Scholarship as an Avocation

October 10, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Max Weber wrote an essay about “Scholarship as a Vocation” (the more commonly used translation is “Science as a Vocation”). It’s a classic, but Weber, in focusing on the professionals, forgot about the hobbyists tinkering in their garages. Sometimes, they do it better.

When I was an undergraduate, there was a lab technician who worked for the biochemistry department – I don’t think he had a college degree, he may even have been a high school droupout – who knew more than most of the doctoral students and probably some of the faculty. He was also the quarterback on the biochem intramural football team, which is why they usually won.

I was reminded of this by two things this week: my sister-in-law’s birthday dinner and Andrew Gelman’s Social Science Statistic Blog.

Gelman prints a rant (his word, not mine) that someone sent him about a wrongheaded statistical analysis done by some consultant for a local government project.
Gelman agrees and adds:

This certainly doesn't surprise me: I've seen worse from paid statistical consultants on court cases, including one from a consultant . . . who reportedly was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for his services.
The key problems seem to be:
1. Statistics is hard, and not many people know how to do it.
2. The people who need statistical analysis don't always know where to look.

The people with credentials can be wrong. And sometimes the uncredentialed guys – like the lab technician – surprise you.

Take Howie, a guy you would never mistake as an academic. He’s an old friend of my brother- and sister-in-law, and Sunday we were celebrating her birthday somewhere out in Queens at an unpretentious Italian restaurant (decent food, reasonable prices, no tablecloths, Yankees on a couple of TVs in the bar). I was seated down at the end of the table with my brother-in-law and Howie. Talk turned to politics – Hillary, Obama, Rudy – and what about Gore? That got us to Gore 2000 and the electoral college, then to Kerry and the Ohio vote in 2004. Were the elections stolen?

It became clear that Howie knew a lot about voting and irregularities and how you might audit results to detect vote-count tampering. He knew about sample sizes and statistical errors. He knew that no single sample size or percentage was perfect and that you optimize sample size by taking account of of electoral shifts and winning margins. He knew all the ways that a House bill on election audits was flawed. He also knew about hacking electronic voting machines, but he thought the computer scientists were focused on the wrong part of the problem. If you wanted to ensure voting integrity, you had to go for statistical audits. (“The computer science guys, they’re not interested in this stuff.”)

But as far as I knew, this was purely a hobby for him. It certainly wasn’t his job. (The last job he had was for an airline.) He had learned the statistics on his own – books, the Internet – after he’d gotten interested in the problem of election integrity. Now he’s publishing papers with academic co-authors and offering expert testimony on proposed federal legislation.

Moral Wars

October 6, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

The mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, came out against the War on Drugs.

“You want to get serious? Reduce crime in this country by 70-percent overnight? End this war on drugs.”

The mayor calls the national drug policy an abject failure, especially crack cocaine sentencing.

The mayor’s comment was all the more surprising for coming in response to news that San Francisco’s murder rate is up sharply this year. Instead of saying the war on drugs is a failure, an American leader should be calling for a surge. At least that’s what we would expect.

Why do we find war such an attractive idea? The appeal of war and its metaphors seems to clash with the American pragmatism. We supposedly prefer looking for practical solutions to problems. Yet we also seem to gravitate naturally towards moralistic views of the world. If there’s something we don’t like, we prefer to think of it as an evil. The next logical step is to ban it and then to declare war on it. Prohibition wasn’t the first such effort, and it wasn’t the last. It’s just the only one that’s written into the Constitution. Later wars, on terror or on drugs, are written in legislation and in judicial decisions. And in our consciousness.

We are, of course, a peaceful nation; we never start a fight. We’re Gary Cooper in High Noon. We react to a threat from the bad guys. When that threat is so evil as to require a war, the obvious corollary is that if we don’t fight this war and achieve victory, our very existence will be undermined. That’s the logic behind the idea that if we don’t fight them over there, we’ll have to fight them here. It’s the logic of moral absolutes rather than the logic of geography, politics, and strategy.

Framing something as war has some important consequences. First, even to question the usefulness or effectiveness of the war becomes tantamount to treason. There’s a war on drugs, and Mayor Newsom wasn’t supporting the troops. He was practically on the side of the enemy.

Second, since the enemy is evil incarnate and threatens our existence, and since we must defend ourselves against this aggression, anything we do is justified. If we’re fighting for our life, anything goes. The war on terror has given us a running tab of $10 billion a month, Abu Ghraib, Guantànamo, torture, and the Patriot Act. The war on drugs has had similar consequences (see “This is Your Bill of Rights on Drugs”). It has cost an enormous amount of money, giving rise to the incarceration-industrial complex, and it has needlessly and wastefully locked up tens of thousands of people. All with meager results.

It turns out there has been some progress in the war on drugs. In the past few months, cocaine prices are up and purity is down. The cause, however, is all on the supply side of the equation and the Mexican side of the border. The Mexican government is cracking down on the cartels, trying to win back cities controlled by the them. Perhaps more important, the cartels are in the midst of a serious war with one another for control of border crossings. Neither of those factors has anything to do with the long sentences we are still handing out to US buyers and sellers.

Other countries, at least their governments, prefer to approach drugs and terror as problems to be mitigated or even solved. Last month, in a lighter post on men’s room carelessness, I contrasted the Dutch solution (a trompe l’oeil fly in the urinal for guys to shoot at) with an imagined American approach – a War on Splashing with severe penalties for bad aim.

Punitive solutions are morally satisfying – I’d really like to stick it corporate polluters rather than let them trade emissions allowances; it’s just that non-moralistic approaches often work better and at less cost to our finances and our freedoms.

Survey This

October 4, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Often in class when I ask students how they might find out about some variable, their response is, “Do a survey.” It’s almost as though a survey were a magical rite with mystical powers able to reveal the unknowable. Maybe some of them are, but the reality – the way many surveys are actually done – has made me a bit skeptical.

I was polled twice yesterday. My phone number must be on a “do-call” list for pollsters. I don’t mind. In fact, I find it interesting to be on the other side of the questionnaire. When the interviewer asks if I’d be willing to participate, I say, “Yes, if you’d be willing to answer some of my questions when we’re done.”

I usually ask the same questions. Last night for example, I discovered that my interviewer was in New Mexico, though he was asking me about a court case – a complicated civil suit – in New York. He was getting $6 an hour, which is maybe why the polling company hires people in Las Cruces rather than in Las Bronx. In three nights of calling, he’d completed five interviews and had a lot of refusals. So we respondents were not exactly a random sample. He didn’t know whether it was the defendant or one of the plaintiffs who was footing the bill for this research, which we agreed was probably good methodology.

