“Mad Men” – Speaking at the Wrong Time

June 26, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

The “Mad Men” season closer on Sunday night sang reprises of its hit numbers –  liquor, cigarettes, adultery, politics (national and office), and even a bit of advertising.  Those plus that other “Mad Men” staple – language anachronisms.

The show is so careful about authenticity – every hat and hairdo, every dress and lipstick shade, suit and necktie, every piece of furniture (home and office), and of course the assumptions and ideas that were part of the culture of the 1960s.* It seems as though Matt Weiner, the show’s creator, has hired experts to fact check everything we see on the screen.  Why does this pursuit of historical accuracy not extend to language? 

On Sunday, one of the characters says that something “sounds like a plan.”  It may sound like a plan, but it does not at all sound like 1968. That phrase is very recent.  The script might as well have had a character pushing the envelope or throwing someone under the bus. 

Then, Don Draper changes his mind about moving to Los Angeles, after his wife has already arranged to continue her acting career there. Now Don tells her that he’ll stay in New York while she works in Hollywood.  “We’ll be bi-coastal,” he says.

Not in 1968, you won’t.  To check, I ran “bi-coastal” through Lexis-Nexis – all English language publications for the year 1968.

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

Lexis-Nexis doesn’t turn up bi-coastal until more than a decade after Draper uses it, when, in January 1980, the New York Times comments on the “new breed” of transcontinental commuters.  The Washington Post doesn’t have bi-coastal until mid-1982. 

I went to hear Matt Weiner speak two months ago.  In the Q & A, I was going to ask, “Do you deliberately put a couple of linguistic anachronisms in each episode just to drive old guys like me up the wall?”  But I didn’t.  It was right after the episode where Joan has a dinner reservation for Le Cirque six years before it existed, so Weiner already had enough troubles with time travel.  (Or as we say these days, he already “had enough on his plate.”  Funny, but one of the “Mad Men” characters used that same phrase back in the 1960s.**)

It turns out that Weiner does have a staff who check for historical authenticity.  It’s headed by Kathryn Allison Mann.  According to the LA Times,

Mann reviews each and every completed script to ensure that all language is period-appropriate. Any suspect words or phrases are checked against the Oxford English Dictionary, slang reference books and printed material from the era.

I wonder if anyone on Ms. Mann’s staff is old enough to have been an adult in the 1960s. 
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* The characters are, of course, oblivious to the sexism and other attitudes that they take for granted but that practically leap off the screen to 21st century viewers.  See this earlier post.

** My first post about the language of “Mad Men” is here .

Bandleaders

June 24, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross posted at Sociological Images

America is the global leader in broadband, with high speeds and great service. And it’s all because the government restrained “onerous” regulation and let companies like Verizon do what they want and charge what they want.  So says an op-ed in Friday’s Times.

It was written by the CEO of Verizon, Lowell McAdam.

I pay Mr. McAdam’s company about $115 each month for my land line, wi-fi, and cable (all FIOS).  Mr. McAdam compares the US favorably with Europe, “where innovation and investment in advanced networks have stagnated under an onerous regulatory regime.”  I asked a friend who lives in Paris what he pays for his FIOS phone, wi-fi, and cable.  The monthly bill:  39.90€ ($52) or half of what I pay Verizon.  Maybe there’s an upside to stagnant and onerous. 

There’s nothing wrong with getting what you can afford, and it occurred to me that US broadband is the best because we can afford more.  Onerous regulations or no, most other countries are not as rich as the US.  What if you looked at broadband and per capita GDP? 

The OECD did just that with data from June 2012, and here’s what they found.  (Their several spreadsheets on this are here.

(Click on a chart for a larger view.)

As of a year ago, France had greater broadband penetration despite a lower per capita GDP ($35,133 vs. $46,588)  – 25% more broadband on 33% less income, and at half the cost to consumers.  If you re-rank the OECD countries factoring in per capita GDP, the line-up changes.  Wealthy countries – notably the US and Luxembourg, drop well below the OECD average.

Of course, not all broadbands are equally broad.  Verizon sold me on fibre optical with their assurance that it was dazzlingly faster than their DSL that I had been clunking along on.* This graph breaks down broadband into its various incarnations.

The US is slightly above average on all broadband, but when it comes to a high fibre-optical diet (the dark blue part of the bars), we are ahead of several other countries that have greater total penetration.  On the other hand, the Scandinavian countries are ahead of us, as are, impressively, the Asian countries. 

This is not to deny US advances.  TechCrunch summarizes more recent data from Akamai on these changes:  

the U.S. is currently second in the price of broadband for entry-level users. The nation is also third in network-based competition, second in the fiber-optic installation rate, first in the adoption of next-generation LTE, ahead of Europe in broadband adoption, and doing quite well in Internet-based services.   

Still, the US lags behind other, less wealthy countries.  InnovationFiles, using Akamai data for different variables, has a less congratulatory view.

• The U. S. has picked up one place in the “Average Peak Connection Speed” that’s the best measurement of network capacity, rising from 14th to 13th as the measured peak connection speed increased from 29.6 Mbps to 31.5 Mbps.
• In terms of the “Average Connection Speed,” widely cited by analysts who don’t know what it means, the U. S. remains in 8th place world-wide. but we’re no longer tied for it as we were in the previous quarter; Sweden is right behind us on this one.
• In terms of “High Speed Broadband Adoption”, the proportion of IP addresses with an Average Connection Speed greater than 10 Mbps, we remain in 7th place, but now we’re tied with  Sweden.    [emphasis added]

The title of CEO McAdam’s op-ed is “How the US Got Broadband Right.”  Given the content, I  guess “We’re Number 13” wouldn’t have been appropriate.  Even “We’re Number Seven (Tied With Socialist Sweden)” doesn’t quite have that affirmative zing.

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* The most noticeable improvement was that our land line phone.  Previously it had been all but unusable because of static that Verizon could not figure out how to fix. Now it works.  

