Porn This Way

March 31, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

If you were gay and getting married, would you go out of your way to hire a homophobic photographer or baker? Would you seek out the florist who, as he delivers your flowers, lets you know that God despises you for your sinful and disgusting ways?

Let’s get real. The uproar over the Indiana law is about something other than a relatively small number of gays prevented from boosting the bottom line of bigots. It’s about something more important – not the practical consequences but the symbolism.  What the law symbolizes is the relative status of different groups. It is an attempt to reassure religious Christian Hoosiers that they still hold sway, that Indiana is still their state. The corollary is that in the state’s official view, gays do not have the same moral standing as Christians.

That reduced status of gays can have real consequences. The more that gays sense that others disapprove of their sexuality, and the more they get the message that their sexuality is not legitimate, then the more likely they will be to stay in the closet, generally not a happy place for them or their loved ones.

Although it seems eminently logical and reasonable to me that gays who live in places where homosexuality is not accepted will be less happy, it would be nice to have some data. Unfortunately, getting information on gays – the number in and out of the closet, and their general happiness – is an inexact science, and we have to turn to sources not usually explored in the undergraduate Methods course.

Over at Sociological Images, Lisa Wade recently posted some data from PornHub on the relative frequency of gay porn use in the 50 states – the percent of all PornHub searches that were for gay porn. They compared states with and without marriage equality.

The gay percentage was slightly higher in states where gay marriage was not legal. 

PornHub’s research report has a couple of problems. For one thing, their map is badly out of date. They posted it only a couple of weeks ago, but they used old information. The number of marriage-equality states is not eighteen (including DC), it’s thirty-eight. Those fuchsia circles on the map are my addition – marriage-equality states that PornHub classified incorrectly. 

Another problem is that PornHub did not take into account basic demographic facts about the states – age and marital status, for example – that might influence the numbers of gay and straight porn consumers.

Still, it’s surprising that the demand for gay porn, relative to straight, is as high in the deep South – Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi – as it is in states with well known gay areas.* That similarity is real, not just an artifact of PornHub’s possibly flawed methods. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, writing in the New York Times in December 2013 (here) found similar results using different data – Google searches for terms like “gay porn” and “Rocket Tube.” These searches, like those at Pornhub, constituted about 5% of all porn searches.

Stephens-Davidowitz also found that ratios among the states were similar regardless of general attitudes towards homosexuality.

While tolerant states have a slightly higher percentage of these searches, roughly 5 percent of pornographic searches are looking for depictions of gay men in all states. This again suggests that there are just about as many gay men in less tolerant states as there are anywhere else.

Stephens-Davidowitz’s “tolerance” measure is more sophisticated than PornHub’s simple law/no-law variable (even if they’d gotten it right). It was based on Nate Silver’s estimate of support for gay marriage laws.**

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

In 2012, states in the Northeast scored about 50% higher than did states in the South and Southwest. Yet in the ratio of porn searches specifying gay material, differences were very small. But while the proportion of men who are gay may be about the same in Mississippi and Oklahoma as it is in Massachusetts and California, the lives of those men are very different. Men in less tolerant states were, not surprisingly, more likely to be closeted. In the less tolerant states, fewer men identify themselves as gay in their Facebook profiles. In Mississippi, for example, while porn-search data suggests that 5% of the men are gay, only 1% of Facebook gender preferences are for another man.
Match.com shows similar results.

Of course, it’s possible that gay men in less tolerant states are already matched up with other men and have no need to declare their preferences on Facebook or Match.com. Possible, but unlikely. Instead, these men are seeking others offline. Or they are married – to women, of course – and surreptitiously searching for gay porn on the Internet. If so, they are not doing such a great job of fooling themselves. Or their wives.

If you Google “Is my husband,” Google will complete the phrase according to the frequency of searches. This is what you’ll see.

Women everywhere, apparently, are more likely to ask “Is my husband gay?” than “Is my husband cheating?” But that ratio is higher in less tolerant states.

Searches questioning a husband’s sexuality are far more common in the least tolerant states. The states with the highest percentage of women asking this question are South Carolina and Louisiana. In fact, in 21 of the 25 states where this question is most frequently asked, support for gay marriage is lower than the national average.

Anti-gay sentiment in a state, a sentiment that takes the concrete form of laws, forces gay people into unhappy and unfulfilled life in the closet, including marriages that are unfulfilling for wives as well. Maybe that’s what the supporters of these laws intend. The laws are their response to the feeling that their position of dominance is slipping. That same fear motivates proposals to make English the official language of a state or the country, or to make Christianity the official religion.***

In its symbolic message, Indiana’s “OK to Say Nay to Gays” law makes hetero the official sexuality of Indiana. The law is a reassurance to conservative, anti-gay Christians that Indiana is still their state. And the nationwide reaction against the law is no more about wedding cakes than the sit-ins of the 1960s were about the delicious hamburgers that Woolworths was serving to its White customers. What’s at issue is the moral legitimacy of an entire category of people.

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* In Maira Kalman’s famous December 2011 “New Yorkistan” cover for the New Yorker, Chelsea appears as Gaymenistan.

**You can find more on Silver’s method here.

*** An earlier post on the wish for Christianity as the official religion is here. I have also argued (here) that the reaction against Obamacare is more about status politics than it is about health care.

Clogged Traffic at the Gateway

March 26, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

All politicians lie, said I.F. Stone. But they don’t all lie as blatantly as Chris Christie did yesterday in repeating his vow not to legalize marijuana in New Jersey.

Every bit of objective data we have tells us that it’s a gateway drug to other drugs.

Maybe the governor was trying to show what a good Republican he is when it comes to the findings of science, because that statement simply is not true. The evidence on marijuana as a gateway drug is at best mixed, as the governor or any journalist interested in fact-checking his speech could have discovered by looking up “gateway” on Wikipedia.

If the governor meant that smoking marijuana in and of itself created a craving for stronger drugs, he’s just plain wrong. Mark Kleiman, a policy analyst who knows a lot about drugs, says bluntly (here)

The strong gateway model, which is that somehow marijuana causes fundamental changes in the brain and therefore people inevitably go on from marijuana to cocaine or heroin, is false, as shown by the fact that most people who smoke marijuana don’t. That’s easy. But of course nobody really believes the strong version.

Nobody? Prof. Kleiman, meet Gov. Christie

Or maybe Christie meant a softer version – that the kid who starts smoking weed gets used to doing illegal things, and he makes connections with the kinds of people who use stronger drugs. He gets drawn into their world. It’s not the weed itself that leads to cocaine or heroin, it’s the social world.

That social gateway version, though, offers support for legalization.  Legalization takes weed out of the drug underworld. If you want some weed, you no longer have to consort with criminals and serious druggies.

There are several other reasons to doubt the gateway idea. Much of the evidence comes from studies of individuals. But now, thanks to medical legalization, we also have state-level data, and the results are the same. Legalizing medical marijuana did not lead to an increase in the use of harder drugs, especially among kids. Just the opposite.

 

(The graph is from Vox.)