The case was complex – it involved at least four “parties,” verbal agreements vs. written ones, and multiple deals that were contingent on other deals. I’d tell you more but I promised I’d keep mum till after the trial. Besides, I’m still not sure I understand it. The questions setting up the case were long and involved, and my interviewer (a college kid studying athletic management) read through them at verbal warp speed. I was surprised that anyone would respond. Or if they did respond, whether they knew what they were responding to. It wasn’t until he’d gone through three or four questions that I was able to form even a murky picture of the case. I'm still not sure I have the names straight.

On the basis of this, I thought, they’re going to decide who to select for the jury and how to present the case. And then I wondered: if they lose, are they going to sue the company that sold them on this survey?

Steeler Nation

September 30, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

It’s nice to have your ideas confirmed in the newspaper of record.

Last November, after the Democratic win in the election, I blogged to the effect that the Steelers had replaced the Cowboys as America’s team. I had thought of doing a follow-up post on the same topic, but I’ve been scooped. On Saturday, the central piece on the New York Times op-ed page was an essay about Steeler Nation.

The author, fashion writer Holly Brubach, writes about finding Steeler fans at bars in Rochester, MN, San Francisco, Toronto, and other cities. “Steeler nation seems to outnumber the fans of every other franchise.”

“Seems.” As a social scientist, I know not “seems,” lady. I was waiting till I found some data. And when I do, I’ll blog the Steelers again.

But I admit what inspired me was something like Brubach’s personal experience. A couple of weeks ago, my son, who has become something of a Steelers fan, was prodding me to find a sports bar where we might watch the game. I Googled local sports bars and called the closest one.

Yes, said the woman who answered the phone, they have football games that the regular channels don’t.

“Will you have the Steelers game?” I asked.

“This is a Steeler bar,” she said, surprised, almost offended, as though I’d asked whether they served beer. She added, however, that all the tables had been reserved long ago, though if I showed up early enough, I might be able to squeeze in at the bar.

On Sunday, we walked past that bar. It was about 15 minutes till gametime, and outside on the sidewalk, where smokers are now exiled in New York City, a woman in a Jerome Bettis jersey was talking with a Mean Joe Greene. Through the large front window I could see that the bar area was packed with people in Steeler regalia.

(On days when the Steelers play the 4:15 game, Steeler Nation waits on the sidewalk for the one-o’clock game fans to clear out of the bar, as in these pictures.)

We went to a less crowded bar three blocks further on. Only two people were in black-and-gold jerseys. But even there, pride of place (i.e., the large projection screen and the audio) was given to the Steelers. They crushed the Bills, 26-3.

The Institutionalization of Hysteria

September 28, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

At the Republican debate Thursday Ron Paul called for an end to the war on drugs. OK, Ron Paul isn’t a very prominent candidate. The leading Republican candidates didn’t show up – after all, the debate was to focus on racial issues, and the audience was predominantly black. Still, Paul’s statement is noteworthy.

Back in the late 1980s I was visiting in Washington, DC. I don’t remember the circumstances, but some people I didn’t know were giving me a ride, and somehow the topic of drugs came up. These people, husband and wife, were lawyers – maybe they worked for the government – and one of them started to say something about the current atmosphere surrounding the topic. He stopped in mid-sentence, searching for the right word, as though a misstatement might be very costly.

“Hysteria?” I offered.

Well, they wouldn’t put it quite like that, they said. But two things were clear to me. One, they agreed that policy and public opinion on drugs had gone way past being rational. And two, they were afraid to let others know their views. It would have been like someone in Salem in 1692 saying that maybe we’ve gone a little overboard on this witch thing.

Here we are two decades later, and at least in the public mind, drugs have been replaced by other fears, notably terrorism. It’s hard to keep two moral panics going simultaneously. (See last December’s entry “The War on Drugs.” )

But we are still living with the consequences of that hysteria. Emotions come and go. Institutions and laws are much more durable. And the fears and moral panic of decades past has become institutionalized. The sentences written into law are the most egregious consequence. Judicial precedents and rulings are usually less glaring, but they are part of the same process.

A couple of days before Ron Paul made that statement, an appeals court upheld the strip search of a 13-year-old Arizona schoolgirl. School authorities suspected her of carrying drugs – prescription-strength ibuprofen. Basically, a double dose of Advil. The strip search was perfectly legal, said two of three judges interpreting the law.

Once the hysteria gets written into law, the original emotion becomes irrelevant. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is about the least emotional person you could imagine. Yet when he was an appeals court judge, he wrote a strictly legal and technical opinion that would have allowed the strip search of a 10-year-old girl.

For what it’s worth, in neither strip search did the authorities find drugs.

The Greatest Drummer in the World

September 26, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Students are so young now. I remember when they were only a few years younger than I was, and we knew the same movies and music. We could talk.

That was then.

Now on the first day of class, I pass out index cards for students to put their vital information – names, e-mail, phone numbers. I ask them to put down the name of their favorite movie, book, and album.

I’m hoping that knowing a bit about such preferences might help me learn their names more quickly. But it’s also my desperate attempt to keep up in some small way with pop culture, which slips further and further away from me each year. Especially music. It’s not just that I don’t know the songs or what these singers sound like; I often don’t even recognize the names of the performers. I’ve made my peace with it; I’m resigned to the fate of never again being cool.

But this semester provided an opening I couldn’t resist. As I went through the cards calling names, talking briefly with each student, I came upon one that listed “Journey.”

“The group?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, “anything by them.”

Now in one of those strange accidents of proximity that can happen when you live in New York, I recently got to know the guy who played drums with Journey back in the day. So I asked, “Do you happen to know who the drummer with Journey was?”

No, she said, she just liked their music.

I was standing there debating whether to play my trump card right then – maybe it would appear too desperate – when another student called out, “It’s Steve Smith.” Then he added definitively, “the greatest drummer in the world.” After a pause he elaborated further, “Not so much his rock drumming, but the later stuff.”

“You mean the jazz fusion stuff with Vital Information?” I asked, not so much looking for agreement as just displaying this one slender wisp of cool.

By the Numbers

September 23, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Does Montclair Socioblog have a reader at CBS TV?

Two weeks ago, I blogged about all those numbers on the covers of women’s magazines.
Today, CBS Sunday Morning led off with a piece about the same thing.

It turns out I wasn’t quite right. The numbers are everywhere, not just on women’s magazines. Twelve steps, seven habits, a thousand places to see before you die. And that’s not counting all those ten-best list. Men’s magazines too find numbers irresistible. The CBS piece showed the guys at Men’s Health kicking around ideas. “'Ten or 15 signs she's cheating' is always a great one.” And the editor tells CBS, “When we put lists or numbers on the cover, our newsstand sales go up.”

