The Waning of Taboo (or Gratitude, UVA Style)

August 4, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

Female sexuality is losing its taboo, and cultural conservatives are dreading the change. That was the gist of my post about the conservative reaction to the Amy Schumer movie “Trainwreck” (here). I quoted a National Review article that reacted to the movie with words like shamelessness, distortion, degradation, and smut.

Taboo combines great power and great danger as well as elements of impurity and uncleanliness (smut still retains overtones of its earlier meaning – dirt). People and things that are taboo must be suppressed or controlled, surrounded with ceremony and restrictions. To allow them as part of the ordinary world threatens the social, moral, and cognitive order.

Shortly after I wrote that post, I was reading Jonathan Haidt’s 2012 book The Righteous Mind and came upon this anecdote.

I was recently eating lunch at a UVA dining hall. At a table next to me two young women were talking. One of them was very grateful for something the other had agreed to do for her. To express her gratitude, she exclaimed, “Oh my God! If you were a guy, I’d be so on your dick right now.” I felt a mixture of amusement and revulsion, but how could I criticize her from an ethic of autonomy?

Sex here, both for men and women, is no longer confined to some secret, sacred realm. It’s just another everyday enjoyable experience,even a way of saying, “Thanks.” She might just as well have said, “I’d spend an hour in the kitchen making you my special brownies-avec-weed.” 

In movies like “Trainwreck” and TV shows like “Girls,” women’s sexuality and women’s bodies are not so imbued with mystery. They are what they are. Along with this waning of sacredness goes a parallel decline in the association of sex with uncleanliness. I can remember when people talked, though usually jokingly, about “dirty books” or “feelthy pictures” or told someone to get his mind “out of the gutter” – all of these contrasted with “good, clean fun.”  You probably won’t hear those  metaphors today at UVA and similar campuses. In some places, people still see female sexuality through the mists of purity and danger. But I would predict that as with attitudes on gay sex, the untaboo view of women’s sexuality will diffuse to more and more regions of society.

ADDENDUM: Lisa Wade, who knows far more about campus sex than I do, reminds me that everything I said here about the demystification of sex describes women’s attitudes far more than men’s. “My female students are still VERY worried that men think that their vulvas/vaginas are gross, disgusting, smelly, unkempt, etc.”  They are probably right to worry. Even at enlightened, elite schools, normal adult female sexuality may trigger in men disgust and ideas of taboo and uncleanliness. Men (some? many? most?) may react with horror/fear/aversion/avoidance to vulvas, menstruation, and even pubic hair. 

Margin of Error Error

August 3, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

The margin of error is getting more attention than usual in the news. That’s not saying much since it’s usually a tiny footnote, like those rapidly muttered disclaimers in TV ads (“Offer not good mumble mumble more than four hours mumble mumble and Canada.”) Recent headlines proclaim, “Trump leads Bush. . .” A paragraph or two in, the story will report that in the recent poll Trump got 18% and Bush 15%.  That difference is well within the margin of error, but you have to listen closely to hear that. Most people don’t want to know abut uncertainty and ambiguity.

What’s bringing uncertainty out of the closest now is the upcoming Republican presidential debate.  The Fox-CNN-GOP axis has decided to split the field of presidential candidates in two based on their showing in the polls. The top ten will be in the main event. All other candidates – currently Jindal, Santorum, Fiorina, et al. – will be relegated to the children’s table, i.e., a second debate a month later and at the very unprime hour of 5 p.m.

But does Rick Perry’s 4% in the a recent poll (419 likely GOP voters) really in a different class than Bobby Jindal’s 25? The margin of error that CNN announced in that survey was a confidence interval of  +/- 5.  Here’s the box score.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

Jindal might argue that with a margin of error of 5 points, his 2% might actually be as high as 7%, which would put him in the top tier. 

He might argue that, but he shouldn’t.  Downplaying the margin of error makes a poll result seem more precise than it really is, but using that one-interval-fits-all number of five points understates the precision.  That’s because the margin of error depends on the percent that a candidate gets.  The confidence interval is larger for proportions near 50%, smaller for proportions at the extreme. 

Just in case you haven’t taken the basic statistics course, here is the formula.

The  p̂  (pronounced “pee hat”) is the proportion of the sample who preferred each candidate. For the candidate who polled 50%, the numerator of the fraction under the square root sign will be 0.5 (1-0.5) = .25.  That's much larger than the numerator for the 2% candidate:  0.02 (1-0.02) = .0196.*

Multiplying by the 1.96, the 50% candidate’s margin of error with a sample of 419 is +/- 4.8. That’s the figure that CNN reported. But plug in Jindal’s 2%, and  the result is much less: +/- 1.3.  So there’s a less than one in twenty chance that Jindal’s true proportion of support is more than 3.3%. 

Polls usually report their margin of error based on the 50% maximum. The media reporting the results then use the one-margin-fits-all assumption – even NPR. Here is their story from May 29 with the headline “The Math Problem Behind Ranking The Top 10 GOP Candidates.”

There’s a big problem with winnowing down the field this way: the lowest-rated people included in the debate might not deserve to be there. The latest GOP presidential poll, from Quinnipiac, shows just how messy polling can be in a field this big. We’ve put together a chart showing how the candidates stack up against each other among Republican and Republican-leaning voters — and how much their margins of error overlap.

The NPR writer, Danielle Kurtzleben, does mention that “margins might be a little smaller at the low end of the spectrum,” but she creates a graph that ignores that reality.

The misinterpretation of presidential polls is nothing new.  But this time, that ignorance will determine whether a candidate plays to a larger or smaller TV audience.**

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* There are slightly different formulas for calculating the margin of error for very low percentages.  The Agresti-Coull formula  gives a confidence interval even if there are zero Yes responses. (HT: Andrew Gelman)

** Department of Irony: Some of these GOP politicians might complain about polls determining candidates’ ability to reach the widest audience. But none of them objects to having that ability determined by money from wealthy individuals and corporations.

“Trainwreck” and Taboo

July 30, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

I saw “Trainwreck” last night. The 7:00 p.m. showing at the 68th Street AMC was full. Maybe people had come just to get out of the apartment and yet avoid the beastly heat, but they enjoyed the movie.  Sometimes the laughter lasted long enough to cover up the next joke.

The “Trainwreck” story is standard rom-com: Amy Schumer plays a young woman who rejects the idea of commitment and love. Circumstances put her together with a man she seems to have nothing in common with. You can guess the rest. But this is Amy Schumer’s movie, so there’s an important twist – the conventional sex roles are reversed. It’s the man who is sweet and naive and who wants a real relationship; the woman has a lot of sex with a lot of different guys, drinks a lot, smokes weed, and resists love until at the end, she decides to become the woman he wants her to be.

Here is the R-rated version of the trailer.



