Did You Sleep Your Way To The Top? And Other Journalistic Questions.

The topic of this post is not of wide-reaching relevance, given the horrible problems of this world, but it opens a nice peephole to some of our cultural beliefs and customs about women, men and sex.  In particular, to what extent sex can be a topic for an interview with either men or women, and what type of questions can be asked.

It all started with a Twitter fight between Andrew Goldman and Jennifer Weiner.  The former writes for the New York Times, the latter is an author.   The fight begins:

And then it got worse, other people joined in and so on.

Margaret Sullivan, the NYT's public editor,  addressed the issue:

I asked Hugo Lindgren, the editor of the Times Magazine, about the incident, sending him a blog post that raised questions about some of Mr. Goldman’s earlier questions to women he interviewed, including one with the NPR journalist Terry Gross and one with Whitney Cummings, both of which had elicited criticism from some female readers.
My questions and his responses are below:
1. How do you respond to the complaints that Mr. Goldman’s questions are frequently sexist and misogynist?
We don’t publish material we believe to be misogynist or sexist. The blog post you sent me cited 3 examples, out of probably a thousand published questions that Andrew has asked since he took over the column. In the context of the full interviews, none of them struck me as sexist or misogynist. There were frank, sensitive questions, not declarations or assertions of his own. In the Terry Gross interview, Andrew is not making his own presumption about her sexuality. He is referring to an anecdote that was published in the introduction of her own book, which was made even clearer when she makes a joke about how widespread this misperception is. The Whitney Cummings question is perhaps a little cheekier but still refers to something other people have said about her — “On those Comedy Central roasts, your fellow comedians liked to joke about how you slept your way to fame. How accurate is that criticism?”
2. What is your view of the specific question to Ms. Hedren about sleeping her way to the top? Did you see it in advance? If not, would you have approved it?
I saw it and approved it. This is the full question: The worst abuse happened after you rebuffed his advances. Actors have been known to sleep with less powerful directors for advancement in show business. Did you ever consider it? The whole reason for the interview is a new HBO movie about how Hitchcock sexually harassed her. It was an unsavory decision she was actually faced with, so he asked her about it: He made no assertions about what she should or shouldn’t have done. Andrew’s questions acknowledge and refer to sexism in the world, but they are not, in and of themselves, sexist.
For what it’s worth, his editor and top editor are both women. They did not object to the question. But I take full responsibility for it all the same.
3. What is your response to the Twitter back and forth as detailed in the piece I’ve attached here?
I thought Andrew was needlessly rude and insulting, and I told him that. He apologized to Jennifer Weiner, and she accepted it.
4. Could you clarify Mr. Goldman’s position with the magazine? Is he a freelancer? A part-time staffer? Does he do other work than the Q&A?
He is a freelancer. He has not yet contributed to the magazine in other ways, but has an active assignment.
5. Is he in good standing at this point? Are you providing any coaching/feedback/disciplinary measures? Does all of this change his standing with The Times?
I made it clear to him that kind of behavior he exhibited in this Twitter exchange would not be tolerated, and he was contrite and accepted that without argument. My feeling is that he had an unfortunate outburst, and that he will learn from it. He works very hard on these interviews and does a good job. Readers are entitled to whatever opinions they have of his work, and he needs to be comfortable with that and engage thoughtfully when appropriate, or not at all.

John Cook responded:

Goldman was rapidly and roundly rebuked on Twitter by New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum—"If you can't respond to criticism without embodying the very douchebaggery you're accused of... C'mon"—and many, many others. After briefly trying to explain the insult as an attempt to comically embrace the caricature he felt Weiner was painting, Goldman apologized for the comment and deactivated his Twitter account.
Last night, Sullivan weighed in. After interviewing Goldman's editor Hugo Lindgren and Weiner, she correctly criticized his "hideous misjudgment" in attacking Weiner personally on Twitter. But she went farther: She gave credence to Weiner's charges that Goldman had exhibited sexism in his interview questions, sending an angry and unhinged critique by blogger Ed Champion to Lindgren and asking him to respond. And she was eager to see Goldman disciplined, strongly suggesting that he should have been fired for the error: "It sounds as though he's going to get [a second] chance. Given his misbehavior on Twitter and his status as a highly replaceable freelancer, I think his editors are extraordinarily generous to give it to him." (She also, oddly, repeatedly harped on the "strong obscenities" Goldman used on Twitter, as though bad words are an offense worthy of disciplinary action. The obscenities he used were "shit" and "bullshit.")
Sullivan's condemnation of Goldman was smug and unforgiving. Calling for his head over one insult, for which he has apologized, is massive overkill. And the eagerness with which she contemplated Goldman losing his job over a mistake that he regrets—almost gleefully calling him "a highly replaceable freelancer"—was unbecoming. Astonishingly, Sullivan, who purports to be the Times' ethical line judge, didn't even contact Goldman for his thoughts before virtually calling for his firing.
But the worst part was Sullivan's seeming endorsement of the charge that Goldman is some sort of misogynist based on the questions he had asked various interview subjects in the past. As evidence of the purported controversy, she cited Champion, who called Goldman "vulgar" and "repulsive" and floated half-baked conspiracy theories about Harvey Weinstein's role in his career. If you're interested in checking out Champion's bona fides on the subject of misogyny, here he is joking about double-teaming the First Lady of the United States.
The rap against Goldman is this: He asked Hedren, "Actors have been known to sleep with less powerful directors [than Alfred Hitchcock] for advancement in show business. Did you ever consider it?" (In Sullivan's inaccurate framing, that became Goldman "asking a successful woman if she has slept her way to the top.") Goldman asked that question in the context of a new HBO movie about Hedren's relationship with Hitchcock, which was a bizarre and cruel sort of sexual slavery—he was obsessed with her and ruined her career over her refusal to give in to his vile advances. Asking did you ever consider it is a perfectly legitimate question—Hitchcock forced her into an awful choice, and he's asking her if she ever had second thoughts about the one that she made. It is most emphatically not, per Weiner, an "accusation" that Hedren slept her way to the top. After I went back and forth with her on Twitter today, Weiner acknowledged to that if she had been Goldman's editor, she wouldn't have thought twice about the question.
But Weiner is also upset about this question Goldman posed to the comic Whitney Cummings last year: "On those Comedy Central roasts, your fellow comedians liked to joke about how you slept your way to fame. How accurate is that criticism?" This was obviously not offered as a serious question. It was not an attempt by Goldman to assess the veracity of the claims being made by Cummings' fellow comedians. Any attempt to read it as such is willfully obtuse. It was a chance for Cummings to address the jokes, and to either riff on them or respond in earnest. (She riffed on them: "If sleeping with people worked, I would be doing it.") It was a provacative way of saying, "What's it like to constantly be accused by men of sleeping your way to the top?" Which is a question I'd imagine a lot of women would want her to be asked.
But there's more. Weiner also cited this Q-and-A with NPR's Terry Gross, in which Goldman asked: "I gather that people frequently assume you're a lesbian. Several years ago, it came up at a cocktail party for your husband, the writer Francis Davis, celebrating his Pew Fellowship." That question was premised on the book Gross was promoting. Here's what Gross herself wrote:
The second most frequently asked question about me is whether I'm straight or gay (this may be number one in San Francisco).... The confusion about my sexual orientation has led to some pretty amusing scenarios. About ten years ago, when my husband, the writer Francis Davis, won an arts fellowship, I went with him to a reception honoring him and the other recipients. My mother-in-law came with us, and at one point I saw her laughing at something the wife of one of the other fellows had just said to her. She later explained that the woman had pointed at me and whispered, 'Terry Gross is here. Did you know she's a lesbian?'"
Goldman's question was literally in invitation for Gross to tell a funny anecdote from her book. There's nothing remotely inappropriate about it. Goldman also asked Gross in the same interview whether she chose "'Fresh Air' over having children," which some may object to as somehow presuming that women are baby-making machines, or something. Of course it doesn't—it simply asks whether she considered her career and children as incompatible alternatives, which is a totally reasonable question. (The answer is no.)

