Draw-a-line Contest

July 17, 2007Posted by Jay Livingston

My previous post was about methodological dishonesty. Here we go again.

A line is a convenient way of illustrating the relation between variables, a quick way to make sense of the trend in an array of points. Here’s a graph showing two variables – the percent of income that corporations supposedly pay (X-axis) and the percent of GDP accounted for by taxes.

Your assignment is to draw a line that shows the relation between these to variables. (Try doing it before you scroll down to see my solution.)



Here’s what I got.



The line is not quite straight – I used Paint, and I haven’t figured out how to draw a straight line – but you get the idea. The higher the tax rate, the more money for the government. That’s only common sense. And the graph seems to show that it holds true even when that money is figured as a proportion of GDP.

If these data points were hours of study time and GPA, we’d conclude that studying generally raises your GPA.

Norway is an “outlier” and we’d need to take a closer look at it to figure out why its tax revenues are so much higher, relative to GDP, than are those in countries with similar corporate tax rates. (If this were studying and GPA, we’d probably conclude that Norway must be unusually smart.)

But that’s not how conservative economists want things to work. They believe in something called the Laffer curve. It’s based on the idea that if you raise taxes too much, people and corporations will be discouraged and not bother working. For example, if the government taxed 100% of your income, would you work? Of course not, and the government would get no taxes from you.

Conversely, if you lower taxes, revenue will actually go up because people will work more, make more money, and even though the percentage paid is lower, the total amount paid will be higher. Twenty percent of $100,000 is more than 30% of $50,000.

When the Cheney-Bush administration proposed huge tax cuts back in 2001, some people thought the loss of tax revenue would erase the surpluses built up in the Clinton years and create a deficit. But the conservatives hauled out the Laffer-curve theory to counter these arguments. Of course they were wrong. The tax cuts quickly wiped out the surplus and ran up huge deficits.

So what’s a Laffer believer like the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal to do with this array of points? Look at the line they draw to illustrate the relation between tax rates and revenue.


Now Norway, instead of being an outlier, is the point that best allows the Journal to draw the Laffer curve. It's a bit of a stretch, much like travelling from the United Arab Emirates to France by going through Norway

Usually, we try to draw a line so that it minimizes the distance of points from the line. The Wall Street Journal line maximizes the distances. Seems like a good idea, doesn't it. If you studied a fair amount and still wanted to improve your GPA, I guess the Journal would suggest cutting down on book time. Let’s party.

Hat tip: Several other bloggers have picked up on this bit of nonsense. Kieran Healy, in his own commentary, links to several of them

Conclusions First, Then the Research

July 15, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Sometimes in class, I’ll ask students how they might find get information on some sociological question. “Do a survey,” is the frequent answer. Students seem to think that a survey, any survey, has magical powers to reveal the truth.

“A survey is just asking a bunch of people a bunch of questions,” I usually say. “Who are you going to ask, and what are you going to ask them?” In other words, the validity of a survey depends on the quality of the sample and the quality of the questions.

Michael Schwartz, when he was a grad student TA for the methods course, would give students an assignment intended to tarnish the objectivity-mystique of surveys: : “Design a questionnaire to show that . . .” Conclusion first, then the research. Mike’s point was that the questions – the order in which they are asked, the phrasing, etc. – can bias the results. I think part two of the assignment was to design a second questionnaire that would yield a result directly opposite to the first.

It was all in good, educational fun, I thought. Real researchers would never deliberately do something like that. But today, Mark Kleiman at The Reality-Based Community gives some examples of result-oriented questions from Zogby polls. Zogby is a pretty good source on political questions, especially their surveys of international populations. So it was sobering to see these polls custom-tailored to produce the results wanted by the people who were paying for the survey.

Here’s an example for a poll Zogby did for Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group that gets a lot of its money from the Clinton-hating Scaife foundation.

Some people believe that the Bill Clinton administration was corrupt. Whether or not you believe the Clinton administration was corrupt, how concerned are you that there will be high levels of corruption in the White House if Hillary Clinton is elected President in 2008?

