The Real America

July 5, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

I was thinking yesterday about Sarah Palin’s famous phrase, “the real America.” I was thinking about it at the parking lot at the beach, where, as we were unloading the car, a fortyish man wished my family a “Hyeppy Fourth of July,” as he passed, then went back to speaking Russian with his group. The beach itself had a diversity that I usually take for granted, at least when I’m not thinking about “the real America.” The Dominicans and Koreans and blacks, the Indian women in their beach saris, the older guy with a gold “ ח י” dangling on his pale chest, the Chinese families – they are the America I live in, and they seemed very real. So did the traffic jam as we inched along the Cross Island Parkway on the way home, and so did the all the thousands of people standing on the West Side Highway who came out of their apartments into the heat to watch the fireworks on the Hudson.

They are all real, but they’re not Palin’s “real America” and I think I know what she means: “real” in the sense of “ideal” – not a utopian, unattainable ideal, but one that actually exists.

A history teacher in my high school asked us who we thought of as the “typical” Mt. Lebanon student. The kid who got by far the most votes was the quarterback and captain of the football team, a High Honor Roll student who went on to Yale. He was real, but he was not typical. Even in my bell-curve-ignorant adolescence I knew that much.

In my own way, I too conflate the real with the ideal, and maybe you do too. I think that if you want to see the real me as a teacher, you should have been in class that day two semesters ago, when I presented the material so compellingly, and all the students were into it, asking questions, and suddenly getting it (also laughing at my jokes and making their own). Those other hours – the ordinary ones and especially the dreary ones – they’re not the real me.

I wonder if the millions of us sitting in traffic, on our way to a job in some Dilbert cubicle, are thinking that this is not the real America and not the real me. The real America is Palin’s real America, and you can read it in the names of our cars. But somehow the real America of those Sequoias and Comanche Explorers, Tahoes, Scouts, and Trail Blazers got trapped in this traffic jam on the Parkway in the same way that a transsexual might feel trapped in a man’s body although he is “really” a woman. In grad school, I knew a guy who was certain that he was “really” an NBA power forward trapped in the body of a Jewish 5' 10" math grad student.

As Palin herself acknowledged, in her dictionary “real” meant “best.” Here’s the longer version:

The best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.

Palin’s “real America” – Norman Rockwell, but with guns and NASCAR – does exist, and for many it’s an attractive picture. The trouble lies in thinking that those other Americans are not real or, as Palin says, are not sufficiently pro-America, and therefore do not have a legitimate right to govern, a view that seems fairly common among the Tea Partiers. The other trouble comes when you try to use that vision as a basis for policy.Those Norman Rockwell pictures have nothing in them about trillions of dollars in highly leveraged CDOs or the complicated politics, ethnic and violent, in the foreign lands we invade, or any of the other problems that government – real government – has to deal with.

Company Ways

July 1, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

“How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” was on TMC Tuesday night in honor of the centenary of Frank Loesser’s birth. The Broadway show opened in 1961, sort of a musical comedy version of William H. Whyte’s 1956 best-seller The Organization Man.


Loesser’s musical was light satire; Whyte’s book was sociology. But the message of both was that corporations were places that demanded nearly mindless conformity of all employees. Or as Mr. Twimble tells the ambitious newcomer (J. Pierpont Finch), “play it the company way.”

FINCH:When they want brilliant thinking / From employees
TWIMBLE: That is no concern of mine.
FINCH: Suppose a man of genius / Makes suggestions.
TWIMBLE: Watch that genius get suggested to resign.

Conformity was a topic of much concern in America in those days, in the popular media and in social science (as in the Asch line length experiments). Today, not so much.

the Organization Man, if he ever existed, is dead now. The well-rounded fellow who gets along with pretty much everyone and isn’t overly brilliant at anything sees his status trading near an all-time low. And all those brilliant screwballs whose fate Whyte bemoaned are sitting now on top of corporate America.

So wrote Michael Lewis in Slate 1997.

