, you can scroll through many, many screens trying to find a tweet with a White profile picture.)

For some reason, Abodo refused to draw this obvious conclusion. They do say in another section of the article that  “anti-Hispanic slurs have largely not been reclaimed by Hispanic and Latino people in the way that the N-word is commonly used in black communities.” So they know what’s going on. Nevertheless, in the section on Blacks, they say nothing, tacitly implying that these “anti-Black” tweets announce an anti-Black atmosphere. But that’s true only if the area is mostly White. When those tweets are coming from Blacks, it’s much more complicated.

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*Abodo backs away from using the actual word. They substitute the usual euphemism – “the N-word.” As I have said elsewhere in this blog, if you can’t say the word you’re talking about when you’re talking about it as a word, then the terrorists have won. In this view, I differ from another Jay (Smooth) whose views I respect. A third Jay (Z) has no problems with using the word. A lot.

** I confess, porch monkey and dindu were new to me, but then, I don’t get out much, at least not in the right circles. Abodo ignored most of the terms in the old SNL sketch with Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase.  (The available videos, last time I checked, are of low quality (this one, for instance), but like Chris Rock’s routine, it is an important document that everyone interested in race and media should be familiar with. A partial transcript is in this earlier post.)

Content Analysis Is a Bitch

March 18, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Can Twitter tell us about the climate of intolerance? Do the words in all those tweets reveal something about levels of racism and sexism? Maybe. But the language of intolerance – “hate speech” – can be tricky to read.

Adobo is website for people seeking apartments – Zillow for renters – and it recently posted an article, “America’s Most P.C. and Prejudiced Places” (here), with maps and graphs of data from Twitter. Here, for example, are the cities with the highest rates of misogynistic tweets. 

Unfortunately, Abodo does not say which words are in its formula for “deragotory language against women.” But Abodo does recognize that bitch might be a problem because “it is commonly used as profanity but not always with sexist intent.”  Just to see what those uses might be, I searched for “bitch” on Twitter, but the results, if not overtly sexist, all referred to a female as a bitch.

Maybe it was New Orleans. I tried again adding “NOLA” as a search term and found one non-sexist bitch.

When Abodo ran their much larger database of tweets but excluded the word bitch from its misogyny algorithm, New Orleans dropped from first place to fourth, and Baton Rouge disappeared from the top ten. Several Northeast and Western cities now made the cut.

This tells us what we might have known if we’d been following Jack Grieve’s Twitter research (here) – that bitch is especially popular in the South.

The Twitter map of cunt is just the opposite. It appears far more frequently in tweets from the Northeast than from the South.

The bitch factor changes the estimated sexism of states as well as cities. Here are two maps, one with and one without bitch in its sexism screen.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

With bitch out of the equation, Louisiana looks much less nasty, and the other Southeast states also shade more towards the less sexist green. The Northeast and West, especially Nevada, now look more misogynistic. A few states remain nice no matter how you score the tweets – Montana, Wyoming, Vermont – but they are among the least populous states so even with Twitter data, sample size might be a problem. Also note that bitch accounts for most of what Abodo calls sexist language. Without bitch, the rates range from 26 to 133 per 100,000 tweets. Add bitch to the formula and the range moves to 74 to 894 per 100,000.  That means that at least two-thirds of all the “derogatory language against women” on Twitter is the word bitch.

There’s a further problem in using these tweets as an index of sexism. Apparently a lot of these bitch tweets are coming from women (if my small sample of tweets is at all representative). Does that mean that the word has lost some of its misogyny? Or, as I’m sure some will argue, do these tweets mean that women have become “self-hating”? This same question is raised, in spades, by the use of nigger. Abodo has data on that too, but I will leave it for another post.

Which Percentages, Which Bars

March 13, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Whence Trumpismo, as ABC calls it (here), as though he were a Latin American dictator? Where does Trump get his support? Who are the voters that prefer Trump to the other candidates?

The latest ABC/WaPo poll, out today, has some answers. But it also has some bafflingly screwed-up ways of setting out the results. For example, the ABC write-up (by Chad Kiewiet De Jonge) says what many have been saying: “Trump’s support stems from economic discontent, particularly among working-class whites.” Appropriately, the poll asked people how they were doing economically – were they Struggling, Comfortable, or Moving Up?

That’s pretty clear: economic circumstances is the independent variable, candidate preference is the dependent variable. You compare these groups and find that Strugglers are far more likely to support Trump than were the folks who are better off. Instead, we get a chart percentaged the other way.

Instead of comparing people of different economic circumstances, it compares the supporters of the different candidates. And it doesn’t even do that correctly. If you want to compare Trump backers with Cruz, and Rubio/Kasich backers, the candidates should be the columns. (The poll merged Rubio and Kasich supporters for purposes of sample size.) Here’s the same data. Which chart is easier to interpret?

This makes the comparison a bit easier.  The margin of error is about 5 points. So Trump supporters might be somewhat more likely to see their economic circumstances as a struggle.

There’s a similar problem with their analysis of authoritarianism. “It’s also been argued that people who are predisposed to value order, obedience and respect for traditional authority tend to be strongly attracted to Trump.” But instead of comparing the very authoritarian with the less so, ABC/WaPo again compares the supporters of Trump, Cruz, and Rubio/Kasich.