First, note the small percents. Perhaps 1.6% of adults used cocaine in the pre-medical-pot years. That percent fell slightly post-legalization. Of course, those older people had long since passed through the gateway, so we wouldn’t expect legalization to make much difference for them. But for younger people, cocaine use was cut in half. Instead of an open gateway with traffic flowing rapidly from marijuana through to the world of hard drugs, it was more like, oh, I don’t know, maybe a bridge with several of its lanes closed clogging traffic.

Higher Ed as Cheerios

March 25, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

How embarrassing. The University of North Georgia used this stock photo for the cover of their course catalogue. 

Two White men in suit, white shirt, and tie crossing the finish line triumphantly well ahead of a White woman (dressed more casually). Staggering in last place is a Black man (no suit jacket).

What were they thinking, the people who chose this photo? More accurately, what were they seeing, or still more accurately, what were they not seeing? One of the privileges of being in the dominant group is that you don’t have to worry about how members of your group are portrayed. You don’t even have to notice it. You don’t even have to notice that people like you are in fact dominant. You’re the default setting.

Those in the minority do not have this luxury of cluelessness. When one of “theirs” is portrayed, they notice.

But what strikes me most about the choice of this photo is not that the catalogue-makers did not notice categories of race and gender. It’s the basic assumption about what a university is and what education is. The view of education underlying the clueless cover is much different from that of the people who actually create and teach the courses described inside that catalogue.  Surely you are familiar with these course descriptions, all stamped out from the same template – the questions a course will raise, the ideas and topics it will probe.  For example.

SOCI 3510 - Sociology of Religion This course examines religious theory and comparative religions, investigates contemporary American religions, and explores personal religiosities with sociological insight and imagination. Course readings and fieldwork underscore religion’s role as a pivotal institution that influences and shapes societal discourse

(I have resisted the temptation to use SOCI 2100 Constructions of Difference, (“focusing on race, class, gender and sexuality”), a course the catalogue makers surely had not taken.)

Even the courses in business rest on similar assumptions.

BUSA 2108 - Business Communication A management-oriented course emphasizing theories and channels on communication, semantic problems, and other barriers to effective communication with emphasis on both oral and written communications.

The cover photo promotes a much different perspective on education. The cover reminds me of magazine ads for children’s food. These would typically show an exuberantly cheerful child doing something incredibly active, while off to the side, mom smiled in warm satisfaction, the food she had given her child having endowed him with energy for success. “Go Power,” as Cheerios used to say.

What the University of North Georgia says it is really offering is not learning or ideas. It’s Go Power. Those courses in the catalogue are power-packed Cheerios that will allow you to triumph over other people and to come in first in the corporate Hunger Games.

This utilitarian view of education is so widespread and unquestioned as to go unnoticed, more so than rankings of race and gender. But those of us in the minority – the people who write the course descriptions, the people who in our caps and gowns at the end of the year think about medieval scholars and the students who followed them just to hear what they had to say – we notice.

To Kindle a Fire

March 21, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Ye shall kindle no fire throughout your habitations upon the sabbath day” (Exodus 35:3).  Orthodox Jews extend this prohibition to electricity. No flipping that wall switch or pushing the start button. But Jews have figured out ways of getting around this restriction – keeping to the letter of the law without having to endure the least inconvenience.

Last June, I blogged (here) about the shabbos goy – the gentile you pay to come in and light the oven. (“Hey, God only said that I couldn’t start the oven. He didn’t say anything about hiring someone else to do it.”) This last shabbat, an orthodox woman in Brooklyn had another way to to get around the restriction. She turned her hotplate on before sundown Friday and left it on. That way she could use it all day Saturday. (“See, God didn’t say we couldn’t cook on shabbat. He only said that we couldn’t kindle a fire.”)

The hotplate sparked a fire, and seven children in the house died.

The authorities attributed the fire to an unknown malfunction in the electric hot plate, a device often used by observant Jewish families to keep food warm from sundown on Friday, the start of the Sabbath, until its end on Saturday night.   (NYT)

“Observant.”  But what are they observing? In that earlier post, I said that what bothered me about these legalistic interpretations was the tone that often accompanied the hypocrisy – “at worst a smug satisfaction, more typically an amiable chuckle – as though there were virtue in putting one over on God.”

But it’s worse than that. How clever to seize on the narrowest interpretation of God’s words, “you” and “kindle a fire,” (much like the Republicans currently in King v. Burwell seizing on a single word in the healthcare law as justification for destroying Obamacare). And how utterly stupid to elevate that linguistic technicality above the spirit of the words and above ordinary safety and sense.

We’ve been here before. Some years ago a religious leader pointed out (mostly to Jews) this mistake of keeping the letter of the law while ignoring its spirit. He frequently put it this way: “You have heard that it is written . . . but I say unto you.”  Eventually he developed a fairly large following.

Freedom and Freeloaders

March 11, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston
       
A Wall Street Journal op-ed heralded Wisconsin’s “right to work” (RTW) law that Gov. Walker signed earlier this week. The column carried the byline of  Luke Hilgemann and David Fladeboe of Americans for Prosperity, which gets a ton of money from the Koch brothers, so their support of the anti-union measure is no surprise.

One of their arguments is that RTW states see a greater growth in jobs and income. Or put another way, capital will move to where labor costs are low. If a corporation shifts its work to a low-wage country like Mexico or a low-wage state like Arkansas, Mexico or Arkansas will see a growth in jobs. The wealthier and non-RTW country or state will see a decrease. Mexico or Arkansas will also see an increase in wages since the corporation, to attract good workers, may have to offer higher-than-average wages.

There’s a methodological problem here, for Wisconsin is not Mexico nor is it Arkansas. Because of its history, a history which includes unions, Wisconsin's workers are fairly well paid. Will RTW laws mean greater incomes for Wisconsin workers? Hilgemann and Fladeboe don’t say. They compare states - those with and without RTW laws. They do not compare workers  - those represented by unions and those who are on their own.

Currently, states with RTW laws have lower per capita incomes, not a great prima facie case for busting unions, but Hilgemann and Fladeboe say that taking cost of living into account reduces and reverses this difference. But with or without the cost-of-living adjustment, state per-capita income may not be such a great measure of workers’ wages.*

The better comparison would be between workers’ wages before and after the passage of anti-union laws. Wisconsin’s RTW law is only a few days old, and it will mostly affect workers in the private sector. Public sector employees have already lost their unions. A 2010 law known as Act 10 prohibited public sector unions from collective bargaining for their members. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages , the 2010-2013 increase in the average weekly wages for local government employees (which, I think, includes most of Wisconsin’s teachers) was about 2.6%.  I compared this with the figures for neighboring state Minnesota, whose public employees still had the right to be represented by unions, and with the national average.  Those increases were higher – 3.8% and 4.7% respectively. 

For state employees, US and Wisconsin salaries increased by about 7.2%, Minnesota by 5.4%, though Minnesota salaries started from a higher point, remain higher, and show a larger increase in the most recent year in the BLS database. As the chart shows, the dollar gap between Wisconsin and Minnesota has widened since Wisconsin Republicans disenfranchised public sector unions.  