Pop Goes the Linguist

June 22, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the Pittsburgh of my youth, soft drinks were “pop” or sometimes “soda pop.”  In college, I found myself among New Yorkers, who ordered a “soda” and made fun of the native Bostonians who called it “tonic” (pronounced “tawnic”)

A few weeks ago, this linguistic map* was making the rounds of the Internet.  It confirms my own impression (though it omits the tonic). 

Today I went to the Yankees-Rays** game, where I saw this.

“Pop” in the Bronx?  I am at a loss to even guess how this word choice might have happened. The mad men with the Pepsi account are probably New Yorkers.  The audience, even if this was today’s national TV game, would be heavily from New York and Florida, both in soda territory. Frankly, I'm puzzled.

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* The map is from a set created by Joshua Katz   from survey data gathered Bert Vaux. You can see all 22 maps here.

** The team was originally the Devil Rays.  I can find no confirmation for the idea that the cause of this casting out of devils was pressure from religious conservatives.  The owner, Stuart Sternberg, explained the new name “We are now the ‘Rays’ – a beacon that radiates throughout Tampa Bay and across the entire state of Florida.”  To my own ear, a team of Rays suggests not a beacon but instead a line-up might with stars like Bradbury, Kurzweil, Charles, and others.

Murky Research, Monkey Research

June 19, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

Marc Hauser left his professorship at Harvard after an investigation found that he had committed scientific misconduct. Basically, he made up the data for some of his published articles. 

It wasn’t the irony that got me – Hauser’s research focused on morality.  It was this brief passage in a Nation article* (here) about the scandal:

Marc Hauser has worked at the exciting interface of cognition, evolution and development . . . Hauser has worked primarily with rhesus monkeys,

That took me back to my first disillusioning dip into the murky waters of scientific research, waters I had imagined to be clear and pure.

As a teenager in the early sixties, I worked one summer in a psych lab where the principal investigators were doing experiments on rhesus monkeys. 
                                                                       

“Communication of Affect in ‘Cooperative Conditioning’ of Rhesus Monkeys.”  That was the title of the article that appeared not long after, though it was probably not till years later that I came across it and was appalled.  The abstract begins:

Rhesus monkeys in primate chairs were conditioned to bar press within 6 seconds of presentation of a light in order to avoid electric shock.

First of all, those “primate chairs.”  The chairs were plexiglass contraptions that isolated the monkey’s head from his arms, and his arms from his lower body.  Clearly, the chairs were uncomfortable, to say the least.

For the first stage of the experiment, you put a chaired monkey in front of a TV screen – black and white, maybe 9" diagonal.  His hand can reach a bar. When the green circle comes on the screen, he has six seconds to press the bar or he gets an electric shock. You train two monkeys.  It doesn’t take them too long to learn the drill.

Following acquisition of this avoidance response two animals were placed facing each other and the bar was removed from the chair of one monkey and the stimulus light from the chair of the other. In order for either monkey to avoid shock a communication was necessary since neither animal had access to all elements of the problem.

You put the monkeys in different rooms. One monkey sees the green circle, but he has no bar to press. The other monkey has the bar but his screen no longer shows the circle. Instead, what he can see on the screen is the other monkey.  Monkey #1 has to let Monkey #2 know when the light comes on, and Monkey #2 has to then press the bar. Otherwise they both get zapped. 

The results indicated that through nonverbal communication of affect an efficient mutual avoidance was performed.

As I recall, the article had photos of the monkeys and an analysis of the facial expressions of Monkey #1.  “Nonverbal communication of affect,”  said the journal articles. Bullshit. Or as they say on each episode of (appropriately enough) “Monk,” here’s what happened.

First, you need to know the layout of the lab.  Our domain was the narrow top floors of an otherwise  large building. 

There were a few linoleum floored rooms. One of the two large rooms was for the humans – psychologists and assistants – who hung out, drank coffee, and did the acrostics from a stash of old copies of the Saturday Review.  The other large room housed the monkey cages, about a dozen in all in two tiers – cages too low for the animal to stand up let alone run or swing or do what monkeys do. The other two or three rooms housed the subject monkeys in their primate chairs. It was our own little Gitmo. The age of animal rights lay far in the future.

When it was time to “run” the monkeys, we would check the TV hookup and other equipment, put Monkey #1 in one room, close the door, put Monkey #2 in another room, close the door. Then we humans would go to our room, close the door, and watch the monkeys on our TV monitors. 

When the light came on, Monkey #1, just as it says in the published articles, would change his facial expression. But he would also swing his head violently about. He knew he was about to get zapped with significant amperes. More to the point, he would scream. His shrieks would echo through the hall. We humans could hear him in our room, and no doubt, Monkey #2 could hear him in his room.  Nothing was soundproof. We could even hear the thump thump as Monkey #1 flailed his arms about between the two plexiglass layers of his chair. 

Often, Monkey #2 would press his bar. As the abstract eloquently says “efficient mutual avoidance was performed.” But what was Monkey #2 doing? Was he reading the “nonverbal affect” of facial expressions on a small black-and-white TV monitor and knowingly pressing the bar? Or was he just terrified by the screams, and in his terror flailing his arms about and incidentally hitting the bar? 

I don’t know how many papers the group published.  In any case, it was probably not scientific misconduct. It was not fraud. The authors did not make up the data. They reported the numbers of bar presses and trials, and they showed photographs of the monkey face on the TV monitor. They just didn’t bother to mention the soundtrack.**

One day early in that summer, when I got home, my older brother asked me about the project I was working on.  “Communication in monkeys,” I told him.

“What do they do – say ‘aba dabba dabba?’” 

That may have been closer to the truth than were those articles published in the psychology journals.

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*HT Andrew Gelman, who recently blogged (here) about Chomsky’s defense of Hauser.

** This was not my only disillusioning experience in this lab. See this post from six years ago about my failure with flatworms. But don’t get me wrong – I mean, some of my best friends do psychology experiments on animals.