Instead of telling us who authoritarians prefer, this analysis tells us which candidate’s backers have a higher proportion of authoritarians. And again, even for that, it makes the answer hard to see. Same data, different chart.

Cruz supporters, not Trumpistas, are the most authoritarian, probably because of that old time religion, the kind that emphasizes respect for one’s elders. (For more on Cruz supporters and uncompassionate Christian conservatism, see this post.)

The poll has worthwhile data, and it gets the other charts right. The pdf lists Abt SRBI and Langer Research as having done the survey and analysis. To their credit, they present a regression model of the variables that is far more sophisticated than what the popular press usually reports. But come on guys, percentage on the independent variable.

The Workers

March 13, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

The last time I heard anyone talk about “the workers” was in Paris in 1976. A Hungarian student I met there was interested in Freud, but in Hungary it was hard to get books on psychoanalysis. Publishing resources (all government operated) were mostly devoted, she said, to books for the workers. She was not a strong supporter of the government, but she did say that it had made life better for the workers.

What struck me was the way she used that phrase, “the workers,” without a hint of ironic quotation marks, even when she was expressing some intellectual disdain for them. To me it sounded quaint, like something out of a past I had heard of but didn’t really remember. In America, we have workers, of course. Everybody works.  But we do not speak of “the workers.” That definite article would imply that they are a distinct class, a group with interests that are different from those of other groups. The Redsox, the Dodgers; the faculty, the students.

“The workers” also implies that social class is based on relation to the means of production. That’s not a thought that comes easily to Americans. When I ask students about social class, the first thing they mention is income, but when I ask for other aspects of class, long before someone mentions occupation, the responses run to “lifestyle” choices – consumption not production.

I was reminded of the absence of “the workers” recently when my colleague Vikas Singh noted this sentence in a student's paper on alienation: “We, the customers are alienated from one’s own labor.” “Alienated customers”? Was this a slip of the pen? Or was it, as Vikas thought, an indication of how far we have come in conflating “consumer” and “worker”?

To see what has happened to “the workers,” I ran the phrase in Google nGrams, and just to check on American exceptionalism, I compared the British and American corpora.

The trends follow a similar pattern – rising to about 1940, then declining – but the rise of “the workers” in the 1930s was much steeper in the UK than in the US. After the decline during the War, Britain, with its socialist government saw a renewed interest in “the workers.” The downturn begins almost exactly at the point that the Conservatives and Thatcher come to power in 1979. In the US the downward trend is a nearly uninterrupted decline starting in 1937. By the end of the century, “the workers” appears only about a third as often as it had during the 1930s.

There’s a more recent trend in what we call people who work. They are still “workers” (though not “the workers”), but that term is fading. More and more they are “employees.”

From 1930 to 1980, workers outnumbered employees two or even three to one. Since 1980, that margin has fallen to about 1.5 to one. Perhaps the trend in words reflects the change in the labor market. “Workers” still wears its blue collar, and those manufacturing jobs have fallen from about 19 million in 1980 to 12 million today.

Fewer workers, more “employees,” a term that elides the difference between the sales clerk and the CEO. And perhaps that is the way we think about class. The sales clerk and the CEO have the same relation to the means of production; they both go to work and get a company paycheck. It’s just that the CEO’s paycheck allows for different lifestyle choices.

A Dream Disconfirmed

March 7, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

What happens to a dream disconfirmed? Does it dry up, a dream no longer? Or does it make commitment even stronger?

Ever since When Prophecy Fails, the 1956 study of a flying saucer cult, we’ve known the answer. When as idea that no longer squares with reality, people will resolve this “cognitive dissonance” by reshaping what they know and what they feel in order to preserve their belief in that idea. 

Failed prophecy was also the theme of a wonderful segment by Zoe Chace on This American Life two weeks ago. She had been spending time in South Carolina in the months before the primary there, and one of the people she met, Alex Chalgren, director of the state’s Students for Trump, was too good a story to pass up. Listen to the podcast (here), and you’ll get a sense of how remarkable and likable he is. You’ll also get a sense of how strongly he supported Trump.

You wouldn’t expect Alex Chalgren to be a Trump supporter. He’s not an angry White man. He is a male, but he’s a high school kid, eighteen years old. He’s not angry, and he is Black.

His early years were rough. He was bounced around from his biological parents to foster homes and back, to group homes and back to foster homes. Then, after a year of asking, he got his teacher in the third grade to adopt him. She later married, and now Alex has two loving parents, both White.

Alex shares the usual conservative talking points – hard work, not handouts; a wall against illegal immigrants; destruction of ISIS – and like his parents he’s an evangelical Christian. But then why not support Ted Cruz as his parents do?

There’s one issue that separates Trump from the Cruz and the others, and for Alex that issue makes all the difference – gay marriage.  “Trump is fine with gay marriage,” Alex tells Chace back in January.
   
“I'm gay. And so it’s big for me. And everyone knows I’m gay. . . . My parents know. Everyone knows. . . .  Trump is fine with gay marriage, thank goodness. And he’s a realist. He knows that as society moves on, we must move on. . . .   My biggest concern is gay marriage and the economy. For example, if it comes down to Ted Cruz or Bernie Sanders, I might not vote or I might vote for Bernie Sanders.”