What interested me was not the movie itself, but the reaction in some conservative quarters. For Armond White at the National Review (here), the movie triggered something like what Jonathan Haidt calls “disgust” – a reaction to the violation of strong taboos that surround things like food, sex, blood and other bodily matters, and death. These taboos are often arbitrary, not rational. Pork is an “abomination” because . . . well, because it is, and because pigs are “unclean.”

“Trainwreck” has no pork, but it does have what some find unclean.

Schumer’s tampon jokes and gay jokes, female versions of locker-room humor, literally drag pop culture to the toilet. A girl-talk scene set in adjoining restroom stalls — one revealing dropped panties, the other panty-less (obviously Amy) — is just Apatow using women to show off his indecency.

Indecency indeed. But something is indecent only to members of groups that deem it indecent. Some groups are not at all disgusted by pork.  And for some audiences, tampon jokes and toilet-stall conversations about Johnny Depp movies are not indecent; they’re just funny. What audiences might those be? Women.

As a comedian and now as a filmmaker, Schumer talks about women-things – body functions and body parts. These jokes seem to elicit two different kinds of laughter.  Back when researchers studying small group interaction were trying to code and categorize behavior, laughter posed a problem. It could be coded as “Shows Tension,” but it might also be “Shows Tension Release.” (See this earlier post on laughter.)  With Amy Schumer jokes, the male laughter is mostly nervous, full of tension about a taboo subject. But the female laughter seems much less inhibited – tension release, maybe even a relief, as if to say, “Someone is finally talking publicly and frankly about things we could only whisper about,” since most of the time they have had to pretend to share the male taboo..

Take the tampon joke that the National Reviewer finds indecent. It would seem obvious that used  tampons look different depending on where you are in your period – less bloody on the final day, more so a few days earlier. But at the mere mention of this fact in “Trainwreck,” hilarity ensues, especially among women in the audience.                        

The thing about taboos – ideas about what is indecent or disgusting – is that entire social structures get built around them. To violate the taboo is to threaten the entire edifice. Powerful taboos on women-things often go with male domination. So for the National Review, the “Trainwreck”reversal of rom-com gender roles makes the movie dangerous and subversive. Here are some excerpts from the review just to give the flavor of this Purity-and-Danger-like conflating of taboo, female sexuality, and social/political threat to the established order.  (I have added the boldface.)

Schumer turns female sexual prerogative into shamelessness the degradation of sex — and women uses sex to promote feminist permissiveness. She enjoys a sexual license Amy brazenly practices the same sexual habits as men Lacking . . . old-fashioned sense of shame, It’s merely brazen, like Lena Dunham’s HBO series, Girls (also about a promiscuous female writer Schumer’s film can be seen to distort human relations into smut. This is not just disrespectful, it confirms Schumer’s project of cultural takeover, she aims to acquire cultural power Schumer disguises a noxious cultural agenda as personal fiat. She’s a comedy demagogue who okays modern misbehavior yet blatantly revels in PC notions about feminism, abortion, and other hot-button topics

Wow.

I should add that not all conservative publications felt so threatened. Joe Morganstern at the Wall Street Journal gave the movie a warm review. Breitbart saw the movie’s essential conservatism (“The anti-slut message is a healthy one,”) and praised Schumer as a comic actor.  Still, the National Review piece seems emblematic of something broader in the cultural conservative camp – a taboo-like reaction to female sexuality.

Mass Shootings – Definitions and Data

July 28, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

A few days ago, I wrote to date, since Sandy Hook, the US has had seventy-five “mass shootings.” I now put that phrase in quotation marks because taken literally, it’s misleading.

Here is the opening from a story in the New Orleans Times-Picayune (here) posted Sunday night.

4 shot in assault rifle attack at Desire's Sampson park A man armed with an assault rifle opened fire at a crowded park in Desire Sunday (July 26), shooting at least four people, including a man left critically wounded, New Orleans police said.

 
Is this a mass shooting? Not in most databases.

Literally, a mass shooting should be an incident where someone shoots a lot of people. The graph I used in that previous post included only public shootings. Or more precisely, public killings.  In the Lafayette movie theater, Rusty Houser killed two people and wounded nine. The FBI definition of “mass murder” sets the minimum at four deaths. By that definition, the Lafayette incident is not a mass murder.  If one of those two women had been seriously wounded rather than killed, the incident would not have been included in any database of multiple killings.

Most definitions also exclude gang killings. If gang members shoot and kill four members of another gang, even in a public place, it doesn’t get counted.  And then there are the domestic massacres – a family killed inside their home. These too do not make it into most definitions of “mass shootings.”

Now, broadening the definition, Guns Are Cool has created a Mass Shooting Tracker – a list of incidents gathered mostly from local news reports.  It includes all incidents where four or more people were shot, whether or not they died and regardless of setting.  As of yesterday, July 26th, the Tracker lists 207 shootings this year. July 26th also happens to be the 207th day of the year. You do the math.

In the assault rifle shooting above, nobody died. That’s not unusual. In 40% of the shootings, there are no deaths. In another 32%, only one person dies.  Multiple deaths are relatively rarer.

But guns are dangerous. Even when the victims are not in close range, and even when the gunman is not especially accurate, a gun can still do a lot of damage. The wounded in these shootings far outnumber the dead nearly three to one.

The Tracker’s criterion for a mass shooting is a minimum of four victims – killed or wounded. It looks like the typical incident in their database involves no deaths and enough wounded to meet that minimum.

Since the database uses news reports, when a victim is seriously wounded and dies days later, the Tracker probably does not include that in the deaths tally. For the same reason, in a large majority of cases (83%), the shooter is listed as “Unknown.” If the shooter is later identified, the Tracker database might still not pick up that story.

So the tally for this year: 207 mass shootings, 172 dead, 761 wounded.  Of course, those numbers will be dwarfed by their counterparts in non-mass shootings. Still, it illustrates one of the essential truths about guns: you can kill and wound a lot of people with them. Yes, if you have only a knife, you  can still slash several people, some maybe even fatally. But you have to get so close – literally within arm’s reach – and if they run away, you’re pretty much out of luck. Guns are so much more effective when it comes to killing and wounding. That’s why people buy them.

Bet on Obamacare, Cash in Big

July 26, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

The standard conservative line on Obamacare was that it would be a disaster.  They still insist that it’s a disaster, despite much evidence to the contrary. I wonder if they put their money where their scowling mouths were.

As Alex Tabarrok says, a bet is a tax on bullshit. Did they bet against healthcare and insurance companies? Probably not. But if they had, their frowns would not be turning to smiles. Just the opposite.

A hedge fund, Glenview Capital Management, did bet, but they bet on Obamacare, not against it. In case you missed the Wall Street Journal’s story on this, here’s the opening:

Glenview Capital Management LLC made a bold decision when President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul was rolling out: Bet on it. The result has been one of the most successful hedge-fund wagers in recent years. New York-based Glenview has realized and paper gains of more than $3.2 billion since it started making investments in hospitals and insurers four years ago, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of securities filings.