Hilgemann and Fladeboe find their own evidence on the economic benefits of of RTW laws very convincing. Your mileage may vary. But it’s not really the money that makes RTW laws so glorious, they say. It’s Freedom. “these economic benefits . . .  pale in comparison with the individual freedom that right-to-work laws provide.”
 
Their evidence that workers want to be free of unions comes mostly from Wisconsin

Wisconsin’s government employees similarly left unions when given the opportunity in 2011. Nearly 70% of the state’s 70,000-member state employees union have since chosen to leave. The powerful American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association saw their ranks decline by more than 50% and 30%, respectively.

This is just a tad disingenuous. If the state passes a law that says your union cannot represent you, would you continue to pay dues? That’s what happened in Wisconsin. The decline in membership (and Hilgemann and Fladeboe’s numbers are probably inflated) surely is much less a matter of workers seeking freedom from unions than their sensible decision not to join an organization that by law can bring no benefits. If a law were passed forbidding corporations to pay dividends and forbidding shareholders to sell at a higher price than they bought, many people would exercise their freedom to get out of the stock market.

Union dues are often compared to taxes. Everyone pays dues, everyone gets the benefits. Under RTW laws, you still get the benefits, but you don’t have to pay. Basically, you’re a freeloader. If there’s a union where you work, and you don’t pay dues, not only to you get the wages and other benefits that union members get, but the union is legally obligated to represent you if you have a grievance.  The freedom so beloved of RTW advocates does not include the freedom of the union to represent only its members and to ignore freeloaders.

It’s like making taxes optional.  If that happened, many Americans would no doubt seize the freedom not to pay. Those who continued to pay their taxes would feel like schmucks and would sooner or later (probably sooner) defect, with the result that government would be unable to provide the things that governments in advanced societies provide. No doubt, economic conservatives would herald this change. What is government after all but coerced collectivism? But people who send their kids to public schools, who prefer to drive on roads with few potholes, who enroll in Medicare, who pay lower tuition at state universities rather than private ones, etc., might be less enthusiastic about this increase in their freedom.


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* For their statistics the authors round up numbers from right-wing sources like  ALEC, Arthur Laffer, and Stephen Moore. It’s possible that less partisan sources (e.g., BLS) have other statistics to measure differences between states and between workers.

Homo Promo

March 9, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

Moslem clerics and Christian evangelicals are often united in their opposition to sex ed, as Roger Zimmerman notes in today’s New York Times (here). These religious types are not such strange bedfellows. They share the idea that sex ed will “promote homosexuality,” a phrase which has acquired a certain currency. Google it, and you'll see this.

 

Sex ed, along with media forces like Ellen DeGeneres and “Modern Family,” promotes homosexuality by showing homosexuals as nice, normal, endearing people.

[It] will convince many school children that engaging in homosexual behavior is perfectly normal and thus creating [sic] a self-fulfilling prophecy of developing more homosexuals.(source here)

Powerful stuff that. What’s puzzling is that these jihadis and crusaders attribute to homosexuality such great powers of attraction. Even letting kids know that it exists creates a nearly irresistible temptation.

The obvious Freudian explanation is that the anti-gay extremists are responding to their own repressed homosexual impulses, but I would guess that only a handful of them answer to that description.

The other curious leg of the religionist anti-gay argument is that homosexuality is “unnatural.” If homosexuality is not in our nature, why must we be so careful to make sure that all evidence of it remains out of sight? The argument embraces both the “essentialist” and the “constructionist” take on sexuality. On the one hand, if homosexuality is unnatural, then heterosexuality is ordained by Nature. Nature (or God) created most of us as heterosexuals, and it is not in our nature to be otherwise. But if homosexuality is a constant temptation that must be conquered or kept hidden, then sexuality is infinitely open to construction and reconstruction. Just a few words from schools or celebrities can alter a kid’s sexual path in the same way that nutrition courses and Wheaties endorsements might change his choice of breakfast foods.

“Have you triiiied Wheaties?” asked the old jingle and then added “Won’t you tryyyyy Wheaties?” – an irresistible invitation. I mean, I found it irresistible and wound up eating a lot of Wheaties when I was a kid. But then again, my classmates were not beating me up or otherwise humiliating me on account of my cereal preference.

Private Troubles and Public Op-eds

March 7, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

The previous post was about an op-ed by criminologist James Alan Fox that suffered from lack of data. That’s an occupational hazard for op-ed writers, though social scientists writing op-eds should know better. At least Fox didn’t try to pass his own views off as those of “the country” as some editorialists do. A post I did back in 2010 (here) showed David Brooks projecting his own concerns onto “the public” and “the country.” Brooks is far from alone in that. Many columnists conflate their own views with those of “America.”

When the topic is politics and policy, the lack of data just means that the author might be wrong. But when a writer does the same thing about less political and more personal matters, it can feel downright embarrassing. 

David Brooks opened his Monday column with this: “So much of life is about leave-taking: moving from home to college, from love to love, from city to city and from life stage to life stage.”

The rest of the column was about the leaver and the left behind.  It featured “facts”  without evidence

to be around college students these days is to observe how many parents have failed to successfully start their child’s transition into adulthood

 moral prescriptions

The person being left has to grant the leaver the dignity of her own mind, has to respect her ability to make her own choices about how to live and whom to be close to

and thoughts about how technology has changed break-ups

Communications technology encourages us to express whatever is on our minds in that instant. It makes self-restraint harder. But sometimes healthy relationships require self-restraint and self-quieting, deference and respect.

If you knew nothing about Brooks, you could shrug it off or take it to heart, whatever your personal experiences, opinions, and situation might warrant. But if you knew even a little about Brooks’s personal life, you might have wondered if you really should be reading this.  As cartoonist Tom Tomorrow tweeted:

Tomorrow could have tweeted the same thing in late January when Brooks wrote (here) about the difficulties people who meet online face in their transition to in-person relationships.

I found myself reconsidering a Brooks column from 2009 that I sometimes use for teaching. The class exercise is to turn data-less assertions into testable hypotheses. The Brooks column, about online dating, was good source material. But the content now suggests something in addition, not just theorizing about technology but personal hopes and experiences. Online dating, Brooks says, can impose “structure” and “courtship” on romance – exactly the sort of things an old-fashioned, values-oriented conservative guy might be looking for. The pronoun “I” does not appear even once in that column. But now I wonder whether that column too was autobiographical.

Any good therapist, listening to a client talking in generalities about “people” will hear the unvoiced first-person pronoun. That’s the therapist’s job. But as an op-ed reader, I’d rather have at least a thin layer of actual data between me and the writer’s personal problems.

Is That Evidence in Your Pocket, or Are You Just Writing an Op-Ed?

February 25, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

Nobody looks to USA Today op-eds for methodologically scrupulous research. But even by these standards, James Alan Fox’s opinion piece this morning (here) was a bit clumsy. Fox was arguing against the idea that allowing guns on campus would reduce sexual assaults.

You have to admit, the gunlovers are getting kind of cute with this proposal. They are ostensibly paying attention to a liberal issue – the victimization of women – but their policy proposal is one they know liberals will hate. Next thing you know, the “guns everywhere” folks will be proposing concealed carry as a way to reduce economic inequality. After all, aren’t guns the great equalizer?