Useful Habits

June 14, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

Habits of the Heart by Robert Bellah and colleagues, published a quarter-century ago, remains a required reference in courses and discourses about American society and culture. I was reminded of its continuing usefulness today when a WaPo link took me to a review by Chrystia Freeland of The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite by Mark Mizruchi

About halfway through the 2600-word review, she writes:

When America’s postwar corporate elites were sexist, racist company men who prized conformity above originality and were intolerant of outsiders, they were also more willing to sacrifice their immediate gain for the greater good. The postwar America of declining income inequality and a corporate elite that put the community’s interest above its own was also a closed-minded, restrictive world that the left rebelled against—hence, the 1960s. It is unpleasant to consider the possibility that the personal liberation the left fought for also liberated corporate elites to become more selfish, ultimately to the detriment of us all—but that may be part of what happened.           

The authors of Habits outline four “traditions” which still, separately or in combination, provide the ideology for American’s private and public lives.  These traditions are, the authors say, rest on:

• Biblical Religion (mostly Protestant)
• Civic Republicanism
• Expressive Individualism
• Utilitarian Individualism

I don’t know whether Chrystia Freeland has read Habits of the Heart, but in the historical change she outlines in those three sentences fits perfectly into the Bellah model.  Elites once based their actions on Civic Republicanism, but Expressive Individualism lured them into Utilitarian Individualism.

Anecdotal Evidence – One More Time

June 14, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

Anecdotal evidence seems more convincing, I tell my students in Week One, but if you want to find out general truths, you need systematic evidence.  The New York Times today provides my example for next semester.

The Times had run an op-ed  last week about only children. The author, Lauren Sandler, referred to results from “hundreds of studies” showing that only children are generally no different from those with siblings on variables like “leadership, maturity, extroversion, social participation, popularity, generosity, cooperativeness, flexibility, emotional stability, contentment.” Nor were they more self-involved or lonelier.  And they score higher on measures of intelligence and achievement.   

Today, the Times printed a letter challenging these conclusions.  

 Another problem with these studies is that they put families in boxes: the only-child box, the divorced-parent box, the single-mother box — all of which I am in. They oversimplify family situations. I have seen the offspring of single divorced mothers grow up happy and successful, and I have seen children of two-parent families turn out disastrously.

Regarding the precocity of only children, my granddaughter at 2, like Ms. Sandler's daughter, could tell the difference between the crayon colors magenta and pink, and she is not an only child. So much for boxes.

Or as a student will usually ask, “But doesn’t it depend on the individual?”

Yes, I say.  But scientific generalizations do not apply 100% to everyone in that box.  Are men taller than women?  Are smokers less healthy than non-smokers?   Of course. Yes, there’s Maria Sharapova and the WNBA, and there are no doubt thousand of pack-a-day octogenarians.  Does that mean we should throw categories (i.e., boxes)  like Sex and Smoking in the trash?

As the letter writer says, categories simplify. They overlook differences. But categories are inevitable. Pineapple is a category. We know that not all pineapples are alike, and yet we talk about pineapples.  And men.  And smokers. And divorced mothers and only children.

I’m not surprised that my students – 18-year old freshmen or transfers from the community colleges – need this brief reminder. But the New York Times?

In any case, the concern over the problems of only children seems to be fading, though I'm not sure how to interpret that.  The Google n-grams graph of the phrase in books looks like this: 

The first decline in the phrase only children runs parallel to the baby boom (though it starts a few years earlier) and the burgeoning of multi-child families.  But the second decline comes in a period when multi-child families are decreasing.  Perhaps there is less concern because single-child families have become frequent rather than freakish. 

Pittsburgh - My Hometahn

June 10, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston
from Amtrak’s Pennsylvanian eastbound, somewhere near Horseshoe Curve.

The cab driver, a Black man in his forties, had a perfect Pittsburgh accent.  On the short drive from the train station to our hotel near Pitt, he talked about the transformation of the “Sahth Side” – the once industrial area just south of the Monongehela. I cannot describe in writing the other linguistic tipoffs – I’m not a linguist, and even if I were, most readers could not decipher those phonetic cryptograms – but I knew I was home.

The man who hooked up the refrigerator in our room and who was as surprised as I was that we couldn’t get the Penguins game (the TV in the bar downstairs had it) – he too was African American and spoke Pittsburghese. 

I take it as a hopeful sign of more general integration – geographic, social, economic. It bothers me when I hear a stereotypically “Black” accent rather than the regional one, not because I don’t like the sound of it, but because it tells me that even after many generations, kids are still growing up in a segregated world.

I know that a handful of brief conversations, and even the several interracial couples we saw at the arts festival in Point Park (or the interracial couple here in the train’s café car) are hardly conclusive evidence.  Still, I was surprised to find that Pittsburgh is among the twenty most segregated metro areas in the country.  On a black-white “dissimilarity” index, the Pittsburgh area scores 63.6.  (A score above 60 is considered “high.”  Chicago, New York, Newark, Milwaukee, and Detroit all have scores above 75.)

Eric Fisher has mapped the 2010 census data.  Here, for example, is the New York area.  (Red dots are Whites, blue Black, orange Hispanic, green Asian.  Maps of many other cities are on Fisher’s Flikr page.) 

(Click on a map for a larger view.)

The shadings – more dots indicating more people – show density as well.  The white rectangle of Central Park is bordered by the high-density White areas of the Upper East and Upper West Sides and the high-density Black area, Harlem, to the north.

This is what Pittsburgh looks like.  (For those not familiar with the local geography, the lazy-Y shape in white represents the three rivers.)

African Americans are now 8% of the population, largely clustered in two areas.  Some have moved to the towns just to the east, like Monroeville, where the cab driver hails from.  But the suburbs of the South Hills (where I grew up) and North Hills, are still predominantly white.

The overall density is much lower than that of New York. Like many US cities, Pittsburgh was transformed by the suburbanization that began in the 1950s – transformed from a city into a “metro area.” After 6 p.m., downtown (“dahntahn”) is a ghost town. The outward migration began not as  “White flight” – Whites being driven from the city by fear of Blacks – but as a response to the pull of the suburbs, with government programs for housing and highway sweetening the deal.