I'm probably quoting too much above, but that's the quickest way to set the stage for what I want to say.  Perhaps it's worth adding that Goldman's assignments in the past have often included asking questions about sex, or at least that he has interpreted those assignments in that light.

OK.  That's enough stage-setting.  The basic issues here are three:  The first, and easiest to resolve is the Twitter brawl.  Goldman was clearly out of line there and pretty much every critic agrees on that, even John Cook.  And Goldman apologized.

The second question is about whether Goldman routinely asks sexist questions of women but not of men.  This matters because no one interview is enough for trend-spotting and because the specific questions in any one interview can easily be justified by stating that the interviewer had heard rumors and decided to ask about them.  The problem, of course, is that in a different interview there might be equivalent rumors but the interviewer does not ask about them.  The only way to solve that conundrum is by looking at masses and masses of interviews by Andrew Goldman and by analyzing them based on the sex of the interviewee.

This question embraces the narrower question about the possible sexism in the mentioned interviews in those quotes above.

The third issue is the widest and by far the easiest to judge!  Aren't you glad that I'm finally going to say something less fuzzy?  That issue has to do with the wider cultural values about women's proper roles and about who can be asked what.

For instance, consider a journalist interviewing a very powerful man in the movie industry.  Would that interview ever ask about whether he had ever made women give him blow jobs or other sex in exchange for a role?  Would an interview with a powerful male CEO ever ask how many women he had promoted only after they slept with him?

I don't see that happening in a general interview about the careers of those men.  Indeed, I can't even imagine interviews with women about possibly sleeping their way to the top asking for the names of those magnates that demanded it.

And asking Terri Gross about children vs. career can be shown to be a similar culturally driven question because men are not asked about choosing children OR a career:

Goldman also asked Gross in the same interview whether she chose "'Fresh Air' over having children," which some may object to as somehow presuming that women are baby-making machines, or something. Of course it doesn't—it simply asks whether she considered her career and children as incompatible alternatives, which is a totally reasonable question. (The answer is no.)

This question is perfectly unreasonable if addressed to famous men because they are not expected to be in charge of all childcare.

 

Voting is Not Like Buying A Pair of Shoes or A New Car

Three odd things I have recently noticed (again) when people talk politics, both in the media and in private lives:

The first has to do with the idea that voting is just like buying a new car or a pair of shoes!  If you decide not to make the purchase, you won't have to pay for it.  So it's all OK.

But voting is NOT like buying a new car.  If you don't vote in a political election you get someone ruling over you anyway, and if that person causes havoc the fact that you didn't vote for him or her makes no difference.  The consequences are there.  You pay for the shoes or the car and someone else picks them out for you.

It's also true that the American political system throws a humongous number of votes down the toilet and then flushes it, while happily telling us who the winner in each state was.  I get that voters become discouraged about that, but the answer is not to take a consumerist stance.

The second odd thing has to do with judging political candidates as "deserving" to lose because of bad campaigning or bad debate performance or similar ultimately non-essential aspects. 

Even that is OK if the task is to judge campaigning performance.  But when someone happily crows about a candidate "deserving to lose" they might spend a minute considering the fact that the political platform of that candidate then also loses, whether it deserves to lose or not, and that all those whom the platform would have helped more are among those losers.

I think both of these odd things (and several others) have to do with a confusion between our role as consumers and as citizens.  The former gets practiced all the time, the latter not so often.  But the media is not helping when they focus on the horse race aspect of politics.  The underlying policy questions are the crucial ones, after all, and I, for one, prefer to have a clumsy performer of the platform I prefer to a slick performer of the platform I frequently visit in my nightmares.

The third odd thing is not about voter or journalist behavior but about the way politicians offer us false dualistic choices.  For instance,  the Republicans tell us that women want jobs and a better economy for themselves and their families, not reproductive rights.

But reproductive rights don't clash with policies which push for jobs and such.  Indeed, providing women with reproductive rights is almost costless, as policies go, and the provision of free or subsidized contraceptives to poor women would save the government money in the long run (thus decreasing the deficit!).

We are asked to look elsewhere, pretty much.

Perhaps at the awfulness of the government subsidy to public television and radio?  The money that could be saved by killing Big Bird is miniscule.  The loss of information and childhood education would have an immense cost.  But the killing of public television is dear to the conservative hearts and the hunt goes on and on. 

The same reason applies to women's reproductive rights.  Conservatives don't want women to have those rights, and that's why women are told that they must choose between jobs and reproductive rights.  Because the Republicans don't want women to have the latter.

So.

The Shooting of Malala Yousafzai

It was carried out by the Taliban in Pakistan (or at least they took credit for it).  Malala Yousafzai is fourteen years old and an activist for girls' education.  The Taliban explains:

Public fury seems to have built up as the country's rolling news channels devoted considerable attention to the story and the Taliban announced they would make another attempt on her life if she survived.
Perhaps conscious of what one media pundit described as a "major PR disaster" for the Taliban, the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) circulated a lengthy statement that tried to justify the assassination with references to Islamic history and the Qur'an.
It said that although the TTP did not believe in attacking women, it was obliged to kill anyone "whosever leads campaign against Islam and sharia" and that her main crime was "because of her pioneer role in preaching secularism and so-called enlightened moderation".
It also said that Yousafzai had been guilty of inviting Muslims to hate the mujahideen, as the insurgents style themselves.
Yousafzai, who won Pakistan's first peace prize for her efforts, did indeed speak out against the Taliban, initially on a blog published under a pseudonym on the BBC Urdu service website. There she chronicled the terror of life in Swat when the area was being fought over by the Taliban and the government. Later she spoke confidently in public against extremism and spoke of her desire to enter national politics.

As a consequence of this shooting, Pakistan has erupted in anger against the Taliban,  the New York Times and other newspapers report.

It's useful to ask what the Taliban's real motives in the shooting were.  The religious explanations it offers  can be debated, even within the circle of Islamic scholars.  But of course they are on some level intricately bound with the need to control women because that control is necessary for the control of the next generation.

Whether the term "misogyny" adequately covers such opinions or whether we need a more specific term I cannot tell.  But I certainly agree that the desire to keep women uneducated has its roots deeply entangled with misogyny.

And no, this particular attack cannot be justified as a response to Western drones killing innocent civilians, horrible as it is.  Malala Yousafzai is not the person who caused that to happen.  Indeed, she is still a child and a Pakistani child at that.

Based on the most recent news I could find, Malala Yousafzai had emergency surgery to remove the bullet and her condition has stabilized.

A Dog Post

Here's my guess (at the age of five) of what a dog might look like:

The text says:  A dog if it is.

It looks like a horse, and that can be explained by the fact that my grandparents had horses but nobody near me owned a dog.  There are deep political insights  to be drawn from that!  The dangers of inferring wider questions from one's own life experiences, the dangers of using analogous thinking and the importance of direct evidence before making wider generalizations.

What I really wanted to write about is the way little children are asked "What does a dog say?" and the answer varies by language, though all the phrases are onomatopoetic.  So what does a dog say in your world?  And which of the many possible correct answers actually IS the correct one?

That's pretty tricky.  When I learned to "read" dog language better I also learned that there is no one single thing that "a dog" says.  They speak, and sometimes they speak in sentences.  The bark which tells a visitor is approaching sounds quite different from the one which asks someone to play with that dog or the one which asks for help.

Romney Leads on Women's Issues --- Back to the Nineteenth Century?

