Pointers on the Zero Point (à la Jonah Goldberg)

August 5, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

As cheap tricks in data visualization go, leaving out the zero point is one of the easiest and most common ways to make a molehill of difference appear to be a mountain. Here’s an example I’ve used before — the Fox News graph showing that a tax rate 39.6% is five times the size of a tax rate of 35%

(Click on an image to enlarge it.)

I’ve blogged on this before (here and here), and as some of the comments on those posts argue, cutting the y-axis down to size is not always deceptive. But in most cases, it’s good to include the zero-point.

Jonah Goldberg, the conservative political writer, has learned that lesson. Sort of. Philip Cohen, in his review (here) of Goldberg’s latest book Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy, has provided examples of Goldberg’s data-viz facility. The problem: how to exaggerate effects while yet including the zero point. Goldberg’s solution: simple – just truncate the y-axis as usual, but then stick a label of zero on the lowest point.

From these graphs we learn

• In 1960, life expectancy worldwide was nearly 0.
• By 2015, infant mortality worldwide had decreased to nearly 0

In a mere 55 years, we went from a world where nearly all infants died to a world in which almost no infants died.

As Philip Cohen notes, the book’s blurbs from conservative pals and colleagues (e.g., John Podhoretz, Arthur Brooks) mention Golberg’s “erudition.” Apparently, this erudition stops short of knowing that the distance between 54 and 56 is not the same as the distance between 0 and 54.
                       

Tribal Politics, Tribal Morality

August 3, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

Paul Krugman today points out something I’d missed. Trumps famous line —“I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters” — is a slur on the morality of his followers. Krugman sees the quote as another instance of Trump’s more general “contempt for his working-class base.” In essence, Trump is saying that the level of morality among his followers is primitive, entirely tribal. The Trumpsters’ only criterion in making moral judgments, no matter how heinous or harmful the action being judged, is whether the person who committed it is one of their own.

After all, if Evangelicals and their leaders have nothing to say about Trump’s lust, greed, anger, sloth, gluttony, envy, and pride; if they are fine with his multiple breaking of the Sixth Commandment, then why would they mind his breaking the Fifth Commandment in the middle of Fifth Avenue?

Tribal morality flourishes when a group feels that it is under attack. The group sharpens the lines between “us” and “them,” as George Bush did after 9/11. “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Under these conditions, the group has to direct its attention outward towards the enemy. The only crime by a group member is disloyalty.
                                                                   
Much of Trump’s rhetoric plays to this feeling that “we” are under attack. The threat comes from many sources — Mexicans, Muslims, immigrants, the media, Hillary, China, and others (though not, of course, Russia) —  and Trump supporters chant enthusiastically about what we must do to these enemies —  wall them out or lock them up or whatever. It is the genius of Trump, his supporters, and Republicans generally that they can maintain this perception of themselves as embattled defenders trying to “take back” their country* even when they control all three branches of the federal government and most state governments.

As long as Trump’s supporters continue to perceive themselves and the world as “us” against “them,” his low estimate of their morality may well remain accurate.

---------------
* “Taking back” the country that rightly belongs to them and not to all these other people who cast more votes has been a constant theme among Republicans at least since Obama’s election and perhaps before. See this 2011 post, “Repo Men.”

Hank Jones, b. July 31, 1918

July 31, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

The great jazz pianist Hank Jones was born 100 years ago today. He recorded with Bird and Diz and other beboppers, but as you can hear in this excerpt from a masterclass he gave at NYU at age 85, he never abandoned his roots in stride, especially when he was playing solo.

I saw Hank a few times in the 1980s playing duos with bassists Ron Carter or Red Mitchell at Bradley’s or The Knickerbocker in The Village. I also saw him in “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” the Broadway shoq based on the music of Fats Waller, Hank was the ontage pianist, and he wore a vest and derby hat like Fats. He had one line – at the end of the show, I think – Fat’s famous “One never knows, do one?”

Like other jazz musicians,* he is uncredited in what is probably his best-known performance – accompanying Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy Birthday” and “Thanks for the Memories” for JFK in 1962. You can hear him and see her here.


-------------
* Other examples include Bud Shank  on “California Dreamin’”  and Phil Woods on “Just the Way You Are.”

The Paradox of Choice Shops for a Birthday Card

July 31, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

Is having a large variety of items to choose from helpful for making a decision? Or, as the paradox of choice would have it, do all those options keep us from deciding and then, when we do finally make up our mind, leave us less satisfied with our choice?

In the previous post, I speculated that it depends on how deeply our ego is sunk in the thing we’re choosing. The same object may have a vastly different meaning to different people. When it comes to shopping, those differences are often strongly rooted in gender roles.

I once heard a marketing expert explain that in a greeting card store, men and women follow much different stage directions. Women will look at nearly every card in the category trying to find the absolutely right one. Men look only until they find one that seems OK, and that’s the one they buy.  It’s the same now on the Internet. Scribbler, an online British card company found that men spent about six minutes online choosing a card. Women averaged 15 minutes.

Men would probably be happier with a small number of cards to choose from. But a woman who finds only a few cards to choose from might extend her search to another store or website in order to find the perfect card. Greeting cards are not a guy thing.* Or as Emily West puts it in an article in Feminist Media Studies (here), “For many women, greeting card communication is part of a feminized habitus that includes kinship work as well as routine provisioning for the household. For men, taking an interest in greeting cards can seem like discrediting behavior for heterosexual masculinity.”

In other words, regardless of what is actually printed on the greeting card, the real message is that the giver and receiver are connected socially and emotionally. For many women, competence in that sphere matters a lot for their sense of self. Men, not so much.**

-------------------------
* Eighty percent of all greeting cards are bought by women.

** It always strikes me as ironic that although greeting cards signify this personal connection, we turn to an unknown and distant stranger, some Hallmark-hired Cyrano, to put these feelings into words (the “sentiment” as it’s known in the card biz).