The idea was pretty simple. Obamacare was going to bring millions of new clients to the healthcare markets. Insurers would have more customers. Hospitals would have more patients whose bills would be paid. Less easy to foresee were the mergers (Athem and Cigna, Aetna and Humana) that added even more to the value of the investments.  The bottom line: “Glenview’s flagship fund has averaged a 26% annual return since the beginning of 2012 . . . much better than the industry’s 6% average.”

The irony is that the health of the healthcare industry under Obamacare puts conservatives at the WSJ and elsewhere in the unusual position of arguing that mergers and corporate profits are a sign of something bad.

Still Not the Time

July 24, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

Can we talk about guns now? I mean now that another angry nut has opened fire, this one in a movie theater in Louisiana. Is it finally time to talk about guns?

Of course not.  Just ask the governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal.

Now is the time for prayer, now is the time for healing. As far as the political spectrum, this isn’t the time.

 Somehow, I don’t think that Jindal will tell us when it actually is time.

Last October I wrote (here):

Guns have become the elephant in the room that nobody talks about. Even asking about access to guns seems unAmerican these days. . . When the elephant’s presence is too massive not be noticed – for example, when the elephant kills several people – the elephant’s spokesmen rush in to tell us that “No, this is not the time to talk about the elephant.”

How much time should we allot to prayer and healing before we can talk about guns? Two weeks?

Let’s do some math. Since the Sandy Hook massacre of schoolchildren (December of 2012), there have been 75 mass shootings. That’s75 shootings in about 140 weeks. That averages out to less than two weeks between shootings. And that interval seems to be getting shorter and shorter, as this timeline of mass shootings shows.* (As I wrote, “timeline of mass shootings,” I wondered: is there any other advanced country where that phrase would even make sense?) 

The two-week “this isn’t the time” rule means that the time is, well, never.

I have nothing against prayer and healing. By all means, let’s sit shiva. But don’t let it become an excuse to avoid talking about doing something to reduce the carnage.
   
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*The graph comes from Vox

Where’s the Swear?

July 22, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

1.  “Asshole is a wonderful word,” said Mike Pesca in his podcast, The Gist, last Friday. His former colleagues at NPR had wanted to call someone an asshole, and even though it was for a podcast, not broadcast, and even though the person in question was a certified asshole, the NPR censor said no. Pesca disagreed.

Pesca is from Long Island and, except for his college years in Atlanta, he has spent most of his time in the Northeast. Had he hailed from Atlanta – or Denver or Houston or even San Francisco – “asshole” might not have sprung so readily to his mind as le mot juste, even to denote Donald Trump. The choice of swear words is regional.

Linguist Jack Grieve has been analyzing tweets – billions of words – and recently he posted maps showing the relative popularity of different expletives.

Every county in the Northeast tweets “asshole” at a rate at least two standard deviations above the national mean. To my knowledge, Grieve has offered no explanation for this distribution, and I don’t have much to add. I assume that as with regional accents, historical factors are more important than the literal meanings of the words. It’s not that tweeters in the Northeast are generally more willing to use foul language, nor is this about anal imagery since the Northeast looks nearly prudish compared to other regions when it comes to “shit.”

2. Less surprising are the maps of toned-down expletives. People in the heartland are just so gosh darned polite in their speech. When Donald Trump spoke at the Family Leadership Summit in Iowa, what got all the attention was his dissing of John McCain ( “He’s not a war hero. ... He is a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”)

But there was also this paragraph in the New York Times’s coverage:

Mr. Trump raised eyebrows with language rarely heard before an evangelical audience — saying “damn” and “hell” when discussing education and the economy. “Well, I was turned off at the very start because I didn’t like his language,” Becky Kruse, of Lovilia, Iowa, said. . . .  Noting Mr. Trump’s comment about not seeking God’s forgiveness. “He sounds like he isn’t really a born-again Christian.”

Aside from the insight about Trump’s religious views, Ms. Kruse reflects the linguistic preferences of her region, where “damn” gets softened to “darn.”

Unfortunately, Grieve did not post a map for “heck.” (I remember when “damn” and “hell” were off limits on television, though a newspaper columnist, usually in the sports section, might dare to write something like “It was a helluva fight.”)

You can find maps for all your favorite words at Grieve’s Website (here), where you can also find out what words are trending (as we now say) on Twitter. (“Unbothered” is spreading from the South, and “fuckboy” is rising). Other words are on the way down (untrending?).  If you’re holding  “YOLO” futures, sell them now before it’s too late.

The Ferguson Effect and Cop-Killing – Update

July 14, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

On May 29, Heather MacDonald wrote in the Wall Street Journal (here): 

A handful of highly publicized deaths of unarmed black men, often following a resisted arrest . . .have led to riots, violent protests and attacks on the police. Murders of officers jumped 89% in 2014, to 51 from 27.

I don’t know why MacDonald was apparently so eager primed to see an increase in cop-killing following protests and some rioting about cops killing unarmed people. In a post three days later (here), I offered some numbers showing that there was no Ferguson effect in the deaths of police officers.

Yesterday, criminologist and former cop Peter Moskos blogged (here):

July 13, 2015 Headline you won't see: Police officer line-of-duty deaths are down 15 percent this year.  Gunfire deaths are down 38 percent. Odd, because a lot of reporters were calling me last year when the numbers were up. “Is it Ferguson?!” “Is it Obama?!” “Are criminals less brazen?!” “Has training gotten better?!” “Are criminals worse shots?!”

Those imagined questions aren’t so different from the questions reporters were asking about the 2014 increase. Reporters work on deadline. They want an explanation – any explanation will do – and they want it before 3 p.m. Maybe criminologists at the Manhattan Institute writing for the WSJ are under similar pressure.

Peter’s answer would, I assume, be that these are fairly small numbers, so short-run percentage increases can look misleadingly huge, and those increases can be created by a few isolated events that have nothing to do with long-term trends. As plain-spoken Peter puts it, “For the record, just like I said last year, I don't think it’s a big deal.”

Microaggresions and Cultures of Social Control

July 13, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

Why these calls for trigger warnings? Why all this magnifying of microaggressions?

Most of the time, it’s more useful to save the “why” for last and to start with the other “reporter’s” questions – who, when, where. In a post two months ago (here), I speculated that the loudest voices making these demands are those people in categories that have gained in power but are still not dominant, notably women at elite universities.  What they’re saying in part is, “We don’t have to take this shit anymore.” Or as Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning put it in a recently in The Chronicle, “offenses against historically disadvantaged social groups have become more taboo precisely because different groups are now more equal than in the past.” (The Chronicle article is a lite version of the authors’ 2014 article in Comparative Sociology, “Microaggression and Moral Cultures.” It’s nice to have one’s hunches seconded by scholars who have given the issue much more thought.)