Via Jessica Valenti on Twitter, we learn this about Romney's views:

Mitt Romney today said no abortion legislation is part of his agenda, but he would prohibit federally-funded international nonprofits from providing abortions in other countries.
“There’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda,” the GOP presidential candidate told The Des Moines Register’s editorial board during a meeting today before his campaign rally at a Van Meter farm.
But by executive order, not by legislation, he would reinstate the so-called Mexico City policy that bans U.S. foreign aid dollars from being used to do abortions, he said.
President Barack Obama dropped the policy on his tenth day in office, Romney said.
In response, Obama’s Iowa spokeswoman, Erin Seidler, said: “Mitt Romney’s not telling the truth about his positions. He’s said he would appoint Supreme Court justices who will overturn [Roe v. Wade]. Romney may try to change his image four weeks before Election Day, but can’t change the fact that women can’t trust him.”

Of course legislation is not what the president does, in any case.  Here's Romney in his own words, earlier this year:




And a year again he was firmly behind the Personhood Amendment, the one about Egg-Americans and their rights, combined with fewer rights for the aquaria, of course.
 
This is the time in elections when  the candidates pretend to move towards the imagined middle positions, when the bases have been fed with fresh meat and so on.   Given the short memory of many voters, it's useful to look back to see where Romney actually stands, on reproductive choice and other issues about women.

-----

Added later:  Romney's campaign has already reassured the conservative base that, indeed, women's repro rights will be up to them in the possible Romney administration.  So that's clear, then.

The Polling Games!

Have intensified.  I came back from a political break to the news that all is lost and we better flee, because the Pew poll for October shows Romney running away with the presidency.  And what's even more horrendous, it's the women's opinions which did that.  So.

What's the next stage in the divine self-defense against angst-and-emotion overflow?

To get hold of that poll and to look at it, naturally.  But first I took a short detour to Nate Silver's blog.  Here's what he says:

But were it not for the Pew poll, our forecast would have been unchanged from Monday, with Mr. Romney’s chances holding at 21.6 percent.
The Pew poll, however, may well be the single best polling result that Mr. Romney has seen all year. It comes from a strong polling firm, and had a reasonably large sample size. Just as important is the trendline. Pew’s polls have been Democratic-leaning relative to the consensus this year; its last poll, for instance, had Mr. Obama 8 points ahead among likely voters. So this represents a very sharp reversal.

...

There are two smarter questions to ask about the Pew poll. First, is it really likely that Mr. Romney leads the race by 4 points right now? The consensus of the evidence, particularly the national tracking polls, would suggest otherwise. Instead, the forecast model’s conclusion is that the whole of the data is still consistent with a very narrow lead for Mr. Obama, albeit one that is considerably diminished since Denver.
It might be granted that the situation is more ambiguous than usual right now. But our forecast model looks at literally all of the polls; it estimates Mr. Romney’s post-debate bounce as being 2.5 percentage points, not quite enough to erase Mr. Obama’s pre-debate advantage.
The other valid line of inquiry concerns the timing of the poll. The Pew poll was conducted from Thursday through Sunday, although more of the interviews were conducted in the earlier part of that period. There’s nothing in the poll that really refutes the story that Mr. Romney initially received a very large bounce after the debate (perhaps somewhere on the order of 4 or 5 points, if not quite as large as Pew shows it), which has since faded some between the news cycle turning over and the favorable jobs report on Friday.
The evidence that Mr. Romney’s bounce is receding some is only modestly strong — as opposed to the evidence that he got a significant bounce in the first place, which is very strong. Still, the order in which polls are published does not exactly match the order in which they were actually conducted — and at turning points in the race, these details can matter.

I also noticed that the Daily Kos/SEIU State of the Nation Poll found a somewhat similar shift towards Romney after the first presidential debate:

The candidates for President are Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney. If the election was today, who would you vote for? Obama 47 (49)
Romney 49 (45)

That's a pretty disastrous six-point net swing in just a week, and the first time we've ever had Romney in the lead. It is inline with all other national polling showing Romney making gains in the wake of his debate performance last week. Both the Gallup and Rasmussen trackers saw their Romney bounce evaporate on Sunday. In this poll, 75 percent of the sample was gathered on Thursday and Friday, at the height of Romney's bounce. This is because PPP does call-backs: It identifies a random range of numbers and begins calling them on Thursday. If they get no answer, they keep trying the same numbers on subsequent days until they get the required number of responses (we ask for at least 1,000). This avoids the old tropes about young liberals being out partying on Friday nights, while conservatives are at church on Sunday mornings, etc.
So this week, 47 percent of responses were on Thursday, 28 percent on Friday, 17 percent on Saturday, and just 8 percent on Sunday. Romney won Thursday 49-48 and Friday 49-44 before losing steam over the weekend. While Romney won Thursday and Friday by a combined 2.5 points, he won Saturday and Sunday by just 0.5 percent.
So where did Romney gain? Among women, Obama went from a 15-point lead to a slimmer 51-45 edge. Meanwhile, Romney went from winning independents 44-41 to winning them 48-42. And just like the Ipsos poll showed last week, Romney further consolidated his base. They went from supporting him 85-13 last week, to 87-11 this week while Obama lost some Democrats, going from 88-9 last week, to 87-11 this week.

In both cases the shift seems to be due to women's opinions, and in both cases the results appear to capture the immediate post-debate reactions.

The Pew poll results are available here (pdf).  I don't see anything major wrong with it, though I wonder how it got such a low number of Hispanic registered or likely voters and young likely voters.

The crucial question asks whom the respondent would vote for if the election was held on the date the poll questions were asked.  That date was sometime last week, from Thursday to Saturday.  The answers to that question:

Forty-four percent of registered male voters stated that they would vote for Obama, 47% for Romney.  Forty-nine percent of registered female voters stated that they would vote for Obama, 45% for Romney.  The percentages for likely voters benefited Romney more:  Among likely male voters 51% chose Romney and 43% Obama, while among likely female voters the percentages for Romney and Obama were both 47%, or a tie.

This means that women are still more likely to vote for Obama than men are.  On the other hand, among the white non-Hispanic (what happened to the Hispanic voters, again?)  respondents in this poll the usual gender gap has essentially disappeared.  Both men and women  would have picked Romney over Obama at roughly the same percentages.

So what's going on here?  I'm not on expert in polling, and probably should not have written about this at all.  But I'd wait and see what happens in the next week or so in all the different polls.  This is because the two I mentioned here were both taken right after the first presidential debate and could be measuring a debate bounce.  The only way to be sure is to see whether Romney's apparent advantage in these two polls turns up in other, later polls.

It's true, naturally, that  the first presidential debate completely protected Romney when it comes to his views on reproductive freedom and whether women should be treated fairly in the labor force and so on.  Obama didn't mention women, either, and not a single question was about this giant wedge issue between the parties (sorta like "are women partly human or not at all human").  Neither did anyone refer to Romney's comments about the 47% being leeches and parasites.

People not following politics that eagerly might have taken the message from the debate that nothing else distinguishes the two candidates except their policies on taxes, jobs and the deficit.  The Pew poll respondents, on average,  thought that Romney did better on all those three questions.  That he also lied a lot more might not matter to the respondents.  Or they may not even know about those lies.

What's the morale in this story?  I'm not sure but Obama should certainly start practicing his debate skills and perhaps even remember that his re-election is crucially dependent on women's votes.

Finally, the Pew results really hinge on the percentage of respondents who self-identified as Republicans: The September Pew poll had 39% Democrats, 29% Republicans and 30% Independents.  While the percentage of Independents stayed the same in the October poll, the percentage of Democrats dropped to 31% and the percentage of Republicans rose to 36%.

This could be a real change in how voters self-identify.  On the other hand, it's always possible that any particular sample fails to be representative, simply because of bad sampling luck.  That jump looks pretty huge for just one single month, though, but who knows.

Julia Gillard, the PM of Australia, Talks About Misogyny

Well worth watching, if not for any other reason than because in the US discussing any of this is utterly outside the mainstream politics.  Indeed, polite and courteous presidential debates on domestic policies never even mention women! 

More here.

Truth Is Weirder Than Fiction. Or On What Some Conservative Politicians Say.

Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) is a member of the House Committee on Science and Technology. This is how he describes his scientific beliefs:

All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior.