Now comes cognitive dissonance. The source of the dissonance was not his family – their love for one another clashing with their strong differences about homosexuality. They’d gotten past that. It was Trump.



As Chace says, Trump’s statement contradicts his previous position. Worse, it would seem to leave Alex in a Wile E. Coyote moment. He looks down and discovers that his grounds for supporting Trump have vanished. But unlike Wile E. Coyote, Alex can exercise the powers of mind over what matters. For example, he can say that what he sees and hears is merely a mirage and that Trump doesn’t mean what he’s just said. He can also deny that Trump’s statement is of any importance since it will not reverse the upward arc of gay marriage, and besides, some things are more important than even gay marriage – things like “the survival of our country.”



When people are faced with evidence that contradicts a strongly held idea, they adjust their perceptions and interpretations so as to protect their beliefs. When the flying saucers did not appear at the appointed hour, the members of the flying saucer cult in When Prophecy Fails did not stop believing. They came up with an explanation just as Alex did when Trump hedged his position on gay marriage. This tweaking of cognitions is not surprising. But the members of the UFO group also had a collective emotional reaction, one that was less predictable. The immediate despair and doubt gave way to enthusiasm as they took to spreading the word about the imminent arrival of UFOs. 
The sequence goes something like this

• public commitment to an idea
• disconfirmation of that idea
• stronger and more emotional commitment to that idea (as long as there is a group to support that sustained commitment)

Alex seems to have gone through a similar transformation.




His main reason for supporting Trump has been disconfirmed, but his commitment is even stronger. He has raised the stakes from a rational support of Trump’s politics to a personal identification with Trump himself.  “You see how I do my hands here? That’s like Trump. He does this.”*

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* Needless to say, this was before the leading candidates of the party of Lincoln became obsessed with the length of Trump’s fingers and what that length might betoken.

(Earlier posts on reactions to failed prophecy are here  and here.)

Ignorant, Apathetic . . . and Realistic?

March 5, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Here’s a multiple-choice question:

1. Voting by people like me
    a.  doesn’t really affect how the government runs things
    b. gives people some say about how the government runs things

Yesterday, Pew (here) told us how we answered this question.

The Pew survey was concerned mostly with how people are getting their news about the presidential campaign. But yesterday’s report focused on those few Americans (9%) who are content to let a week or more go by without getting any news about the election.

“Half of this group thinks that their vote doesn’t really affect how the government runs things.”

The two sentiments – about the news and about one’s own influence – seem to be part of a more general feeling of alienation from government. The General Social Survey used to ask about this alienation with the variable ANOMIA7, which asks people to Agree or Disagree with the statement, “Most public officials (people in public office) are not really interested in the problems of the average man.” A clear majority – never less than 65% agree.

The GSS hasn’t asked this one since 2006, and the time before that was 1994 (maybe that “average man” has something to do with it.) A similar item in the 2012 GSS allowed for a more nuanced response.

This looks more like the uninformed Pew respondents – evenly split between “None/A Little” and “Some or more.”

But which side has the correct answer to that multiple-choice question? The disaffected, alienated citizens, the ones who don’t care to find out about the election and don’t think their vote or ideas matter – they are ignorant and apathetic. But might they also be realistic? And those of us who watch the news and the debates, who check out the political tweets in our Twitter feed – we’re certain to vote come November. We want to make a difference. But are we fooling ourselves?

In their 2014 paper (here) which got some attention even in the popular press, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page looked at 1779 policy decisions to see how the actual outcomes lined up with the preferences of three different types of people or groups

• organized interest groups
• “economic elites”
• average citizens

They graphed the results to show how likely a policy was to be adopted at each level of support from each type of source.  For interest groups, they counted up the interest groups that favored a policy and subtracted the number that opposed it.

The more that interest groups were relatively unanimous in favor of a policy, the more likely the government was to adopt that policy.  (The preferences of interest groups were frequently similar to those of elites and to those of the public, so the authors statistically controlled for this overlap. The graphs show the effect of just one variable controlling for the effects of the other two.)

The data on economic elites showed the same kind of influence. The more that rich people were together on an issue, the more likely they were to get their way.

What about the average citizen?

The slope is close to zero. Ninety percent of average citizens may favor or oppose some policy, but  their preferences have little impact (unless, of course, these preferences are also those of interest groups or, especially, economic elites). These folks may be citizens united, but they are also citizens powerless.
As Gilens and Page summarize their findings.

Not only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely substantial power over policy decisions; they have little or no independent influence on policy at all. By contrast, economic elites are estimated to have a quite substantial, highly significant, independent impact on policy. This does not mean that theories of Economic-Elite Domination are wholly upheld, since our results indicate that individual elites must share their policy influence with organized interest groups. Still, economic elites stand out as quite influential—more so than any other set of actors studied here—in the making of U.S. public policy.

When I first looked at the Pew data on the alienated non-voters, I thought about it in terms of cognitive consistency. If you don’t feel that your vote makes a difference, it makes no sense to bother finding out about the candidates.