What makes the guns-on-campus debate so frustrating is that there’s not much relevant evidence. The trouble with Fox’s op-ed is that he pretends there is.

However compelling the deterrence argument, the evidence suggests otherwise. According to victimization figures routinely collected by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the sexual assault victimization rate for college women is considerably lower (by more than one-third) than that among their non-college counterparts of the same age range. Thus, prohibiting college women from carrying guns on campus does not put them at greater risk.

You can’t legitimately compare college women on college campuses with non-college women in all the variety of non-college settings. There are just too many other relevant variables. The relevant comparison would be between colleges that allow guns and those than don’t, and there are very few of the latter. Yet even if more campuses begin to allow concealed carry, comparisons with gun-free campuses will be plagued by all the methodological problems that leave the “more guns, less crime” studies open to debate.

The rest of Fox’s op-ed about what might happen is speculation, some of it reasonable and some of it not. “Would an aroused and inebriated brute then use his ‘just in case of emergency’ gun to intimidate some non-consenting woman into bed? Submit or you’re dead?” 

But the “pure speculation” label also applies to the arguments that an armed student body will be a polite and non-sexually-assaultive student body.  Well, as long as we’re speculating, here’s my guess, based on what we know from off-campus data: the difference between gun-heavy campuses and unarmed campuses will turn up more in the numbers of accidents and suicides than in the number of sex crimes committed or deterred, and all these numbers will be small.

Predicting the Oscars

February 22, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

Of the films nominated for Best Picture, “American Sniper” is the clear winner at the box office. But will it will win Best Picture? or Director? or Actor?  Nobody thinks so, even its ardent supporters on the political right. How do they know?

It’s not like elections, where a hundred polls blossom to survey voters. Google Consumer Surveys did as the public (though not a random sample), and Sniper easily picked off the competition. David Leonhardt at the New York Times (here) provided this graph:

(Click on a graphic for a larger view.)

But the Oscars are decided not by the public but by the Academy. Nobody is polling them. Their views are not those of the public (or those on both the right and left put it, they are “out of touch”). So we are left with the equivalent of what readers of the racing from know as “past performances” - other races against the same competition. That means the critics’ ratings, the Golden Globes, BAFTA, and SAG. In all these the Sniper crew were pretty much left out in the desert.

We also have the prediction markets, where the price of an investment reflects roughly the collective wisdom of the bettors. Several posts in this blog have contrasted this  “wisdom of crowds” with the views of “the smart money,” a relative handful of professional bettors. By watching the moves of the point spread, you can make a pretty good guess as to which side the crowd is on. If you had bet against their wisdom on NFL games this past season, you’d be well on the plus side.

With the Academy Awards, while the public may have an opinion, they do not place bets, except in office pools. My guess is that the action at the prediction markets comes mostly from a much smaller and better-informed number of participants.  It’s all smart money. And they do not think much of Sniper’s chances.  Predictwise has “Birdman” as having a 67% chance of winning, “American Sniper” only a 0.3% chance. The comparable figures at Betfair are 60% and 1.5% respectively.

The prices at Hollywood Stock Exchange tell a slightly different story.

How do the HSX bettors decide what to bid? I don’t know. I thought that history of the price changes might provide a clue. In some cases, the betting suggests a kind of cascade. People see the price going up and follow what they assume is smart money. The performances of J.K. Simmons, Patricia Arquette, and Julianne Moore were no better – relative to the competition – yesterday than they were a month earlier. But in that month the price of Arquette relative to that of Felicity Jones has gone from about 2.5-1 to 9-1.*

Other changes are more puzzling. Here are the prices for “Birdman” and “American Sniper.”

 

On  Jan. 23, a bet that would pay $25 if  “American Sniper” won cost $8.91, while a similar bet on “Birdman”was only $1.51.  Now a “Birdman” bet costs six times as much as “American Sniper.” What happened on Jan. 23? I don’t know. It wasn’t the announcement of winners at BAFTA, Golden Globes, or SAG.  Maybe some more knowing reader can provide some enlightenment.

UPDATE: Feb. 22, 8:30 p.m. EST.  Since I  grabbed those HSX graphs yesterday, the bettors have been hitting “Birdman”and abandoning “Boyhood.”  As the market moved to the close, “Birdman” would have cost you another $10. “Boyhood” was cheaper by a similar amount. If this were football, I’d be going with “Boyhood.”
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* Simmons, Arquette, and Moore now look like sure things. For my favorite anecdote about Oscar predictions, see this 2007 post  about the time I put a multiple-choice question on the midterm asking what would win Best Picture.

My Sweet Old et al.

February 15, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

Some fashions trickle down through the social class lattice.  It’s as though people look to those just above them to see what they’re wearing or what names they’re giving their kids. I see the same process with some words, though the crucial dimension is not wealth but apparent intelligence or education. You hear someone use the word fortuitous. It sounds so much more sophisticated than fortunate, and it seems to mean the same thing. So you swap out the more pedestrian term, and the next time you catch a lucky break, you say that it was fortuitous.

When something is perfect, why say that it’s merely ideal when you could say that it’s idyllic? It sounds similar, and you hear people use it in a context where ideal would also work, so it probably means the same thing. It just sounds so much more like a word the very well educated would use.  That’s why when I serve the salad, I ask my guests for their choice of dressage, which has the added advantage of sounding French.

And now we have Gwyneth Paltrow trying to jack up the tone of her advice just a notch. Here is a report from The Guardian.

(Click for a slightly larger view.)

It wasn’t the Mugwort the got me. It was the Latin. What happened to etc.?  Et (and) cetera (the rest of these things).  Et al. is for when the too-numerous-to-mention are people rather than things. They are alia – others. In the footnotes, et alia (“and other people”) gets abbreviated to et al. 

Needless to say, et al. is the province of the very educated –  the kind of people who talk about articles that have multiple authors. Etc., by contrast, seems so ordinary. Everyone uses it. So to give your Mugowrt advice a more scholarly aura, use et al.  Like idyllic, it’s gotta mean the same thing as the ordinary version.  Except it doesn’t. Steaming your vagina to “cleanse your uterus, et al.

Oh, who are the people in your neighborhood?

The Very Reasonable Dutch

February 11, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

An early post on this blog (here) compared two ways of framing bad behavior – as an evil to be punished or as a problem to be solved. The behavior was trivial and hardly evil – men peeing carelessly rather than mindfully, with reeking men’s rooms the result. The Amsterdam solution exemplified the Dutch problem-solving approach. Americans, I imagined, would have relied on punishment.

Peter Moskos has taken his Cop in the Hood blog to Amsterdam for a short while, and he reports on a similarly rational approach to a real problem. Amsterdam has long be a Mecca for pharmaco-tourism, and two tourists had died recently from wrongly identified drugs (heroin sold as cocaine).

The city put up signs to warn tourists. It may seem like common sense, but what American city would do this?

See the full post here, complete with pictures of the signs and most impressively, a letter from the mayor – a letter whose reasonable tone is hard to imagine from an American mayor faced with a similar problem.