The Bible as a science textbook, in other words.  Broun is a tea party member.  By the way, you can find his votes on women's issues here.  Do watch some of the video at the linked site, just to see all those dead animals stare back at you in a religious meeting.  But be warned, Broun moves from a story about hunting a bear which was minding its own business to the importance of freedom for hunters to the necessity of getting to know Jesus on a personal level.

In Arkansas:

Arkansas Republicans tried to distance themselves Saturday from a Republican state representative's assertion that slavery was a "blessing in disguise" and a Republican state House candidate who advocates deporting all Muslims.
The claims were made in books written, respectively, by Rep. Jon Hubbard of Jonesboro and House candidate Charlie Fuqua of Batesville. Those books received attention on Internet news sites Friday.

House candidate Fuqua skips merrily to this conclusion on his website:

Fuqua blogs on his website. One post is titled, "Christianity in Retreat," and says "there is a strange alliance between the liberal left and the Muslim religion."
"Both are antichrist in that they both deny that Jesus is God in the flesh of man, and the savior of mankind. They both also hold that their cause should take over the entire world through violent, bloody, revolution," the post says.
In a separate passage, Fuqua wrote "we now have a president that has a well documented history with both the Muslim religion and Communism."

I love the intellectual dexterity of someone who can make a moderate Republican (which Obama really would be called in a saner world) into an Islamofascist communist.

Conspiracies in the Labor Department!

This piece of news has fun stuff about how common conspiracy theories have become:

The big drop in the unemployment rate a month before the presidential election brought cries of disbelief and conspiracy theories from Jack Welch and other critics of the Obama administration Friday. But the Labor Department was quick to dismiss such claims.
"Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can't debate so change numbers," tweeted Welch, the former CEO of General Electric (GE, Fortune 500). Welch did not respond to a request for further comment on his tweet.

It's also a good reminder that practically anything one says online becomes public information.  Sorta like giving a press conference.

It's hard to say how seriously  Mr. Welch intended his tweet  to be taken, but the proper way of responding to data one doesn't believe in is to do that dratted and fearsome thing:  Research.

Go and find out if the basis for the calculations has changed from last year.  Go and check whether unemployment usually decreases this time of the year.  Think of alternative theories besides the conspiracy one, and test them against the same data.  And so on.  Or for people like  Mr. Welch, have your staff do this for you.

All that is much more work than tweeting, of course.  But I believe that conspiracy attitudes are becoming more common because of the way people use the Internet, by clustering in small circles of co-believers,  and because of the advent of politics-based news corporations which pre-filter reality for their audiences.  After a few years of that it's pretty hard to agree on what reality might be.

By the way, this works even across countries.  The US news media sometimes offer different takes on news than the news media in other countries.  Checking those alternative sources out can be informative, not the least because it helps in understanding why those furriners think the way they do.

Today's Funny Picture

From here:

It also serves to remind us of the default setting for human beings.  Looking at that picture does not make me think that it's men who might mess up the oceans but that it's  human beings.

If the cartoonist had depicted women,  I would read it as an argument about women only.  Because that's how the default  is set up in our minds.

----
Added later:  The picture also uses a race default which got me, too.  I think the default race depends on the country one lives in and its racial makeup.  The default gender does not.

I Haven't Posted This One For A While

The First Presidential Debate. ZZZZZ.

Yeah,  it was boring, as performance art goes, and that's the way the debates are rated, I understand.  Like horse races or ballet or figure skating, and the journalists and talking heads are the judges.

Out of the trio on stage, Mitt Romney was the most awake, even hyper, and Jim Lehrer (the moderator)  perhaps the least awake.  Barack Obama seemed tired and only got going towards the end of the game.

That's enough of my scoring style points.   Fox News found Romney's performance beautiful:

Mitt Romney energized his campaign for president Wednesday night, charging out of his first debate having by most accounts from both sides of the political spectrum dominated President Obama in a stand-off for which he was evidently well-prepared.
The Republican nominee was quick on his feet, polished and feisty as he repeatedly cut off the moderator and challenged his opponent on the facts. His central argument -- that Obama's economic policies have consigned the middle class to an eroding "status quo."

Some voters might find cutting off the moderator disrespectful.  And of course one might wonder what Romney has in mind for the middle class, given the increasing income inequality in this country and his party's willingness to continue that trend.


What about the factual contents of the debate?  Those Romney challenges on Obama's facts, for instance?

Luckily, fact checks are getting pretty common among the mainstream media, though, sadly, that seems to mean that some of them end up a bit biased themselves.  Never mind.  Here are a bunch of sites you might want to look at.

The consensus appears to be fairly strong:  Romney won the debate and he also lied the most. 

I could also spot the usual Tweedledum-and-Tweedledee phenomenon:  The attempt of presidential candidates to place themselves in the middle, back-to-back, in order to catch that elusive Snark undecided voter.  Heh.

There was nothing in the debates about who should have the padlock-and-key to the American vaginas.  Jim Lehrer picked the questions himself, he tells us, so I guess he's not interested in women's reproductive rights and such.  Perhaps that will be the topic in one of the remaining two debates?

Was that too snarky?  My apologies.  I still much prefer Obama's policies to Romney's policies.

NononoNO. She Gets It Wrong.

That would be Hanna Rosin's response at Salon to Stephanie Coontz's op-ed in the New York Times.  Rosin argues that Coontz is wrong in her criticisms. 

But Rosin herself is wrong in quite a few places in her response.  For instance here:

I hesitate to get drawn into data wars (if you have an appetite for them you should visit the blog of University of Maryland professor Philip Cohen). I’ve learned over the course of my research that data can support many different stories. For example, one figure in my book, and in Liza Mundy’s The Richer Sex, that’s been much fought over is how many wives earn more money than their husbands.
We all agree that the number of female breadwinners leapt from only 4 percent in 1970 to nearly 30 percent in 2010. Coontz, however, discounts this gain by arguing that when we look at all married couples, not just dual-earner couples, the numbers look much weaker because some wives don’t work at all. This is a fair point. But if we are going to add on extra data samples, then I offer another, more relevant one: the growing number of single mothers. Trends in the United States do not point toward an explosion of full-time stay-at-home mothers but of single mothers who are, by default, for better or worse, often the main breadwinners of their families. We recently passed the threshold, for example, at which more than half of all births to mothers under 30 were to single mothers. I’m not sure this counts as feminist progress, but it does count as a profound shift in the traditional power dynamics of the American family.
In my book I call it “ambiguous independence.” The women are struggling financially but also learning by necessity to support themselves and their children. And because they are less economically dependent on men, these women are also less likely to stay in abusive relationships, as Coontz herself mentions.

Mostly the same data CANNOT support many different stories.  When people argues that it does, most of those stories are fables and not based on the data.  Now, different sets of data may well result in different conclusions.  One's task, then, is not to engage in data relativism but to figure out which data set is the best, which study the most careful and which conclusions therefore the most reliable.

In that quote Rosin begins with the question:  How many wives earn more than their husbands?  But she then argues that data on women without husbands is relevant for this argument.  It's not.  It may well be relevant for arguments about women's independence, but it's completely and totally irrelevant as an answer to the original question.

That's not picky, by the way.  If we move the ground under the questions we never get anywhere.

For another example of exactly that:

Coontz takes on another data set that I discuss in my book: that young, childless women in their 20s have a higher median income than the equivalent men in the vast majority of metropolitan areas. These findings by market researcher James Chung were first reported in a Time magazine story in 2010. Coontz cites a new analysis of similar data showing that this particular demographic includes a disproportionate number of low-earning Latino men, which explains why women in this age group earn more.
For one thing, it’s hard to say if this new data set she points to is a statistical anomaly. Unlike Chung’s, the new numbers only cover a single year. But even if her data is accurate, and young Latino men are weighting the data, should we not care about that? It seems like just a fine-tuning of my thesis, that certain men are struggling in this economy. And even by Coontz’s reading, these young, childless Latino women are out-earning the Latino men, and these young white women and men earn the same—which alone is a remarkable shift. The explanation for that is simple: At that age, many more women have college degrees, and there are generally better jobs available for college graduates.
Coontz mentions a new analysis that will be unveiled later this month proving a wage gap in various professions for that same young, childless set. But how is that new? We know there is a wage gap. We know that Suzy likely earns less money than Bill who sits in the cubicle next to her, for many complicated reasons that I discuss in the book. The new development is this: For many jobs there are a lot more young Suzies in those cubicles these days than young Bills. That’s why these young women as a group have a higher median income.