But for decades, African Americans were excluded from that process.  In the 1950s and 60s, in the suburb where I grew up, there were no known Negroes (it was said that there were a handful of families that were “passing”).  Nobody would sell or rent to Blacks.  Even after the civil rights laws, change was slow.  Stateways can nudge folkways along, but it takes persistent work. 

Graphing Grade Inflation

June 5, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

I have little talent in the visual arts.  But since I started doing this blog, and especially when Sociological Images started using some of my posts, I’ve become more sensitive to graphs. and the visual presentation of quantitative data.  In the old days, when I had trouble deciphering a graph, I blamed my own visual limitations.  Now, I think about how the graph might be improved. 

A couple of days on a campus listserv, someone posted this graph to illustrate grade inflation.

The first comment on this began, “If I understand the chart correctly . . .”  Exactly.  The chart is hard to understand. When you are trying to show changes over time, lines flowing from left to right imply that time sequence, so this graphs makes it seem as though F’s were changing to D’s and then to C’s, and so on.  When I wanted to know how the percentage of B’s had changed over the three time-points, I had to keep looking at the legend to see which color dot represented each year.

Was there a better way to graph the 30 data points?  This is what I came up with.

I thought it was better.  But the first comment on it said, “I like the earlier one and actually find it easier to make comparisons across institutions.” 

Tax Expenditures

June 3, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston
   
We got another reminder last week that despite complaints about federal government programs that give money to the poor, when it comes to taxes, the government is much more generous to the wealthy.

The news came in a report  from the Congressional Budget Office:

The Distribution of Major Tax Expenditures

in the Individual Income Tax System

Tax expenditures are ways that the government uses the tax system to give money to people. Some expenditures are tax credits, which can take the form of cash payments.  Others are tax breaks – giving people a discount on their income tax.  For example, if I am in the 35% tax bracket, but the government charges me only 15% on the $100,000 I made playing the stock market, the government is giving me $20,000 it could otherwise have had me pay in taxes. That’s an expense. The special rate I get on the money I made in the market costs the government $20,000.

This government largesse benefits some people more than others. 

(Click on a chart for a larger view.)

About half of all tax expenditures go to the top quintile.  The bottom 80% of earners divide the other half.  And within that richest quintile, the top 1% receive 15% of all tax expenditures (this distribution of tax breaks roughly parallels the distribution of income). Were you really expecting Sherwood Forest? 

Here is a breakdown of the costs of these different tax expenditures.

The Earned Income Tax Credit, which benefits mostly the poor, costs less than $40B.  The tab for the low tax on investment income (capital gains and dividends) is more than twice that, and nearly all of that goes to the top quintile.  More than two-thirds goes to the richest 1%.

Dylan Matthews at the WaPo WonkBlog (here) regraphed these numbers to show the total amounts overall plus the amounts in each category for each income group.

The justification for these expenditures is that they are a way the government can encourage people to do something that it wants them to do.  With tax breaks, the government is basically paying people by not charging them full tax fare – encouraging them to buy a house or give to charity or  get health insurance at their work.  Similarly with the tax credits that go mostly to the poor. We want people to hold a job and to care for their kids.  The child tax credit gives people more money to care for their children.  The Earned Income Tax Credit pays them for working, even at jobs that pay very little.  By the same logic, the government is paying me to invest my money in companies – or put another way, to play the stock market.  

Mulgrew Miller

May 31, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

Mulgrew Miller died on Wednesday.  He was 57 years old. 

He was a giant among piano players – a large man with large hands (he could comfortably span all the major tenths).  He was solidly in the bebop tradition.  In his twenties he was playing with Art Blakey, and he stayed in that main stream.  He recognized that bebop had become what Jenn Lena calls “a traditionalist genre,” something taught at universities, but he had little respect for avant-garde for its own sake.

A lot of people do what a friend of mine calls ‘interview music.’ You do something that’s obviously different, and you get the interviews and a certain amount of attention. . . . Guys who do what I am doing are viewed as passé.

And now Mulgrew himself has passed.  As I was listening to YouTube clips, I found this interview that contains a now-poignant moment.  Mulgrew relates how vibraphonist Steve Nelson reminds him that our time here is finite.

Hudson on Hudson

May 30, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

Maybe geographical names are like t-shirts.  The farther away the place, the more attractive the shirt.  Local references, not so much.  You don’t see many New Yorkers wearing I ♡NY t-shirts, certainly not here on the banks of the Hudson.

A week ago, I got an e-mail birth announcement from a local West Side politician, Ken Biberaj (politicians have extensive contact lists).  He and his wife (a handsome young couple if ever there was) named their son Hudson.

To my ear,  Hudson doesn’t really fit with their obviously Albanian surname. Maybe the Biberajs were in a New York state of mind. We do have a city and a river by that name.  Oh well, it’s different. Or so I thought.

A few day later, I was at a street fair on upper Broadway, and near a rather desultory clown who was making balloon figures, I heard a man call, “Hudson, don’t go too far away.”  And sure enough, there was a little blond Hudson, three or four years old.  A trend?   

It turns out that we New Yorkers are way behind the Hudson curve.  The name has been on the rise for the last 15 years. 

I just hadn’t noticed because the flood of Hudsons has been taking place far from the waters of the Hudson river.  In New York, New Jersey, and other Northeastern states, Hudson hasn’t yet broken into the top 100.  But in the South, in the Plains states, and the Mountain states, Hudson is doing quite well.  He’s not up there with Ethan, Mason, and Jacob, of course.  But in Utah, for example, Hudson was slightly more popular than Jayden and Lucas.  In Kansas, he placed well ahead of Brayden and Jayden (though not Aiden).  And in most other states, he ranks in the top 100, usually  between 25 and 75.  (The exceptions, besides the Northeast, are large states – California, Illinois, Florida.)

Five years ago, I wrote about the same pattern with Brooklyn (that blog post is here). This name for girls had been on the rise, but mostly in places far from the geographical Brooklyn. That pattern continues.
 

Until 1990, Brooklyn was not in the top 1000.  Since then she has risen dramatically, and is now in the top 30.  But not in New York and New Jersey, where she still can’t break into the top 100.  As I said in that post, if you’re trying to find girls named Brooklyn in Brooklyn, fuhgedaboudit. Go to Utah.  But Hudson may be different.