Sure enough, at the Men’s Health website today you can find

• 5 ways to get her into your bed
• 10 foods you should eat every day
• 10 muscles she wants to see

The lists and numbers appeal to two strong themes in American culture: self-improvement and rationalization. Self-improvement is a theme in American magazines date back at least to the late nineteenth century. It’s an idea that expands rapidly in a culture of optimism and an ideology of individualism and social mobility.

As for rationalization, it seems there is nothing so personal and ineffable that we can’t try to reduce it to a prescribed number of steps, Power Point list of bullet points. Like workers on a Taylorized assembly line, we can all follow the same routinized procedure to find success, raise happy children, be physically fit, have mindblowing orgasms, overcome our fears, or find the perfect hair style for this fall.

Kids and Danger - II

September 19, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Matilda’s mother apologizes for calling so late, but she wonders whether Caroline might be free for a playdate? Like, tomorrow? “Matilda’s had a cancellation,” she says. Liz searches the kitchen drawer for Caroline’s Week-at-a-Glance. It’s ten already and she’s had her wine; down the hall the baby nurse, Lorna, is asleep with the twins and Caroline; Ted’s out of town. What the hell is Matilda’s mother’s name, anyway? Faith, Frankie, Fern— “We could do an hour,” Liz says. “We have piano at four-thirty.”

That’s the opening of “Playdate,” a story by Kate Walbert published in The New Yorker several months ago. It fits with my previous post about parents and children, control and protection.

Is this the way we live now, I wondered as I read these paragraphs – six-year-olds with planner appointment books, mothers scheduling playdates because a child had “a cancellation”? A nurse for the kids even when mom is at home? (The twins, we learn later in the story, were conceived in vitro with another woman’s eggs.)

Sometimes fiction captures the culture and social structure well before the sociologists move in. For freshman English long ago, I had to read J.D. Salinger’s much anthologized story, “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut.” At the time, I didn’t appreciate its sociological imagination, its showing the connections between private troubles and social structures. Nor did I appreciate how ahead of its time it was in applying this sociological imagination to women. (If you have a copy of the story, take it off the shelf and read it now. It won’t take long.)

The postwar years in the US seemed prosperous and problem-free. The principle criticism of the period at the time was that it was dull, dominated by conformity. But Salinger’s story gave us the underside of middle-class prosperity – the frustrations of the bright, educated woman trapped as a housewife in suburbia. That suburban context makes us understand and sympathize with her cynicism, her drinking, her anger at her husband, and even her anger at her child.

Salinger’s story was published in 1948. Sociologists and psychologists began exploring this territory in the fifties and didn’t begin thinking seriously about women until at least a decade later.

“Playdate” is obviously based on “Uncle Wiggly.” (I suppose there are fine lines between being inspired by, writing in homage to, and just plain ripping off another author.) The New Yorker blurb puts it this way: “Short story about two Manhattan mothers getting drunk and confiding in each other while their daughters are on a playdate.” Which would work for “Uncle Wiggly,” except that there’s only one daughter, and the setting is a Connecticut suburb rather than Manhattan. The rhythm of the events in the stories is the same, some of the images are identical (a woman lying on the floor balancing her drink on her chest), even the flow of the final sentence.

In both stories, the women sense that something is missing from their lives, something they can’t quite identify. In the 2007 story, that sense is symbolized in the pet cat’s “hot spot”: “Their cat . . . recently contracted a hot spot. A hot spot, she tells Liz, is an itch that can’t be scratched.” A problem you literally cannot put your finger on.

But while the mood of Salinger’s postwar story is isolation and anger, the tone of “Playdate” is not as bleak, and its central feelings are anxiety and uncertainty. The mothers have attended a talk at school: “Raising a Calm Child in the Age of Anxiety; or, How to Let Go and Lighten Up!” Walbert is spoofing pop psych here, but the “anxiety journal” the professor tells the parents to keep becomes a significant item in the story.

“We are living in the Age of Anxiety,”says the professor. But several eras in the last century have been the age of anxiety – the phrase itself originates (I think) in a 1948 poem by Auden, and an Internet history guide applies the phrase to the 1920s. What’s different from one era to another are the causes of the anxiety. This is the post-9/11 era. “Helicopters,” the mother lists in her anxiety journal along with Thieves, Crowds, and Playdates. Twice in the story we hear the subway warning announcement: “Protect yourself. If you see a suspicious package or activity . . . .”

There may also be differences in how we react. Salinger’s suburban postwar mother chose sarcasm and alcohol. The Manhattan mothers in 2007 deal with anxiety by trying to schedule uncertainty out of their children’s lives. They hover like helicopters.

Too Safe for Children?

September 16, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

“The city went about its business, and in many ways the place was heady and wide open in ways that just aren’t possible now.”

The New York Times devotes its entire City section to the idea of being seventeen in the city. This sentence is from a nostaligic piece on being seventeen in 1980. The author, Christopher Sorrentino, has the uneasy sense that kids today are more sheltered. “Apron strings were untied a lot younger then,” he says. “Parents didn’t hover so much,” says the Times blurb.

Sorrentino adds, “I should confess that I can’t imagine making a similar arrangement with my own kids . . . Are you kidding? The kid’s going to be 12, and my heart’s in my mouth if I send her out for a quart of milk.”

This dilemma isn’t confined to New York, this nagging thought that in giving kids more safety we've also deprived them of something important. Alongside all the news stories about the dangers of toys and priests and candy and everything else, there has been a small but noticeable backlash. Sorrentino’s article is part of this ambivalence – the sense that protection is becoming overprotection. The Dangerous Book for Boys has been a best seller, largely because its title and publicity promise a more rugged, less cautious ideal of childhood. Elsewhere, Jeff Zaslow in a Wall Street Journal article – linked to by a couple of sociology bloggers (Ezster, Anomie) – complains that the concern about child sexual abuse has poisoned the atmosphere. Children are taught to fear men, and men are afraid to go near children other than their own. Last Halloween, I contrasted today’s trick-or-treating with that of my youth, when kids would range far from home unaccompanied by parents.

Apparently, it’s not just in the US that childhood has become more circumscribed.. The London Daily Mail posted a map showing the roaming area of children over four generations in the same family in roughly the same part of Sheffield. Back in 1919, Great-grandfather at age eight had a range of six miles. Today, the eight-year-old in the family is allowed to walk 1/6 mile – to the end of the street.

Ready, Aim . . .