I think that the Sociology department at Montclair will rewrite some of the items in our teacher evaluation forms.

Some students in this professor’s other courses have said that this instructor is one of the best in the university. Regardless of those other courses, how would you rate the professor’s performance in this course?

Maneaters

July 13, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

David Brooks, in his Tuesday op-ed column in the Times, wrote about today’s young women:

These iPhone Lone Rangers are completely inner-directed; they don’t care what you think. They know exactly what they want; they don’t need anybody else.

A lot of people on the left wish the Times would dump Brooks. He holds down the neoconservative seat on the Times op-ed page, and he usually writes about politics. He was a staunch supporter of the Iraq invasion and many other policies of the Cheney-Bush administration. But sometimes he looks at social and cultural matters, so he’s providing something for us sociologists, even though, as with his politics, he usually gets it wrong.

For the text of his sermon on Tuesday, he took three hit songs: Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend,” “U + Ur Hand,” by Pink, and “Before he Cheats,” by Carrie Underwood. (He could have added Nelly Furtado’s huge hit “Maneater.”)

These songs, according to Brooks, herald the appearance of a new kind of young woman – “hard-boiled, foul-mouthed, fed up, emotionally self-sufficient and unforgiving.” She’s the female counterpart of the hard-bitten hero of Western movies or the hard-boiled detective of crime fiction. Clint Eastwood and Bogie in drag.

But Brooks’s radio must be tuned in to unusual versions of these songs. These women are not emotionally self-sufficient, they’re angry, and they want revenge. The tough guys in US culture are essentially devoid of feeling. They don’t get mad, they get even. Suppressing their emotions, including anger, allows them to mete out justice, even against those they might once have been romantically involved with. In the well-known ending of I the Jury (see the film “Marty” next time it comes around on TCM), private eye Mike Hammer shoots his former love Charlotte after figuring out that she’d killed his partner.

“How c-could you?” she gasped.
I only had a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in.
“It was easy,” I said.

The justice is not purely abstract or ideological; the hero has been personally touched by the crime. But he also acts on the basis of personalized principle, not a simple emotional reaction. Sam Spade puts it nicely at the end of “The Maltese Falcon,” in circumstances similar to those of I the Jury. He discovers that Brigid O’Shaughnessy has killed his partner. She appeals to their past relationship: “You know in your heart that in spite of anything I've done, I love you.”

But Spade is adamant: “You killed Miles and you’re going over for it.” He explains, “When a man's partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something. It makes no difference what you thought of him. He was your partner, and you’re supposed to do something about it.”

A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

The women in these songs are not acting on any general principle. They are responding, violently and personally to personal insults. They don’t want justice; they want revenge.

That I dug my key into the side of his pretty little souped up 4 wheel drive,
carved my name into his leather seats,
I took a Louisville slugger to both headlights,
slashed a hole in all 4 tires...
Maybe next time he'll think before he cheats.

(In America, if you really want to take revenge on a guy, go after his car.)

As Brad deLong points out, the rage of a woman scorned goes back a few years – Medea, Clytemnestra, Frankie and Johnny. But in our culture, it’s usually been the men who are allowed to express their anger by seeking revenge. So in a way Brooks is right; the tone in these songs may not be completely unprecedented, but it is atypical. The women in these songs also don’t bother with the typically feminine strategies of seduction, pleading, or guilt-tripping to get what they want. They make direct demands, and if the guy can’t meet those demands, to hell with him.

Brooks attributes the ethos of these songs to the Zeitgeist. They are “a product of the cold-eyed age of divorce and hookups. It’s also a product of the free-floating anger that’s part of the climate this decade.”

Not exactly. The emotions and actions in these songs have been around for centuries. It’s just that for most of that history, they had been restricted to men. If the popularity of these songs illustrates anything, it’s the democratization of emotions and actions, much like the “foulmouthed” language that upsets Brooks. Those words, reactions, and actions which have long been a male preserve are now becoming legitimate for women as well. At least for rock stars.