“Frances Ha” and Those Narcissistic Millennials

May 28, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Frances Ha,” the new movie by Noah Baumbach is basically “Girls” in black and white.  Twenty-seven year olds in Brooklyn. They move from one relationship to the next searching for a good one and never quite finding it.  The same goes for jobs and especially for apartments.* Fluidity rules. For the girls at least, only their friendships have something suggesting permanence, importance, and intensity.

Most of the reviews of the film were favorable, but at the New York Film Critics Circle, Armond White (here) would have none of it.

It offers an obnoxiously self-satisfied portrait of a young white New Yorker–played by Greta Gerwig–running out her parent’s stipend, roommating with other New York hipsters, sometimes skipping the pond to Paris, all the time pursuing her goal to be a professional dancer, even though she demonstrates no aptitude for it.

White tears into Baumbach’s “warped values,” values that White says also permeate Baumbach’s “detestable” movie “The Squid and the Whale.”  What really galls White are the concerns and desires of the characters in the film.

Maybe you have to be a Mumblehattan elite to love this kind of self-love.

I wouldn’t pay such attention to this obscure review except that it embodies a much more widely held view of “millennials” like the characters in this movie. They are narcissistic, they won’t work hard for the things they want but instead feel entitled to them. “They really do seem to want everything, and I can't decide if it’s an inability or an unwillingness to make trade-offs.”  “Their attitude is always ‘What are you going to give me,’” says a manager of human-resource programs.  (These quotations are from a WSJ distillation (here) of The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation Is Shaking Up the Workplace by Ron Alsop.

A Facebook friend of mine says much the same thing

 My work in HR teaches me daily that the younger generations entering the workforce are dripping with this undeserved sense of entitlement (not all, of course).        

A business researcher says,

Nearly 70 percent of survey respondents think Millennnials are lazy and uninterested in their jobs. What’s more, 55 percent of Millennials agree.

This moralistic hand-wringing about the younger generation – even when the hand-wringers are not so old themselves (my FB friend is 33) – reminds me of the song “Kids” from “Bye-bye Birdie,” a musical that opened more than a half-century ago.**

Kids!
I don’t know what’s wrong with these kids today! . . .
Kids!
They are disobedient, disrespectful oafs!
Noisy, crazy, dirty, lazy, loafers!
While we’re on the subject:
Kids!
You can talk and talk till your face is blue!
Kids!
But they still just do what they want to do!

The perception of millennials as “lazy” or “uninterested in their jobs” or doing only the things they want to do may not even be generally true of most of these twenty-somethings.  So the complaint probably tells us more about the complainers than about the objects of their contempt.  The complaint comes down to this: Frances Ha, Hannah Horvath, and their real-life counterparts are willing to forgo financial rewards in order to spend more of their time doing (or at least looking for) something personally meaningful. And for some reason, in the view of theses critics, that’s just wrong.  Those who castigate them seem to be saying, “For years, I spent forty or more hours a week at a job I disliked, making myself miserable so that I could make a lot of money. You should choose to make yourself miserable too.”

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* You could even say that “Girls” and “Frances Ha” are really about the New York rental market.  In a 2007 post, I said that most American films are “about” Success in the same way that British films are “about” The Class System. Even if the characters do not discuss them explicitly, these ideas and structures (Success, Social Class) shape the actions and reactions of the characters in the way that grammar shapes their speech.The same goes for the NYC housing market.

** This post from years ago offers a more complete explanation of the moral nostalgia that this song is satirizing. 

Small-time Gamblers

May 24, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

Someone on the Internet is wrong. I just can’t believe it’s Mark Kleiman. 

I made my usual argument that (in rough numbers) 80% of the users of almost any drug use it moderately, take no harm from it, and do no harm to others, but that the other 20%, who use more than is good for them, account for 80% of the consumption and an even larger fraction of damage to themselves and others. . .  Since the industry that sells the drug (or offers other potentially habit-forming services such as gambling) will always be financially dependent on dependent problem users, while the public interest is in serving the desires of non-dependent non-problem users while minimizing the number of dependent users.

Mark surely knows about drugs and alcohol.  And the distribution of other activities (serious crime, for example) may be even more skewed than 20-80.  But gambling – at least casino gambling, is different. It didn’t use to be, but it is now, and I’m not sure why it changed.

In the old days, casinos too relied on “whales” – the high rollers who gambled large amounts on table games like craps, roulette, and blackjack.  Casinos saw the slot machines as diversions for the whale wives or whoever – small-time customers dropping in their pennies, dimes, and quarters and pulling the handles. 

That was then.  Now, the larger part of casino revenue comes from not from the few but the many – the smaller-time folks playing the slot machines.  The whales still matter.  The average table brings in 15-20 times as much money as each slot machine, even when you factor in the table’s larger capacity.*  (Tables are communal; slots are a solitary vice.)

Perhaps as early as the mid-70s but certainly by the mid-80s, casinos began increasing the number of machines relative to the number of tables.

(The differences in absolute numbers are so great, I used a secondary Y-axis for the tables.  Take note of the axis scales.) 


The ratio of slots to table games increased from about 20:1 to more than 30:1.

Among casual or infrequent gamblers and in newer gambling venues like Pennsylvania, the slots account for an even larger share of the house take.  But even on the Las Vegas strip, the traditional feeding area of the whales, slot machines still account for nearly half (45%) of revenues. 

Why did casinos shift their bets from the few whales at the tables to the myriad krill at the slots?  Slots are not whale-friendly. They don’t handle large and varying bets. But aside from that, they have several advantages for the casinos. Slot machines

• work a 24/7 shift
• can’t cheat the house
• can’t cheat bettors
• don’t call in sick
• don’t have drug and alcohol problems
• don’t join unions
• don’t require health benefits
• don’t get arguments from bettors

The time-line suggests that the shift to machines had something to do with competition from other states. The first non-Nevada casino opened in New Jersey in 1978. Starting around 1990, other states started to get in on the action. Or maybe the success of these other casinos revealed a previously neglected or uncourted population – a population that the casinos could easily accommodate. 

