Status Politics Again – Looking Back From the Future

August 26, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The news photos of health care reform protestors – invariably described as “angry” – remind me of the photos and footage of the angry protestors in Little Rock over a half century ago.

The boy in the picture on the right must be in his sixties today. When he sees this photo now, what does he think of himself, or of his parents or whoever it was that got him to carry the sign? And all those other protesters – how many years did it take, I wonder, for their anger to turn to embarrassment or even shame? Or are they still proud of their efforts to keep black children from going to school with white children?

And now we have people angrily protesting an attempt to ensure that all Americans have health care. How will these protesters feel in ten or twenty years when they look back? What will their children or grandchildren think when they see these pictures 50 years from now?


These protests are status politics (an earlier post on this is here). They are about the symbolic meaning of a policy rather than its actual consequences. Whatever fantasies about “race mixing” may have haunted the white protesters in Little Rock, in their more rational moments, they could not really have believed that desegregating schools would have some real effect on their kids’ education or lives. Instead, desegregation was a statement that they and their ideas had lost their status in US society.

In the same way, I find it hard to believe that the people screaming about Hitler, socialism, death panels, and the rest really want to keep 40+ million Americans uninsured and to keep US health care the least cost-effective in the world. Their protests, like those of the segregationists, are about “the government.” The government, in this sense, is the symbolic representation of the country. The message they heard in desegregation and hear now in “Obamacare” is that their position in the country is no longer the dominant one.

Good Terrorists

August 24, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

“A little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms are in the physical.” When psychologist Solomon Asch, in 1946, told American students that the quote was from Lenin, they rejected the idea. Told that Jefferson was the author (and he was), they tended to agree with it. After all, the Fourth of July is a celebration of revolution, i.e., rebellion.

Fast forward to the present, and let’s talk about terrorism. I thought the word terrorist was an automatic red flag. Remember Sarah Palin’s “pals around with terrorists” slur on Obama because he had served in a couple of education and anti-poverty organizations that Bill Ayres was also part of?

Suppose a Congressman holds a public meeting at which a member of the audience says, “I’m a terrorist.” How would any US politician respond? Would he denounce the man, or would he call him “a great American”?

Think again.

Wally Herger is a Congressman from Northern California, and last week he held a town hall meeting on health care.

Web extra: Congressman Herger calls Obama plan 'threat to democracy' - Mount Shasta, CA - Mount Shasta Herald via kwout

I guess a little terrorism now and again is a good thing, so long as it’s right-wing terrorism. To what extent will the far right wingers convert their admiration for terrorism from words into actions? The record of terrorist attacks on abortion clinics and abortionists gives us some cause for concern.

Update, August 27. The video of the exchange between the self-proclaimed terrorist and Rep. Herger shows that the man uses the phrase right-wing terrorist almost in quotation marks, as if to preface his proclamation by something like, “Supporters of Obama have called us ‘right-wing terrorists.’ In that case, I am a proud right-wing terrorist.”

But as far as I know, nobody has called these tea-baggers and other assorted wingnuts terrorists unless they have in fact committed terrorist acts. Google the phrase and all you will find are references to this guy at the town hall meeting and to the Homeland Security report on real right-wing terrorists.

(HT: Mark Kleiman)

Was He Fat? I Didn’t Even Notice

August 24, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

At least two or three times a semester, I’ll tell my class that people don’t really know why they do what they do. Nobody believes me, so I rephrase the idea: We are often unaware of many things that affect our behavior.

Sometimes, we pay a price for that ignorance.

In an experiment reported this year, Eugene Caruso and colleagues told volunteers that they would be competing in a sort of trivia contest, and they could choose their teammates. They were shown pictures of the potential teammates and given information on three variables, each with three categories)

• Education (High School, B.A., M.A.)
• IQ (23, 93, 104)
• Experience (never played the game before, played 3 times, plays every week)

Oh, and one more thing. The person in the picture could be either thin or fat.

Researchers asked the subjects, 101 college students,* why they made the choices they did – that is, which criteria were most important in their decisions. Weight, which has nothing to do with winning trivia contests, was the big loser. On a 9-point scale, the students rated it 2.5 in importance; the other factors were rated 4.9, 6.4, and 5.2, respectively.

But the data on actual choices told a different story. Weight accounted for more of the variance than did any other variable, about 25%. “Participants gave up about 11 IQ points to have a thin rather than overweight teammate.”

Three points here.

• First, the students discriminated against fat people.
• Second, they were unaware of how their own prejudices involved.
• And third, when you ask people why they did something, what you get is not an accurate assessment of factors that actually affected their behavior. Instead, people mention those factors that should rationally be at work.**

*For reasons not explained in the paper, these were Bulgarian students. The title of the paper is, “101 Bulgarians – Using Conjoint Analysis to Detect Discrimination Revealing Covert Preferences from Overt Choices.” Just kidding about the part before the dash. Bulgaria is not all that far from Dalmatia, but Cruella DeVil is not even in the footnotes.

** The classic statement of this idea is Nisbett and Wilson’s “Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes,” Psychological Review 84 (May 1977), pp. 231-259.

The Food’s Not Bad Either

August 21, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

For those of us who have never lived in a country with socialized medicine, it’s always useful to get the truth from ground level about the horrors of these inferior systems. J.A. Getzlaff is an American journalist who lives, for the moment, in Paris. Here are some excerpts about French medical coverage from her blog, Foreign Parts.

Obviously, she’s biased and selective in her reporting. For example, she completely omits any mention of les panels de mort.

Foreign Parts: À AIMER: Getting Sick, Part One via kwout

A euro is about $1.42. To make it simple, just multiply by 1.5. So as an American in Paris, she pays about $85 a month for her health insurance.

The hospital room costs her $24 (€16) a night, more if she wants a . . .

Foreign Parts: À AIMER: Getting Sick, Part One via kwout

Foreign Parts: À AIMER: Getting Sick, Part One via kwout