Making Memories

February 10, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

An article in the Science section of today’s New York Times (here) says pretty much what I said in the previous post about memory and Brian Williams.  The author, Tara Parker-Pope, even uses the same metaphor – that most people think of memory as a video camera.

Here is how Parker-Pope puts it:

But the truth is our memories can deceive us — and they often do. Numerous scientific studies show that memories can fade, shift and distort over time. Not only can our real memories become unwittingly altered and embellished, but entirely new false memories can be incorporated into our memory bank, embedded so deeply that we become convinced they are real and actually happened.

She then quotes  Elizabeth Loftus, the doyenne of eyewitness-testimony research, whose studies are also very relevant to questions about memory.

“You’ve got all these people saying the guy’s a liar and convicting him of deliberate deception without considering an alternative hypothesis — that he developed a false memory. . .  It’s a teaching moment, and a chance to really try to get information out there about the malleable nature of memory.”

Good luck with the teaching and really getting the word out. When Science goes up against ideology and common-sense, don’t bet the ranch on Science.

A more interesting question arises if Williams’s helicopter story is not a one-off but just the latest in a series of anecdotes that exaggerate the dangers he faced.  As with the helicopter story, it doesn’t mean that Williams was deliberately lying.  I would also imagine that all of us, when we unknowingly alter our memories, do what Williams did. We make them consistent with our image of ourselves and the world. 

Still, individuals differ, and while we all edit our memories and mistake the most recent version for the original, some people may revise the past more extensively and frequently.  Maybe Williams is doing what we all do but on a larger scale. As someone said of Warren Beatty in his Hollywood Lothario days, “He puts his pants on one leg at a time like everyone else. He just does it more often.”*

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*Even if more helicopter-like stories turn up, there are other possible explanations:

• Williams’s enhanced memories are no more frequent than yours and mine,, but now since the helicopter imbroglio, his entire folder of stories is getting far more attention than anyone else’s.
• Williams’s faulty memories are no more frequent, but they have much greater exposure.  Williams is called on (and paid well) to speak publicly about his work; he tells the stories audiences want to hear, and these often involve danger, drama, and important events.  My stories don’t have those elements; do yours? So no far fewer people will hear them. And although our stories may suffer from inaccurate memory, the cannot be easily fact checked. Williams’s stories can and are.

Ah Yes, I Remember It Well

February 6, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

I don’t think Brian Williams was lying.  Obviously he wasn’t telling the truth. The helicopter he was in was not hit by an RPG. But a lie is a deliberate falsehood – telling people something that you know to be untrue. Surely Williams is not so stupid as to think that he could get away with such a fabrication. He would have little to gain, and, as we are seeing, much to lose.

Instead, I think it was what Williams says it was – messed-up memory.  At some point in his recalling and recounting of the incident, he swapped in someone else’s experience for his own. After all, he was in the same place, he was in a helicopter, and did talk with the soldiers whose chopper was hit. So maybe he was feeling roughly the same emotions that he imagined they felt.

Once that idea became embedded in his mind, he constructed a story that fit. And the more often he told that story, the clearer and sharper it became both as a coherent narrative and as a memory.

Robert Krulwich too is a non-print journalist. He’s worked at ABC, CBS, and NPR.  Take four and a half minutes and watch this video. It’s an animated version of a “This American Life” story showing how Krulwich appropriated an anecdote that happened to his wife. He would regale friends with the anecdote, recounting it as an eyewitness, when in fact he had only heard about it second-hand from his wife. Yet he was absolutely convinced that he was there.

Should Krulwich be banned from the media? Should we distrust everything that he has ever reported?

What Krulwich and Williams did is something we all do. Forty years of research about memory has shown that memory is not a camcorder; it’s an editing program. We edit – dropping some details, altering, sharpening, and even adding others. We hit “Save,” and when we next call up the memory, we are opening not the original but the most recent edit of the file.

Unfortunately, most people still think of memory as a camcorder, and they are convinced that if someone remembers something that is not true, he must be lying and is therefore untrustworthy.* They’re wrong, but that doesn’t matter. I don’t see how Williams is going to survive this one.

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* Reaction to bad memory is not quite so simple. In this case, politics plays a part. Over on the right, the air is thick with schadenfreude over Williams’s troubles. Those same delighted folks were much more forgiving of Ronald Reagan’s memory lapses and conflation of movies with reality.

Deflated

February 4, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

For Seattle fans, it was what poker players call a “bad beat” – a big pot and a hand that’s nearly sure to win but then loses on the final, unlikely card. A loss like that can dampen enthusiasm for things beyond football, at least in the short run. On the other hand, a sudden and satisfying victory can whet other appetites.

PornHub, which purports to be the most popular place for porn, ran its data on traffic before, during, and after the big game (their full report is here). The chart below shows the data for the home cities of the two teams plus Phoenix, where the game took place.

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

As you might expect, the Super Bowl took a bite out of porn, and more so in Boston and Seattle than in other cities.  The folks who would ordinarily be checking in to PornHub started leaving early for an hour or two of pre-game hype, and of course they stayed for the real game.  Even Katy Perry held their attention at halftime.

But after Pete Carrol’s game-losing call and Malcolm Butler’s game-saving interception, porn paths parted. The seekers in Seattle hurried back online while those in Boston apparently stuck with their TVs for some of the post-game ceremony.

Then, about an hour after the game, porn traffic in Boston rose and didn’t begin to taper off until after midnight. But in Seattle, the post-Bowl bump was shorter lived. Even though the night was young (8 p.m. PST) the Seattle fans lost their interest in PornHub. Phoenix, in the Mountain time zone,  is a useful comparison. Even though the hour was later, Phoenix pornophiles were still checking in as their disheartened Seattle counterparts were logging out.

In the end, it was Seattle that was deflated.

A Most Unreflective Businessman

February 2, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

“I won’t do business in New York,” my father once told me.  When I asked why, he described how New York customers would cheat in order to push down the price they paid for his steel.

I hadn’t thought about that for a while. The memory came back just after I saw “A Most Violent Year” set in the grimy and graffiti-covered New York of 1981. The hero, Abel Morales, is trying to expand his heating oil business, but someone is out to thwart him. His trucks are hijacked, the oil stolen. His employees are threatened and beaten up.  In addition, the DA trying to clean up the heating oil business has gotten a 14-count indictment, and the bank withdraws the loan they had agreed to.

My father’s customers did nothing violent or illegal, just unethical and dishonest.  Why would they do that, I asked my father. I was young and naive. “Guys in New York,” he said, “it’s a tough market.”

I was amazed that he could be so understanding.  But he recognized that people in business acted not solely on the basis personal morality. In some markets, you had to be a little dishonest in order to survive. That’s the point that both Abel and the “A Most Violent Year” try very hard to ignore.  Instead, the movie, at least on its surface, seems to be trying to convey the message – that cliche that runs from old Westerns to the latest thrillers – that even in a corrupt world, an honest man acting honorably can come out on top. The bad guys may lie, cheat, steal, kill, kidnap, or whatever, unconstrained by any moral sense; yet the good guy, using only honorable means, will win. The good guy’s goodness and the bad guy’s wickedness are never in doubt. Doubt, in fact, is usually irrelevant.