To go back to Mark Kleiman, for whatever reasons, the gambling market does not share the inequalities of drug and alcohol markets, where the heavy users far outweigh the long tail of the distribution.  True, some of those small-time players at the slot machines may be problem users. And many of the high rollers at the tables may be problem free (as Book of Virtues whale William Bennet claims to be. But in the overall distribution of gambling revenues, things are more evenly shared between the whale and the tail.

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* Data on Nevada come from a UNLV site (here)

Dismissing Durkheim . . . and Sociology

May 23, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

There it was again, the rejection of sociological thinking – not because it’s wrong or because it offers no effective policies, but just because it doesn’t make people feel better. 

A Newsweek article on suicide makes the obligatory hand-wave:

Sociologists in general believe that when society robs people of self-control, individual dignity, or a connection to something larger than themselves, suicide rates rise. They are all descendants of Emile Durkheim, who helped found the field in the late-19th century, choosing to study suicide so he could prove that “social facts” explain even this “most personal act.”

That’s 58 words in a 6600-word article, not so much a shout-out as a mumble-out.   I exaggerate.  The article does cite sociologists Julie Phillips and Sherry Turkle, and it tosses around statistics about suicide rates by age, sex, race, and birth cohort.  Still, the paragraph that starts with sociology and Durkheim ends with this curt dismissal of sociology because it cannot play to people’s feelings by predicting individual cases:

But when someone’s son dies by suicide and the family cries out for an answer, “social facts” don’t begin to assuage the pain or solve the mystery. When a government health official considers how he might slow down the suicide problem, “society” is a phantom he can’t fight without another kind of theory entirely.       

That other theory, needless to say, is focused on individuals, and the center of the article is a psychologist, Thomas Joiner, whose first job was to identify– and quarantine! – those who would otherwise kill themselves. 

He got to regularly look suicidal people in the eye, only this time he did so knowingly, as a therapist, and with a decision to make: which of these people were risks to themselves? Under Texas law he was allowed to lock people up if they were.

The article gives no data on whether Joiner was actually able to pick out the truly suicidal.  I would guess that he had a Texas-size false-positive problem. That problem comes with trying to predict and change individual behavior.  It is much more socially beneficial and accurate to think in terms of predicting and changing rates of behavior.

If someone’s son dies in a car crash, it might “assuage the pain or solve the mystery” to find out who was to blame – which driver was drunk or momentarily distracted or whatever.  It’s much less comforting to look at aggregate rates.  But when you do, you just might notice that crashes are frequent on this one stretch of road or that crashes are more likely to be fatal in cars without airbags or seatbelts.  Those “social facts” lead to structural policies that can reduce the overall numbers. 

In fact, the absolute number of highway deaths in the US in 2012, despite a 5% increase over 2011, was  lower than at any time since the early 1950s.  The rate per vehicle-mile has fallen by 80% since the 50s and 60s.  Most of that decrease – tens of thousands of saved lives each year – came not from identifying fatality-prone drivers but from changing the structure of roads and cars.  We don’t know which individual lives were saved.  We just know that there were a lot of them.

Not Your Grandfather’s Anti-Fluoridation Movement

May 22, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Fight Mental Health.”  The gag bumper sticker from decades ago was funny because of the double-take you did to realize what it literally meant. 

Yesterday, the citizens of Portland, Oregon voted No on fluoridation (a news story is here). I had thought that questions about fluoridation had been settled long ago, and that most Americans had made their peace with water that reduced tooth decay.  But the issue never really went away.

The “fight dental health” movement is no joke.  But the constituents and ideology have changed somewhat.  Here’s what it was like back in the day.

In Seattle, Washington, in 1951, for example, the anti-fluoridation committee drew support from Christian Scientists, a few dentists, health food operators, and fervent anti-Communists.*               

Those fervent anti-Communists seemed awfully worried about boundaries – the boundaries of the nation and the boundaries of the body.  McCarthy and his followers seemed less troubled about external threats – the military might of the USSR – than about internal ones.  Actors, directors, writers, schoolteachers and others – Americans all – had to be rooted out lest they insinuate an alien ideology into our unsuspecting brains.  

The anti-Communist imagery reminds me of Animorphs, a series of books once popular among grade-school kids (or at least among the one who lived in my house).  The series premise is that aliens from outer space have come to earth, but only the Animorphs -- our quintet of teenage heroes – knows about them.  The worm-like alien creatures, Yeerks, threaten to take over the country not by force but by stealth – taking over our minds.  A Yeerk slips into the porches of a victims ear, slides inside, and swift as quicksilver wraps itself  around the victim’s brain.  To others, the victim appears unchanged, an ordinary American citizen, but he is now under the control of the evil aliens.

As with Animorphs, so with fervent 1950s anti-Comnunists. Three months ago (here), I quoted Gen. Jack Ripper of “Dr. Strangelove”:

It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hard-core Commie works.

 Gen. Ripper and the Animorphs are fictional.  But they’re not far-fetched.

During the 1950s, Golda Franzen, a San Francisco housewife, became the leading exponent of the idea that fluoridation was a “Red conspiracy.” She predicted that fluoridation would produce “moronic, atheistic slaves” who would end up “praying to the Communists.” Franzen's warnings, echoed by such groups as the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan acquired particular salience during the anti-communist fevers of !he McCarthy era. For his part, C. Leon de Aryan, editor of an antiSemitic publication in San Diego, described the spread of fluoridation as a plot to “weaken the Aryan race” by “paralyzing the functions of the frontal lobes.”

 Maybe the Yeerks too wrapped themselves around the frontal lobes.

The mood of the anti-fluoridation forces today in Portland seems different, at least according to the WSJ account, more lighthearted (they have a film called “An Inconvenient Tooth”) and perhaps more concerned with filtration than with infiltration.  Rock musicians, not usually known for rigid boundary maintenance, participated. Local bands – the Dandy Warhols, the Guantanamo Baywatch – were part of the opposition.  On the other side, the Decemberists, who rock globally, were acting locally in favor of  fluoridation. 