September 13, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

I should really have passed this one off to Dan Myers, who is developing urinal blogging into something of an art form or at least he was until he ascended into the lofty area of peace studies. Or maybe I should have passed it to Chris Uggen, who has blogged about the American tendency to deal with problems by criminalizing them. But I’ll do the reporting myself, even though the story is old news. I discovered it only recently on, of all places, a food blog.

Ten years ago, the powers that be at JFK airport signed a Dutch company, Schiphol, to run the International Arrivals Building, probably because the Amsterdam airport, run by Schiphol, is one of the world’s finest. JFK was one of the worst.

In Amsterdam, they had a clever solution to a men’s room problem. No, not the Larry Craig kind of problem; the Dutch are very open-minded about sex. The Dutch are also very clean. And the problem was that jet lagged travelers, men at least, tended to be, how shall we put it, careless? aimless?

I imagined what the American solution might be. Signs posted on the walls: “No Spillage or Spraying. Penalty $500 fine.” But where Americans tend to frame problems in moral terms, the Dutch have a more practical approach, focused on solving a problem rather than on punishing evil. At the Amsterdam airport that meant improving aim by providing a target.

If you go to the men’s room in the Amsterdam airport, you’ll see a fly in the urinal.


If you’d look closely, which you probably wouldn’t, you’d see that it wasn’t a real fly but a trompe l’oeil black outline. The idea was that men would aim for the fly - the stream would go from one fly to another (I’m sure this pun doesn’t work in Dutch) – and the men’s room would stay cleaner.

It worked. A study by Schilpol’s social science team found that fly urinals had an 80% reduction in spillage.

Road Rage

September 11, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Over at Blue Monster, Dan Myers is trying to rein in his road rage. Now that he’s doing a course in peace*, he’s trying to practice what he teaches. Dan, if we believe his self-report, is apparently the kind of driver who not only drives fast but curses out the other drivers on the road whose driving isn’t up to his standards.

He’s not the only one. I’ve ridden with people who on foot were eminently reasonable and polite but on the road became ogres. What is it about driving that makes us forget ourselves? My friend Gail, for example, forgot she had her young nieces in the car with her and slipped into her usual driver monologue, a running dramatic commentary on the inadequacies of other drivers. “Oh Auntie, you said the A-word,” came the voice from the back seat. The A-word and probably worse. But why?

Goffman has the answer. Because we’re locked in our steel-and-glass isolation tanks, we can’t engage in the little interaction rituals that validate and uphold the self of each person in the situation. When we can’t perform those rituals of repair, things can spiral further towards anger. Neither driver can hear the other, so we think we’re invulnerable to any reaction from the other guy. That may account for this anecdote told me by a state trooper (also an adjunct professor in sociology at the time): In one of these highway ego-contests – dangerous enough when you’re going 70 mph – one of the disputants pulled alongside the other and brandished a pistol. In his anger and isolation, he’d forgotten that the other driver might have a cell phone and that he might use it to call the troopers.

My son has the solution. The next generation of cars should come equipped with a menu of messages that you can flash on your rear window. With the touch of a button, you can say, “Sorry for cutting you off there. Won’t happen again.” Or “My mistake, I should have signaled earlier.” And so on.
-------------------------

* I highly recommend the student entries in the Peace Blog for the course.

Hey, Larry Summers - Read These

September 7, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Why do men’s shirts have the buttons on the left side, but women’s blouses have the buttons the right? Someone posted this question at the Teaching Sociology listserv/GoogleGroup. Robert H. Frank’s poses this same question in his book The Economic Naturalist, and I blogged about it not long ago. I thought again of converting Frank’s economics assignment into a sociological one: find something curious or paradoxical in everyday life, something you’ve seen with your own eyes. Todd Bern at Broward Community College calls this assignment “The Inner Sociologist,” and requires students to peg their questions to the topics in the readings for the current segment of the course.

I haven’t assigned this yet. But in keeping with my principle of not asking students to do something I hadn’t done first, I tried coming up with some questions. Turns out, it’s not all that easy. But here are a few.

Why do college/university courses meet two or only one time a week but high school courses meet five days a week?

Why do baseball players throw the ball around the infield after they make an out?

Then I went to the newsstand this morning, and this is what I saw.


Men’s magazine covers have pictures of attractive women, but women’s magazine covers have pictures of . . . attractive women. Why not attractive men?

And what’s with the numbers? (Larry Summers, BTW, is the former president of Harvard. He was forced out for several reasons, but one of those was a talk he gave suggesting that compared with men, women were by nature less inclined towards math.)


Cosmo is the piker here with only 4 and 5. Glamour raises with 12, 39, and 101. Vogue outbids them with 840, but Lucky comes in with 863 and looks like it’s going to win.


But then Bazaar leaves them all in the dust with a bid of 1,015 New Looks. Beat that.

But why? You don’t see numbers like these on other kinds of magazines.

Good Neighbors

September 4, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Where can we put this terrific little toxic waste dump?

Sunday’s New York Times Magazine had a short article reminding us that poisonous facilities --power plants, waste-transfer stations, truck fleets, refineries – usually get put in poor neighborhoods. Poor people pay the price with their health.

Conservative, individual-based explanations of poverty often blame the poor for their condition. Those people don’t work hard enough, don’t get enough education, aren’t smart enough, spend their money foolishly, have too many kids, don’t stay married, and so on. Some explanations blame the victims for their poor health as well. If only they’d practice good health habits, eat the right foods, etc.

It’s hard to see how conservatives can apply this logic to environmentally caused diseases like lead poisoning. But they try.

“It’s neither possible nor desirable in a free society to have all groups living equally close to everything — be it libraries or landfills,” argues Michael Steinberg, a Washington lawyer with clients in the chemical industry.” The mere fact of disparate impact, he says, is not evidence of intentional discrimination in the placement of polluting facilities — it’s just economics.

See, it’s economics. Polluters choose the cheapest locations. So if a polluter puts a waste dump next door, don’t blame the polluter; blame yourself for not having the money to move to a better neighborhood.

Social Organization of Newsgathering - Larry Craig Department

September 2, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston


Larry Craig was arrested in June, but the story didn’t hit the news until late August. A US Senator arrested for soliciting homosexual acts in a public restroom – not the sort of thing that would normally go unnoticed.

Mark Kleiman has a link to the Minnesota newspaper that should have caught this one. The Star Tribune ran an article explaining how it missed the arrest. The story, worth reading in its entirety, gives an idea of how crime news is normally reported and why normal procedures didn't work this time. The important factors were:

• the place – the crime desk doesn’t expect much to happen at the airport
• the commonplace – the name Larry Craig is so ordinary that it didn’t ring a bell with the people who monitor the police blotter
• structure of police reports – the arrestee’s occupation doesn’t appear until page 3
• other news – Craig’s guilty plea occurred just after the bridge collapse in Minneapolis, which still commanded most of the media’s attention.