The same logic applies to the “good” citizens. If you follow the news, if you develop a preference for a candidate, if you think it’s important who gets elected, then you will be more likely to vote. And if you’re going to vote, it would make sense to also think that your vote made a difference. So the news followers develop a false sense of efficacy. If the Gilens-Page study is right, however, if you want to have any influence at all, voting is far less important that other things you might do, like aligning yourself with an interest group, or getting rich – really, really rich.

Sic Transit Gloria

February 29, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

In 1970, the day after National Guard troops killed four unarmed protesters at Kent State University, students at Southern Illinois University went to the local McDonald’s and demanded that the flag be lowered to half staff.  The franchise owner complied.

Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s got wind of this and told the franchise owner to raise the flag back up to full staff. When he conplied, the students threatened to burn the place down.

The whipsawed franchise owner phoned McDonald’s CEO Fred Turner asking what to do. If Turner’s response isn’t part of the canon of management courses, it ought to be:  “The next delivery truck that arrives, have him back in to the flag pole and knock it down.” [Source.]

Lands’ End now finds itself in a similar position but with no flagpole and no trucks.

You may have noticed that the most recent Lands’ End catalogue looks different from the other 273 they’ve sent you this year. Lots of people in a tableau rather than close ups of one model in merch. And palm trees. Palm trees? From Wisconsin? The paper too is less slick, with more of a matte finish. But what has landed Lands’ End in hot water is the four-page interview with Gloria Steinem wearing Lands’ End gear.

(The text in the upper right begins, “Introducing the Legend Series, our ode to individuals who have made a difference . . . .”)

Lands’ End is in trouble – profits and sales way down – and the new CEO wanted to change the look of the catalogue if not the clothes. But that was the beginning of more trouble. First, conservatives got word of it and started criticizing Lands’ End for celebrating a woman who not only spoke out in favor of legalized abortion but who had actually had an abortion and said so.

Lands’ End responded:  “It was never our intention to raise a divisive political or religious issue, so when some of our customers saw the recent promotion that way, we heard them. We sincerely apologize for any offense.”

Besides apologizing, they also wiped the Gloria material from their website. (So far, they haven’t yet asked me to return my catalogue, but who knows?)

Then the pro-Gloria forces took to Facebook and Twitter.

“I don’t intend to teach my children that anyone should do business with a company that is ashamed to even talk about feminism,”

The Washington Post says that Lands’ End, in its attempt to retroactively duck the issue, is tacking away from the trend. Companies, says WaPo, have now become “unapologetic in their stance on social issues.” Big companies –Target, Gap, Visa, Cheerios, etc. – have supported the Supreme Court decision on gay marraige or criticized Trump’s denigration of Latinos. Sears and Wal-Mart came out against the Confederate flag.

The message of these earlier moves seemed to be that the companies were willing to stake out a position they felt strongly about, even if it meant alienating some customers. Lands’ End, it appears, may have a different mindset.

Is it Lands’ End not being as fearless as those other companies, or is it the issue? After the Charleston Church Massacre of June 2015, retreating from the Confederate flag became the majority view even in the South.

(Click on a chart for a slightly larger view.)

The trend on gay marriage has also made acceptance a safe bet.

But on abortion, the public is still split. and the issue is still salient.

Lands’ End was caught between equally strong opinions. Their dilemma on Gloria reflects their dilemma on clothing and clientele. Lands’ End wants to attract younger shoppers, who lean towards the pro-choice side, but not lose their older customers, who lean the opposite direction.
Here at the SocioBlog, we’re proud to show our colors – a bright orange Lands’ End sweater.

Donald’s Delegate Condition

February 25, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

USA Today carried this front page graph showing just how completely Donald Trump was routing the competition for the Republican presidential nomination. (I have re-created the page with the text blanked out so as to make the graph easier to see.)

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

I’m not sure what to make of this. Trump certainly has by far the greatest number of the 125 delegates now committed. But the Republican convention will have nearly 2500 delegates. When you plot the current delegate count against the number needed to win, Trump’s current lead looks a bit less overwhelming.

Trump no longer looks like the obvious winner.  His 64-delegate lead over Cruz and Rubio doesn't look so insurmountable.

Maybe the Republicans in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina do reflect the sentiments of their counterparts in the other 46 states. The prediction markets now (I’m writing this just before this evening’s debate) have Trump as a heavy favorite, more than two to one.

Maybe the crowd is truly wise. Or maybe, now is the time to short Trump and buy Rubio, hope that Tuesday’s primaries reduce the gap, and take your profits.

Oh, Those Hypersensitive Students

February 21, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Liberals, as Jonathan Haidt has documented, argue on the basis of only two principles or “moral foundations”: Hurt and Fairness. Conservatives add other bases for their positions: Loyalty (vs. betrayal), Authority (vs. subversion), and Sanctity (vs. degradation). Also Liberty, which Haidt later added to the original five. (A summary of Haidt's moral foundations is here: http://moralfoundations.org/.)

So conservatives have lots of ways to justify what they want. If hurt and unfairness are not in plain sight, conservatives can fight against betrayal or subversion. But liberals, absent real hurt or unfairness, must have recourse to finding micro-hurts and micro-unfairness from micro-aggressions.