The purity-of-essence argument still has exponents, but they do not look at all like the anti-Communist Jack Rippers of the 1950s.  Their quest is not for freedom from insidious foreign influence but for what is “natural.” (A major organic food vendor was on board.)  I would guess that they prefer acupuncture and herbal remedies and don’t want their children inoculated.  I would also guess that even with Portland’s water still uncontaminated by fluoride, they drink only bottled natural spring water.

But the dominant non-medical theme seems to have been “choice.”  The government should not force you to do things without your consent, even if those things are good for your health.

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* From Donald R. McNeil (1985) “America's Longest War: The Fight over Fluoridation, 1950 —” (full text behind a paywall here.

Abortion and Infanticide

May 17, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross posted at Sociological Images

Does “the abortion culture” cause infanticide?  Does legalizing the aborting of a fetus in the womb create a cultural, moral climate where people feel free to kill newborn babies?

It’s not a new argument.  I recall a Peggy Noonan op-ed in the Times in 1998, “Abortion’s Children,”* arguing that kids who grew up in the abortion culture are “confused and morally dulled.”  Earlier this week, USA Today ran an op-ed by Mark Rienzi repeating this argument in connection with the Gosnell murder conviction. 

Rienzi argues that the problem is not one depraved doctor.  As the subhead says:

The killers are not who you think. They’re moms.

Worse, he warns, infanticide has skyrocketed.

While murder rates for almost every group in society have plummeted in recent decades, there's one group where murder rates have doubled, according to CDC and National Center for Health Statistics data — babies less than a year old.

Really? The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports has a different picture.

Many of these victims were not newborns, and Rienzi is talking about day-of-birth homicides – the type of killing Dr. Gosnell was convicted of – a substitute for abortion.  Most of these, as Rienzi says are committed not by doctors but by mothers.  I make the assumption that the method in most of these cases is smothering.  These smothering deaths show an even steeper decline since 1998.

Where did Rienzi get his data that rates had doubled?  By going back to 1950.

The data on infanticide fit with his idea that legalizing abortion increased rates of infanticide.  The rate rises after Roe v. Wade (1973) and continues upward till 2000.

But that hardly settles the issue. Yes, as Rienzi says, “The law can be a potent moral teacher.”  But many other factors could have been affecting the increase in infanticide, factors much closer to the actual killing of a child by its mother – the mother’s age, education, economic and family circumstances, blood lead levels, etc. 

If Roe changed the culture, then that change should be reflected not just in the very small number of infanticides but in attitudes in the general population. Unfortunately, the GSS did not ask about abortion till 1977, but since that year, attitudes on abortion have changed very little.  Nor does this measure of “abortion culture” have any relation to rates of infanticide.
 

If there is a relation between infanticide and general attitudes about abortion, then we would expect to see higher rates of infanticide in areas where attitudes on abortion are more tolerant. 

The South and Midwest are most strongly anti-abortion, the West Coast and Northeast the most liberal.  Do these cultural difference affect rates of infanticide?

The actual rates of infanticide** are precisely the opposite of what the cultural explanation would predict.  Regions that are more anti-abortion have higher rates of infanticide. Regions that are more accepting of abortion rights have lower rates of infanticide.  The abortion culture does not seem to work the way Rienzi and Noonan claim.

The data instead support a different explanation of infanticide, an explanation that looks at laws and policies and how these shape individual decisions. Some state laws make it harder for a woman to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.  Under those conditions, more women will resort to infanticide.  By contrast, where abortion is safe, legal, and available, women will terminate unwanted pregnancies well before parturition. 

The absolutist pro-lifers will dismiss the data by insisting that there is really no difference between abortion and infanticide and  that infanticide is just a very late-term abortion. As Rienzi puts it,

As a society, we could agree that there really is little difference between killing a being inside and outside the womb.

In fact, very few Americans could agree with this proposition. Instead, they do distinguish between a cluster of a few fertilized cells and a newborn baby. I know of no polls that ask about infanticide, but I would guess that a large majority would say that it is wrong under all circumstances.  But only perhaps 20% of the population thinks that abortion is wrong under all circumstances.

Whether the acceptance of abortion in a society makes people “confused and morally dulled” depends on how you define and measure those concepts.  But the data do strongly suggest that whatever “the abortion culture” might be, it lowers the rate of infanticide rather than increasing it.

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* I had trouble finding Noonan’s op-ed at the Times Website.  Fortunately, then-Rep. Talent (R-MO) entered it into the Congressional Record.

** The data are from the CDC.  In earlier version of this post, I used data based on the CDC’s more inclusive “external causes” codes which include accidents.   

Goffman in the Lunch Room

May 12, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

One of my favorite quotes from Goffman’s Asylums (on my syllabus this semester) appears early on in the section on The Staff World

This contradiction, between what the institution does and what its officials must say it does, forms the basic context of the staff’s daily activity.

The semester is over, but I was reminded of that passage when I read a New York Times online article about school lunches.  An 11-year old kid had surreptitiously taken videos of what was actually served and compared these with the official menus

there is a disconnect between the wholesome meals described on school menus and the soggy, deep-fried nuggets frequently dished up in the lunchrooms.

Apparently, the contradiction Goffman mentions goes all the way down the staff hierarchy, even to the people dishing out school lunches.

On a day advertising “cheesy lasagna rolls with tomato basil sauce, roasted spinach with garlic and herbs,” for instance, Zachary is handed a plastic-wrapped grilled cheese sandwich on an otherwise bare plastic foam tray.

Salads devised by the Food Network chefs Rachael Ray and Ellie Krieger are similarly plagued by missing ingredients. On the day Ms. Ray’s “Yum-O! Marinated Tomato Salad” is listed, Zachary is served a slice of pizza accompanied by a wisp of lettuce.

The filmmaker, Zachary Maxwell (that’s a nom-de-vid) has edited his clips into a 20-minute documentary: “Yuck.”

You can read the Times story and see an excerpt here. 

And the Prize Goes To . . .

