I learned today that Otis Dudley Duncan, sociologist and anatomist of the “American Occupational Structure”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0029036704/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/, has died at the age of 83. Duncan was a major figure in mid-20th century sociology, a pioneer in the theory and practice of social measurement, the analysis of stratification, “occupations and prestige”:http://cloud9.norc.uchicago.edu/faqs/prestige.htm, organizations and urbanism. He taught at the “University of Arizona”:http://fp.arizona.edu/soc/ for many years. Bloggers may know his name because — well into his retirement — he was one of the first people to notice and analyze “inconsistencies”:http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/guns/duncan1.html, “errors and omissions”:http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/guns/files/duncan3.html in John Lott’s claims about defensive gun use.
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Kieran Healy
One of the advantages of not being a philosopher — and, in particular, not being a metaphysician — is that you don’t get emails like this:
Dear “Mrs Paul”:http://www.u.arizona.edu:~/lapaul,
may I offer you a final (as I think) ontological argument and ask your disproof on it? I’d be very thankful to you for answer.
Sincerely yours,
etc.
I imagine “Brad DeLong”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/ gets similar stuff on why gold is the One True Measure of Value, and “Jaques Distler”:http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/ has a folder of proofs that String Theory was Anticipated by the Ancients. When you’re a Sociologist like me, and your field has no credibility, people just assume you’re stupid and don’t bother sending you their Final and Completely True Theory of X in the first place. On the other hand, it does invite people to assume the answer to any problem you are studying is simply obvious common sense.
“Delicious Monster”:http://www.delicious-monster.com/ is a two-person company out of Seattle with a good pedigree in the Apple development community — even though half the company is eighteen years old, he’s been writing good software for the past three years. They have just released “Delicious Library”:http://www.delicious-monster.com/, a cataloguing application for books, music, movies and computer games. John Siracusa has a “detailed review”:http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/delicious-library.ars at Ars Technica. As Siracusa points out, an application designed to keep a catalog of your books and whatnot is fundamentally a boring idea. Yet Delicious Monster has managed to make it cool.
There’s a nice piece in the Times about Irish emigrants returning home from New York because they think they can do better these days in Ireland. (Many of them do, though very low-skill service jobs are done by emigrants from Eastern Europe and elsewhere.) The article gives some sense of the surprise many of them feel when they see how much the country has changed. That used to take a generation or more to happen — one of our American cousins, returning to Ireland in 1978 after nearly fifty years in San Francisco, lasted only three days before the presence of televisions and the absence of livestock in the house caused him to fly home in disgust — but now returning emigrants can get culture shock after only a few years away:
bq. Counselors in immigrant advice bureaus on both sides of the Atlantic say that many returnees will have a rude awakening in Ireland — especially those who were stuck in the underground economy in the United States, unable to travel abroad for fear of not getting back in. The Irish government now puts out brochures warning that they will find not the Ireland of memory, but rather a fast-paced multiracial society where their dollars are weak against the euro and affordable housing scarce.
I go back as often as I can, in part to inoculate myself against misplaced nostalgia for the ole Green-n-Lovely. With typical good timing, I left Ireland in the Autumn of 1995, more or less exactly when the things were really starting to pick up. My younger brother had left the year before that, coming to college in the U.S. on an athletics scholarship. When he graduated, he convinced a big financial services company to sponsor his work visa and he got his green card last week. By contrast, my youngest brother and my sister left school a few years later and never gave a thought to emigrating. Neither of them even bothered to go to University and both have good jobs. Quite a transformation from a world where, around 1990, Career Guidance Counseling amounted to a recipes for leaving the country efficiently, and getting a Summer job stacking shelves in a department store required a family connection.
In the comments to “John’s post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002842.html about a jailed spammer, “George Williams”:http://ghw.wordherders.net/ notes that “If we outlaw spam, only outlaws will send spam.” This is exactly right. The solution is to put industrial-strength spamming technology into the hands of ordinary citizens. The resulting deterrent effect would reduce the flood of spam to almost nothing, as no rational spammer would risk immediate retaliation in kind. Of course, no-one would be _required_ to own huge email lists, spambot factories or “relay-rape”:http://www.comedia.com/hot/jargon-4.2.3/html/entry/relay-rape.html kits, but enough decent citizens would legally conceal them on their person and use them as needed that the problem would take care of itself very quickly. Moreover, actual use of spam technology would be very uncommon. A survey[1] I did a few years ago while not quite on the faculty of the University of Chicago showed[2] that simply brandishing a DVD of the software was enough to deter would-be spammers 98% of the time. In the American West of the early 19th century, where this approach prevailed, letter-writing was far more common than it is today, but spam was virtually unknown. Also indoor plumbing.
fn1. The data are unavailable for reasons “too complex”:http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/guns/Lott/survey/ to go into here. You would be amazed how easy it is to lose every last shred of evidence showing you conducted a major piece of social research.
fn2. When appropriately, um, weighted.