Fashion Police (literally) - A Tale of Two (or more) Cities

August 31, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Speaking of victimless crimes* (as I was in the last post), the New York Times yesterday reported on baggy pants laws that have been passed in some towns. In Mansfield, LA, wear your jeans so low that they expose your boxers, and you can wind up with a $500 fine or even jail time.

Other towns have passed similar laws; state legislatures have come close. The laws are couched as “indecency” laws. But that seems pretty lame since the law is about cloth, not skin. It’s not about showing your butt, it’s about what you use to cover your butt: jeans, good; jeans with boxers, bad. Presumably, if the offender stripped off his jeans entirely and walked around in basketball shorts – maybe even plaid ones – there’d be no problem.

The real issue, as the Times points out, is hip-hop and all its implied attitudes and ideas. (I’m surprised that Rachel hasn’t blogged this one.)

People have often reacted to outward appearance in this way. We all judge others on their appearance, and sometimes the judgments become extreme. Violent fashionistas beat up zoot suiters in the 1940s, longhairs in the 60s and 70s. Institutions, notably schools, are similarly sensitive to seemingly small matters of style. At my school, leaving your shirttail out or turning your collar up in back were punishable offenses. The NBA has regulations limiting the length of basketball shorts. It’s not that the players are showing too much leg but too little.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale and the other end of the Eastern time zone, Brattleboro, VT, has just overturned its ban on public nudity. (Sorry, no pictures, but here’s a link to the story.) If you want to walk around downtown letting it all hang out, Brattleboro’s the place to be, at least for the next few weeks before the weather starts to turn.

(* I realize that we are now supposed to refer to these as “public-order offenses” or “non-predatory crimes,” but I think Schur’s original term, if less strictly accurate, better conveys the moral idea.)

(Hat tip on the Brattleboro story to my friend Alice, whose young grandchildren live there.)

Who's a Criminal?

August 29, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

When I look at the news these days, I sometimes think that labeling theorists have been running the show.

If you’ve taken even one sociology course, you probably know that labeling theory revolutionized the study of deviance starting about fifty years ago by expanding that topic to include social control. Most approaches to deviance and crime start from two basic questions: Why do those weird (or evil) people do those weird (or evil) things? And how can we get them to stop?

Labeling theory, by contrast, focuses less on the rule breakers and more on the people who make and enforce those rules.

So here we have Republican Senator Larry Craig, a family values kind of guy from Idaho, who got busted for soliciting homosexual sex in the men’s room of the Minneapolis airport. Several things are worth noting from the labeling perspective.

1. First, none of the accounts in the media are asking why Craig was doing what he did. Instead, the questions are about the law and its enforcement.

2. The cop who arrested him was sitting on the toilet in a stall for one and only one purpose – to get solicited for sex. It’s not technically entrapment in the legal sense, but clearly rule enforcement had a lot to do with what happened. If the decoy cop hadn't been there, it's quite possible Craig wouldn't have violated the law.

3. Craig tried to use his high status to avoid labeling. The arresting officer reported “Craig handed me a card that identified himself as a United States Senator as he stated 'What do you think about that?'”

4. No sex occurred, only “signals” like foot tapping. So Craig might have beaten the charges had he contested them. Instead he pleaded guilty to a disorderly conduct charge. Now he says he regrets that plea, and he insists that he’s not gay. His major battle is not about what he did and whether it was illegal; it’s about avoiding the label “gay.”

5. Others people are trying very hard to label Craig, whether as gay, hypocrite, criminal, etc. The incident happened in June, but it got press coverage only in the last week or so. Whether something is covered up or disclosed is not automatic. It’s the result of enterprise and work on the part of people with an interest in the outcome.


Meanwhile, the New York Times today reports that police are cracking down on people who sell tickets at the US Tennis Open. Here too, the police take an active role in soliciting the crime, approaching people as they go to the Tennis Center and asking them to sell their extra tickets. It is a crime to sell a ticket, even at less than face value, within 1500 feet of the event. Still, the people busted are outraged, and they deny the label of criminal:

“We weren’t trying to make a profit, but it didn’t matter.”
The Levines were trying to sell the tickets to help friends, two couples who were unable to attend the Open because their homes were damaged by Hurricane Dean. The four tickets cost $55 each.
“I’m in shock,” said Sharon Levine, a 50-year-old lawyer whose eyes were wet with frustration. “We were just trying to help out our friends whose homes were hit by the hurricane. We’re not criminals.”

The Times takes a labeling theory approach. The cops are enforcing the law not against real scalpers but against ordinary citizens. Who, the Times asks, benefits from this moral entrepreneurship? Answer: Ticketmaster.

Of course, the police claim that they are just enforcing the law: “A New York City Police Department official said . . . that the number [of undercover cops] was determined by the department and not influenced by event coordinators or box offices.” Yeah, right.

I’m going to the Open tomorrow. But I’m not selling my extra ticket – at least not without a 1500-foot tape measure. And I’m not tapping my foot in the men’s room either.

Hey Dude, Where's MY Internet Bubble?

August 26, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

One final thought on fortunes and the dot.com bubble – along the lines of “private troubles” and “public issues,” biography and history. In putting together those graphs on income a couple of days ago, I realized something weird: I felt the effects of the Internet boom and bust, felt them deeply – the giddiness of sudden riches, the despair of getting wiped out. But my biographical changes are not in any of those historical graphs.

I made a lot of money in the late 1990s. Oh, not a lot of money by the standards of the people in those graphs. But a lot for me. The value of my stock portfolio nearly doubled. I constantly watched my stocks on Yahoo in those days. It was great fun. One day when I noticed that one of my stocks had just gone up, I started to type an e-mail about it to a friend who also owned it. By the time I finished the message, the stock had jumped another 25%. (By contrast, Dan Myers, in these calmer times, is justifiably impressed that his son’s imaginary portfolio has gone up 3.3% in a week.)

If I’d closed out all my positions at the start of the 2000 baseball season, I’d have fewer financial worries today. It’s called “realizing” a profit – i.e, making it real. But instead, I watched as all those on-paper profits slipped away.

As a result, none of that money shows up in the data. My private troubles and triumphs would have become part of the public-issue statistics on income only if I had cashed in my profits in the 90s and then cashed out my losses in later years. But I didn't, and so I remain the invisible investor.