These songs are all hits. I just wish we had some data on who’s downloading them – men or women.

Ratatouille

July 8, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Ratatouille” opened to universally great reviews, and it’s a delightful film. The more important question for Hollywood, though, is not whether a film is good but whether it will make money. No, not just whether it will make money but whether it will make a lot of money. “Ratatouille” had an opening weekend gross of “only” $47.2 million, and people at Disney already felt they had to spin the numbers to rebut claims that the movie was a disappointment.

The “trades” (I love using show-biz lingo) were comparing it unfavorably with “Cars,” Pixar’s 2006 summer movie and a big money make. But besides the financial comparison, the two films also provide an interesting cultural comparison. They exemplify the “culture wars,” the red-state blue-state divide.

“Cars” embodied the Nascar red-state mythology, not just because of its obvious theme (stock car racing) and setting (the American Southwest) but because of its moral: the triumph of American small-town virtues (friendship, community) over egotistical self-fulfillment and achievement.

The Michael J. Fox film, “Doc Hollywood,” was nearly identical in plot (career-minded doctor headed for Beverly Hills crashes his Porsche and winds up in a small Southern town; you can guess the rest), but this theme is a staple in many American fictions. Community is to be prized over individual achievement; plain small-town folk are better than city fast-trackers.

“Ratatouille,” by comparison, is downright unAmerican. I imagine Disney-Pixar was taking a chance even with the title, a foreign word unknown to many Americans, and most of those who do know it probably can’t spell it. On the other hand, what could be more American than “Cars”? The movie is set in France, a country US patriots were boycotting not so long ago (remember “freedom fries”?).  As for the virtues of bucolic settings, the rural life shown at the start of the film has little to recommend it, and our hero, the rat Remy, quickly winds up in Paris. And this movie loves Paris, a city which has long been, in the American imagination, the antithesis of down-home American virtues and values. Paris is tempting because of its sensuality (“How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm?”) but ultimately evil.

Even the basic concept of the film must seem foreign to the red-state mentality. It’s not about a manly pursuit like driving fast; it’s about cooking. While other films may extol just plain folks who eat plain simple food that nobody made too much of a fuss over in preparing, “Ratatouille” dismisses such an attitude as unworthy. Food is something that requires attention, both in the cooking and the eating. And the film takes frequent jabs at the American way of eating. It makes Remy’s rival (the evil chef Skinner) all the more repugnant by having him promote his line of micorwavable frozen foods – burritos, pizzas, and other things you’d find in many American freezers. Even worse, he has his people working to produce a frozen corn dog.

The attack on American bread is a bit more subtle – a didactic speech by a female chef giving the audience a lesson in what makes for good bread: a crunchy crust. The slap at our preference for squishy bread (Wonder) is so obvious she doesn’t need to say it out loud.

Despite this unAmerican aura, the film seems to be “doing well,” and the grosses from the weekend will probably look encouraging. I take these numbers as a sign that things are changing in America, that good food, even good European food, is not something that happens only on the coasts. Remember the Republican attacks on Democrats in recent elections as “brie-eating, chablis-drinking” pretentious snobs? But stores in the heartland are selling brie and chablis. David Kamp is probably exaggerating in calling America The United States of Arugula, but apparently a lot of Americans now at least know what arugula is.

In fact, the red-state blue-state division may be less an accurate representation of reality than a convenient stereotype dreamed up by politicians and the press. Like any stereotype, it may be a useful shorthand with some truth to it, but like other stereotypes, it can also make real-life contradictions harder to see. Not so long ago, a caffe latte was an exotic drink reported on by adventurous tourists returning from Italy. Now, every kid in Iowa and Wyoming has grown up with Starbucks. The drinks have been Americanized (a spoonful of high fructose corn syrup makes the espresso go down), but now latte and cappuccino are as American as pizza.

Maybe the next time you stop in at Flo’s Café in Radiator Springs, the menu will feature ratatouille.