“Mark Schmitt asks”:http://markschmitt.typepad.com/decembrist/2004/11/the_right_quest.html a good question:
bq. The right question, I think, is not whether religion has an undue influence, but why it is that the current flourishing of religious faith has, for the first time ever, virtually no element of social justice? Why is its public phase so exclusively focused on issues of private and personal behavior? Is this caused by trends in the nature of religious worship itself? Is it a displacement of economic or social pressures? Will that change? What are the factors that might cause it to change. I need some reading suggestions here.
Well, here are four from the Sociology department. Bob Wuthnow’s “After Heaven: Spirituality in American Since the 1950s”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520222288/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ might be a good place to get a sense of the shift from what Wuthnow calls “place-based” to “practice-based” spirituality in America. His recent “Saving America? Faith-Based Services and the Future of Civil Society”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691119260/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ looks at the social-service role of religions. Mark Chaves’ “Congregations in America”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674012844/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ is built around the first nationally representative survey of U.S. congregations and emphasizes how _small_ a role politics and social services play in the lives of churches. And “The Quiet Hand of God: Faith-Based Activism and the Public Role of Mainline Protestantism”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520233131/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/, edited by Wuthnow[1] and John Evans, offers a survey of recent trends in the political involvement of the Mainline. (Full disclosure: Bob was one of my advisors, Mark is head of my department, and John is a friend of mine from grad school.) But I’m not a sociologist of religion, so there’s probably a lot of other relevant stuff out there I don’t know about.
fn1. Bob can write books faster than most people can read them.
I put my post about “how to best represent county-level election data”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002820.html on “my own weblog”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/000943.html#000943 as well. Yesterday it got linked to from “this thread”:http://www.jouster.com/cgi-bin/guntalk/config.pl?read=15832 on the “CSP Gun Talk Forum”:http://www.jouster.com/cgi-bin/guntalk/config.pl. Apparently, trying to present the data honestly is a problem:
Re: Don’t let “them” get away with it!
Posted By: those Sore Losers
They are rewriting history as we speak …….. !!!
Look at the map below >>>
then Go to the link below the map for the real shock >>>
Then they provide their own analysis:
bq. The only reason New Mexico and Colorado have any blue counties is because of all the idiot Kalafornicators that moved there. The only reason south Texas is blue is because of all the illegal mexicans that live there. It is sad the dimocrap city slickers want to force their pitiful way of life on the rest of us country folks…….maybe we need to wall off the large metro areas of the country…..chris3
Jim Henley “expresses some skepticism”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2004_10_31.html#005612 about the post election analysis saying that the Democrats need to do more about “moral values”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002811.html if they want to win the next election:
[I’m] calling qualified bullshit on the suddenly popular notion that liberals need to come up with “a plausible spiel on morality,” essentially dressing their existing beliefs in the language of religion so as to reach Christians who currently vote Republican … Among other things, this will raise conservative-Christian comfort levels with liberal politicians and make liberal policies attractive in the terms with which said voters view the world.
This is naive and even condescending. Conservative, values-minded Christians aren’t looking for validation. They’re looking for specific policy outcomes that their strongly-held beliefs entail – among them, the prohibition of abortion and the marginalization and if possible elimination of homosexuality. They are not empty urns waiting to be filled with liberal policies dissolved in honeyed words about faith.
… Bush and Rove’s faith talk may be every bit the “spiel” Kieran Healy says it is. Doesn’t matter. The question for evangelicals and what Sullivan calls “religious moderates” isn’t the sincerity of politicians, it’s whether those politicians deliver on their issues.
This is fair enough. I wrote that phrase, “a plausible spiel on morality” in a bit of a rush the morning after the election, and Russell Arben Fox and others picked up on it in the “comments thread”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002811.html. I think my original post ran together a few different and half-formed thoughts. So, uh, here are some more.