Income and the Internet Bubble

August 23, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the previous post, I suggested that much of the fluctuation in mean income (but not median income) in this century was accounted for by the changing fortunes of the very rich. Here are some relevant graphs showing the share of income going sectors among the top 10% of families. The first one shows the share of total income going to the all but the top 1% – the 90th to 95th percentiles and the 95th to 99th.

These folks are not poor – the lower group averaged $110,000, the upper group $177,000 – and their incomes have increased faster than those of those below them. That’s why their share of all income increased from about 24% in 1973 to 27% in 2005. But the changes are not dramatic. The difference in the lower group, the 90th to 95th percentiles, is essentially unchanged. The upper group increased its share by a factor of 18%.

Now here is the top 1%, all except the tenth of one percent of the population, the top 145,000 families. Here too, I’ve divided them into two.

The “poorer” half of this 1% (average income $370,000) increased its share from 2.7% to 4%. The share of the upper half (average income $696,000) went from 3.2% to nearly 6%. As in the first graph, the richer half got even richer than did the lower half – an 87% increase compared with a 47% increase.

But what about the truyly rich, he top tenth of 1% of families – with incomes well over $2 million? Their considerable incomes show much larger fluctuations.

The overall trend is a big increase. Their share of total income doubled. It is also in this group that we see the effects of the dot-com boom (1995-2000) and bust (2000-2003). In 2004 and 2005, they seem to have gotten their groove back.

(Note: these graphs are based on data published by Piketty and Saez based on tax returns. The figures for income do not include capital gains. If capital gains were included, the differences between the very rich and the rest would be even larger.)

Here’s one final picture showing that the largest effects of the Internet bubble occurred at the top. It shows the ratio of CEO income (including bonuses and stock options) relative to that of the average worker.

The billowing and bursting of the Internet bubble is obvious. But smoothing out the curve also shows the general trend towards increasing inequality.

Income - Averages vs. Medians

August 21, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

David Cay Johnston reports on taxes and income for the New York Times, and he does a great job. Not too many other publications have reporters on this beat. But why, in today’s article, is he using averages?

While incomes have been on the rise since 2002, the average income in 2005 was $55,238, still nearly 1 percent less than the $55,714 in 2000, after adjusting for inflation, analysis of new tax statistics show[s].

Here’s the graph that accompanies the article.

Much of the fluctuation in income is accounted for by those at the top. When average income rises, it’s probably because those at the top are getting a lot richer. But the decline in the average income in the early years of this decade may have been driven by the bursting of the Internet bubble, a bubble which affected the top 10% or less.

When economists want a single figure that shows income trends, they use not the average but the median. In this case, the news is about the same. Here are some data from the Regional Economic Information System (REIS) of the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis. It uses 3-year averages.

In constant dollars, median income is about $1000 (2%) lower in 2005 than it had been in 2000.

There was one bit of good news in the Times article: “The I.R.S. data showed that the number of Americans making less than $25,000 a year shrank, down by 3.2 million, or 5.5 percent.” Unfortunately, we don't know how may of those 3.2 million people increased their income and how many just dropped out of the labor market entirely

There Will Be More Joy in Heaven . . . (Crime and Punishment - II)

August 19, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Yesterday, I posted an excerpt from an essay by Glenn Loury. Loury is trained as an economist, and when economists explain behavior, they usually focus on individual factors. But Loury was emphasizing the constraining power of social forces. The difference in focus is also the difference between conservative and liberal thinking, especially on matters like crime and deviance. Conservatives ignore social forces, locate all cause in the individual, and see punishment for bad behavior as the only way to deal with crime. Loury’s article is a critique of American punitiveness.

Glenn Loury used to be a conservative. Black conservative intellectuals are something of a rarity. The vast right-wing conspiracy carefully nurtures the few there are, installing them in conservative think tanks and trotting them out as needed. Each published piece seems to be accompanied by a chorus of conservatives, neo and paleo, gloating and nyah-nyahing, as though they’d brought off some game-winning coup in capture-the-flag.

In his days as a conservative, Loury was befriended by neo-con publications, think tanks, and politicians. He was the highest ranking African American in the Reagan Administration (Deputy Secretary of Education).

But he drifted away from conservatism, and this latest article is both a moral critique of

American punitiveness and an indictment of social conditions as causes of crime. Our society—the society we have made—creates criminogenic conditions in our sprawling urban ghettos, and then acts out rituals of punishment against them as some awful form of human sacrifice.

No wonder it has been spread so quickly around the liberal orbits of the Internet.

For those not familiar with the phrase alluded to in the title of this post, here’s the full quote: “There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.” (Luke, 15-21)

Crime and Punishment - I

August 18, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

The first time I was on jury duty, many years ago, I was eager to serve. I wanted to be on a jury and see how the process worked. But I never made it past voir dire. The lawyers would ask some basic questions – age, occupation, neighborhood – maybe something about free-time activities. They’d meet with the judge, sotto voce, and then several jurors would be dismissed. I was always among the rejected.

One afternoon, I happened to bump into the prosecuting attorney whose case I’d been rejected for that morning.
“Why’d you throw me off your jury?” I asked.
“A sociologist?” he said. “You people don’t believe anybody’s responsible for what they do.”
At the time, I didn’t really know how to respond.

I remembered this encounter when I read the following paragraph from an article by economist Glenn Loury, “Why Are So Many Americans in Prison? Race and the transformation of criminal justice.” It was posted on the Internet recently, and several of my friends have sent me the link.

We would, in short, recognize a kind of social responsibility, even for the wrongful acts freely chosen by individual persons. I am not arguing that people commit crimes because they have no choices, and that in this sense the “root causes” of crime are social; individuals always have choices. My point is that responsibility is a matter of ethics, not social science. Society at large is implicated in an individual person’s choices because we have acquiesced in—perhaps actively supported, through our taxes and votes, words and deeds—social arrangements that work to our benefit and his detriment, and which shape his consciousness and sense of identity in such a way that the choices he makes, which we may condemn, are nevertheless compelling to him—an entirely understandable response to circumstance. Closed and bounded social structures—like racially homogeneous urban ghettos—create contexts where “pathological” and “dysfunctional” cultural forms emerge; but these forms are neither intrinsic to the people caught in these structures nor independent of the behavior of people who stand outside them.

What he said.

Doing It In Public (and then doing it again)

August 15, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

“People say they don’t want to read about your cat,” said Jeremy Freese, “but in fact the posts about your cat are the ones that get the most response.” (Or words to that effect.)

Chris Uggen and Jeremy Freese

As Jeremy has pointed out, I got it all wrong. I’m starting over.


