Acknowledgments

May 23, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Is it an homage, or is it an outright ripoff?  That’s often hard to know, and maybe the difference lies not in the work itself but in whether the artist acknowledges the link.  In academic writing, we can be explicit – “As So-and-so pointed out in 1972 . . .” – and we can footnote scrupulously.   Or not.

But in the arts, a performer cannot stop the show and acknowledge the others whose material he is reworking or just plain copying.  (One of this blog’s first posts (here) was about the problem of plagiarism in comedy and magic.  ) 

Not long after, I ran across a short story in The New Yorker (Kate Walbert’s “Playdate”) that seemed, to me at least, clearly based on J. D. Salinger’s 1948 story in The New Yorker, “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut.” Homage or ripoff, I wondered at the time (here).

This week’s New Yorker brings us this opening to a short story by Lorrie Moore.

For the third time in three years, they talked about what would be a suitable birthday present for her deranged son.  There was so little they were actually allowed to bring; almost everything could be transformed into a weapon, and so most items had to be left at the front desk and the, if requested, brought in later by a big blonde aide, who would look the objects over beforehand for their wounding possibilities.  Pete had brought a basked of jams, but they were in glass jars, and so not permitted. “I forgot about that,” he said.  The jars were arranged by color, from the brightest marmalade to cloudberry to fig, as if they contained the urine tests of an increasingly ill person.  Just as well they’ll be confiscated, she thought. They would find something else to bring.

Moore makes no attempt to hide her source, though she cannot add footnotes (she’s not David Foster Wallace, and anyway that’s not the kind of footnotes he used).  To anyone vaguely familiar with Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols,” published in The New Yorker in 1948, the similarity is unmistakable.  Here is Nabokov’s opening paragraph.

For the fourth time in as many years, they were confronted with the problem of what birthday present to take to a young man who was incurably deranged in his mind. Desires he had none. Man-made objects were to him either hives of evil, vibrant with a malignant activity that he alone could perceive, or gross comforts for which no use could be found in his abstract world. After eliminating a number of articles that might offend him or frighten him (anything in the gadget line, for instance, was taboo), his parents chose a dainty and innocent trifle—a basket with ten different fruit jellies in ten little jars.

(The full text of the story is here.)

Moore even gives her story the title “Referential,” a double (at least) meaning. In the Nabokov story, the son’s delusions are a form of “referential mania.”

“Referential mania,” the article had called it. In these very rare cases, the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence.

And of course, Moore’s story, from beginning to end, is referential, if not reverential, to Nabokov’s. 

Milestone

May 21, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Yesterday’s post was the SocioBlog’s 1000th entry.  The blog took its first baby steps into cyberspace on September 20, 2006.  Here we are, 68 months and 1000 posts later. 

Thanks for reading.

They Work Hard for a Ton of Money

May 21, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’m not very good at looking at a scatterplot and estimating the correlation. 

This morning’s Wall Street Journal had a front-page story  about CEO pay.  Here’s the lede:

Chief executives increasingly are being paid based on their companies' financial results and share prices, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

The WSJ even had an outside source check their calculations and conclusions.

Pay was “highly correlated with performance,” says Steven Kaplan, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business who reviewed the Journal calculations.

Here’s the scatterplot showing the 300 largest companies:

(Click on the chart for a larger view.  Those wedge-shaped lines point to
very large photographs of individual CEOs, which I cropped out.)

I guess “highly correlated” is a term of art.  Unfortunately, the WSJ does not provide a regression line or correlation coefficient, but apparently the slope is +0.6.

On average, for every additional 1% a company returned to shareholders between 2009 and 2011, the CEO was paid 0.6% more last year, the analysis found. For every 1% decline in shareholder return, the CEO was paid 0.6% less.

I like that idea of considering the profitable CEOs separately from the CEOs whose firms lost money.  Here is the same scatterplot split down the middle. 

If you divide the Pay axis at $20 million, the relation becomes clear.  For every $20M+ CEO in a losing company, there are three in profitable companies. 