The ground is shifting!  Try to keep your balance!

What's happening here is a skip from one argument:  young single women earn more than young single men in large metropolitan areas, to a completely different one:  young single women in metropolitan areas are more likely to hold jobs which require education than young single men.

The latter argument could well be true.  But, and this is a huge, giant BUT:  The users of the original Chung study have adopted it as a signpost that we are approaching the era of the Reverse Gender Gap, the monstrous regimen of the petticoats and so on.  The study was rarely used to talk about education, probably because Chung did not control for education. 

This means that his comparisons were flawed from the beginning.  They did not compare men's and women's wages for that age group AND for a given level of education.  They omitted the education variable altogether.  The consequence was that Chung compared single oranges to single apples.  Of course the married apples and oranges never showed any kind of female earnings advantage but the reverse.

Do I sound a bit obsessed about that particular study and its uses?  I am, because not controlling for education in income comparisons makes the conclusions of the study useless.  Rosin tries to salvage her message by moving from the likely finding that female workers on every education level earn, on average, less than otherwise identical but male workers to the also-likely finding that metropolitan areas tend to have a higher percentage of educated young single women than educated young single men.

Note, also, that a proper treatment of the gender gap in wages compares the "net gap" which is arrived at after controlling for all those other variables (education, work experience, hours worked per week,  general occupation, geographical area, marital status, number of minor children etc) that also affect earnings.  The Chung study fails to control for education, and thus tells us nothing about the actual gender differences in the earnings of young metropolitan singles.

What's left of Rosin's argument?  That women are more likely to get educated than men.   But Coontz points out that women have good reasons to be more motivated that way:

Even women’s greater educational achievement stems partly from continuing gender inequities. Women get a smaller payoff than men for earning a high school degree, but a bigger payoff for completing college. This is not because of their higher grade point averages, the economist Christopher Dougherty concludes, but because women seem to need more education simply to counteract the impact of traditional job discrimination and traditional female career choices.

Just think about the kinds of jobs available for a high-school graduate with no further qualifications.  The traditionally male jobs of that type pay considerably better than the traditionally female jobs.

That's no excuse against tackling the problem of getting boys more focused on education, of course.  But neither does it presage a world where all the power lies in female hands.  Probably not even half of all power, even in the United States, given that women are still found over-represented in those academic fields which pay less well.

Or as Rosin puts it:

Coontz makes the broader point that women—and even college-educated women—are continuing to segregate themselves into less prestigious, lower-paid professions. She points out that women are even more concentrated now than they were before in the fields of legal secretaries or “managers of medicine and health occupations.” We can call this by its old disparaging name: “gender segregation.” But we can also see it through a new paradigm—as Coontz so successfully encouraged us to do when looking at marriage—as women making intelligent decisions about what jobs are available in this economy. (You can see this decision-making at work in community colleges, the training camps for the current workforce, where the gap between men and women is the greatest.)

As I write in the book, of the top 15 jobs projected to grow in the next several years, 12 of the categories are dominated by women. Maybe women are choosing health occupations because the health care field is booming, not because they are blindly walking into a female ghetto.

Gender segregation*, whether by choice or by steering, is actually a large chunk of the reason why women earn less than men, on average.  I don't care what Rosin might call this pattern but it is not something new and exciting.  Indeed, it's a pretty depressing pattern because the traditionally female occupations are poorly paying ones.  It may well be the case that they offer more opportunities for "balancing" family and work than the traditionally male occupations (as well as less harassment).

But choosing them for that  reason is not necessarily as laudable as, say, creating a labor market with proper parental leave, annual vacations and more humane working hours.

I wrote about those fifteen jobs which are growing most rapidly before, but here's a reminder:

Finally, let's have a look at those 15 fastest growing professions which are dominated by women. It's not clear which list Rosin's book used as there are several ways of defining "fastest growing" (percentage increases or absolute numbers etc). The one Rosin probably used is Table 2 in this article (scroll down), although it lists twenty occupations, not fifteen.

It's worth noting the text under that table:

The education categories and wages of the occupations with the largest numbers of new jobs are considerably different than those of the fastest growing occupations. Only three of these occupations are in the associate’s degree or higher category. Fourteen of the 20 occupations with the largest numbers of new jobs paid less than the national median wage of $33,840 in May 2010.

Out of the top five listed (all female dominated, by the way), only the first occupation mentioned, registered nurses, has a highish median annual salary: 64, 690 dollars.  The next four:  retail salespersons,  home health aides, personal care aides and office clerks, general, have median annual salaries of $20,670, $20,560, $19,640 and $26,610, respectively.  In other words, dominating twelve out of the top fifteen categories doesn't actually make women the winners in some giant employment race.

Sad to say, those are not the types of jobs which will result in women becoming the major breadwinners in married-couple families, in general. 

Far down in her column, Rosin seems to write about her reasons for writing about "the end of men:"

Now, of course, I live on this planet and, more specifically, I live in Washington, D.C. I can see that neither the corner suites of corporate America nor the halls of Congress echo with the clacking of heels. After doing dozens of radio shows and interviews to discuss my book, I have grown accustomed to being asked about why, if women are so hot and men are so not, there aren’t more women at the top. But I’m still searching for a way to answer without irritating the host (or op-ed contributor) who insists that it can’t be the end of men until we’ve had our first female president and Coke and Pepsi are both run by women.

But here’s the thing: The upheaval in gender dynamics I’ve spent three years reporting and writing about all points in one direction. Yes, there are zigs and zags. Yes, different sectors of the economy and society are moving at different rates. Yes, in the last decade progress has slowed down (it has slowed down for men, too). Yes, a female MBA earns less than a male MBA out of school (although the difference, before children, is now negligible). Yes, the richest of the rich are still almost exclusively male, or their wives. And yes, we have not yet remotely figured out how to make most American workplaces family-friendly.

But zoom the graph back a few decades and you can see how far we’ve come—and that the lines all point one way: Men’s wages have been stagnating, and by some measures declining, as women’s economic fortunes continue to rise. The wage gap has been slowly closing for women, but the education gap has not been closing for men. We can focus only and eternally on the fact that those lines have not yet crossed or even converged in many professions. But isn’t that vantage point a bit narrow? Why does we’re-not-there-yet mean we’re not headed there?

Headed where?  To a matriarchy?  That's my problem with Rosin's arguments.  To talk about "the end of men" when it is women, in fact, who are shrinking as a percentage of population in China and India seems utterly disgusting to me.  To imply that advances towards greater gender equality are a sign of the death of men or at least all male power seems equally weird to me.  If we take her stance here seriously, then any improvement  in women's relative position could be a sign of some sort of mass annihilation of men.  Women still earn less than men, on average, but the gender gap has shrunk some in the last thirty years:  Sign of the end of men!  And so on.

I don't like games and gambles with serious matters.  That's because I'm a humorless feminazi who believes in a fair world where people are not put into little boxes by gender (or by race or sexual preference etc.) when they try to decide which talents to nurture and which working lives to choose.

 Rosin appears to see the situation as a competition, a "winning-gender-takes-all" game.  But if that's the interpretation one chooses, then the data suggests that it's still not women who are winning.   Things are considerably better for women than they were, of course (though I wonder if anyone wrote about the end of women when women were one third of college graduates, in those halcyon days of yore), but no, men are not ending.  At all.