At the beginning of the Bloggers session, there was some light banter about blogging trivial, personal subjects – what you had for lunch, your cat, the sort of thing we don’t really want to be thought of as the core of our calling.

The ASA session was Blogs as a Forum for Public Sociology (in “the coveted 8:30 a.m. Tuesday slot” as Kieran Healy put it – or maybe Kieran was quoting someone else).

And that’s the catch: we want our blogs to be public sociology – the sort of thing MainStream Media people turn to when they need a spot analysis of some socially relevant topic. But the audience doesn’t seem to be MSM, at least not right now, and it does seem to have people who want our cat. Or as Jeremy says, “It turns out that, indeed, some people are interested in what you had for lunch, and might even be more interested in that than some serious post you spent a lot of time on.”

Kieran Healy, Eszter Hargittai, Laura Clawson, Kim Scheppele, Chris Uggen

Chris Uggen made a similar point. His own blog is sometimes personal (kids, music, marathons) and sometimes public – accessible reporting and data on prisoners and former prisoners. Excellent stuff. So Chris, along with Michelle Inderbitzin, created a separate blog, Public Criminology, for these more public issues. “And nobody reads it.”

Chris was exaggerating I’m sure. “Nobody” is relative. Relative to Daily Kos (represented on the panel by Laura Clawson), PubCrim’s audience looks like nobody. But that audience may be larger than the readership of, say, this blog. (Yes, reader, you are among a select few – I sometimes think of this website as the unheard tree that falls in the blogosphere – and I wish I could figure out a way to increase that to an audience that is still select, but far more numerous. Unfortunately, I don’t have a cat. I can say, however, that my lunch of Buffalo chicken salad at the Heartland Brewery on 51st St. was truly awful.)

Maybe the best route to a widely heard, public sociology is the collective blog, like Crooked Timber (Eszter and Kieran) or Balkinization, the law blog represented on the panel by Kim Scheppele. That, and a lot of work at linking it to other places so that potential readers might find it.

ASA Bloggers

August 13, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Sociology Bloggers get-together. Considering that it was not listed on the official program, it was well attended and probably one of the most interactive sessions at the ASA meetings as you can see in the photo. (Why is it that Dan Myers gets better photos with his Treo than I get with my Canon Power Shot?) Here’s another with Chris Uggen and Fabio.









I’ll probably learn more at the ASA session on blogging tomorrow, but a quick-and-dirty demographic survey suggests that Northamerican sociology bloggers are predominantly male. (Who are the other women besides Ezster? Should we count Danah Boyd as a sociologist?) Jeremy Freese (who in person doesn’t look a whole lot like that caricature on his blog) tells of trying unsuccessfully to get the chair at Wisconsin to blog. This reluctance is curious, especially considering the sex ratio for Myspace and Facebook, which, according to the Pew research, tilts heavily towards females.

Less curious is the age factor. Blogging, like other Internet participation, is apparently for the young. At the gathering Saturday, the age distribution topped out at 41 (not counting one graying outlier sliding inexorably into geezerdom). Is this just a matter of computer literacy? Yes, the under-forties may see computers as naturally incorporated into the self if not the body, thumbing their Blackberries and cellphones like worry beads. But blogging requires little computer competence. I wonder whether the age difference signals a generational change in notions of private and public even among academics – the kind of change evidenced by the Myspacebook generation.

DEAD TABLOID SIGHTING IN SOCIOLOGY BLOG

August 10, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

PLANE MISSING SINCE 1939 LANDS WITH SKELETON AT THE CONTROLS

The Weekly World News is going under. Not devoured by space aliens or dinosaurs but killed by its parent company because of low circulation (PARENTS KILL; BLAME FAILING PAPER ROUTE!).

Supermarket tabloids nowadays are all celebrity gossip. But back in the day (the day being the 1950s and 60s), that prince of tabloids, the National Enquirer, specialized in stories of the weird, especially blood and gore. I CUT OUT HER HEART AND STOMPED ON IT! is one of its more famous headlines.

In late 1979, the Enquirer’s publisher, Generoso Pope switched it to color. (Legit newspapers didn’t go color until USA Today came along in 1982 and started cutting into tabloid circulation.) With color came the almost exclusive focus on celebrities, diets, and other more timid stories. But Pope apparently had a soft spot in his heart for the old black-and-white presses and the stories of the bizarre, so he created Weekly World News (POPE GIVES BIRTH TO BLACK AND WHITE OFFSPRING – WITHOUT SEX!) to continue the tradition.

In the early days of the Enquirer and even the Weekly World News, the stories had to have at least some basis in reality. Some of them were actually true. Reporters at local newspapers who came upon an incident that was just too gory or gross for their own paper to run would, for a fee, send it on the National Enquirer. Later, the tabloids would require only that someone claimed to have seen or done something. If someone said that he’d seen Elvis in the Dairy Queen or that Bigfoot ran off with his wife, that was good enough. The editor’s motto was “Don't fact-check your way out of a good story.”

Writers embellished stories, adding facts, quotes, and sources, and over time the connection with reality became more and more tenuous and eventually disappeared. Photoshop probably also helped, though faked photographs had long been a staple of the tabloids. By the 1990s, stories were born via parthenogenesis, springing fully-formed directly from the heads of the journalists in the office. As the Washington Post’s obit for Weekly World News, puts it

First, somebody would yell out an idea for a headline, then everybody else would yell out better ideas. The yelling was exceeded only by the laughing. “There were days when I would leave work,” Lind says, “with my stomach and my face hurting from laughing all day at the ideas being kicked around.”

(Lind, by the way, is Bob Lind, for all those of you unfortunate enough to remember his 1966 hit “Elusive Butterfly.”)

SOCIOLOGY LINKED TO WEIRD NEWS!

What does any of this have to do with sociology and thus merit inclusion in a sociology blog? For one thing, we might ask why Weekly World News’s circulation tanked. The Washington Post article blames it on a change in staff. With the news writers acting more like a team of comedy writers, management figured it would do even better by replacing them with real comedy writers. But as one of the ex-writers said, “It’s not just comedy. It’s a different skill set.” (I wonder if he said “skill set” with a straight face.)

On the data analysis front, Weekly World News stories are a data set crying out for content analysis. I recall a contest in New York Magazine long ago (like the Washington Post’s Sunday Style Invitational) that asked for parody tabloid headlines. The winner was BABY BORN WITH WINNING LOTTO TICKET! which gets at two hugely popular themes in tabloid stories – birth anomalies and luck. (HUMAN JELLYFISH BRINGS GOOD FORTUNE AND BIG BUCKS TO OUR READERS: These lucky readers rubbed his belly and won—and so can you!) That’s an actual headline from September 1993. I know because Chip Rowe, among the many funny and inventive things in his career, collected and catalogued a year’s worth of Weekly World News headlines. Space aliens, miracle cures, medical anomalies, marriage, sex, and dieting. A really good story combines at least two of these (GAL WAS SO SHOCKED BY PROPOSAL OF MARRIAGE —HER HAIR FELL OUT!).

