February 12, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston
Last month, a freshman at the University of Idaho committed suicide in his dorm room. He shot himself with his Smith and Wesson .357. In his obituary, his parents wrote, “Let us drag the evil hiding in the darkness of the most dangerous places on earth: Gun free zones.”
At first this reaction seems hard to understand. True, the university is a gun-free zone, but it’s hard to see how allowing guns on campus could have prevented his death.* More logical is the idea that if the campus had been truly gun-free, if he had not had a gun in his room, he might still be alive. So the suicide should make his parents soften their pro-gun absolutism rather stiffen it. The suicide is evidence that the danger lies not in gun-free zones but in guns themselves, .
My guess is that the parents’ reaction can be understood as cognitive dissonance, much like the reaction of the believers in When Prophecy Fails. When the flying saucer failed to appear, when, instead of being whisked away to the planet Clarion, they were still in a living room in Illinois, they did not give up their belief. Instead, they went public and tried, as they never had before, to bring others into their group. (An earlier post on post-election dissonance is here.)
When a piece of evidence, even a huge piece, is dissonant with beliefs, people rarely change their beliefs. Instead, they find a way to explain away the evidence.
In the debates over crime, conservatives liked to say that a conservative is a liberal who’s just been mugged. Cute, but there was no evidence to support it. There was no correlation between victimization and ideologies about crime. (I don’t remember any research on the obverse proposition: a liberal is a conservative who’s just been arrested.) It’s not just a matter of “if the facts don’t fit the theory, too bad for the facts.” A single fact need not invalidate a theory or ideology.
But if that fact is truly weighty, it does threaten the ideology. To defend against that threat, the believer goes out proselytizing. If he can persuade other people, then the belief must be true after all. And even if other people are not persuaded, the effort of repeating and elaborating a position solidifies the belief in his own mind.
(HT: Dave Purcell, who tweeted this story.)
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* The student, Jason Monson, had kept a Desert Eagle handgun under his pillow, against university regulations. His roommate reported the gun, the police came and took it. On Saturday, he went to the police station to retrieve the gun – it violated no state law, only the university regulations – but was told that because of the long weekend, he couldn’t get it back till Tuesday. Instead, he got the .357 he kept in his pick-up, returned to the dorm, and shot himself.
We don’t have a clue as to what precipitated the suicide. The NBC news story (here) has no hint of an explanation. Monson left notes to his family, but the parents haven’t spoken with the media. Still, it seems unlikely that his suicide was a reaction to having his gun temporarily confiscated.
The Wi-Fi Nazi
February 7, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston
(This post has no sociological commentary or content.)
I can’t remember where this was – probably an airport – but I was looking for free Wi-Fi. When I clicked on the icon to search for networks, these were the results:
No net for me, but at least a smile.
Posted by Jay Livingston
(This post has no sociological commentary or content.)
I can’t remember where this was – probably an airport – but I was looking for free Wi-Fi. When I clicked on the icon to search for networks, these were the results:
No net for me, but at least a smile.
More College Grads? Not Here.
February 6, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston
You may have seen this chart already – Paul Krugman and others have posted it – originally posted by Jared Bernstein nearly a year ago. It’s from OECD data comparing college graduation rates across a generation. The US has had zero increase. The graduation rate for the 55-64 year old boomers was 40%. The rate for the cohort thirty years younger (does anyone still call them Gen X?) was 40%.
South Korea meanwhile has gone for higher ed Gangnam style, and in the years between the two cohorts, their economy has boomed. Other countries seem not to fit the education-vs.-stagnation story. Germany,* like the US, has also seen no increase in college grads, and their economy has not done badly. Brazil has been doing very well, despite a rate of college graduates that has remained unchanged and at a low level.
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* In Germany’s educational system, high-school graduates have choices other than college for education for new-economy work.
Posted by Jay Livingston
You may have seen this chart already – Paul Krugman and others have posted it – originally posted by Jared Bernstein nearly a year ago. It’s from OECD data comparing college graduation rates across a generation. The US has had zero increase. The graduation rate for the 55-64 year old boomers was 40%. The rate for the cohort thirty years younger (does anyone still call them Gen X?) was 40%.
(Click on the chart for a larger view.)
South Korea meanwhile has gone for higher ed Gangnam style, and in the years between the two cohorts, their economy has boomed. Other countries seem not to fit the education-vs.-stagnation story. Germany,* like the US, has also seen no increase in college grads, and their economy has not done badly. Brazil has been doing very well, despite a rate of college graduates that has remained unchanged and at a low level.
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* In Germany’s educational system, high-school graduates have choices other than college for education for new-economy work.
America’s Team Is Not in the Superbowl
February 3, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross-posted at Sociological Images
Six years ago, I blogged (here) that the Pittsburgh Steelers had become “America’s Team,” a title once claimed, perhaps legitimately, by the Dallas Cowboys.
Now Ben Blatt at The Harvard College Sports Analysis Collective concludes that it’s still the Cowboys. (His post is here.)
It’s Superbowls X, XIII, and XXX all over again – Steelers vs. Cowboys. And the Cowboys have a slight edge. But does that make them “America’s Team”? It should be easy to get more likes when you play to a metro area like Dallas that has twice as many people as Pittsburgh. If the question is about “America’s Team,” we’re not interested in local support. Just the opposite – we want to see how many fans a team has away from the home field.
Blatt measures nationwide support by seeing which team gets the most likes in each Congressional district. Unsurprisingly, each local team dominates its area.