That’s one version. I don’t really know if the corporate climate is different today (where’s an OrgTheorist when you need one?). No doubt, “brilliant screwballs” can find save haven in corporations, at least in areas that require technical brilliance, and some may wind up at the top. But I wonder how such quirkiness survives in other areas like sales. Barbara Ehrenreich, in her recent book Bright-Sided, looks at corporations today – with their motivational speakers and “coaches” – and sees the same old demand for cheerful, optimistic obedience, especially in this era of outsourcing and downsizing.

The most popular technique for motivating the survivors of downsizing was “team building” – an effort so massive that it has spawned a “team-building industry” overlapping the motivation industry. . . .
The literature and coaches emphasize that a good “team player” is by definition a “positive person.” He or she smiles frequently, does not complain, is not overly critical, and gracefully submits to whatever the boss demands.

Or as Frank Loesser put it,

FINCH: Your face is a company face.
TWIMBLE: It smiles at executives then goes back in place.

Here’s the whole song from the 1967 film version:

The movie has another uncanny resemblance to today. The costumes and even the sets look like “Mad Men” – not surprising since both are set in the New York corporate world of the early 1960s. But there’s more. In the Broadway show and then the musical of “How to Succeed,” Robert Morse (Finch), rises to become head of advertising. Fifty years later, in “Mad Men,” Robert Morse (Bert Cooper) is the head of an advertising agency. (And he’s still wearing a bow tie.)

I asked my son, a “Mad Men” watcher, to look at the 1967 movie and try to identify the actor playing Finch. He couldn’t, at least not without a hint or two.

Methods Fraud - Right and Left

June 30, 2010

Two links:

1. Fox News used a really, really deceptive graph to make job loss data look even worse than it really is. Media Matters has the story.

2. Research 2000, a polling firm, may have been faking its data. Kos, who has been relying on their polls, has a long post detailing the tell-tale signs – things people would do if they were trying to make their polls appear to follow random sampling. (Makes me feel a bit more confident of my own criticism of a Research 2000 poll.)

UPDATE, July 1: I had thought that the Kos/Research 2000 story was just for those interested in technical matters (sampling, data distributions) and maybe political blogs. But the both the Times and WaPo and perhaps other newspapers have stories about it today.

Rich and Richer, Dumb and Dumber

June 28, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities ran the CBO data on income and published a report showing the huge increase in inequality since 1979, especially in recent years (the data go up to 2007 – full report here). It’s the people at the top – the default swappers and hedge funders – who’ve been making out like bandits, while the rest of us limped slowly along.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

The graph shows percent changes. How much is that in American money?

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

We all knew this. But I’m still surprised that supposedly intelligent people can still attribute it all to individual factors. Yes, individual differences in ability account for individual differences. But they don’t make for huge changes in the overall distribution
.
But here we have Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit, one of the most widely read bloggers in the known universe (especially the conservative universe), reprinting the comment of a reader at a tax blog that posted the data.

A reason for the “wealth or income gap”: Smart people keep on doing things that are smart and make them money while stupid people keep on doing things that are stupid and keep them from achieving.

People who get an education, stay off of drugs, apply themselves, and save and wisely invest their earnings do a lot better than people who drop out of school, become substance abusers, and buy fancy cars and houses that they can’t afford, only to lose them.

We don’t have an income gap. We have a stupid gap.

Glenn calls it “the comment of the day.”

In 1993, the average household in the top 1% was making 36 times the income of a household in the lowest fifth. In the next 14 years, those top guys worked really hard while the poor apparently sold their diplomas to buy crack and Escalades, so by 2007 the gap had doubled. The richest now made 72 times the income of the poor.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

The funny thing is that for a few years (1984- 1983 1993) the rich-poor gap was decreasing. It must have been all the cocaine those bond traders were doing.

The commenter is right – there may be a stupid gap. But it’s the gap that Durkheim suggested long ago. Some people look at “social facts” – large differences between one time or place and another – and try to explain them in terms of individual facts. Other people seek an explanation in social facts – facts about the society, facts which individuals have little power to change.

(HT: Mark Kleiman)