Campbell and Manning make the context even broader. The new “plague of hypersensitivity” (as Todd Gitlin called it, here) indicates a cultural transformation – from a “culture of dignity” to a “culture of victimhood.” More specifically, the aspect of culture they are talking about is social control. How do you get other people to stop doing things you don’t want them to do – or not do them in the first place?

In a “culture of honor,” you take direct action against the offender.  Where you stand in society – the rights and privileges that others accord you – is all about personal reputation (at least for men). “One must respond aggressively to insults, aggressions, and challenges or lose honor.” The culture of honor arises where the state is weak or is concerned with justice only for some (the elite). So the person whose reputation and honor are at stake must rely on his own devices (devices like duelling pistols).  Or in his pursuit of personal justice, he may enlist the aid of kin or a personalized state-substitute like Don Corleone.
                                   
In more evolved societies with a more extensive state, honor gives way to “dignity.”

The prevailing culture in the modern West is one whose moral code is nearly the exact opposite of that of an honor culture. Rather than honor, a status based primarily on public opinion, people are said to have dignity, a kind of inherent worth that cannot be alienated by others. Dignity exists independently of what others think, so a culture of dignity is one in which public reputation is less important. Insults might provoke offense, but they no longer have the same importance as a way of establishing or destroying a reputation for bravery. It is even commendable to have “thick skin” that allows one to shrug off slights and even serious insults, and in a dignity-based society parents might teach children some version of “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” – an idea that would be alien in a culture of honor.

The new “culture of victimhood” has a different goal – cultural change. Culture is, after all, a set of ideas that is shared, usually so widely shared as to be taken for granted. The microaggression debate is about insult, and one of the crucial cultural ideas at stake is how the insulted person should react. In the culture of honor, he must seek personal retribution. In doing so, of course, he is admitting that the insult did in fact sting. The culture of dignity also focuses on the character of offended people, but here they must pretend that the insult had no personal impact. They must maintain a Jackie-Robinson-like stoicism even in the face of gross insults and hope that others will rise to their defense. For smaller insults, say Campbell and Manning, the dignity culture “would likely counsel either confronting the offender directly to discuss the issue,” which still keeps things at a personal level, “or better yet, ignoring the remarks altogether.”

In the culture of victimhood, the victim’s goal is to make the personal political.  “It’s not just about me. . . .”  Victims and their supporters are moral entrepreneurs. They want to change the norms so that insults and injustices once deemed minor are now seen as deviant. They want to  to define deviance up.  They pose with signs illustrating the remarks they find offensive in hopes that others will think so too. Some may even contrive hate-crime hoaxes – more serious versions of the genre of insult – in order to call attention to the more general problem.  In other cultures of social control, this tactic that would be useless or worse.

It’s not clear how the conflict between dignity and victimhood will develop. I would expect that those who enjoy the benefits of the status quo and none of its drawbacks will be most likely to resist change. Don Corleone and similar justice brokers probably resented the state encroaching on their deal, coming in with some depersonalized, universalistic system of laws and enforcement. So too in the current cultural conflict, people like Campbell and Manning (and me) will be more sympathetic to the culture of dignity, though perhaps not so strongly as some. Campbell and Manning quote UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, for example, who wrote “Well, I’m happy to say that I’m just going to keep on microaggressing,” as though insulting people were a virtue to be bragged about.

Amazing

July 7, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

As we all know, President Obama, at the end of his eulogy for Rev. Pinckney, sang “Amazing Grace.” It was something of a last-minute decision.  The Times yesterday (here) referred to an account by Valerie Jarrett, family friend and White House senior advisor.

“When I get to the second part of referring to ‘Amazing Grace,’ I think I might sing,” he told them, by Ms. Jarrett’s account. “Hmm,” Ms. Jarrett recalled responding. Mrs. Obama was a little more pointed. “Why on earth would that fit in?” she asked.

But sing he did.

Much has been written about that speech, but what struck me were two things that few people mentioned. First, the discovery that the leader of the free world has a somewhat uncertain relationship to pitch. Maybe that’s what the First Lady had in mind (“Why on earth . . . ?”)

Many who watched him that day noted that he paused a long time before beginning to sing. “So later I said to him, ‘Were you thinking about whether or not to sing?’” Ms. Jarrett recalled at Aspen. “He said, ‘Oh no, I knew I was going to sing. I was just trying to figure out which key to sing it.’”

It took the musicians even longer to figure out what key that was.  If you watch the video (here), you can hear that after Obama’s first few bars a capella, they try to come in with some accompaniment, and there seems to be some tacit negotiation between them and the president over whether they can pull him to E-flat, the key he seems closest to.

The other thing “Amazing Grace” reminded me of was the amazing power of the pentatonic scale. Five notes, most easily visualized as the five black keys on a piano. You could play “Amazing Grace” without using your fingers just by rolling an orange over the keys.

You could also play the melody of all these other songs. And note the variety. Some are folk songs (other Scottish and Appalachian tunes, less well known, might be included), but there are also spirituals, pop, and rock:

Amazing Grace Swing Low Sweet Chariot Coming Through the Rye Auld Lang Syne A la Claire Fontaine Wayfaring Stranger Camptown Races (Stephen Foster) If I Had a Hammer (Pete Seeger, Lee Hays) Use Somebody (Kings of Leon) 4 Real (Avril Lavigne) We Didn’t Start the Fire (Billy Joel) My Girl (The Temptations) Stay ft. Mikky Ekko (Rihanna) Bad, Bad Leroy Brown (Jim Croce)

I’m sure there are many others.*

Watch Bobby McFerrin lead an audience in the pentatonic scale completely impromptu. He gives no direct instructions, and yet the audience intuitively gets it. So do McFerrin’s audiences all over the world. As he says, “The pentatonic scale for some reason . . . .”

I nearly forgot – one other pentatonic song: “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

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* Several songs are pentatonic except for the bridge, i.e., for 24 out of 32 bars – the theme song from “All in the Family,” for example,which adds one more tone, or “Every Little Breeze Seems to Whisper Louise”. I have omitted them.

Can Republicans Talk About Race Now?

July 3, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

A blogger I know (his post is here) caught Garrison Keillor in a historical inaccuracy at the beginning of last Saturday’s episode of “A Prairie Home Companion.” Commenting on recent political events, Keillor said,

Republicans came out against the Confederacy after 150 years. They came out against it. It was not a good idea. It was not a good idea: A war in behalf of the institution of slavery.

Keillor was confusing the Republicans of today with those of 1860.  Back then, anti-slavery forces were Republican, and they elected Lincoln. The war on behalf of slavery was a Democratic venture. 

In 1860, the South was pro-slavery and solidly Democratic. The vote in the presidential election makes this split very clear.