A National Guard F-16 “strafed an elementary school in New Jersey”:http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=227410 last night with 25 rounds from its “M61-A1 Vulcan Cannon”:http://www.wpafb.af.mil/museum/arm/arm8.htm:
bq. A National Guard F-16 fighter jet on a nighttime training mission strafed an elementary school with 25 rounds of ammunition, authorities said Thursday. No one was injured. The military is investigating the incident that damaged Little Egg Harbor Intermediate School shortly after 11 p.m. Police were called when a custodian who was the only person in the school at the time heard what sounded like someone running across the roof. Police Chief Mark Siino said officers noticed punctures in the roof. Ceiling tiles had fallen into classrooms, and there were scratch marks in the asphalt outside.
I take it this is an early warning of the attack on the Blue States that will be launched early in the new year, after Colin Powell makes a presentation to the U.N. demonstrating the existence in New Jersey of large “research”:http://chemeng.princeton.edu/html/home.shtml and “production facilities”:http://www.conocophillips.com/global/na/bayway.asp most likely devoted to the manufacture of lethal chemical weapons.
Via “Pandagon”:http://www.pandagon.net/mtarchives/003885.html I see that Michelle Malkin “smugly presents us”:http://michellemalkin.com/archives/000792.htm with a map (from “USA Today”:http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vote2004/countymap.htm) showing the apparently overwhelming predominance of Bush-supporting counties in the United States. That’s the top panel in the figure below. Looks like the GOP is overwhelmingly dominant, eh? Well, no, of course. It takes about ten seconds on Google to find the bottom panel of the figure, which shows you about how many people live in each county. The comparison is instructive. Of course, there are still a bunch of well-populated areas that Bush carried, but we know that already because, you know, he won the election.
Note also that the USA Today map has quite a few missing observations, shaded in grey, presumably because the final results weren’t available when they drew the map. Missing observations seem predominantly to be counties with large urban populations. Most of these (like Cook County, IL, and Palm Beach County, FL!) should probably be colored blue, as a comparison with the “2000 results”:http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vote2004/countymap2000.htm shows. CT readers are probably too sensible to fall for invidious comparisons like this to begin with, but it does seem that the likes of Michelle Malkin think that complete dominance of the Prairie Dog and cowpat vote is what really matters. She should check to see how “Leroy Chiao”:http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/astronaut_vote_041018.html voted — maybe the GOP can claim the Solar System vote, too.
*Update*: Thanks to some pointers in the comments, below the fold I’ve included two other figures. The first is a cartogram from the New York Times that scales the states by their electoral college votes, and the section is a terrific map from “Robert Vanderbei”:http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/ that gives a continuous rather than a binary representation of the county vote data, allowing us to see that “purple America” is more common than red or blue America.
What were the most important issues for voters in the election? If you were reading the polls, and listening to the media chatter before the election, the answer would have seemed clear: Iraq or the War on Terror and the state of the economy. In news coverage of the campaign, in the Presidential debates and in the blogosphere blather, the election was fought on these issues. But from about 10pm last night onwards, and increasingly so this morning, commentators suddenly started talking about the importance of moral values in the campaign. It was all over the news this morning.
The “exit poll data”:http://us.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html show that 22% of the electorate thought that “moral values” was the most important issue in the election, and these voters went for Bush nearly 80% to 20%. The ratio is reversed for the 20% who thought that the Economy was the most important issue. In the case of Iraq and Terrorism, it’s interesting to see, first, that these are two separate options.[1] People who said “Iraq” (15%) went for Kerry 75% to 25%, while those who said “Terrorism” (19%) went for Bush 85% to 14%. But the main issue for voters was moral values and it seems to me that there was basically no sustained media analysis on this point prior to the election. I want to know why. Were the pollsters keeping quiet about it? Was it an error in their categorization? For instance, did they lump a bunch of things including moral values into an “Other” category early on and then just focus on the Economy vs Iraq/Terror trope for the campaign?
So it seems to me, in short, that “Amy Sullivan’s analysis”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0306.sullivan.html has been vindicated by the results. She first articulated it in June of 2003, well before it was clear who was going to win the Democratic nomination and “reiterated”:http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?contentid=252572&kaid=127&subid=170 it more than once recently. Right now the Democrats don’t have a plausible spiel on morality. I don’t mean that they’re less likely to be moral people, just that they don’t have a coherent way of talking to their own base — let alone the electorate — about what they stand for in religious terms. The fact that it _is_ just a spiel can be seen from the fact that — as Sullivan has also pointed out — the upper reaches of the Bush Administration are not exactly staffed with devout Christians and the President, unlike Kerry, hasn’t been to Church in years.