May 12, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

When you hustle you keep score real simple. At the end of the game you count up your money. That’s how you find out who’s best. 
        “The Hustler,” screenplay by Sidney Carroll and Robert Rossen

I missed this Freakonomics post by Dave Berri back in February* – the one arguing that the Oscar award for best picture should follow the money.  Why would a presumably intelligent economist make such an argument?  I have a guess. Read on.

According to Berri, box office receipts reveal the opinion of a different but more important set of judges – “people who actually spend money to go to the movies.” 

According to that group, Marvel’s the Avengers was the “best” picture in 2012. With domestic revenues in excess of $600 million, this filmed earned nearly $200 million more than any other picture. And when we look at world-wide revenues, this film brought in more than $1.5 billion.

To rule out The Avengers is an insult to moviegoers around the world

Essentially the Oscars are an industry statement to their customers that says: “We don’t think our customers are smart enough to tell us which of our products are good. So we created a ceremony to correct our customers.”

The only reason the Oscars are of any use at all, says Berri, is that the they get people interested in the nominated films, and this interest “generates value.”  See, it’s still about the money.

OK, it’s a really stupid argument. (Some readers may have thought that Dave Berri was a typo and that the author was Dave Barry.)  The 50+ comments on the post were not kind.  Many of the comments criticised Berri’s economics, noting that many factors besides the quality of the movie can influence gross sales –  advertising budgets, production costs, barriers to entry, etc.

But I think everyone overlooked the real point of the post.  It’s not about movies.  Consider that it was posted on Freakonomics.  Consider also that the Freakomics blog, books, and movie have far more viewers than do most other economic works, even widely used economics textbooks.  The implication couldn’t be clearer: when it comes time to give out the prizes in economics – the Nobel and lesser awards – the judges should factor in book sales, blog hits, movie tickets, and TV appearances.. 

Levitt, Dubner, and contributors like, oh, maybe Dave Berri would be shoo-ins . . . if it weren’t for competitors like Suze Orman and Jim Cramer.  As for Ostrom, Sen, Diamond, Schelling, Kahneman, et al. – nice try you guys, but really?

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*Andrew Gelman dusted it off recently on his blog (here).

Rich and Happy

May 11, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross posted (in edited form) at Sociological Images

In America I saw the freest and most enlightened men placed in the happiest circumstances that the world affords, yet 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.
    DeTocqueville, Democracy In America, Book II, Chapter 13 

Mo money, mo problems  
    Notorious B.I.G.

Forty years ago Richard Easterlin proposed the paradox that people in wealthier countries were no happier than those in less wealthy countries.  Subsequent research on money and happiness brought modifications and variations, notably that within a single country, while for the poor, more money meant fewer problems, for the wealthier people – those with enough or a bit more – enough is enough.  Increasing your income from $100,000 to $200,000 isn’t going to make you happier.  

It was nice to hear researchers singing the same lyrics we’ll soon be hearing in commencement speeches and that you hear in Sunday sermons and pop songs, both the earnest (“The best things in life are free”) or ironic (“Money, it's a gas / Grab that cash with both hands / And make a stash” sounds anything but joyful).  But this moral has a sour-grapes taste; it’s a comforting fable we nonwealthy tell ourselves all the while suspecting that it probably isn’t true.

A recent Brookings paper by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers (here) confirms that suspicion.  Looking at comparisons among countries and within countries, they find that when it comes to happiness, you can never be too rich.

Stevenson and Wolfers also find no “satiation point,” some amount where happiness levels off despite increases in income.  They provide US data from a 2007 Gallup survey.

The data are pretty convincing.  Even as you go from rich to very rich, the proportion of “very satisfied” keeps increasing.* 

Did Biggie and Alexis get it wrong? 

Around the time that the Stevenson-Wolfers study was getting attention in the world beyond Brookings, I was having lunch with a friend who sometimes chats with higher ups at places like hedge funds and Goldman Sachs.  He hears wheeler dealers complaining about their bonuses. “I only got ten bucks.”  Stevenson and Wolfers would predict that this guy’s happiness would be off the charts given the extra $10 million.  But he does not sound like a happy master of the universe.** 

I haven’t read Robert Frank’s Richistan, but the New York Times review had this to say: “If  Richistan is travel journalism, then . . . do we want to go there? Not much. The people sound dreadful and not very happy, to boot.”

I think that the difference is more than just the clash of anecdotal and systematic evidence.  It’s about defining and measuring happiness.  The Stevenson-Wolfers paper uses measures of “life satisfaction.”  Some surveys ask people to place themselves on a ladder according to “how you feel about your life.”  Others ask

All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?

The GSS uses happy instead of satisfied, but the effect is the same.

Taken all together, how would you say things are these days - would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?

When people hear these questions, they may think about their lives in a broader context and compare themselves to a wider segment of humanity.  I imagine that Goldman trader griping about his “ten bucks.”  He was probably thinking of the guy down the hall who got twelve.  But when the survey researcher asks him where he is on that ladder, he may take a more global view and recognize that he has little cause for complaint.  Yet moment to moment during the day, he may look anything but happy.  There’s a difference between “affect” and life satisfaction. 

Measuring affect is much more difficult – one method requires that people log in several times a day to report how they’re feeling at that moment – but the correlation with income is weaker. 

In any case, it’s nice to know that the rich are benefiting from getting richer.  We can stop worrying about their being sad even in their wealthy pleasure and turn our attention elsewhere.  We got 99 problems, but the rich ain’t one.

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* Sample size in the income stratosphere might be a problem.  As the authors footnote, “While 100 percent of those reporting annual incomes over $500,000 are in the top bucket of ‘very happy’, there are only 8 individuals in this category.” I suspect that bucket is a Cupertino and that they intended it to be bracket.  But bucket is a much more colorful metaphor.

** In Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), the yuppie bond traders appropriated the Mattel action figure title to refer to themselves.  And they were not being entirely facetious.  Wolfe does research for his fiction – he was a first a journalist, then a novelist – and I suspect that in this use of MOTU he was reporting, not inventing.