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

Following the war, in that brief decade when Southern Blacks could vote in meaningful numbers, they voted for the party of Lincoln, and the South looked more Republican.  With the end of Reconstruction, the Southern vote returned to being White and Democratic, and it remained that way for a century. In 1960, the South elected mostly Democrats to the House of Representatives.

The politics of the last 50 years have reversed those colors. In 2000, all Southern electoral votes went to Bush.

There still are Democratic districts in the South, but they are blue islands in a sea of red.

One of the main reasons for this party realignment is race. Race has become a Democratic issue. It’s mostly liberals who have argued that we need to have a “conversation” about race. Only Democratic politicians speak of race as a problem requiring change. (Analogous Republican issues include taxes and defense.) Republicans have refused to acknowledge that racism still exists at all – a deliberate blindness parodied by Stephen Colbert in his right-wing persona: “I don’t see race.”

This allergic reaction to race usually comes across as callous but occasionally as just stupid. The day after the murders in Charleston, a reporter asked Jeb Bush if he thought the Charleston killings were racially motivated. The only reasonable response would be “duh” and a comparison to questions about bears’ preferences in toilet location or Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s religious affiliation. But Jeb said, “I don't know.” (story here)

We can’t be certain what Jeb had in mind at the time, but my guess is that he feared that to answer “yes” would be to admit that racism existed and was a problem. And that’s an idea you don’t want to mention if you’re trying to get Republicans to vote for you. After word of Jeb’s flub got out, a spokesman tweeted that “of course” Jeb thought the killings were racially motivated.

After the Charleston killings, some prominent Republican politicians went on record favoring the removal of Confederate flags from official sites. Some of these politicians, like Gov. Haley of South Carolina, had only a few months earlier been defending the display of that flag. Apparently, they no longer fear offending the blatant racists in their constituencies, a number which seems in any case to be declining. 

Perhaps now Republicans will be willing to enter that conversation about race. The question is: what will they say?

UPDATE July 8: When I posted this, I was unaware that the day before, Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican candidate for president, had given a speech acknowledging that African Americans had been badly mistreated in the past (he described in graphic, grisly detail the lynching of a Black man in Texas 100 years ago). He also said that “there will continue to be an important and a legitimate role for the federal government in enforcing civil rights.”

As I suggested in an earlier post  about taking down the Confederate flag, Republican politicians may be realizing that their long-held ideas about the political dangers of acknowledging race are based on pluralistic ignorance.

Green Light, Red Light, 3-2-1

June 30, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

The good news about those countdown timers at pedestrian traffic lights is that they do what they’re supposed to do – save pedestrian lives and limbs. 

The research on this comes from two economists, Arvind Magesam and Sacha Kapoor (here). You may have heard Shankar Vedantam reporting it on NPR a few days ago (here).

The bad news is that while these timers are good for pedestriams, they are bad for cars. They increase car-on-car violence, and of a particular kind – rear-end collisions. 

Economists Magesan and Kapoor think of an intersection as market of walkers and drivers. The purpose of their study was “to evaluate a policy that improves the information of all market participants.” They conclude that giving everyone more information about when the light will change is what’s causing the accidents.

The largest increase is in rear-end accidents and we think it’s because two cars approaching a light, who both see the countdown, the guy behind, he sees the two or three seconds and thinks, oh, the guy in front of me is going to floor it too, I'll floor it and we’ll both get through the intersection. Whereas the guy in front thinks, OK, I only have two or three seconds left, I'm going to slowdown.

It’s like the old joke:

Cop to driver who has run a light: Don’t you know what that yellow light means?
Driver: Yeah, go like hell, the red one’s next.

The problem is not that pedestrians and drivers have the same information but that drivers have two sources of information. My guess is that in these rear-enders, the driver in front is paying more attention to the traffic light. he sees that it’s yellow and might turn red at any moment now. He slows down. The driver behind is focused more on the countdown timer. He sees that he still has a second or two to beat the light. Crash.

The economists have a solution – asymmetric information.  More specifically

Install them so that the pedestrians are aware of the timers but the drivers are not. And one way to do that would be to broadcast the timers via audio so that the pedestrians can hear the countdown clock go down, but drivers cannot.

Would you want the added noise of an audio signal? And if the intersection is already loud with the noise of traffic, the volume on the audio would have to be fairly high for people to hear it.

There’s a different, and cheaper, way. Give the walkers and drivers different information. In New York, some countdown timers for pedestrians are not synched with the traffic lights for cars. At the corner of 79th and Broadway, the light for cars turns red at the 9-second mark and red at 6 seconds. 

At 72nd St., if drivers going downtown on Broadway focus on the timer, rather than racing through the intersection, they will stop while the traffic light is yellow.

 (The poor quality of the video makes it hard to see the timer, but take my word  –
it goes to 0 when the traffic light turns orange.)

As you can see from just these two videos, the time difference between the lights for drivers and walkers varies considerably from one corner to the next. I have no idea whether each timing is based on some logic and evidence about the specific intersection or whether these are different treatments in an experiment.

Stateways v. Folkways; Alito v. Roberts

June 27, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Stateways cannot change folkways.”* Or can they? That’s an empirical question, and it figures briefly in two of the dissents in the Supreme Court’s gay-marriage decision yesterday.

Chief Justice Roberts (Dread Justice Roberts – except for an occasional Obamacare decision) and Justice Alito both dissented. Their arguments were mostly about the Constitution. But both also made stateways/folkways predictions about the effects the decision would have on public opinion.

Justice Roberts went sociologist Sumner one better. The law would change public opinion – but in the opposite direction.

Supporters of same-sex marriage have achieved considerable success persuading their fellow citizens—through the democratic process—to adopt their view.   That ends today.   Five lawyers have closed the debate and enacted their own vision of marriage as a matter of constitutional law.  Stealing this issue from the people will for many cast a cloud over same-sex marriage, making a dramatic social change that much more difficult to accept.              *        *        *        * Indeed, however heartened the proponents of same-sex marriage might be on this day, it is worth acknowledging what they have lost, and lost forever: the opportunity to win the true acceptance that comes from persuading their fellow citizens of the justice of their cause. And they lose this just when the winds of change were freshening at their backs. [emphasis added]

Alito, on the other hand, thinks the Court’s decision will make gay marriage so widely accepted that those who oppose marriage equality will live in fear, able to “whisper their thoughts” only in the safe rooms of their houses.

It will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy. In the course of its opinion, the majority compares traditional marriage laws to laws that denied equal treatment for African-Americans and women. The implications of this analogy will be exploited by those who are determined to stamp out every vestige of dissent. I assume that those who cling to old beliefs will be able to whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their homes, but if they repeat those views in public, they will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools. By imposing its own views on the entire country, the majority facilitates the marginalization of the many Americans who have traditional ideas.