This week’s example comes from Georgetown law school (source: Inside Higher Ed).  Justice Scalia was an undergrad at Georgetown and made several visits to the law school. Shortly after Scalia’s death, a law professor (Prof. G___ , to use a 19th century construction) sent out an e-mail to students and faculty eulogizing Scalia – his jurisprudence, his wit, his writing, and his refusal to trim his sails to the winds of political correctness. Scalia, said Prof. G____, stood steadfast in putting Constitutional principles ahead of the particular interests of classes of people, classes based on race, gender, or economic standing.

Some other professors objected to this e-mail, not for its content but for its effect on students.

Some of them are twenty-two-year-olds, less than six months into their legal education. Leaders of the Black Students Association, the Latino Law Students League, and two women’s groups reached out to us to tell us how traumatized, hurt, shaken and angry were their fellow students. Of particular concern to them were the students who are in Professor G____’s class who must now attend class knowing of his contempt for those who disagree with Scalia.  How are they now to participate freely in class? What reasoning would be deemed acceptable on their exams?

I think most people would doubt that students at a top law school would be “traumatized” by a professor stating his views about Scalia. Are these ambitious 20-somethings such delicate flowers that they must be protected from legal positions they disagree with lest they be “traumatized, hurt, shaken”? If so, maybe they should choose a different profession. Lawyering ain’t beanbag. And must a law professor, in the interest of fairness, pretend that all opinions are equally valid?

Conservatives will probably tell these students to stop their whining and sniveling and to man up (or attorney up). Conservatives could also argue on the basis of Liberty. People, even professors, should be free to expound their opinions; nobody should censor them.

There’s nothing new here, except . . .

It was the other way round. I reversed the actual facts. The Georgetown law professor who sent the e-mail, Gary Peller, came to criticize Scalia not to praise him. The faculty who then accused Peller of traumatizing the students are Scalia supporters. The hothouse flowers in need of protection are the student conservatives and libertarians.  (“Leaders of the Federalist Society chapter and of the student Republicans reached out to us to tell us how traumatized, hurt, shaken and angry were their fellow students.”)

When the claims of injury and intimidation on the one side and the accusations of hypersensitivity on the other are bouncing back and forth like this, it’s hard to tell the pot from the kettle.

Saoirse’s Choice

February 20, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

In a course I taught long ago, I would give students the set-up of a movie – act one – and ask them to write a plot summary of the rest of the film. When they had finished, I would tell them how the actual film went. It unfolded to something completely different from what they had thought up. That’s because it was French.

The students were very bad at thinking like a French cineaste, but they did a top-notch job of filling in the predictable character types and plot elements of American movies.

I remembered this after I saw “Brooklyn.” It’s certainly a pleasant hour and fifty minutes. The film is set in the early 1950s, but it cleaves so closely to America’s immigrant-story cliches that it could be taking place any time.  The trailer summarizes the story.



Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) must decide between two countries, Old Ireland and New America, and between two men, one in Enniscorthy, one in Brooklyn. In Ireland she lives in a small town and works for a particularly nasty shopowner, a snoop who uses her knowledge of everyone’s secrets as weapons. Eilis comes to America, an open land of opportunity where she works hard at her job and takes classes to improve her abilities. Predictably (i.e., just like in the movies) she keeps moving up.

The man she meets on her return trip to Ireland is at the top of the town’s social ladder. The man she meets in America is a working-class Italian, a plumber, but he has plans to start his own construction company (to build what we know will become the new suburbs). Like Eilis, Tony too is on the path to success.

In a post nine years ago (here) I speculated that all American movies, even romantic comedies, are really about achieving success. “Brooklyn” is firmly in that tradition. The movie presents both men as ideal, someone any girl would want to marry, and Saoirse Ronan is able to convince us that the choice is agonizing. But while Eilis may feel torn between the man who has already inherited a life of comfort and the man who is getting there through honest work, we in the audience, schooled on scores of American movies, know immediately who is preferable.

“Brooklyn” lays out its cards in such a familiar arrangement that the movie’s real achievement is in making us believe that the sides in this choice are nearly equal. It does that mostly with the pull of family obligations.  Eilis’s mother needs care, and now that Eilis’s sister has died, Eilis is the only family she has left. But that also means that an aging mother is the only family that Eilis herself has, her only real human bond to Ireland. Even if we weren’t Americans rooting for America, we know what the right choice is, and “Brooklyn” does not disappoint. To its credit, the movie avoids the impossibly perfect solution, the “Hollywood ending,” which might have been for Eilis to bring her mother to America to live happily ever after.

On the podcast “Culture Gabfest,” Julia Turner comments that “Brooklyn” could almost be a silent movie. This is said in praise of Saoirse Ronan’s acting – her face tells so much. But it could be a silent movie also because the plot and characters are so familiar – the spiteful shopowner, the kindly priest, the Italian family – that the dialogue doesn’t add anything to our understanding of them.

That said, the film is very good for what it is. It looks terrific, the story is well told, and Saoirse Ronan deserves her Oscar nomination. But “Brooklyn” is the movie equivalent of comfort food – familiar, pleasant, and easy to digest.

