The Decline of Car Culture

March 23, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

(I was going to call this post “SocioBlog Scoops the Times - By Five Years”)

Nearly five years ago, a post on this blog said

cars may have lost their symbolic value as markers of identity.

Today, a front-page story in the Times  says

many young consumers today just do not care that much about cars.

My comment came after I’d been watching “American Graffiti” on TV.  My teenage son was in the room, and it just seemed to me that while the cars in the movie carried so much meaning for me, the cars of his generation were at best transportation, at worst nuisances or eco-villains.  As I put it five years ago,

Occasionally, I would offer an astute cinematic comment like, “The fifty-eight Impala, what a car.”   But later as we were talking about it, my son wondered what sorts of things from today would trigger the same kinds of response forty or fifty years from now.  “Will we look at a movie and say, ‘Wow, a 2007 Accord!’?”

Or as the Times says today,

That is a major shift from the days when the car stood at the center of youth culture and wheels served as the ultimate gateway to freedom and independence. Young drivers proudly parked Impalas at a drive-in movie theater, lusted over cherry red Camaros as the ultimate sign of rebellion or saved up for a Volkswagen Beetle on which to splash bumper stickers and peace signs.

This loss of iconic status for the car is not universal.  It has happened primarily among the current counterparts of the kids in “American Graffiti” – white, middle-class, mostly suburban. Young, urban African Americans may still prize their ride.  In the 1960s, we had the Beach Boys, an unquestionably white group, singing about T-birds, 409s, and deuce coupes, while their imitators paid homage to Barracudas, super-stocked Dodges, and many others.  For today’s equivalent, you have to go to the rappers, who favor Beamers, Benzes, Bentleys, Escalades, and Lamborghinis.

It’s Not So Hot Being a Republican

March 22, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Hot enough for you?  Your answer might depend on who you’re voting for.

World views affect not just how we interpret what we see; these views influence what we actually experience.  That was the point of the previous post.

Do people who reject the idea global warming perceive the weather as being cooler?  Gallup just published the results of a poll (here) that asked people if this winter was warmer than usual. Unfortunately, Gallup asked only for political affiliation, but it can stand as a rough proxy for ideas about global warming.  So the data are suggestive, not conclusive. But for what it’s worth, Democrats were more likely than Republicans to say yes, it’s been a warm winter.  Some of the difference can be attributed to geography (Democrats living in places that had a much warmer winter than usual). But I suspect that at least part of the 11-point difference is political.  

Republicans reject the idea that the world is getting warmer – that’s a question of science – but they also experience their own immediate environment as cooler, which is a matter of perception.

As the graph shows, Gallup then asked those who did think that the winter was unusually warm what they thought the cause was – global warming or just normal variation..  As you might expect, political affiliation made a difference.   Democrats were more than twice as likely as Republicans to cite global warming as the cause.

Faulty Cognitive Wiring and the News

March 21, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross-posted on April 18 at Sociological Images)

Have you heard about the killing of Trayvon Martin?  Even if you watch the news channels, the answer might depend on which one you watch.  ThinkProgress counted the number of stories about this killing on three cable news outlets in the week following the event. 




Megan McCardle (here) interprets the data as an example of “the Availability Heuristic, a rule of thumb that says the frequency of an event should correspond to how quickly you can think of examples of it.”  The Availability Heuristic makes us overestimate the risk of shark attacks.  The Availability Heuristic is probably behind my students’ writing confidently that teenage pregnancy has been steadily rising (thank you, MTV). 

McCardle looks at the graph and sees a reason for different perceptions of racism as a problem:

the disparity here may have something to do with whether one thinks institutional racism remains a serious problem in the United States. Conservatives often seem to think it isn’t, and that if anything, the real problem is how often spurious charges of white racism are deployed by their political opponents, while liberals more often tend toward the opposite view. Maybe both groups are drawing justified inferences from the data they’re seeing.

Do Fox viewers discount racism because of what they see?  Or is the network disparity more an example of another cognitive wiring problem – Confirmation Bias?  Confirmation bias is our tendency to seek out and to remember information that fits with our existing ideas.  Faced with information that clashes with that world view, we ignore, forget, distort, or misinterpret. 

In Foxland – the world of both those who create Fox news and those who consume it – racism is not a real problem.  A story of a white Hispanic man armed with a 9mm chasing down and shooting a black teenager armed only with Skittles has no place in that world.  The Fox news producers don’t want to tell that story, and the viewers don’t want to hear it.  In the days since this graph appeared, the story has become too big for even Fox to ignore. I would imagine that Fox will instead interpret the events so as to fit with the view that McCardle suggests – that whites are the victims.  If you watch Fox, get ready to hear a lot about self-defense.

Subtle Ben

March 21, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Ben Bernanke defended the Fed yesterday.  He explained the origins and functions of his little organization, and he explained the wisdom of FDR’s decision to abandon the gold standard.

Ostensibly, he was lecturing to a handful of George Washington University students.  In fact, his intended audience was the whole country and perhaps a former TV host and a politician or two with retrograde views on central banks and gold (“I’m looking at you, Ron Paul.”  No, he didn’t say that, but he might well have done so.)

His PowerPoint included a few slides on the gold standard, all with the same graphic.

And in case you didn’t catch the subtlety of those ingots, this part of the lesson was followed immediately by a detour through William Jennings Bryan and his “cross of gold speech.”

 

If you missed class, you can get the notes and slides here.