Once you get past the whiny tone (poor little Sam Alito: “My ideas will be won’t be popular any more and people will make fun of me”), you have an empirical prediction. Those who “cling to old beliefs” will be persecuted. You know, like early Christians (or contemporary Christians if you believe Bill O’Reilly). 

For one of his predictions you have to define “marginalization” and “vilification” and get measures of them before and after yesterday’s decision — a difficult task, maybe an impossible one, though the question remains an empirical one. It will be easier to operationalize and get data on how often America’s governments, employers, and schools mistreat the anti-gay-marriage thought-whisperers.

If previous SCOTUS decisions are a guide, you have to lean towards Alito, at least as concerns public opinion. Patrick J. Egan at The Monkey Cage (here) created this chart showing trends in public opinion following decisions on interracial marriage and abortion. He also included opinion on marriage equality in the years leading up to yesterday’s decision.

In 1967, the year of the  Loving decision, supporters of interracial marriage were in the minority.** By the time of that decision, support had risen, and it continued to rise. The Court had, to paraphrase Roberts, “stolen the issue from the people,” But that decision did not “cast a cloud over interracial marriage,” nor did it “make a dramatic social change that much more difficult to accept.”  Much the opposite. But Roe v. Wade seems to have had little impact on public opinion.

Obergefell looks more like Loving than like Roe. Support for gay marriage has been on the increase and has already become the majority view. More important, the pro/anti differences are generational, as was the case with interracial marriage. The generations coming in are more liberal on this issue than are the generations exiting the population. Opposition to marriage equality will continue to fade, not because of persecution or because of “government, employers, and schools,” but because of heart disease, cancer, and respiratory illness.

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* What Sumner actually said was, “legislation cannot make mores.”* But he said it in a book called Folkways (1906), the meaning is nearly identical, and it sounds better than what he really said. For more on inaccurate quotes, see James Grossman’s blog post “Did They Really Say That?” (here).

 Grossman adds, “if you are of a mind to check ‘legislation cannot make mores,’ please note that if you do it through Google Books you are likely to be asked whether you really mean ‘legislation cannot make smores.’”

** The chart shows GSS data on “oppose ban” – 44%.  A Gallup poll from roughly the same time asking about “approval” for interracial marriage showed only about 20% approving.

Character or Structure – The David Brooks Temptation

June 26, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

I was on jury duty this week, and the greatest challenge for me was the David Brooks temptation. I found myself on the verge of using that experience to expound on the differences in generations on the great changes in culture and character that technology and history have brought.

I did my first tour of duty in the 1970s. Back then you were called for two weeks. Even if you served on a jury, after that trial ended, you went back to the main jury room. If you were lucky, you might be released after a week and a half. Now it’s two days.

What most struck me most this time was the atmosphere in the main room. Now, nobody talks. You’re in a large room with maybe two hundred people, and it’s quieter than a library. Some are reading newspapers or books, but most are on their latops, tablets, and phones. In the 1970s, it wasn’t just that there was no wi-fi, there was no air conditioning. Remember “12 Angry Men”? We’re in the same building. Then, you tried to find others to talk to. Now you try to find a seat near an electric outlet to connect your charger.

I started to feel nostalgic for the old system. People nowadays – all in their own narrow, solipsistic worlds, nearly incapable of ordinary face-to-face sociability. And so on.

But the explanation was much simpler. It was the two-day hitch. In the old system, social ties didn’t grow from strangers seeking out others in the main jury room. It happened when you went to a courtroom for voir dire. You were called down in groups of forty. The judge sketched out the case, and the lawyers interviewed the prospective jurors. From their questions, you learned more about the case, and you learned about your fellow jurors – neighborhood, occupation, family, education, hobbies. You heard what crimes they’d been a victim of.  When judge called a break for bathroom or lunch or some legal matter, you could find the people you had something in common with. And you could talk with anyone about the case, trying to guess what the trial would bring. If you weren’t selected for the jury, you went back to the main jury room, and you continued the conversations there. You formed a social circle that others could join.

This time, on my first day, there were only two calls for voir dire, the clerk as bingo-master spinning the drum with the name cards and calling out the names one by one. My second day, there were no calls. And that was it. I went home having had no conversations at all with any of my fellow jurors. (A woman seated behind me did say, “Can you watch my laptop for a second?” when she went to the bathroom, but I don’t count that as a conversation.)

I would love to have written 800 words here on how New York character had changed since the 1970s.  No more schmoozing. Instead we have iPads and iPhones and MacBooks destroying New York jury room culture – Apple taking over the Apple. People unable or afraid to talk to one another because of some subtle shift in our morals and manners. Maybe I’d even go for the full Brooks and add a few grafs telling you what’s really important in life.

But it was really a change in the structure. New York expanded the jury pool by eliminating most exemptions. Doctors, lawyers, politicians, judges – they all have to show up. As a result, jury service is two days instead of two weeks, and if you actually are called to a trial, once you are rejected for the jury or after the trial is over, you go home.

The old system was sort of like the pre-all-volunteer army. You get called up, and you’re thrown together with many kinds of people you’d never otherwise meet. It takes a chunk of time out of your life, but you wind up with some good stories to tell. Maybe we’ve lost something. But if we have lost valuable experiences, it’s because of a change in the rules, in the structure of how the institution is run, not a because of a change in our culture and character

YouThought So Too? I Had No Idea.

June 24, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

The governors of Virginia and South Carolina have now taken stands against the Confederate battle flag. So have honchos at Wal*Mart, Sears, Target, and NASCAR.

NASCAR! How could this cascade of reversals have happened so rapidly? Did these important people wake up one morning this week and say to themselves, “Gee, I never realized that there was anything racist about the Confederacy, and never realized that there was anything wrong with racism, till that kid killed nine Black people in a church,”?

My guess is that what’s going on is not a sudden enlightenment or even much of a change in views about the flag. To me it looks more like the process of “pluralistic ignorance.” What these people changed was not their ideas about the Confederacy or racism but their ideas about other people’s ideas about these matters. With pluralistic ignorance (a term coined by Floyd Allport nearly a century ago) everyone wants X but thinks that nobody else does. Then some outside factor makes it possible for people to choose X, and everyone does. Everyone is surprised – “Gee, I thought all you guys wanted Y, not X .” It looks like a rapid change in opinion, but it’s not.

A few years ago in places like Ireland and Europe, people were surprised at the success of new laws banning smoking in pubs and restaurants. Oh, the smokers will never stand for it. But it turned out that the smokers too were quite happy to have rooms with breathable air. It’s just that before the laws were passed, nobody knew that’s how other people felt because those people kept smoking. The same thing happened when New York City passed a pooper-scooper law. The law is unenforceable, people said; cops will never see the actual violation, only its aftermath. And do you really think that those selfish New Yorkers will sacrifice their own convenience for some vague public good? But the law was remarkably effective. As I said in this post from 2009,

Even before the new law, dog owners had probably thought that cleaning up after their dogs was the right thing to do, but since everyone else was leaving the stuff on the sidewalk, nobody wanted to be the only schmuck in New York to be picking up dog shit. In the same way that the no-smoking laws worked because smokers wanted to quit, the dog law in New York worked because dog owners really did agree that they should be cleaning up after their dogs. But prior to the law, none of them would speak or act on that idea.