Polish Joke

February 16, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

I am not all familiar with Freeman beauty products, but I am somewhat familiar with the French language. So I wonder: how did this happen? (Note the English and French lines below “Goyave.”)

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

The translation gaffe was soon corrected (I assume that the Salt Scrub on the right is the later version*). But how could polishes ever become les polonais (Polish people)?

Google Translate had no problem with it, though it preferred softening the skin to smoothing out the wrinkles.

The linguists at Language Log haven’t checked in on this one, and until they do here’s my guess: Freeman is a privately held company. I imagine it as a family operation – a mom-and-pop beauty products company. Old Mr. Freeman, the founder, ponders the new product, and says, referring to his grandson, “Little Ryan is taking French – they start ’em in fourth grade nowadays – let’s give him a shot at this one.” So Ryan, a not-so-adept student in Beginning French, looks up polish and finds le polonais, pl. les polonais.


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My keen-eyed colleague Lois Oppenheim points out that in the somewhat-corrected version the accent on protége [sic] is aigu when it should be grave.

Hat Tip: Polly-vous Français

Margin of Error – Mostly Error

February 14, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

It’s the sort of social “science” I’d expect from Fox, not Vox. But today, Valentine’s Day, Vox (here) posted this map purporting to show the average amount people in each state spent on Valentine’s Day.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

“What’s with North Dakota spending $108 on average, but South Dakota spending just $36?” asks Vox. The answer is almost surely: Error.

The sample size was 3,121. If they sampled each state in its proportion of the US population, the sample in the each Dakota would be about n = 80 n = 8. The source of the data, Finder, does not report any margins of error or standard deviations, so we can’t know. Possibly, a couple of guys in North Dakota who’d saved their oil-boom money and spent it on chocolates are responsible for that average. Idaho, Nevada, and Kansas – the only other states over the $100 mark – are also small-n. So are the states at the other other end, the supposedly low-spending states (SD, WY, VT, NH, ME, etc.). So we can’t trust these numbers.

The sample in the states with large populations (NY, CA, TX, etc.) might have been as high as 300-400, possibly enough to make legitimate comparisons, but the differences among them are small – less than $20.

My consultant on this matter, Dan Cassino (he does a lot of serious polling), confirmed my own suspicions. “The study is complete bullshit.”

UPDATE February 24, 2016: Andrew Gelman (here) downloaded the data did a far more thorough analysis, estimating the variation for each state. His graph of the states shows that even between the state with the highest mean and the state with the lowest, the uncertainty is too great to allow for any conclusions: “Soooo . . . we got nuthin’.”

Andrew explains why it’s worthwhile to do a serious analysis even on frivolous data like this Valentine-spending survey. He also corrects my order-of-magnitude overestimation of the North Dakota sample size. 

More Good News About Kids

February 12, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Five weeks ago I asked

When’s the last time you read an op-ed or magazine article that began, “Kids today are just so much better than kids of a generation or two ago.”

 
That post (here) had some data showing that in crime, drug use, unwanted pregnancy, and other categories, today’s youth were doing much better than their counterparts of earlier generations.
           
Now, the answer to that question (“When was the last time you read . . ?) is “Today.”

Today, Vox has an article called “Today’s Teens Are Better Than You, and We Can Prove It” (here). It has data on the variables I mentioned plus meth and other drugs, carrying guns to school, fighting, and other things most of us are glad to see less of. There’s even an interactive function where you can compare kids today against your own cohort – if you are under 45.

The article begins, “The kids are all right,” an obvious line that I had to try very hard to avoid in my post. But take a look at the data.

The article makes no attempt to pinpoint the causes of these changes, so feel free to attribute the good news to whatever factors you favor.

Fairway Farewell?

February 10, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Update: Three months ago, I blogged (here) about Fairway, a New York food market. Things had not been going well for Fairway since its buyout by a private equity firm, and especially since the IPO in 2013. “That’s private equity for you,” said one of their former managers.

Now Fairway is looking at bankruptcy. The New York Post reports that Fairway has lost over $300 million in the last five years. The Wall Street Journal  says, “Fairway—a high-end chain with 15 stores in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut—said that there is substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.”

Auteur, Schmauteur

February 10, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Despite the maxim about familiarity breeding contempt, we usually like what’s familiar.  With music for example, familiarity breeds hits in the short run and nostalgia in the long run. The trouble is that it’s tempting to attribute our liking to the inherent quality of the thing rather than its familiarity.  With movies, film buffs may make this same conflation between what they like and what they easily recognize.

That’s one of the points of Scott Lemieux’s takedown (here) of Peter Suderman’s Vox article about Michael Bay.

Suderman hails Bay as “an auteur — the author of a film — whose movies reflect a distinctive, personal sensibility. Few filmmakers are as stylistically consistent as Bay, who recycles many of the same shots, editing patterns, and color schemes in nearly all of his films.”

But what’s so great about being an auteur with a recognizable style? For Lemieux, Michael Bay is a hack. His movies aren’t good, they’re just familiar. Bay’s supporters like them because of that familiarity but then attribute their liking to some imagined cinematic quality of the films.