Let's put all this into a proper perspective in terms of time and place:  After thousands of years of pretty much male domination we suddenly worry about tipping into a matriarchy?  Because sixty percent of new college graduates are women?   That to me seems to be the one type of data which might (weakly) support Rosin's theory.  But then how does she explain Saudi Arabia or Iran (the latter until the government enforced gender quotas)?  Those countries have similar female domination in higher education.

Mentioning Iran and Saudi Arabia brings me to the proper place of Rosin's arguments:  The global one.  No end of men in that wider view.  Male domination seems to be doing very well in many, many countries on this earth.  Come to think of it, it's doing pretty well even in the US government.

I'm not particularly ecstatic when writing these criticisms about "The End of Men" and related topics.  But I feel I must,  because of those data problems and also because these calls sound like "the-sky-is-falling" to me or at least extremely premature.  The latter means that there will be those who argue that we've come to as close to gender equality as we can, without ending all those men.

At the same time, I sorta agree with Rosin's basic conclusions here:

The place I would like to arrive after the “end of men” is not Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s Herland, a mystical biological matriarchy in which the men are literally obsolete. It’s a place where my son’s girlfriend earns more money than he does and no one cares or interviews him about it for a story. It’s a place where he decides he wants to work four days a week and spend the fifth picking up the kids from school, or doing his sculpting, and no one thinks there is anything wrong with him. It’s also a place where, if he decides he wants to work all five days, and his wife decides she doesn’t, they can both make that work. It’s a place where the single standard for power and success is not hours logged and paychecks earned. It’s a place where we use our imagination to give men and women, both, a little more room to breathe.

I just don't think rigid definitions of masculinity can be changed by writing books about the "end of men."  Rather the reverse, to be honest.

------
*This deserves a proper long and dry post, this topic.  I shall get to it one day.

What's For Breakfast? A Brand's Reputation!

I was reading about Mitt Romney and the Bain company, and came across this:

Companies like Bain Capital call themselves private equity firms, but as I explained in my book “The Buyout of America” they really provide no equity. They make money by putting businesses at risk. They say they turn struggling businesses around. But Sealy was not a turnaround — it was the market leader in its sector.
Romney first tried to boost Sealy’s profits, so it could pay its debt, by acquiring one of Sealy’s biggest retail customers, Mattress Discounters. But MD expanded too quickly and went bankrupt.
Bain then pushed Sealy to design the no-flip, or one-sided, bed. To cut costs they eliminated the bottom cover, making the bottom simply a foundation. With two-sided beds, consumers can flip their mattress, like they rotate a tire, for longer wear, so getting rid of the bottom would shorten the life of the mattress.
But Bain was more interested in cutting costs and boost short-term profits than in providing value to consumers. For a while, it didn’t seem to matter. Bain and co-investors sold — “harvested,” if you like — Sealy in 2004 to fellow private equity firm KKR for $1.5 billion, pocketing $741 million for its $140 million investment.

That's not quite the same thing as those firms which acquire another firm with a good reputation for quality or durability and which then eat up that reputation by lowering the quality or durability of the product.  Doing that makes a nice short-term profit for the acquiring firm and its owners but of course it makes the consumers ultimately angry and destroys the brand.

All this is easiest with so-called experience goods:  Those things which you have to use for quite a while before learning how good they are.

Mattresses certainly qualify.  If a mattress used to last ten years and now only lasts five years, you wouldn't want to pay as much for it, right?  But it takes five years to learn that a previously ten-year mattress now only survives five years.  This gap lets the acquiring firm milk down that reputation bank account.

Closer at home, I use Arabia's Teema mugs as the divine-coffee containers.  They are expensive, yes (22 dollars for a mug though I get mine for less while in Finland)  but they are so smooth on the eye and what's most important, they used to last almost forever.  The glazing was very thick.  I have dropped these mugs on tiled floors several times (accidentally!)  and never could break one (except for once the handle breaking off).

All this means that my china choice was probably saving me money, despite the high initial purchase price.

But the two I bought this summer seemed different to me.  When I got back to Snakepit Inc.  I weighed them and compared the weights to the old mugs.  The new ones are much, much lighter.  And they have small chips (from the dishwasher) after less than two months' use.

Now, whether this is a conscious policy of milking down Arabia's reputation (for high design and high quality in the past) by the new owner, Iittala,  I don't know.  But  when a brand is mostly known for, say, high quality, choosing to lower that quality to cut costs may have the same effect as a conscious policy of reputation-eating.

OK.  After glancing this through I just wanted to complain about my mugs...



 

Thanks, Distance Readers

Information about your existence is very helpful.  From where I sit, all I get told are the actual visits to this blog.  All others are invisible to me.  That can create weird incentives.  For instance, suppose that a hundred regular readers all switch to Google Reader, say, simultaneously.  What I would then observe is a drop of hundred readers.  Then I'd wonder what I'm doing wrong and if I should stop this shitty blog right away and so on.  That's what comes with being a neurotic goddess.

More precisely, I need that information for the purposes of possibly  getting an agent for the so-far imaginary book  (they want a "pre-market," heh), and also for the purposes of figuring out funding for what goes on here (and the chocolates).

But essentially the problem is that I have no way of knowing my total readership right now.  The Google Reader suggests that I have over 1400 subscribers but who knows what that means, and in any case it's just Google Reader.  On the other hand, perhaps many of those subscriptions are never read.  On the other hand, much bigger blogs have fewer subscribers.  And so on and so on.

None of this is of interest to you but since I'm still working on the old comments transfer and similar matters my creative juices are running slow. 

Let me also say that I'm honored by every one of my readers.  Smart lot, you are.

Technology Sucks And Other Blog News

That's my divine opinion today, and it has direct roots in this business of changing everything about the blog in less than a week.  My fault, naturally,  for waking up only a few days before the demise of Echo, but there must be some excitement in life, right?


Or just call me the goddess of procrastination.  Anyway, the reason why technology sucks today is not because I'm a Luddite (which I am, in some ways) or opposed to technology (I love washing machines!  And fast cars!).

Nope.  The reason why I am so exhausted and disgruntled has to do with the One Time Only aspect of almost all changes that I have been forced to obey during my blogging career.  From an economist's angle the learning costs are always a new hurdle to scale, and once all that necessary learning is over it's pretty much useless for the future.  Because the next change is also One Time Only with brand new learning costs.

After a dozen or so of these event one gets jaundiced.   And becomes a procrastinator.

Returning to the recent changes, most things should be working by now.  I will go through the blogroll in the near future to update it.  Whether the old comments will appear or not is unclear right now.  I gave my weekend to them, including having to learn how to edit xml files.  We shall see.  Or not, depending on the gods of blogging.  But I got rid of quite a few gremlins.

I'm planning to put links to some of the series I have written in the right-hand column.  If you can think of any other improvements, please let me know.

The Myth of Male Decline

Stephanie Coontz has written a good opinion column, "The Myth of Male Decline",  on the recent rush of those oh-my-god-men-are-dying books.  I recommend reading it and also my earlier post on the Hanna Rosin book.

This, for instance, is quite important in Coontz's piece:

Proponents of the “women as the richer sex” scenario often note that in several metropolitan areas, never-married childless women in their 20s now earn more, on average, than their male age-mates. 

But this is because of the demographic anomaly that such areas have exceptionally large percentages of highly educated single white women and young, poorly educated, low-wage Latino men. Earning more than a man with less education is not the same as earning as much as an equally educated man. 

Among never-married, childless 22- to 30-year-old metropolitan-area workers with the same educational credentials, males out-earn females in every category, according to a reanalysis of census data to be presented next month at Boston University by Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland. Similarly, a 2010 Catalyst survey found that female M.B.A.’s were paid an average of $4,600 less than men in starting salaries and continue to be outpaced by men in rank and salary growth throughout their careers, even if they remain childless. 