Late in the day, Kerry’s began to talk about his faith a lot more explicitly in his stump speech. It does seem like his campaign was starting to see the importance of the issue to voters. But I didn’t see this question getting the kind of coverage the data show it merited.
fn1. I want to know whether voters are just asked to say what their view is, or whether they’re presented with a laundry list of choices. I imagine it would have to be the former.
I know you’re all getting your election night news from CT anyway, so chat away if you like. The “BBC has a nice flash application”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/americas/04/vote_usa/map/html/default.stm that’s feeding off AP Projections and the latest returns to give a good overall battleground map. “CSPAN”:http://network.ap.org/dynamic/files/specials/election_night_2004/us_map_govsenhouse/index.html?SITE=CSPANELN&SECTION=POLITICS&reload=true has a good map as well.
For the key swing states, there’s “The Florida Department of State Count Page”:http://enight.dos.state.fl.us/20041102_SUM_PRE.html and the “Ohio Secretary of State Count Page”:http://election.sos.state.oh.us/results/SingleRaceSummary.aspx?race=PP.
*Update*: So things are moving along nicely. It’s 7pm, I’m on my 3rd cocktail, and the closest thing to solid food I’ve seen since lunchtime is a bowl of Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk. I feel just like “Wonkette”:http://www.wonkette.com, except without the pathological desire to get fired from whatever job I have at the moment or the desperate, aching need to sell out to any television network whatsoever. The Food Network. “CMT”:http://www.country.com/. Please. I don’t care. I can’t keep attending panels and affecting a superior attitude to “these losers”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002787.html.
*Update 2*: The Republican legal strategy in Ohio “seems to be premised”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_10_31.php#003921 on the idea that the fewer votes that are allowed to be cast, the less voter fraud there will be. This is like the old Argentinian strategy that, in order to keep the support of the silent majority, you have to keep the majority silent.
*Update 3*: It’s turning into a real nail-biter. Big Republican turnout in Michigan. Arkansas and Missouri to Bush. No clear resolution in Florida, and Ohio has Bush ahead. Florida is gearing up to count absentee votes till Thursday and the Republicans are already tying up the courts in Ohio in an effort to suppress the vote. It’s going to be a long night — possibly lasting till later this week. On the other hand, people are still in line to vote in places like Columbus and Oberlin. So I’m not giving up yet.
*Update 4*: I wonder whether you could do a county-level analysis of where the electronic voting machines were, to see whether that predicted any discrepancies between the exit poll data and the results as recorded. Tricky. (Mini-update: looks like the final exit polls were a negligibly different from the result, so never mind about that.)
*Update 5*: Well, looks like it’s going to be Bush — though Kerry is right not to concede until the votes have been counted in Ohio. It’s frankly amazing that the country is so evenly divided. I mean, what’s it going to take to break the deadlock in this country?
bq. The humblest individual who co-operates in the government of society acquires a certain degree of self-respect; and as he possesses authority, he can command the services of minds more enlightened than his own. He is canvassed by a multitude of applicants, and in seeking to deceive him in a thousand ways, they really enlighten him. He takes a part in political undertakings which he did not originate, but which give him a taste for undertakings of the kind. New improvements are daily pointed out to him in the common property, and this gives him the desire of improving that property which is his own. He is perhaps neither happier nor better than those who came before him, but he is better informed and more active.
— _Democracy in America_, Book I, Ch. 14.
Or, “Anything for Halloween?” as we used to chant at doorways when we went around in the Days Before Television. Other differences between Halloween in Ireland then and the U.S. now include the absence of pumpkins and the stricter dress code — we had to dress up as _something_ frightening, whereas in the U.S. it’s more like a fancy dress party. A final difference: the apartment across the way from us has a pumpkin carved with “W ’04”. I get the sense that there’s a bit of strife between the college girls who share the apartment, as one of them keeps turning the pumpkin around so that the uncarved side faces outward. If the carver comes trick-or-treating I’ll be sure to ask why she expects a handout from me. Let the market provide you with candy, I say.
“In every Presidential election-year since 1936”:http://www.snopes.com/sports/football/election.asp, if the Washington Redskins lost their last game before the election, the “incumbent lost as well”:http://www.sacbee.com/24hour/weird/story/1774448p-9625249c.html. In “today’s game”:http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/playbyplay?gameId=241031028, the Packers beat Washington 28 – 14. A late rally by the Redskins in the 4th Quarter couldn’t save them. This is the strongest spurious evidence yet that Kerry’s going to win on Tuesday.