My students, I discovered last week,  harbor no such delusions about themselves and the songs they like. As a prologue to my summary of the Salganik-Watts MusicLab studies, I asked them to discuss what it is about a song that makes it a hit. “Think about hit songs you like and about other hit songs that make you wonder, ‘How did that song get to be #1?’” The most frequent answers were all about familiarity and social influence. “You hear the song a lot, and everyone you know likes it, and you sort of just go along, and then you like it too.” I had to probe in order to come up with anything about the songs themselves – the beat, the rhymes, even the performer.

Lemieux cites Pauline Kael’s famous essay “Circles and Squares” (1963), a response to auteur-loving critics like Andrew Sarris. She makes the same point – that these critics conflate quality with familiarity, or as she terms it “distinguishability.”

That the distinguishability of personality should in itself be a criterion of value completely confuses normal judgment. The smell of a skunk is more distinguishable than the perfume of a rose; does that make it better? Often the works in which we are most aware of the personality of the director are his worst films—when he falls back on the devices he has already done to death. When a famous director makes a good movie, we look at the movie, we don't think about the director's personality; when he makes a stinker we notice his familiar touches because there’s not much else to watch.

Assessing quality in art is difficult if not impossible. Maybe it’s a hopeless task, one that my students, in their wisdom, refused to be drawn into. They said nothing about why one song was better than another. They readily acknowledged that they liked songs because they were familiar and popular, criteria that producers, promoters, and payola-people have long been well aware of.

“In the summer of 1957,” an older friend once told me, “My family was on vacation at Lake Erie. There was this recreation hall – a big open room where teenagers hung out. You could get ice cream and snacks, and there was music, and some of the kids danced. One afternoon, they played the same song – “Honeycomb” by Jimmie Rodgers – about twenty times in a row, maybe more. They just kept playing that song over and over again. Maybe it was the only song they played the whole afternoon.”

It wasn’t just that one rec hall. The people at Roulette Records must have been doing similar promotions all around the country and doing whatever they had to do to get air play for the record. By the end of September, “Honeycomb” was at the top of the Billboard charts. Was it a great song? Assessment of quality was irrelevant, or it was limited to the stereotypical critique offered by the kids on American Bandstand: “It’s got a good beat. You can dance to it.” Of course, this was before the 1960s and the rise of the auteur, a.k.a. the singer-songwriter.

Hollywood uses the same principle when it churns out sequels and prequels – Rocky, Saw, Batman. They call it a “franchise,” acknowledging the films have the similarity and predicatability of Burger Kings. The audience fills the theaters not because the movie is good but because it’s Star Wars. Kael and the other anti-auteurists argue that auteur exponents are no different in their admiration for all Hitchcock. Or all Michael Bay. It’s just that their cinema sophistication allows them to fool themselves.


(Big hat tip to Mark at West Coast Stat Views.)

What Are the Odds?

February 7, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’d just picked this book from off the shelf – the “New Books” shelf, though I could see it was a paperback so not entirely new.

The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles,
and Rare Events Happen Every Day by David J. Hand

I read the intro chapter, put it down, intending to get back to it some time. A few days later, at the library for the performing arts at Lincoln Center I saw the posters from their latest show – an exhibit about the plays of Shakespeare. They’d asked a lot of people in the theater – musicians, writers, actors, set designers – to talk about their loves and their dislikes: which characters, which plays, which lines, which scenes.

Jane Alexander, often overlooked but one of our truly great actresses, had this to say about her line in “As You Like It” as Rosalind in drag.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

Every night when Orlando had left the stage and I turned to Celia and swooned, “O coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love,” the four hundred years that separated Elizabethan England and me simply vanished.

It is indeed a time-transcendant line. But Shakespeare has many, many more, and alas, I know so few, so I moved on to see what other people had to say. There were perhaps a dozen on display. Several didn’t quote lines. Instead they’d note a scene, a character, or cherished production. Alan Cumming hated “Timon” but loved Miranda played by Felicity Jones to Helen Mirren’s Prospera (renamed).

Cumming’s not Alexander, and I’m sure  he’s never been a Rosalind, and yet of all the lines in all the plays in all of Shakespeare, what line did he choose? From “As You Like It,” “pretty little coz.”

I still can’t help but ask, what are the odds?

Cruz-Jews News

February 6, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

When Ted Cruz says “New York,” does he really mean “Jewish”?

In a Republican debate in Iowa, Maria Bartiromo asked Ted Cruz what he meant when he referred to Donald Trump’s “New York Values.” My response (the blog post is here) was the same as Toby’s on “The West Wing” when a conservative professional Christian balks at Josh’s “New York sense of humor”: he means Jewish.

Not everyone agreed, maintaining the we should take Cruz’s remarks at face value, and that any dog-whistle overtones about Jews were in the ears of the listeners. Now Cruz himself has pretty much cleared up the question of whether he was equating “New York” with all things Jewish.  He was responding to the accusation from Trump and others that he and his wife had borrowed money from Goldman Sachs, where Mrs. Cruz works – an arrangement that puts at least a small question mark on Cruz’s claims to being a stalwart battler against Wall Street.

Dana Milbank in the Washington Post reports:

Cruz, asserting that Trump had “upward of $480 million of loans from giant Wall Street banks,” said: “For him to make this attack, to use a New York term, it’s the height of chutzpah.” Cruz, pausing for laughter after the phrase “New York term,” exaggerated the guttural “ch” to more laughter and applause.