Because Hollywood prefers this simplified view of morality, we have very few honest films about business. In “A Most Violent Year,” at least we see a more realistic businessman – successful, even wealthy, but not all powerful, running a small company, dealing with everyday crises, trying to negotiate loans so he can stay afloat. More often in Hollywood films, businessmen are the sinister, greedy, and powerful CEOs of large corporations. The Montgomery Burns caricature in “The Simpsons”  is not too distant from executives in serious movies.

I can think of only one movie centered on a businessman faced with moral problems that have no simple, untainted solution – “Save the Tiger” from 1973.

“A Most Violent Year” could have been such a movie, but Abel never admits to himself that his motives and actions are anything but pure. The trailer gives some suggestion of his resoluteness. 




Others recognize that the the heating oil business is a compromised and compromising world. “Everyone in this room is fully capable of lying to their own mothers on their deathbeds,” says Peter Forente at a meeting of the fifteen important players in the business. Forente is the son of a mobster now in prison, but Peter is trying to do things differently to the extent he can. When Abel asks him for a much-needed loan, Peter tells him, “I don’t want you to be in this position. We are not nice people to borrow three quarters of a million dollars from.”

Abel’s wife – her father too was connected to organized crime – is aware of how that world works.  She has been keeping two sets of books, and she’s been skimming money over the years, apparently without her husband – the head of the company – knowing.  She has put  enough money aside that Abel won’t have to borrow from the “not nice people.”  She shows him a slip of paper with the sum on it.

ABEL What do you expect me to do with this? ANNA Use it.... Abel... ABEL Is it clean? [snip] ANNA It’s as clean as every other dollar we’ve ever made. ABEL That’s a fucking bullshit answer. [a few moments later] ABEL I’ll get it done. And it won’t be as a cheat. ANNA (Yelling, but controlled enough to not wake the kids.) Oh you are too much. You’ve been walking around your whole life like this all happened because of your hard work, good luck, and charm. Mr. Fucking American Dream. Well this is America... but it’s not a dream, and that wasn’t good luck helping you out all those years... IT WAS ME! Doing the things you didn’t want to know about...

Somehow, Abel acts as though he still does not to know about those things, continuing to believe in his own rectitude. In fact, compared with the other oil dealers, he is more honorable. Yet, despite the phony books (which he helps to hide under his house when law enforcement comes snooping), despite the felony indictment, despite all those dollars he made being equally clean (i.e., not so clean), he fails to confront or even acknowledge the moral ambiguities. Abel is like so many other protagonists in American films.  All conflict is external. Life is about solving problems. Self-doubt would only get in the way.

No Pass on the Passive

February 1, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

The idea that the passive voice must be avoided at all costs is of course wrong-headed. Still, passive voice remains a refuge for writers who would rather not say who’s doing what.

Ross Douthat, in his column today (here) on the causes of political correctness, twice says that liberal economic policy proposals “are mostly blocked.”

the paths forward for progressive economic policy are mostly blocked — and not only by a well-entrenched Republican Party, but by liberalism’s ongoing inability to raise the taxes required to pay for the welfare state we already have.* Since a long, slow, grinding battle over how to pay for those commitments is unlikely to fire anyone’s imagination, it’s not surprising that cultural causes — race, sex, identity — suddenly seem vastly more appealing.

In that first phrase, Douthat allows that it’s the Republicans who are doing the blocking, but then he adds a clause about the “liberalism’s inability” to pass economic legislation as though this inability were something different from the Republican Party. This is a little like talking about “the Colts inability to score points” without mentioning the Patriots defense.

A few paragraphs later, when Douthat repeats this idea, he doesn’t even bother to go beyond the passive voice: “because the paths to economic distribution are mostly blocked, the more plausible way . . .”  How about this rewrite: “Because Republicans block all tax and spending proposals that might discomfit the rich. . . .”

I am not saying that Douthat is wrong about the relation between the Republican’s disproportionate** dominance and the cultural left’s attention to political correctness – I think it goes beyond even what he’s talking about. But I hope that Douthat’s attempt to obscure the role of Republican legislators, in part by using the passive voice, has not gone unnoticed.***

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* Douthat announces this “we can’t afford it” view of Medicare and Social Security (which account for most of “welfare state we already have”) as though it were undisputed fact. It isn’t. Nor is there agreement as to how long it will be until these programs become unaffordable if nothing is changed.

** At the national level, more people voted for Democrats than for Republicans.

*** Yes, I am well aware that this sentence breaks not only the rule against passive voice but also the rule outlwawing “not-un–” construction.

Patriots and Scoundrels

January 25, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

Sunday, and no football. But we’ll always have Belichick and Brady.

I’m not saying that the Patriots are out-and-out liars. But they are outliers.

The advantage of an underinflated ball, like the eleven of the twelve footballs the Patriots used last Sunday, is that it’s easier to grip. Ball carriers will be less likely fumble if they’re gripping a ball they can sink their fingers into.

We can’t go back and measure the pressure of balls the Patriots were using before the Colts game, but Warren Sharp (here) went back and dug up the data on fumbles for all NFL games since 2010.  Since a team that controls the ball and runs more plays has more chances to fumble, Sharp graphed the ratio of plays to fumbles (values in red squares in the chart below) along with the absolute number of fumbles (values in blue circles). The higher the ratio, the less fumble-prone the team was.

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

One of these things is not like the others.  That’s what an outlier is. It’s off the charts. It’s nowhere near the trend line. Something about it is very different. The variables that might explain the differences among the other data points – better players, better weather or a domed stadium, a pass-centered offense – don’t apply. Something else is going on.

As the graph shows, when the teams are rank ordered on the plays/fumbles ratio, the difference between one team and the next higher is usually 0-2, there are only two gaps of 5 until the 9-point gap between #3 Atlanta and #2 Houston. From the second-best Texans and to the Patriots there’s a 47-point jump. 

Sharp also graphed the data as a histogram.

It’s pretty much a bell curve centered around the mean of 105 plays-per-fumble. Except for that outlier. And the chart shows just how far out it lies.

The Patriots play in a cold-weather climate in a stadium exposed to the elements.  Yet their plays/fumble ratio is 50% higher than that of the Packers, 80% higher than the Bears. They have good players, but those players fumble less often for the Patriots than they did when they played for other NFL teams. 

Usually, the statistical anomaly comes first – someone notices that US healthcare costs are double those of other nations – and then people try to come up with explanations.  In this case, it wasn’t until we had a possible explanatory variable that researchers went back and found the outlier. As Peter Sagal of “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” said, “The League became suspicious when a Patriots player scored a touchdown and instead of spiking the ball he just folded it and put it in his pocket.”

UPDATE, Jan. 28: Since I posted this, there has been some discussion of Sharp’s data (“discussion” is a euphemism – this is sports and the Internet after all). If you’re really interested in pursuing this, try Advanced Football Analytics  or this piece  at Deadspin “Why Those Statistics About The Patriots’ Fumbles Are Mostly Junk,” (to repeat, “discussion” is a euphemism, and if you want more strongly voiced views, read the comments).  Neil Paine at FiveThirtyEight  links to some others.  In sum, the evidence is not as strong as what Sharp’s version suggests. (One of the difficulties I suspect is that a fumble is a rare event. The difference between the teams with the surest grip and the most butterfingered is about one fumble every couple of games.