Among married couples when both partners are employed, wives earned an average of 38.5 percent of family income in 2010. In that year nearly 30 percent of working wives out-earned their working husbands, a huge increase from just 4 percent in 1970. But when we include all married-couple families, not just dual-earner ones, the economic clout of wives looks a lot weaker. 

In only 20 percent of all married-couple families does the wife earn half or more of all family income, according to Professor Cohen, and in 35 percent of marriages, the wife earns less than 10 percent.

The bolds are mine.  This is important, because that earlier study got wings and an ability to carry bombs (to kill all men)  and so on, all the time being a  gender comparison only within single, childless workers without any standardizing for education levels.  Sorta like comparing the earnings of a man without a high school diploma to the earnings of a woman with an MBA, to make the example extreme.

The reanalysis compares like with like, and seems to find that men earn more, on average, in each educational category.  As men earn more among those young workers who are married and/or have children, the overall reading is that young women, as a group,  earn less than young men, as a group, even in metropolitan areas.

RSS Feed Readers: Could You Do Me A Favor?

I'd love to know how many regular RSS feed readers I have, for planning purposes.  If you regard yourself one, could you be kind enough to leave a short comment to this post? 

Polling Conspiracies

I once wrote a bad poem about Conspiracy Theories.  It began like this:

There are five fat men in a secret  cave somewhere.
They are naked.  They are bald.  They live in a wave of purified air.
They read the Playboy and the Joy of Cooking.
They have grown obese and sated from just looking.

They can feel us.  They can see us.
They know our petty schemes.
They have planned us.  They have manned us.
They compute our secret dreams.

And they caused it to be thus:
Nothing that we do is quite as it seems.
 
Dreadful, isn't it?  But also fun.

I bet you have heard about those polling conspiracies  if you live in the US.  It all started with this site, run by one Dean Chambers (whose favorite sites include Rush Limbaugh).   He argues that almost all political polls are biased in favor of the Democrats and against the Republicans because they ask too many Democrats and too few Republicans for their opinions.

In order to fix that bias, Chambers takes all those polls and then applies the method one pollster, Rasmussen, uses to estimate party membership numbers.  Because Rasmussen's method often produces more Republicans than Democrats than the methods of other pollsters*, Rasmussen's polls are the ones most likely to find  that Republicans, in general, do better.

Chambers doesn't interpret his "corrections"** just as deciding to apply the Rasmussen figures (not necessarily applicable to other polls, in any case) to everything in sight.  Nope.  He states that all the other polls are skewed or biased!  Because they are frequently carried out by that evil imaginary monster:  the leftish mainstream media.  That Fox News' own polls fail Chambers' test for unbiasedness doesn't matter.  Everybody must do as Dean says, pretty much.

This mess has at least two central tangles.  One has to do with the statistical questions, the other with the conspiracy theories.    The statistical tangle is created by the goal of the polls: to predict behavior in next November's elections while asking people about their views today. 

To get from the latter to the former requires not only careful sampling to get a representative group of American adults but also some way of predicting which of those adults are not going to vote and which are.  It is the views of those who are most likely to vote in the future that the pollsters want to tap, and it is in the way the polls arrive at that group and the variables which determine its choices that we find the disagreements.***

Those disagreements are fine and useful.  Dean Chambers is not interested in them, because he has already decided that only one poll is unskewed and the rest of them horribly biased.  And the reason?

Chambers said he suspects that big polling shops are intentionally over-sampling Democrats to help get the President re-elected.
"This year, they've been more skewed than in the past. Any poll that says NBC, CBS, or ABC is going to be skewed and invested in trying to get this President re-elected," he said.
But while Chambers' methods may appeal to conservatives, other pollsters say their samples reflect reality — not wishful thinking — and that the higher Democratic numbers are similar to those in the most recent presidential election.

Conspiracy!  I love it.  Fox News joined in right away:

It’s clear that Fox & Friends has a tricky relationship with data. But on the show Thursday morning, the hosts took that relationship to a whole new level.
After a raft of new polls showed Obama opening up leads in swing states, the Friends flew in to full-blown conspiracy mode about what’s really behind the data.
Parroting the latest Republican meme that national polls oversample Democrats, host Steve Doocy threw in to the mix the possibility that pollsters are using voter turnout from 2008 to guide who they should be asking. And why would the “left-based mainstream media” do this? Doocy had an answer.
“Well, two reasons,” he said. “One, perhaps, to keep Mitt Romney’s donors from coughing up more cash. And two, to keep people from doing early voting.”

Of course conspiracy theories can be created in reverse:  Perhaps Rasmussen stands out so much because it's a water-carrier for the extreme conservatives in this country?

I don't mean that seriously.  But anyone who believes that the owners of media outlets in this country, other than Fox News,  are overwhelmingly some sort of extreme left-wingers is seriously deluded.

--------
*I was unable to find information on what the Rasmussen method consists of, other than some kind of sampling with something else.
** Chambers seems to just re-weight all the "skewed" polls with his own preferred party membership figures.  Because he believes there should have been more Republicans he adjusts all the findings to give Republican views a greater weight, one based on Rasmussen's calculations.
**For more discussions about what the underlying debate is all about, see here, here and  here.  

Today's Funny Picture. Also Educational.

Via HJ, from the I f***ing love science site:

Does this remind you of the many evolutionary psychology critiques on this site, especially of those studies  which use that particular type of evolutionary psychology Satori Kanazawa is infamous for?   They certainly apply fixed ideas, selectively choose which studies to discuss and react to criticism pretty much as politically motivated or simply illogical.

-------

There are several definitions of pseudoscience.  The one I find most useful is Popper's falsifiability concept:

Karl Popper stated it is insufficient to distinguish science from pseudoscience, or from metaphysics, by the criterion of rigorous adherence to the empirical method, which is essentially inductive, based on observation or experimentation.^[33] He proposed a method to distinguish between genuine empirical, nonempirical or even pseudoempirical methods. The latter case was exemplified by astrology, which appeals to observation and experimentation. While it had astonishing empirical evidence based on observation, on horoscopes and biographies, it crucially failed to adhere to acceptable scientific standards.^[33] Popper proposed falsifiability as an important criterion in distinguishing science from pseudoscience.
To demonstrate this point, Popper^[33] gave two cases of human behavior and typical explanations from Freud and Adler's theories: "that of a man who pushes a child into the water with the intention of drowning it; and that of a man who sacrifices his life in an attempt to save the child."^[33] From Freud's perspective, the first man would have suffered from psychological repression, probably originating from an Oedipus complex, whereas the second had attained sublimation. From Adler's perspective, the first and second man suffered from feelings of inferiority and had to prove himself which drove him to commit the crime or, in the second case, rescue the child. Popper was not able to find any counterexamples of human behavior in which the behavior could not be explained in the terms of Adler's or Freud's theory. Popper argued^[33] it was that the observation always fitted or confirmed the theory which, rather than being its strength, was actually its weakness.
In contrast, Popper^[33] gave the example of Einstein's gravitational theory, which predicted "light must be attracted by heavy bodies (such as the sun), precisely as material bodies were attracted."^[33] Following from this, stars closer to the sun would appear to have moved a small distance away from the sun, and away from each other. This prediction was particularly striking to Popper because it involved considerable risk. The brightness of the sun prevented this effect from being observed under normal circumstances, so photographs had to be taken during an eclipse and compared to photographs taken at night. Popper states, "If observation shows that the predicted effect is definitely absent, then the theory is simply refuted."^[33] Popper summed up his criterion for the scientific status of a theory as depending on its falsifiability, refutability, or testability.

Who Do The Moochers Vote For? That 47%?

I almost couldn't sleep because my earlier post about Romney's views of the 47% (or 46%) of Americans failed to state that of course Romney glibly assumes that the moochers and leeches he describes are also identical with those who would vote for Obama:

ROMNEY: There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.

But we don't know how that group of Americans vote or if they vote at all.   They might even -- gasp! -- vote for Romney!