In South Carolina and Georgia and Bentonville, Arkansas and elsewhere, the governors and the CEOs surely knew that the Confederacy was based on racist slavery; they just rarely thought about it. And if the matter did come up, as it did in a recent Supreme Court decision about license-plates, they probably assumed that most of their constituents and customers were happy with the flag and that the anti-flaggers were a cranky minority.

With the support for letting that flag fade into history, it looks now as though for quite a while, many Southerners have been uncomfortable with the blatant racism of the Confederacy and the post-Reconstruction era. But because nobody voiced that discomfort, everyone thought that other Southerners still clung to the old mentality. The murders in the Charleston church and the subsequent discussions about retiring the battle flag allowed Southerners to discover that their neighbors had always shared their misgivings about the old racism. And it allowed the retail giants to see that they weren’t going to lose a lot of money by not stocking the flag.

James Salter, 1925-2015

June 20, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

A Sport and a Pastime has long been one of my favorite novels. The author, James Salter, died yesterday. 

The novel was published in 1967. I don’t remember when I first read it – maybe in the 1970s. It had me at hello. Here are the opening sentences

September. It seems these luminous days will never end. The city, which was almost empty during August, now is filling up again. It is being replenished. The restaurants are all reopening, the shops. People are coming back from the country, the sea, the roads all jammed with cars. The station is very crowded. There are children, dogs, families with old pieces of luggage bound by straps.

Unmistakably Paris. The narrator is in the station and then on a train leaving the station.

Soon we are rushing along the valley of departure, the houses of the suburbs flashing by, ordinary streets, apartments, gardens, walls. The secret life of France into which one cannot penetrate, the life of photograph albums, uncles, names of dogs that have died.

Salter paints with quick brushstrokes, somehow finding the perfect details that convey the entire scene and an idea – that the narrator, an American, can never know this secret but ordinary France.  The names of dogs that have died.

At first, I was a bit hesitant to recommend this book to others, mostly because of the sex. Even the Times obituary is circumspect.

Controversy surrounded “A Sport and a Pastime,” a slender book dense with eroticism about an American expatriate’s affair with a young Frenchwoman. Their lovemaking is described at close range by a third party, a none too reliable narrator, in a story that has been called, among other things, “intensely transgressive.”

Any guesses as to what about the lovemaking was transgressive? OK. It was anal sex – in 1967 still a rarity for serious writers. Only Burroughs in Naked Lunch (1959) and Mailer in An American Dream (1965) come to mind, and they were using it to epater le bourgeois; these were exertions, deliberate attemps to be “transgressive.”  In A Sport and a Pastime, the anal sex is part of the love affair.

Strange that the Times is so prissy nearly three decades after they first decided the AIDS crises had made the phrase “anal sex” fit to print. I long ago abandoned my diffidence about recommending the book because of it.

The narrator presents more of a problem. His identity and his relation to the characters is ambiguous. We can trust him about what he sees out the window of the train. But how can he know what has gone on in the hotel rooms of the lovers (Philip Dean and Anne-Marie)? He makes no secret of his unreliability.

I am not telling the truth about Dean, I am inventing him. I am creating him out of my own inadequacies, you must always remember that.

But I confess, it’s mostly for the prose style that I reread this book.

Images of the towns. Sens. The famous cathedral which is reflected in the splendor of Canterbury itself rises over the icy river, over the still streets. . . . The little shops have grown close around it, cinemas, restaurants. Still, it cannot be touched. Beneath the noon sun the roof, which is typically Burgundian, gleams in the strange design of snakeskin, banded into diamonds, black and green, ocher, red. The sun splashes it like water. The brilliance seems to spread.

Snakeskin! I had looked at those roofs in Burgundy several times, but I had never really seen them.

Me and Earl and the Diffusion Curve

June 16, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

How does a movie gain an audience?

Saturday night, I went to the 7:30 showing of “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.” The movie had just opened, so I went early. I didn’t want the local teens to grab the all the good seats – you know, that thing where maybe four people from the group are in the theater but they’ve put coats, backpacks, and other place markers over two dozen seats for their friends, who eventually come in five minutes after the feature has started.

That didn’t happen. The theater (the AMC on Broadway at 68th St.) was two-thirds empty (one-third full if you’re an optimist), and there were no teenagers. Fox Searchlight, I thought, is going to have to do a lot of searching to find a big enough audience to cover the $6 million they paid for the film at Sundance. The box office for the first weekend was $196,000, which put it behind 19 other movies.
               
But don’t write off “Me and Earl” as a bad investment. Not yet. According to a story in Variety, Searchlight is hoping that “Me and Earl” will be to the summer of 2015 what “Napoleon Dynamite” was to the summer of 2004. Like “Napoleon Dynamite,” “Me and Earl” was a festival hit but with no established stars and a debut director (though Gomez-Rejon had done television – several “Glees” and “American Horror Storys”). “Napoleon” grossed only $210,000 its first week, but its popularity kept growing – slowly at first, then more rapidly as word spread – eventually becoming a cult classic. Searchlight is hoping that “Me and Earl” follows a similar path.

The other important similarity between “Napoleon” and “Earl” is that both were released in the same week as a Very Big Movie – “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” in 2004, “Jurassic World” last weekend. That too plays a part in how a film catches on (or doesn’t).

In a post three years ago (here) I graphed the growth in cumulative box office receipts for two movies – “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” and “Twilight.”  The shapes of the curves illustrated two different models of the diffusion of ideas.  In one (“Greek Wedding”), the influence came from within the audience of potential moviegoers, spreading by word of mouth. In the other (“Twilight”), impetus came from outside – highly publicized news of the film’s release hitting everyone at the same time.*

You can see these patterns again in the box office charts for the two movies from the summer of  2004 – “Harry Potter/Azkaban” and “Napoleon Dynamite.” (I had to use separate Y-axes in order to get David and Goliath on the same chart.)**

“Harry Potter” starts huge, but after the fifth week the increase in total box office tapers off quickly. “Napoleon Dynamite” starts slowly. But in its fifth or sixth week, its box office numbers are still growing, and they continue to increase for another two months before finally dissipating. The convex curve for “Harry Potter” is typical where the forces of influence are “exogenous.” The more S-shaped curve of “Napoleon Dynamite” usually indicates that an idea is spreading within the system.
       
But the Napoleon curve is not purely the work of the internal dynamics of word-of-mouth diffusion. The movie distributor plays an important part in its decisions about how to market the film - especially when and where to release the film. The same is true of “Harry Potter.” 