Ward Swingle (1927-2015)

January 23, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

(Not sociology but, to borrow Chris Uggen’s term, “self-indulgery.”)

Ward Swingle died last week. A few weeks earlier, I had been listening to this video of Andras Schiff playing the Bach C-minor partita, and I heard him play a wrong note in the Sinfonia. Maybe not wrong, but not what Bach wrote – a C instead of a B♭.*  Ward Swingle was the reason I knew.

In 1963, Phillips released “Bach’s Greatest Hits” – Bach compositions done by the Swingle Singers, a vocal octet, plus drums and one of Europe’s top jazz bassists, Pierre Michelot). I listened to that record so often enough that I knew every note in the Sinfonia. I even got the sheet music, and since the left hand was mostly eighth notes at a slow tempo, I could play it in my own clumsy fashion.**

Here are the Swingle Singers lip-synching to that record. Funny, but what sounded so cool then, now sounds thin, even cheesy, especially with the drums, and I think it would be better a capella.

Because the Swingle Singers were based in Paris (many of them had been in the Double Six de Paris), I was surprised to learn from the obits that Swingle himself was not French (he grew up in Mobile, Alabama) and that Swingle really was his name rather than a nom-de-disque he invented because of its jazzy overtones.

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* It comes at about the 2:00 mark.

** I am entirely self-taught (i.e., untaught) at the piano, and my left hand is pretty much useless for anything but chords.

What You Mean, “We”?*

January 20, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

What do we mean when we say “we”? Or more to the point, what does the president mean when he uses that word? 

The Atlantic has an interactive graphic (here) showing the relative frequencies of words in State of the Union addresses. (“Addresses” because I’m choosing my words carefully. These were not “speeches” until Wilson. Before that, it was written text only.) Here “we” is.

(Click on thechart for a larger view.)

The rise of “we” seems to parallel the rise of big government, starting with Wilson and our entry into a world war, followed by a brief (10-year) decline. Then FDR changes everything.  “We,” i.e., the people as represented by the government, are doing a lot more. 

Sorting the data by frequency shows that even in the big-We era, big-government Democrats use it more than do Republicans.  (JFK used We less frequently than did the GOP presidents immediately before and after him. But then, it was JFK who said not to ask what the government could do for us.)

Other words are less puzzling. Freedom is a core American value, but of late (the last five or six presidents), it’s the Republicans who really let it ring. 

As with We, Freedom gets a big boost with FDR, but Freedom for Reagan and the Bushes is not exactly FDR’s four freedoms – Freedom of speech, Freedom of religion, Freedom from want, Freedom from fear – especially the last two. Nor is it the kind of freedom LBJ might have spoken of in the civil rights era, a freedom that depended greatly on the actions of the federal government.  Instead, for conservatives since Reagan, freedom means the freedom to do what you want, especially to make as much money as you can, unbothered by government rules, and to pay less in taxes. 

Freedom in this sense is what Robert Bellah** calls “utilitarian individualism.”  As the word count shows, freedom was not such a central concern in the first 150 years of the Republic. Perhaps it became a concern for conservatives in recent years because they see it threatened by big government.  In any case, for much of our history, that tradition of individualism was, according to Bellah, tempered by another tradition – “civic republicanism,” the assumption that a citizen has an interest not just in individual pursuits but in public issues of the common good as well. 

That sense of a public seems to have declined. Even the “collectivist” Democrats of recent years use the term only about one-tenth as much as did the Founding Fathers. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison – their SOTUs had more than ten publics for every freedom.

I checked one other word because of its relevance to the argument that the US is “a Christian nation,” founded on religious principles by religious people, and that God has always been an essential part of our nation.

God, at least in State of the Union addresses, is something of an Almighty-come-lately. Like We, He gets a big boost with the advent of big government. FDR out-Godded everybody before or since, except of course, the Bushes and Reagan.

That is the end of this post. Thank you for reading. God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.***

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* For those who are very young or have led sheltered lives, this title is the punch line spoken by Tonto in an old joke, which you can Google.

** See his Habits of Heart, written with Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, Steven M. Tipton.  Or get a brief version in this lecture.

*** Update: I just noticed that the two “Gods” in that sentence work out to a rate of 200-300 per million. If tag lines like that are included as part of the text, that accounts for the higher rate since FDR. It’s not about big government, it’s about radio. Prior to radio, the audience for the SOTU was Congress. Starting with FDR, the audience was the American people.  Unfortunately, I don’t know whether these closing lines, which have now become standard, are included in the database. If they are included, the differences among presidents in the radio-TV era, may be more a matter of the denominator of the rate (length of speeches) than of the numerator (God).  FDR averaged about 3500 per SOTU. Reagan and the Bushes are in the 4000-6000 range. Clinton and Obama average about 7000. So it’s possible that the difference that looks large on the graph is merely a matter of a one God-bless or a two God-bless at the end of the speech.
 
This  audience factor might account for some of the increase in the use of we. A president addressing the nation rather than reporting to Congress might use we far more often.

Dissed Again

January 18, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

Sociology is the Rodney Dangerfied of social science. The latest insult comes from economist Noah Smith. On his Noahpinion blog, he posted two pictures of faux zoo animals: a dog that a Chinese zoo tried to pass off as a lion; and a “panda” in an Italian circus that was really a chow painted black and white.

But why did Smith say that his post was “a blaze of amateur sociology”?*

Smith does not mention sociology in the post, nor does he use any sociological terms, as if to suggest that the amateur sociology dig is so obvious that it needs no explanation.  But I’m confused.  Is he saying that these clumsy attempts to pass domestic dogs off as exotic animals are amateur sociology? Or is he saying that his pointing out frauds that are this obvious is amateur sociology? Or is he saying that amateur sociology (if not all sociology) is tries to pass off the commonplace as something of real interest.

Either way, we don’t get no respect.

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* Smith changed the title, but the original still shows up in blog aggregtors like my G2Reader and in the URLfor the post: http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2015/01/lion-dog-panda-dog-blaze-of-amateur.html.

Gifted and Talented – Academics and Athletes

January 16, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

Can women be brilliant?  Apparently, academics don’t think so, at least not according to some research reported in The Chronicle (here). 

New research has found that women tend to be underrepresented in disciplines whose practitioners think innate talent or "brilliance" is required to succeed.

Women might be successful in those fields, but while the top men in those fields will be seen as having some ineffable je ne sais quoi – in the words of the survey questionnaire, “a special aptitude that just can’t be taught” – women achieve their place the old fashioned way– hard work.  The Chronicle interviewed Sarah-Jane Leslie, one of the authors of the study.

It’s easy to find portrayals of men with a “special spark of innate, unschooled genius,” like various incarnations of Sherlock Holmes or television’s House, M.D. But accomplished and smart women—think Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter series—are typically depicted as simply hard-working.

