Handling the Truth

April 3, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

We can’t handle the truth.  We want all the facts to fit with our picture of the world.

The “Mad Men” scripts (see last week’s post ) use words and constructions unknown to real 1966 ad men.   These anachronisms sound “right” to us despite their historical inaccuracy.   And historical facts may sound wrong. 

The Times TV critic saw the “Mad Men” season opener and complained:

The themes of civil rights and equal opportunity thudded into view in a couple of unfortunately ham-handed scenes, one involving the scamps at Young & Rubicam dropping water bombs on picketers (“And they call us savages!” an indignant protester exclaimed) . . .

Bad scene, bad line.  “It’s a terrible line that should have been red-penciled,” said the New York Magazine critic.”  The only trouble is that it’s all taken directly from a 1966 news item in the New York Times.

(This is a screen grab.  To see the full 1966 Times story – and if you saw 

the episode of “Mad Men” you must read it – go here. )

Far from being disarmed by the facts, the critics stood their ground when informed of the historical accuracy.  The Times critic still insisted that the scene was bad and that the line, a true quote, “just rings so false.”

The critics are right, of course.  All the news that’s fit to print does not make for good drama.  A scriptwriter or novelist has to select and shape the facts and edit the language.  What fictional people do and say must not clash with character. 

This preference for a coherent story, a perfect congruence of character and action, becomes a problem when we use it to filter reality and then think that this filtered reality is “the truth.”  But that’s another story.

Following the Money

April 2, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the politics of wealth and taxes, the dominant emotion in the US seems to be righteous anger.  The Occupy movement looks at the 1% and thinks they are getting too much money and paying too little in taxes.  The Tea Partiers complain that the government is picking their pockets and giving too much to the poor, who are not paying enough in taxes. 
Here are two graphs that might be relevant.

First, of the total increase in income in the US in 2010, who got how much? 

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

This Piketty and Saez graph was included in an article by Steven Rattner at the New York Times website (here).  It’s a little misleading because that $80 apiece increase for the 99% was not evenly distributed.  I would imagine that in the lower 50% the increase was meager at best.

At the same time, have rising tides been lifting all boats?  That depends on which country your boat is floating in. 

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

The income of the median US earner hasn’t moved much in the last twenty years.  That includes the economically sunny 1990s.   In some other countries, everyone seems to be doing better.  (This graphic, found here, comes from a report nearly a year ago.  I discovered it today thanks to a link from Matt Yglesias at Slate.) 

I would guess that the anger over income and taxes would be less pronounced if incomes had been rising.  The signs from the 99% were often complained that they could not find jobs, at least not jobs that would allow them to make even a small dent in their student loans.  What rankles them is not just that incomes at the top are soaring but that incomes for the middle have become insufficient.  On the other side.  It’s even possible that Republicans, had their incomes been rising steadily, might not be so resentful about tax-funded safety-net programs.

AKD - 2012

March 31, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

We had our annual Alpha Kappa Delta induction ceremony Thursday evening. ΑΚΔ is the sociology honor society, and the students who join are not only the best and brightest (ΑΚΔ has a minimum B+ average requirement), but they’re the ones who have some commitment to sociology.  They’re the ones we like to have in class.   At the ceremony, we get to see them a little more dressed up than usual, and we get to meet their parents, if only briefly.

From left to right

• Pamella Salgado
• Jessica McCabe
• Francheska Martinez
• Samantha Gowe
• Nadia Ibrahim
• Tiffany Holoubek
• Brienna Rauhauser
• Atika Rahaman
• Benjamin Rhodes

Our speaker was Jenn Lena, author of the recently published Banding Together: How Communities Create Genres in Popular Music.  Jenn has done radio interviews about the book, but she says that this was her first “official” book talk.  She used rap as her example of a music that has evolved through the sequence of genre types – Avant Garde, Scene Based, Industry Based, and Traditional.  Good choice, I thought, it’s certainly something students will know. But I was surprised that it was only a few of the parents in the room who knew of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.  I also noticed one of those parents – and no one else in the room – rapping along quietly when Jenn played Run DMC’s “It’s Tricky.”   So rap now has a generation gap; it’s a “traditionalist” genre.  (Jenn also pointed out that it had a genre gap much earlier, with the arrival of gangsta and other variants.)

A great talk.  A great group of students.  A great evening. 
Same time next year.

UPDATE April 1:  After Jenn’s talk, it occurred to me that the Broadway show  “Million Dollar Quartet,” which I blogged about two years ago (here) is really about the transition from Scene-based to Industry-based.  The setting for the show is the scene-based studio of Sam Phillips’s Sun records, but we are looking at the end of an era.  Elvis and Johnny Cash are leaving for industry-based giants like RCA. 

Stacked Bar Graphs

March 30, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

To create stacked bar charts, I usually use Excel.  But whoever* created these used Legos, a children’s diversion, appropriately enough.  Numbers 5 and 8 are based on French -Belgian data**, so you may find them harder to interpret.

(Click on the graphic for a slightly larger view.)

* The farthest I can trace this back is actor George Takei, who posted it on his Facebook page.  I expect that it is zooming around the Internet fairly quickly.

** For original data go here and here.