Names on the Map

March 27, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

The National Geographic has an interactive map (here) of the most frequent names in the US.  Here is our mid-Atlantic region.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

It’s tempting to read the names as a proxy for ethnicity, as the color coding implies.  The green Kelly and Murphy show that those are those common Irish names.  But what about the Williamses?  On the map, they’re all Welsh blue.  But in person, their color is not nearly so uniform.  I doubt that Juan (of Fox News) and Deron (of the Nets) trace their ancestry back to Wales.  (However, National Geographic does make some distinctions.  The Lees in the central part of the map are Chinese.  The Lees further down the coast are English.  National Geographic counts Martin as Spanish in California but English in other parts of the country. )

I’d also like to see an interactive map that showed the change in ethnic concentrations over time.  When I first started teaching at Montclair a few decades ago, I used to joke that on my class list, the C-Cathys were Italian, and the K-Kathys were Irish, and that accounted for a lot of the class.  This semester, more than a quarter of my students have Hispanic surnames, though not the more popular Rodriguez and Gonzalez on the map, and they far outnumber the Italian and Irish. 

HT: Ezra Klein, where I found this link.

Piety, Politics, and the Press – New York Edition

March 25, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Venn diagram of American culture shows a large overlap of political conservatism and Christian belief.  Folks who take their Christianity seriously (and their Bible literally) can be counted on to vote with Fox News.  Those who mock Christian piety even mildly are over on the left side of the room watching The Daily Show.

Not in New York. 

I was listening to the Christian radio station (officially “family radio”) on my drive home*  the day Peyton Manning signed with the Broncos.  The announcers’ main concern of course was what would happen to Tim Tebow.  They did not speculate much as to where Tebow would wind up, but they did assure me and my fellow listeners repeatedly that the Manning deal was evidence that “God has a plan.”  

A few days later, Tebow was on his way to New York and the Jets.  If you thought the New York Post would treat God’s plan with the appropriate respect, think again.

The New York Post, brought to you by the same Rupert Murdoch gang that owns Fox, is reliably right-wing on just about any political matter you can think of. But when the Manning/Broncos deal went down, the Post front page report on Tebow-Jets rumors was not quite in tune with the church choir.

The Post continued this irreverent tone when the Jets did sign Tebow.  The front page had a photoshopped picture of a towering Tim, Tebowing over Times Square.

Today, the Post tone on Tebow seems to be  bordering on sacrilege.  The QB is shown topless in a crucifix-like pose – arms outstretched, head turned to the side, legs crossed at the ankles – over the headline “The Passion of the Tebow.” 

(Previous Post posts in this SocioBlog are here and here.)

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* If you must know, this is what happens when you’re not interested in the guy Terri Gross is interviewing and you hit the Scan button.

The Decline of Car Culture

March 23, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

(I was going to call this post “SocioBlog Scoops the Times - By Five Years”)

Nearly five years ago, a post on this blog said

cars may have lost their symbolic value as markers of identity.

Today, a front-page story in the Times  says

many young consumers today just do not care that much about cars.

My comment came after I’d been watching “American Graffiti” on TV.  My teenage son was in the room, and it just seemed to me that while the cars in the movie carried so much meaning for me, the cars of his generation were at best transportation, at worst nuisances or eco-villains.  As I put it five years ago,

Occasionally, I would offer an astute cinematic comment like, “The fifty-eight Impala, what a car.”   But later as we were talking about it, my son wondered what sorts of things from today would trigger the same kinds of response forty or fifty years from now.  “Will we look at a movie and say, ‘Wow, a 2007 Accord!’?”

Or as the Times says today,

That is a major shift from the days when the car stood at the center of youth culture and wheels served as the ultimate gateway to freedom and independence. Young drivers proudly parked Impalas at a drive-in movie theater, lusted over cherry red Camaros as the ultimate sign of rebellion or saved up for a Volkswagen Beetle on which to splash bumper stickers and peace signs.

This loss of iconic status for the car is not universal.  It has happened primarily among the current counterparts of the kids in “American Graffiti” – white, middle-class, mostly suburban. Young, urban African Americans may still prize their ride.  In the 1960s, we had the Beach Boys, an unquestionably white group, singing about T-birds, 409s, and deuce coupes, while their imitators paid homage to Barracudas, super-stocked Dodges, and many others.  For today’s equivalent, you have to go to the rappers, who favor Beamers, Benzes, Bentleys, Escalades, and Lamborghinis.

It’s Not So Hot Being a Republican

March 22, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Hot enough for you?  Your answer might depend on who you’re voting for.

World views affect not just how we interpret what we see; these views influence what we actually experience.  That was the point of the previous post.

Do people who reject the idea global warming perceive the weather as being cooler?  Gallup just published the results of a poll (here) that asked people if this winter was warmer than usual. Unfortunately, Gallup asked only for political affiliation, but it can stand as a rough proxy for ideas about global warming.  So the data are suggestive, not conclusive. But for what it’s worth, Democrats were more likely than Republicans to say yes, it’s been a warm winter.  Some of the difference can be attributed to geography (Democrats living in places that had a much warmer winter than usual). But I suspect that at least part of the 11-point difference is political.  

Republicans reject the idea that the world is getting warmer – that’s a question of science – but they also experience their own immediate environment as cooler, which is a matter of perception.

As the graph shows, Gallup then asked those who did think that the winter was unusually warm what they thought the cause was – global warming or just normal variation..  As you might expect, political affiliation made a difference.   Democrats were more than twice as likely as Republicans to cite global warming as the cause.