That reminded me immediately of a similar issue in sports, where the key variable is not gender but race. (See this HuffPo piece.) The observation has become almost a cliche. Blacks are perceived to have natural talent while Whites achieve a place on the All-Star team through diligence and perseverance. Or to paraphrase Ms. Leslie and The Chronicle:

It’s easy to find portrayals of Blacks with a “special spark of innate, unschooled genius,” like Michael Jackson or Magic (note that name) Johnson. But accomplished Whites – Larry Bird or Steve Nash – are typically depicted as simply hard-working.

Oops, We Did It Again

January 16, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

How many times can you lose your innocence?

I was listening to a podcast of an old (June, 2000) episode of the BBC’s “In Our Time.”  It was about America, and on the panel was Christopher Hitchens, the British journalist who had relocated to Washington, DC.  The moderator’s first question was about American idealism, and this is what Hitchens had to say:



Here is a transcript, but you should really listen to the audio clip, if only to catch Hitchens’s tone and to hear him spin out long, perfect sentences with the ease that most of us have for answering questions like “What time is it?”

The one that amuses me the most is the reference that you get about once a year to the American loss of innocence, as if this giant, enormous, powerful, slightly vulgar society ever had any innocence to lose, let alone could regain it and lose it again. I’ve heard the loss of innocence attributed to: the Spanish-American War, the assassination of President Kennedy, the assassination of President Kennedy’s brother, the war in Vietnam, the disclosures made at Watergate, through the discovery, which is in Robert Redford’s movie “Quiz Show,” that the quiz shows in the fifties were fixed – that was apparently a great American loss of innocence – and on the front page of the New York Times, when he died, in the obituary of Frank Sinatra, the idea that Frank Sinatra’s songs represented the loss of innocence for America. . . There is . . . a danger of self-regard, of narcissism in that.

That was in 2000, so you could add 9/11, the Iraq war, Abu Ghraib, the torture report.

If we keep losing our innocence so often, we never really lose it.  We might be temporarily careless with it, but we find it again very quickly and forget that we’d ever lost it. We return to an idealized view of ourselves as a nation whose motives are 100% pure.  As Randy Newman puts it in his song “Political Science,

No one loves
I don’t know why
We may not be perfect,
But Heaven knows we try.

With such a view of ourselves, each revelation of anything that departs from the ideal is a new shock. One immediate reaction is denial.  And when the facts become undeniable, we react wtih something like the disbelief and regret of the morning-after drunk who had blacked out.* “I really did that? Oh, gee, I’m sorry. Killing millions of indigenous people and taking their land? I really did that?  Slavery? Atomic bombs?** We really did that?”  Why not face it: we’re not that innocent.

Forgetting (in Freudian terms, repression) and denial allow us to retain our innocence, at least in our own minds, but with the result that we’re less likely to change. For example, many White Southerners today want to enshrine the Confederate flag, the flag of a country that was based on the enslavement of Blacks and that waged a war that killed a greater proportion of the United States population than did any other war.** “We really did that?”

 As James Baldwin once said, “Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart.”


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* I think Philip Slater may have made this same analogy. If so, maybe his inspiration was the same as mine – Shelly Berman.

**When my brother taught world history in high school, he included this question on a test:

Which is the only country that dropped an atomic bomb on another country?
a.  Russia
b. Germany
c.  Japan
d.  the United States

Only about half the students got it right.

*** In absolute numbers, more US soldiers died in World War II.

This American Life Sociology Syllabus

January 13, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

At the ASA meetings in 2013, when Ira Glass and “This American Life” were given the award for Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues, Donald Newman hailed the show for providing such good material for his classes but regretted that the show was so short on theory.

No, no, Ira protested. What the show wants is stories, especially stories with interesting characters, who, almost by definition, are not typical.  Sociological principles and generalizations, Ira said, are the last things we want.*

But that means that the show is a great resource for us professors. It provides the stuff that will grab students’ attention. Then we come in and show how sociological concepts spin a larger web that includes other stories that at first might not seem related.

Last weekend’s edition (the podcast is here) is a case in point. The show, given over to Lulu Miller and Alix Spiegel of NPRs new “Invisibilia” podcast, was about “expectations.”  Miller and Spiegel begin with a laboratory rat they had smuggled into the NPR offices. They would show people the rat and ask,

Do you think that the thoughts that you have in your head – your personal thoughts – can influence the way that rat moves through space?

Nearly everyone said no.

 “Ask Bob Rosenthal,” I said to myself. I had taken methods with him not so long after he had done his  famous experiments – grad students told that their rat was either “maze bright” or “maze dull.” The rats were, of course, the same, but the results were different.  And Miller and Spiegel did ask Bob Rosenthal, who described those experiments. They also asked Carol Dweck, who extended the idea, listing other examples of expectation influencing performance.

But the phrase coined by sociologist Robert Merton, “Self-fulfilling prophecy,” isn’t mentioned, though it covers an even wider range of behaviors.  

Then Miller and Spiegel moved to a different question:

Could my expectations make a blind person – who literally has no eyeballs – see?

Even Bob Rosenthal, when they ask him, says no. The question led to a segment on Daniel Kish, who is blind – no eyeballs – but who, using a kind of echolocation he taught himself, was riding a bike by age six. He climbed trees and fences, walked to school, made his own breakfast and lunch, and couldn’t imagine living any other way.

In fifth grade, Daniel meets another blind kid, Adam.

Adam completely unnerved him because he was so incapable of getting around on his own. . . He had simply never needed to get around on his own before. ADAM: I went to this school for the blind from age five to age seven. And there he was taken around on someone’s arm almost all the time. In the lunchroom, people brought him his food, carried his books, helped him tie his shoelaces. ADAM: I don’t know why people did things for me. They just did.

It’s like Robert Scott, The Making of Blind Men, I said to myself.  I’d read it decades ago. It’s about agencies for the blind, adult versions of Adam’s school. I tried to remember how Scott put it –  something like, People arrive thinking that they are normal people who have a lot of trouble seeing; the agency teaches them that they are blind people who have some residual vision.

Sure enough, just as the program called Bob Rosenthal to talk about his experimenter-effect experiments from the 60s, now they had Bob Scott talking about his research from roughly the same time.  Again, the program takes you right up to the edge of sociological concepts and generalizations and then stops.  It mentions the idea that blindness might be a “social construction,” but by this they seem to mean, as Spiegel puts it, “that blindness is mostly in our head.”

Talking with Scott, they couldn’t very well miss the role that agencies for the blind played.  Lulu Miller says that Scott, in the course of his research, started to see that what organizations for the blind were doing was to communicate to them the message, “Blind people can’t do those things.”

But the larger point is that expectations are not just personal and interpersonal (“mostly in our head”). They are institutional. “Social constructions” are more than just conventions or shared definitions. Once they become built into the architecture of institutions, they become real in a way that makes them much more difficult to question.

So** for the sociologist, a one-hour podcast fills in several open spots in the course outline – self-fulfilling prophecy, social construction of reality, institutions, self-concept and the self, and perhaps more.

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*I’m working from memory here. Ira might not have said this so explicitly.

** Lulu and Alix (pronounced uh-LEECE) start most of their sentences with “so.” They’re not alone. I hear it all the time now, and since I can remember a time before this trend, I notice it. And I wonder: so when did this start?