The Warner Bros. strategy for “Harry Potter” was to open big – in theaters all over the country. In some places, two or more of the screens at the multi-plex would be running the film. After three weeks, the movie began to disappear from theaters, going from 3,855 screens in week #3 to 605 screens in week #9.

“Napoleon Dynamite” opened in only a small number of theaters – six to be exact.  But that number increased steadily until by week #17, it was showing in more than 1,000 theaters. 

It’s hard to separate the exogenous forces of the movie business from the endogenous word-of-mouth – the biz from the buzz.  Were the distributor and theater owners responding to an increased interest in the movie generated from person to person? Or were they, through their strategic timing of advertising and distribution, helping to create the film’s popularity? We can’t know for sure, but probably both kinds of influence were happening. It might be clearer when the economic desires of the business side and the preferences of the audience don’t match up, for example, when a distributor tries to nudge a small film along, getting it into more theaters and spending more money on advertising, but nobody’s going to see it. This discrepancy would clearly show the influence of word-of-mouth; it’s just that the word would be, “don’t bother.”

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* I was working from a description of these models in Gabriel Rossman’s Climbing the Charts, which had recently been published.

** All the box office information comes from BoxOfficeMojo.

Girl With a Disputed Ethnography

June 13, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Chronicle ran this photo to accompany its story about Alice Goffman.

I don’t know what the photographer, Narayan Mahon, had in mind; I don’t knowif he was using “Rembrandt lighting.” But the portrait suggests 17th-century Holland more than 21st-century Philadelphia. It is also much different from the way Alice Goffman comes across in person.

With a Quack Quack Here

June 8, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

Heather MacDonald, in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, tried to blame an increase in killings of cops this year on a “Ferguson effect.”  Protests over the police killing unarmed people cause politicians to criticize the police. The police, rather than risk sanctions, reduce their proactive efforts. As a result, the “criminal element is feeling empowered.” So crime and cop-killing increase.

In a post last week, I offered a simple count of cop killings to show that MacDonald’s assertions about them were quack criminology. I didn’t say anything about crime in general, but in yesterday’s Daily News (here), Frank Zimring, a distinguished criminologist, calls out MacDonald on those numbers as well.

The most recent official crime statistics indicate that so far in 2015, [New York City] has experienced significant declines from 2014's ultra-low levels in burglary, robbery and larceny. At the same time, total homicides for the first five months of the year at 135 are higher than in 2014 — but quite close to the pace of 2013 and around 30% lower than in 2010. At their current rate, killings in New York City would end 2015 as either the third or fourth lowest year in the city’s modern history. “Ferguson Effect”? Doesn’t look like it. And if such an effect has indeed increased the New York homicide total, should it also get credit for the 223 fewer robberies so far in 2015 when compared to the previous year? How about the 974 fewer burglaries in five months?

The Zimring asks, “Why Mac Donald’s fearful haste?”

His answer is, roughly, that MacDonald and The Manhattan Institute where she is the Thomas W. Smith fellow just have a penchant for a sky-is-falling perception of crime. He could have added that the corollary to this view is a preference for policies promoting punishment and the police.*

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* Years ago I posted (here) about MacDonald’s “lock ’em up” views on drugs.

A Time to Be Born

June 8, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

Primates of Park Avenue is Wednesday Martin’s quasi-anthropological account of the young and the wealthy on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.  The “wife bonus” got most of the pre-publication flap, but the item that struck me was about family planning.

Martin was further panicked to learn her child had been born in the wrong month; many women on the Upper East Side time their pregnancies and IVF treatments to school enrollment, so their child will begin school at the oldest age possible — a practice known as redshirting. “You go to the Upper East Side, and everyone will be heavily pregnant in the same month, because the time to have a baby is October or November,” Martin says. “Those are the good birthdays.” [New York Post.]

And why not? We now know, thanks to Malcolm Gladwell, that role birth month plays a large part in who winds up at the top in Canadian junior league hockey.* Couple that with the child-rearing strategy that Annette Lareau calls “concerted cultivation” typical of middle- and upper-class parents. The agrarian metaphor is apt. For Martin’s East Side one-percenters, even before the cultivation of an actual child comes a careful decision about when to plant the seed. 

In this, they resemble the breeders of race horses. The official “birthday” of all thoroughbreds is January 1, so breeders time things so that for maximum development at that cutoff date.  That’s why American Pharoah and four of the other seven horses in the Belmont were foaled in April.** 

At private schools in Manhattan, where tuition fees are comparable to stud fees (K- 5 will run you upwards of $200K), a similar logic makes October and November “good birthdays. ” The cutoff date is September 1; children entering kindergarten must have turned five before that date. Those October children will have turned five eleven months before the cutoff. 

Do the Primates of Park Avenue really time their pregnancies? And does the strategy work? Are elite-school classes in May and June unpunctuated by cupcakes?  If anyone has data on the birthdays of kids in the lower schools of Dalton, Trinity, Horace Mann, etc., please come forth.

In horse racing, early developmental advantages fade as the horses become older. But Gladwell argues that for humans – or at least, for Canadian junior league hockey players – the initial advantage expands thanks to the way the system is organized. It’s what Robert Merton called “The Matthew Effect.” The parents of Park Avenue seem to subscribe to this same idea – that the October advantage extends past kindergarten, past grade school and high school, into the Ivies and then to career success.

What puzzles me is my own reaction that there’s something not quite right with this birth-timing. I accept other aspects of family planning – controlling the spacing of siblings or timing a birth so as to minimize the inconvenience to the parents’ work lives (especially given the anti-family US policies on parental leave). The same goes for the other things parents do to cultivate their children and ensure their chances of a successful life – the culturally enriching experiences, the “good” schools, the tutors, the coaches and, if necessary, the therapists – assuming that these are in fact helpful. There’s really no reason I should find the “good birthday” strategy objectionable. But I do.

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 * In first chapter of his best-seller Outliers, Gladwell shows that the ranks of the top Canadian junior league hockey teams (boys 16-19years old) are heavy with boys born in the first quarter of the year.  That’s because official age is determined by the calendar year.  The  born on January 1, 2008 and the boy born 12 months later on Dec. 31, 2008 are both seven-year olds.  But the January boy has a huge edge in physical development. He is more likely to be selected for better teams, better coaching, and better competition.

** Horses born in the early spring mature faster than do those born earlier. 
Here is a chart of the birth months of winners of the individual Triple Crown individual races since 1970 and the birth month of horses sold at the Keeneland Yearling sales. (To keep both variables on the same chart, I have divided the sales figure by 10. Data source here.)

If you are spending $60,000 to have your mare bred to Pioneer of the Nile (American Pharoah’s sire) or $300,000 for Tapit, the sire of Frosted, who finished second in the Belmont, you want to make sure that your foal has the best chance to win these million-dollar purses.