Chutzpah is a Yiddish word. It is “a New York term” only if you equate New York with Jewish. New York sense of humor, New York values, New York phrases.

So we can put to rest the debate about whether in the mind and speech of Sen. Cruz, New York is conflated with Jewish.  Thanks to the senator for settling the question.

Pittsburgh Hip

February 5, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

A friend/colleague/co-commuter sent a link to this article.

I especially appreciated the gesture since the dude is a diehard fan of all things Seattle (we commiserated about playoff defeats). Although the article was at a Pittsburgh booster Website , the original source was ThrillList, which ranked Pittsburgh in “The next Portland: 8 Cities All the Cool Kids Are Moving To.” The list includes Missoula, Louisville, Boise, etc. ThrillList, after a shoutout to Pittsburgh’s “several expert-vetted breweries” and “superior cocktail bars,” had this to say about my home town.

There is a fake robot repair shop inside the airport, which is a totally, totally reasonable thing to have in an airport, and if you’re after artisan stuff, Handmade Arcade  – “Pittsburgh's first and largest independent craft fair”  – will have all of the trinkets and tchotchkes you definitely don’t need.

I would think that a healthy economy must be prerequisite for hipness. Not that prosperity is any guarantee. Back when Pittsburgh had steel, and the mills were glowing night and day, the city was economically healthy but hardly hip. Now the mills are malls, and the main employer (and owner of real estate) seems to be UPMC, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Yes, if your tastes don’t run to craft beer, you can still get Iron City – “a bottle of iron” (pronounced “ahrn”) is what you ask for – and you can wave your terrible towel for the Steelers. But absent tradition and trademarks, the local beer would be a bottle of Imaging, and Mike Tomlin would be coaching the Medics.*

Has Pittsburgh really improved? Brookings has a nifty interactive site that ranks the largest 100 cities on three dimensions

• Growth (Jobs, GMP (gross metro product), total wages)
• Prosperity (GMP per job, GMP per capita, average wages)
• Inclusion (median wage, poverty relative to median wage, employment/population ratio)

Here’s how the former Steel City has changed in the last decade.

It comes off much better in the rankings than do Boise and Louisville.

The Brookings app and data are here. You can check out the other “hipster cities” – Salt Lake (who knew?), Asheville, the other Portland – or your own home town, hip or not.

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* According to Wikipedia, Pittsburgh also has “established itself as a technology hub.” And here’s a personal note about that not-always-perfect transition. My father was in the steel business in the good years – the 40s and 50s. In the early 60s, a friend, an engineer at Westinghouse, was quitting the big company, taking a couple of other impatient engineers with him, and forming what we now call a tech start-up, an electronics company, Milletron. My father was persuaded to cash in his steel business and join. He would handle the non-tech business side of things.

The Regional Industrial Development Corporation had recently been formed by private interests who could see the handwriting on the steel-mill walls and wanted to push the local economy towards diversity and modernity. The RIDC provided some financing and helped them secure loans. The company struggled along. The contracts they got never quite paid all the bills, and they had other projects that required a little more time and a little more cash. After  three or four years, the RIDC finally pulled the plug. Milletron was no more. And my father, once well off, was more or less broke. “You lost a lot of money?” I asked him once, a few years later. “Yeah, he said, but the banks lost a lot more.”

Decadence Anyone?

January 31, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Five years ago, I borrowed Stephen Colbert’s title I’m America, and So Can You for a post on the tendency of some columnists to attribute their own views to “Americans,”  “the public,” “the country,” or some other collective mind. “The public seems to be angry about values,” wrote David Brooks at the time. So much for “I-statements.” (That blogpost is here.)

Once you become sensitive to this rhetorical tactic, you can’t help noticing it. In his New York Times column today (here), Ross Douthat writes.

What are Trumpistas and Bern-feelers rebelling against? They’re rebelling against decadence.

Is decadence really the problem that is roiling the Trump and Sanders supporters? I don't recall seeing that term on any of their signs and slogans ( “Down With Decadence,” “Trump Trumps Decadence”).
A Lexis-Nexis search for “Trump” and “Decadence” in the last seven months turned up only one article in the US press linking these two –  a Times op-ed a month ago with the title “Cracks in the Liberal Order.” It was written by Ross Douthat. 

Swap out “Trump” for “Bernie Sanders,” and you get only this same Douthat column.

There was one article (Rochester, MN Post-Bulletin, Jan. 13) referring to a “Trump-style tower in giddy display of decadence.” And an editorial in the Providence Journal by Jay Ambrose said that Sanders and progressives generally should “stop their decadent way of supposing that people are poor because others are rich.” But these were saying that Trump and his would-be emulators and Sanders and his fellow progressives were themselves decadent, not that they were responding to decadence.

Despite the months of pre-primary coverage, journalists turn up no voters in Iowa, New Hampshire, or anywhere else who complained they were troubled about decadence in America. The Obama-haters compare him to Hitler, not Caligula. The Sanders supporters are rallying against inequality, not iniquity.

Decadence is in the eye of the beholder, and the only eye that seems to be beholding it belongs to  Ross Douthat.