The Cowboys are number one in the hearts of a wider area. In Arkansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, New Mexico, Idaho, and Utah they crush the non-existent competition. Curiously, Blatt does not report the number of likes those states contributed. He says only that in those regions there were more likes for the Cowboys than for any other team. By this measure, the Steelers don’t even win all Pennsylvania, but that’s because, unlike the Cowboys, the Steelers face other NFL cities close to home. Their home state and every bordering state except West Virginia has one or even two competing NFL teams – Eagles, Browns, Bengals, Ravens, Bills.
The map makes the it appear that the 3.6 million Steeler fans are crowded into a small area while the 3.7 million Cowboy fans are widely spread. But those wide open Western spaces may not contain all that many people. And it’s fans, not real estate, that root for a team.
If you want to know who America’s team is, you should find out how many fans it has outside its local area. Unfortunately, Blatt doesn’t provide that information. So for a rough estimate, I took the number of Facebook likes and subtracted the metro area population. Most teams came out on the negative side. The Patriots, for example, had 2.5 million likes. but they are in a media market of over 4 million people. The Cowboys too wound up in the red 3.7 million likes in a metro area of 5.4 million people.
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* The Packers also have a legitimate claim to the title. To get the numbers to come out in favor of the Steelers, I assigned the Pack the Milwaukee metro area as its local support even though Milwaukee is 100 miles from Green Bay. (Milwaukee is closer to Chicago, but as the map makes clear, Packer and Bear loyalties split at the state line.) Subtract the Green Bay population instead of Milwaukee from the Packer likes, and the Packers win the America’s Team trophy by two touchdowns.
** I my own zip code +25 miles, the score is Steelers 45, Cowboys 18. (See this earlier post about Steeler bars.)
UPDATE: It turns out that a few days ago, an intern at Facebook, Sean Taylor, published data on this same topic (here). Taylor’s map. by county rather than Congressional district, is a bit clearer than the one above.
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross-posted at Sociological Images
Six years ago, I blogged (here) that the Pittsburgh Steelers had become “America’s Team,” a title once claimed, perhaps legitimately, by the Dallas Cowboys.
Now Ben Blatt at The Harvard College Sports Analysis Collective concludes that it’s still the Cowboys. (His post is here.)
Still, based on their huge fan base and ability to remain the most popular team coast-to-coast, I think the Dallas Cowboys have earned the right to use the nickname ‘America’s Team’.To get data, Blatt posed as an advertiser and euchred Facebook into giving him some data from 155 million Facebook users, about half of the US population. Blatt counted the “likes” for each NFL team.
Blatt measures nationwide support by seeing which team gets the most likes in each Congressional district. Unsurprisingly, each local team dominates its area.
The map makes the it appear that the 3.6 million Steeler fans are crowded into a small area while the 3.7 million Cowboy fans are widely spread. But those wide open Western spaces may not contain all that many people. And it’s fans, not real estate, that root for a team.
If you want to know who America’s team is, you should find out how many fans it has outside its local area. Unfortunately, Blatt doesn’t provide that information. So for a rough estimate, I took the number of Facebook likes and subtracted the metro area population. Most teams came out on the negative side. The Patriots, for example, had 2.5 million likes. but they are in a media market of over 4 million people. The Cowboys too wound up in the red 3.7 million likes in a metro area of 5.4 million people.
Likes outnumbered population for only five teams. The clear winner was the Steelers.*
I made one final comparison –Steeler bars and Cowboys bars in Los Angeles It’s the second largest media market in the country but hasn’t had a home NFL team to support in nearly two decades (how do economists explain this?). The Cowboys should have an advantage in LA since more Angelenos have roots in Texas than in Pennsylvania. According to FanLoop, there are 16 Cowboys bars within a 25-mile radius of 90210 (the first Los Angeles zip code that came to mind). In that same circle, there are 31 Steelers bars.**
I made one final comparison –Steeler bars and Cowboys bars in Los Angeles It’s the second largest media market in the country but hasn’t had a home NFL team to support in nearly two decades (how do economists explain this?). The Cowboys should have an advantage in LA since more Angelenos have roots in Texas than in Pennsylvania. According to FanLoop, there are 16 Cowboys bars within a 25-mile radius of 90210 (the first Los Angeles zip code that came to mind). In that same circle, there are 31 Steelers bars.**
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* The Packers also have a legitimate claim to the title. To get the numbers to come out in favor of the Steelers, I assigned the Pack the Milwaukee metro area as its local support even though Milwaukee is 100 miles from Green Bay. (Milwaukee is closer to Chicago, but as the map makes clear, Packer and Bear loyalties split at the state line.) Subtract the Green Bay population instead of Milwaukee from the Packer likes, and the Packers win the America’s Team trophy by two touchdowns.
** I my own zip code +25 miles, the score is Steelers 45, Cowboys 18. (See this earlier post about Steeler bars.)
UPDATE: It turns out that a few days ago, an intern at Facebook, Sean Taylor, published data on this same topic (here). Taylor’s map. by county rather than Congressional district, is a bit clearer than the one above.
But this repeats the shortcoming of the other map. It shows which team was most popular, but it does not show the level of support for other teams. Looking at the map, you would never suspect that the Packers get a lot of love (or rather a lot of likes) nationwide, not just in Wisconsin. But it’s never enough to overcome the home team advantage. (Note also that the Steelers kick ass even in far away places like Alaska and Hawaii.)
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