Inflation - Garden Variety

February 22, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Sports is a business. 

The Dow is getting close to 13,000.  The Knicks are getting close to .500.  This month at least, it’s the Knicks who have been doing better, but then the Dow doesn’t have Jeremy Lin.  The Knicks do. 

The Knicks are owned by MSG, and the change in the Knicks’s fortunes has been taking place not just on the floor of the Garden but on the floor of the Stock Exchange as well.  Here is the chart of MSG vs. the Dow so far this year.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

Lin’s breakout game was against the Nets on Feb. 4, a Saturday.  The next trading day, Feb. 6, MSG shows mostly a continuation of a pre-Lin upswing.  But Lin does seem to have had an effect.  The stock kept rising over the next several days, climbing higher than it had been in a couple of years.  February 13 was the first trading day after Lin’s 38-point game against Kobe and the Lakers.  Both the volume of trading and the price were up. 

The people at The Harvard Sports Analysis Collective (they have an understandable interest in all things Lin) have tracked the Lin effect on the stock price and compared it with similar periods surrounding the arrival of other big Knicks – Carmelo and Stoudemire.  Air ball.  Apparently, the traders at the NYSE ignored those trades at the Garden. 
The Collective provides one other financial indicator:  $503.82.  That was the average cost of a ticket to Sunday’s game against Dallas (the Knicks won by five).  That Nets game back on the Feb. 4th would have cost you, on average, only $140.57.  The price of a Knicks ticket has more than tripled in less than a month.  Talk about inflation (and no, I’m not going to say it, not here, not in the post’s title, not anywhere.  Enough already.)

Distinction in the Buff

February 21, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

According to a story in today’s Guardian, Bourdieu is “the second most frequently quoted author in the world, after Michel Foucault.”  

Sociology students the world over are familiar with concepts such as social reproduction, symbolic violence and cultural capital.

Funny you should mention cultural capital, given another story in the Guardian (and elsewhere) about Dominique Strauss Kahn.  I may be misinterpreting Bourdieu, but I think cultural capital includes the ability to distinguish what is of high quality from what is ordinary.  La distinction is what characterizes the French elite.

As for Strauss Kahn,  certainly a member of that elite, he’s being questioned by French police about his part in recruiting prostitutes for “soirées coquines” at a hotel in Lille.   (In France, being a client is not illegal, but pimping is.)  DSK is claiming that he didn’t know the women were prostitutes.   As his lawyer said, shortly after the case came to light in France,  

People are not always clothed at these parties. I challenge you to tell the difference between a nude prostitute and a classy lady in the nude

That “classy lady” may not be le mot juste.  Worse, this Times translation also loses the Bourdieu angle – distinction.   Here’s what the lawyer actually said,

Je vous défie de distinguer une prostituée nue d'une femme du monde nue.

I’ll have to reread Bourdieu to see if he makes the point that la distinction requires that people have their clothes on.

Exceptional American Magazine Covers

February 18, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

American “exceptionalism” often takes the form of American insularity – the assumption that we don’t really need to know anything about the rest of the world.  The European economic crisis, how and whether it is resolved, surely will have an impact on the US economy.  But to judge from Time Magazine covers (the Feb. 20 edition) , it’s not worth our attention, at least not when you compare it with something really important – like animal friendships.

Kos has several other examples.  Or go to the source and click back through the weeks.

I’ve noted before (here) how news magazine covers show the American preference for life-style stories rather than hard news.  Again, I’m reminded of the line spoken by Ben Kingsley as Behrani, the Iranian immigrant in the movie “The House of Sand and Fog”:

Americans . . . They have the eyes of small children who are forever looking for the next source of distraction, entertainment, sweet taste in the mouth.

Avoiding Indeterminacy (Predicting the Past)

February 15, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

One of the most difficult ideas to grasp or accept is indeterminacy, randomness.  We devote a considerable effort to making up stories to show that nothing is random, that everything is, or was, predictable. 

“We should have seen Lin coming” was the headline in Carl Bialik’s Wall Street Journal blog post (here) on Monday. 

Jeremy Lin – is there anybody who has not heard about “Linsanity”? – a guard for the Knicks, is the NBA’s new great white hope, though he’s Asian (his parents are from Taiwan).  Single-handedly he is bringing the NBA a new demo.  Even when the Knicks are on the road, the fans – in Washington, in Toronto, wherever – cheer for Lin.

Like one of those huge best-sellers by an unknown author that 39 publishers turned down before one took a chance, Lin’s talents might never have seen the light of NBA.  He played well at Harvard but in the NBA draft received not a nibble.   Eventually, he was picked up by the Knicks, but they too had no idea that Lin was star material.  Coach D’Antoni didn’t give him much court time until a game earlier two weeks ago when Lin went in to give Bibby a breather.  He scored 25 points, and since then, he has been headline news.

How did everyone miss him?  Carl Bialik is the WSJl’s “Numbers Guy,” and he puts together some numbers to show that Lin’s abilities were clear from the start.  Numbers like this:

Per 40 minutes this season, he’s taken 7.8 shots at the rim and made five of them. That’s the second-most made field goals from the rim for guards who’ve played at least 10 games and at least 10 minutes per game, and a percentage in line with the impressive Nos. 1 and 3 on the list . . .

If you thought a rim shot was something that followed a lame joke in a burlesque house, you might not find this convincing.  But Bialik has more such numbers, and he makes the case. 

Still, it reminded me of days at the horse track.  The Racing Form provides a wealth of information, mostly quantitative, on each horse in the race – the horse’s past performances.*   Horseplayers process all this data and make a bet.  Then, after the race, as they tear up their losing tickets, they go back to the past performances, and no matter which horse won, they can always find the bits of data that made it clear why that horse was bound to win. 

Prediction is very hard, especially about the future, as Yogi Berra or someone said.  Prediction about the past and present is much easier, as Bialik’s blogpost illustrates.  Or as Duncan Watts puts it in the title of his excellent book, Everything is Obvious . . . Once You Know the Answer.** 

There’s another reason the Knicks didn’t know how good Lin was.  Here’s Knick announcer Clemson Smith-Muñiz (la voz en Español de los Knicks):

I’ve asked the coaching staff the question this way: didn't you see this in practice? And the answer has been, invariably, “What practice?” Due to this condensed season, which included barely 4 weeks of pre-season, all teams are limiting their practices, especially the full-court scrimmages, on off days.

Their point, again, is that the Lin phenomenon was not indeterminate.  Given a chance to see Lin in practice, any good coach would have seen his abilities.

Of course, Lin might turn out to be a flash in the pan.  Maybe by his second time around the league, the other teams will have learned how to play him.  It hasn’t happened yet (last night, his three-pointer with less than a second on the clock won the game), but if it does, sports writers, maybe even Carl Bialik, will write columns and blog posts saying that his short-lived success was utterly predictable.

Linsanity is fine, Lindeterminacy is intolerable.

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* When non-horseplayers appropriated the term “track record,” they distorted its meaning, just as Bialik does in his blogpost (I did not bother to quote it).  What they are referring to is what horseplayers know as “past performances.” 

Not only does the popular meaning of “track record” have nothing to do with its meaning at the race track, but in most cases, the speaker or writer could drop the “track” without changing the meaning, except perhaps to make it clearer. 


** Another blogpost on Watt’s ideas and horse races is here.