But here’s where my inability to look at the dots and estimate correlations messes me up.  To me, it looks as though among the losing firms, there’s no relation between CEO pay and how well the company did (i.e., how small its losses).  Same thing on the profit side, especially if you ignore the three $60M+ outliers.  (Timothy Cook of Apple, at $378M, lies out so far he’s not even on the chart.)  

I’m not sure to who to believe – the Wall Street Journal or my lyin’ eyes. 
The WSJ site has a chart listing the compensation of all 300 – from Apple down to Whole Foods, whose CEO didn’t even snag $1 million.

The story also heralds 2011 as showing huge improvement over the previous year in rationality, or at least the proportionality of pay to profits,

In 2010, there was no correlation; for every 1% decrease in shareholder return, the average CEO was paid 0.02% more.

Yes, you read that correctly.  The correlation was negative  – the smaller the profit (or larger the loss), the higher the CEO pay. 

She Works Hard For No Money

May 20, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross posted at Sociological Images

The politics of motherhood reared its head again last month when Hilary Rosen, who the news identified as a “Democratic strategist,” said that Ann Romney (Mrs. Mitt) had “never worked a day in her life.” (A NY Times article is here.)

“Worked” was a bad choice of words.  Raising kids and taking care of a home are work, maybe even if you can hire the kind of help that Mrs. Romney could afford.  Rosen’s comment implied that family work is not as worthwhile as work in the paid labor force.  That’s not such an unreasonable conclusion if you assume that we put our money where our values are and reward work in proportion to what we think it’s worth.  Mitt’s supporters use this value-to-society assumption to justify the huge payoffs Romney derived from those leveraged buyouts at Bain Capital.*

Even Mrs. Romney apparently felt that there must be some truth to the enviability of a career.   Why else would she refer to stay-at-home motherhood as a career?  “My career choice was to be a mother.”

Still, regardless of the truth of Rosen’s remark, it was insulting.**  Stay-at-home motherhood is work – a job. 

But is it a good job? 

A recent Gallup poll provides some more evidence as to why stay-at-home moms might be both envious or resentful of their employed counterparts.  Gallup asked women about the emotions, positive and negative, that they had felt “a lot” in the previous day.  Gallup then compared the stay-at-home moms, employed moms, and employed women who had no children at home. 

The stay-at-home moms came in first on every negative emotion.  Some of the differences are small, but the Gallup sample was more than 60,000 so these differences are statistically significant.   The smallest difference was for Stress – no surprise there, since paid work can be stressful.  Worry and Anger too can be part of the workplace.  The largest differences were for Sadness and Depression.  Stay-home moms were 60% more likely to have been sad or depressed. 

Gallup also asked about positive feelings (Thriving, Smiling or Laughing, Learning, Happiness, Enjoyment), and while the differences were smaller, they went the same way, with stay-at-home moms on the shorter end.  Still it’s encouraging that 86% of them had Experienced Happiness 86%; so had 91% of the employed moms.

Money matters.  As Rosen said,

This isn’t about whether Ann Romney or I or other women of some means can afford to make a choice to stay home and raise kids. Most women in America, let’s face it, don’t have that choice.

Gallup found a small interaction effect.  The stay-at-home mom-employed difference was greater for low-income women.

The Gallup poll does not offer much speculation about why stay-at-home moms have more sadness and less happiness. One in four experienced “a lot” of depression yesterday.  That number should be cause for concern.

Maybe women feel more uncertain and less able to control their lives when they depend on a man, especially one whose income is inadequate.  Maybe stay-at-home moms find themselves more isolated from other adults. Maybe they are at home not by choice but because they cannot find a decent-paying job. Or maybe money talks, and what it says to unpaid stay-at-home moms is society does not value your work.  Nor, in comparison with other wealthy countries, does US society or government provide much non-financial support to make motherhood easier.

The late Donna Summer sang,

She works hard for the money
So you better treat her right

But how right are we treating women who work hard for no money?

-------------------------------

* For example, Edward Conrad is a former partner of Romney.  In a recent article in the Times Magazine, Adam Davidson writes, “If a Wall Street trader or a corporate chief executive is filthy rich, Conrad says that the merciless process of economic selection has assured that they have somehow benefitted society.”

** Hillary Clinton committed a similar gaffe twenty years ago in response to a reporter’s question about work and family “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life”