We know how these stories got produced. But who was consuming them, and why? What did they get from them? As Kevin Walker, in one sociological article found online put it, “The pleasure from reading any text comes from the interaction of the reader and the text, situated in social and historic context.” Which means that if we are to do this correctly, we have to identify the readers and their social and historical context. Or as the Weekly World News might have put it SOCIOLOGISTS TAKE FUN OUT OF READING TABLOIDS!
(Superfluous note: in this post, italicized sans-serif headlines are my own invention. The others are actual World Weekly News headlines, not that it matters, at least not by tabloid criteria.)

Bourdieu Tube

August 8, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) was certainly one of the biggest names in sociology in the last 25 years. He was even the subject of a documentary film “La Sociologie est un Sport de Combat” that was something of a hit in France.

He was also politically engagé as well as thoughtful. Now Tina Guenther, a sociologist who blogs from Germany (Bamberg, I think) in both English and German, has posted a recently released video of a brief interview with Bourdieu about politics. The interviewer, Gabi Reich, is obviously German; the producer-director is Pierre Carles, who also did the Combat Sport film.

Bourdieu says, among other things that there’s nothing worse than a failed revolution, and points to the return in force of extreme conservatives after the demise of leftist movements at Berkeley and Columbia. (I wasn't there. Is he accurate in this?)

What also struck me is the location of the interview – an ordinary café in Paris. You can hear the clank of plates and glasses, the buzz of motos outside on the street. I can’t help thinking that if this were an American video done by Americans, it would have been set in the professor’s office, and in front of the great man would have been a gleaming wooden desk, not a café table and an empty beer glass, and behind him, the bookshelves full of books of all colors and sizes, not a street scene with buses and pedestrians and a video game store across the street.
Despite Starbucks, we still don’t have the hang of this café thing – the public private space – in the way that Europeans have had for a couple of hundred years.

Durkheim With a Rim Shot

August 7, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

In his comment on yesterday’s blog post here, Jeremy Freese mentioned Robert Frank’s new book Falling Behind and its consideration of the general economic importance of relative deprivation. The Times reviewed that book Sunday along with another book by Frank, The Economic Naturalist.

This second book is the outcome of an assignment Frank gives his students: “pose and answer an interesting question about some pattern of events or behavior that you personally have observed.” The reviewer (Daniel Gross) provides a couple of examples.

Frank’s students, with a writing assist from their professor, explain why a $20,000 car rents for $40 a day but a $500 tuxedo rents for $90 a day. (Among other things, it has to do with the need for tuxedo shops to maintain a large inventory of different sizes.) Or why fast-food restaurants promise a free meal if customers don’t get a receipt. (It’s to deter theft by cashiers.)

The review doesn’t say which classes was Frank using. Was it freshman econ? Or was it the graduate seminar?

But I wonder if something similar might work in sociology. I wouldn’t even require that students provide answers. I just want them to step back and stop taking the world for granted. In fact, it’s always seemed to me that some of the best sociologists are like stand-up comedians – the “observational” comics who point out some not-quite-rational fact that we’ve all seen but haven’t really noticed. “What were they doing with a car on the moon? . . . There is no more male idea in the history of the universe than ‘Why don’t we fly up to the moon and drive around.’” That’s Seinfeld. But there are other examples.

And this thing with the number of suicides staying pretty much the same year in year out, what’s up with that? I mean, it can’t be the same thirty thousand Americans killing themselves each year.

Or did you ever notice that with some of these real tight-ass religious types? They work so damn hard, they gotta wind up making some money, and then they don’t know how to kick back and enjoy it. What’s that all about? You’ve got the money. Spend it. Of course, in Italy it’s just the opposite. You work a little extra there, they make you feel guilty. They’re like, “Uh-oh, here comes the Protestant.”

But seriously folks... The above are macro-level phenomena not so visible in everyday life. I expect that students will choose more micro-level puzzles not based on differences in rates. But what specific questions would we get with this assignment. Only one way to find out.

I guess it’s time to revise the syllabus.

Another $10 Million Nobody

August 6, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston
Gary Kremen is the founder of Match.com. He’s 43 years old and worth about $10 million. If it were you, you might think you’d slack off, take it easy, and enjoy the life your money can buy. But Kremen, according to a story in Sunday’s New York Times, “logs 60- to 80-hour workweeks because, he said, he does not think he has nearly enough money to ease up.” That’s the way it is in Silicon Valley. 

“You’re nobody here at $10 million,” Mr. Kremen said earnestly over a glass of pinot noir at an upscale wine bar here.

Kremen is typical of millionaires in the area and probably elsewhere. They are not the richest of the rich – they are merely “single-digit millionaires” – and they put it long hours in order to get richer. “Working class millionaires,” the Times calls them.
It seems as though no amount is ever enough. The article quotes another 70-hours-a-week millionaire: “Here, the top 1 percent chases the top one-tenth of 1 percent, and the top one-tenth of 1 percent chases the top one-one-hundredth of 1 percent.” It’s “a marathon with no finish line.” But why do they keep running?
Nearly forty years ago, Samuel Stouffer coined the term “relative deprivation” to account for those who objectively had more than most others yet felt dissatisfied. (Stouffer was looking not at income but at promotions in the military, but the same principle was at work.) No matter how much you have, if you compare yourself with others who have more, you’re going to feel deprived. It’s just one more way in which people are not rational about money.
But it’s nothing new, at least not in America. Here’s deTocqueville, writing in 1836:

In America I saw the freest and most enlightened men placed in the happiest circumstances that the world affords, it seemed to me as if a cloud habitually hung upon their brow, and I thought them serious and almost sad, even in their pleasures. . . .there is something surprising in this strange unrest of so many happy men, restless in the midst of abundance.

Who were the 1830s was counterparts of the dot.com millionaire, and what were the counterparts of the expensive cars, houses, planes, etc. they want more of? Whatever they might have been, deTocqueville saw the endless marathon:

Besides the good things that he possesses, he every instant fancies a thousand others that death will prevent him from trying if he does not try them soon. This thought fills him with anxiety, fear, and regret and keeps his mind in ceaseless trepidation, which leads him perpetually to change his plans and his abode.