Catherine Rampell has a neat piece on the various possibilities.  I encourage you to read it through.  The elderly often qualify for that moocher-group, and they tend to vote Republican, for example.  The poorest earners are less likely to vote, in general, but even among that group a sizable minority votes Republican.

Rampell also makes a necessary clarification:

Mr. Romney also said that this “47 percent” of people who don’t pay federal income taxes are the same people who are “dependent” on government services:

All right, there are 47 percent … who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.

...the nonpayers can’t be conflated with the service receivers; people of all incomes and tax liabilities receive government services, not just those who have no federal income tax liability.

See how much more complicated reality is..

Todd Akin And The Girlz

Todd Akin, the Republican representative from Missouri, has an interesting relationship with his sexism.  He just can't stop picking at it, the way a teenager picks at a zit.  As background, he's the guy who told us that women's bodies have a way of shutting down the whole conceiving business in the case of rape.

Now he has criticized his opponent in the Senate race, Claire MCCaskill, for being insufficiently ladylike:

“I think we have a very clear path to victory, and, apparently, Claire McCaskill thinks we do, too, because she was very aggressive at the debate, which was quite different than it was when she ran against Jim Talent,” Akin told the Kansas City Star on Thursday. “She had a confidence and was much more ladylike [in 2006], but in the debate on Friday she came out swinging, and I think that’s because she feels threatened.”

Akin might well be the choice of Missouri voters, which makes me weep a little, in a very ladylike fashion.

Never mind.   The more important point is that the "traditional" gender norms really make it hard for a woman in politics.  If she is ladylike and demure she comes across as weak.  If she "comes out swinging" she is emotional.   There's always a way to criticize her performance.

Religious Liberty Vs. Contraception Coverage

Kathryn Jean Lopez in the right-wing National Review is among those who believe that my religious liberty can infringe on your life.  Or rather, that employers should be able to decide which medical treatments the health insurance policy they offer their employees covers:

Friday morning, the U.S. District court in Detroit will hear a plea from the Weingartz Supply Company, a Michigan-based, family-owned business, and Legatus, a professional association of Catholic business leaders, for a preliminary injunction to protect them from the HHS mandate requiring employers to pay for insurance covering contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs.

If they asked to be protected by some horrible forced feeding of contraceptives to themselves I'd have some sympathy.  But what they ask is to have the right to determine which services their workers' health insurance policies may cover, and that choice, they believe, should be  based not  on medical or economic concerns but on the private beliefs of the owners.

I'm waiting eagerly for a Christian Scientist firm to make a plea for the right to offer only health insurance policies which cover prayer and that's it.  The logic is identical, after all.

The gist of all this is an odd confusion about the rights to practice one's religion and the "rights" to force its consequences on people who may follow a completely different religion or none.  At the same time, religious scruples are privileged over other types of values.

More Housekeeping

I think Disqus will now allow commenting.   The old comments are still absent but I'm working on that..

Warning: Roadwork

I've been forced (finally!) to work on the blog's template and to get a new commenting system.  Some things seem to be working, lots of stuff is right now lost.  When the comments will become fully functional is unclear right now.

But they now use Disqus (yeah, I know), and the current comments should work*.

I hope that all the missing elements can be slowly added back and so on.

My apologies for that.  Fines will be doubled in the work zone.

-----

*Added later:  I spoke too soon.  The comments aren't working at all right now.   Sigh...

Mothers vs Parents

Mitt Romney has told us how very important having a parent at home with small children is, in his opinion:

At NBC News’ Education Nation Summit on Tuesday, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said it was preferable for one parent stay home when kids are young.

I guess even a Republican presidential candidate must say "parent" now instead of "mother."  But it's mothers, of course, that these opinions apply to.  Even the quoted item continues:

In 2011, 63.9 percent of the mothers with children under 6 years old held jobs outside the home, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  

What about fathers of children under 6 years old?  They are not mentioned.




 All this reminded me of something from a long-ago era,  year 2000, to be specific, when Anne Case and Christina Paxson (now the president of Brown University) came up with an article about the effect of various family types on children's health. 

Their study concerned the question whether stepmothers are good substitutes for birth mothers as parents, and they argued that it was not the case.  Yup.  One summary of the study:

"Children living with stepmothers are significantly less likely to have routine doctor and dentist visits or to receive regular medical care, are less likely to wear seatbelts."
Roughly half of all children in the United States grow up with at least one of their birth parents absent. Research has shown that these children tend to have more behavioral, academic, and social problems than other children. In Mothers and Others: Who Invests in Children's Health? (NBER Working Paper No. 7691), NBER Research Associates Anne Case and Christina Paxson investigate whether part of the reason these children face poorer outcomes is because parents invest less in them. They find that children living with stepmothers are significantly less likely to have routine doctor and dentist visits or to receive regular medical care, are less likely to wear seatbelts, and are significantly more likely to be living with a cigarette smoker in the household than other children.
The authors use data from the 1988 Child Health Supplement to the National Health Interview Survey to analyze family composition and investments in children's healthcare. Children living with foster or adoptive mothers generally have similar experiences in these areas to children living with birth mothers. Also, the nature of the relationship of the child to the father has little effect on the health care investments made in the children. As a rule, fathers appear to know very little about their children's health or health investments.

Bolds are mine.  As an even shorter summary, the researchers state:

We cannot reject that investments for children living with birth fathers and step mothers are the same as those made by birth fathers living alone with their children. 

In other words, by marrying or partnering again the birth fathers appear not to have hired  a substitute mother for their children!   Hmm.   It looks like the stepmothers are acting pretty much the same way as stepfathers would in the reverse type of a mixed family.

I write about this old study because it was one of the first cases which set me on my way of studying how research is popularized when it's about women or about gender roles.  

Newspapers wrote it up starting with the evil stepmothers of Snow-White and Cinderella, and none of the write-ups had anything about the role of the fathers.  Even the idea that custodial fathers should probably be the ones who know about their children's health care decisions (given that they are the custodial parents) went unmentioned. 

Instead, the focus was on which kind of mothers were good and which kind were bad, and the implicit assumption all this was based on was that women are to take care of children.
 

Traditional Conservatism: The Emperor Wears No Clothes.

In the fairy tale "The Emperor's New Clothes" the emperor was actually naked,  but since his subjects knew that telling the truth would get them beheaded  they eagerly cheered those nonexistent new clothes.

David Brooks is like that emperor in his most recent column.  Even several liberals and progressives think he may have a point.  The guy's vest shimmers!

That's because he reintroduces "traditional conservatism" as something which sounds almost exactly like a nature-lover's egalitarian dream.  Just check out for yourself:

When I joined the staff of National Review as a lowly associate in 1984, the magazine, and the conservative movement itself, was a fusion of two different mentalities. 

On the one side, there were the economic conservatives. These were people that anybody following contemporary Republican politics would be familiar with. They spent a lot of time worrying about the way government intrudes upon economic liberty. They upheld freedom as their highest political value. They admired risk-takers. They worried that excessive government would create a sclerotic nation with a dependent populace. 

But there was another sort of conservative, who would be less familiar now. This was the traditional conservative, intellectual heir to Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, Clinton Rossiter and Catholic social teaching. This sort of conservative didn’t see society as a battleground between government and the private sector. Instead, the traditionalist wanted to preserve a society that functioned as a harmonious ecosystem, in which the different layers were nestled upon each other: individual, family, company, neighborhood, religion, city government and national government. 

Because they were conservative, they tended to believe that power should be devolved down to the lower levels of this chain. They believed that people should lead disciplined, orderly lives, but doubted that individuals have the ability to do this alone, unaided by social custom and by God. So they were intensely interested in creating the sort of social, economic and political order that would encourage people to work hard, finish school and postpone childbearing until marriage.

I bolded the bit about the "harmonious ecosystem."  It could mean several different things, and that's the nifty little trick in Brooks' language.  Liberals might think he's saying this:

With that background in mind, when I consider the concept of harmony in the context of humans, their societies, and the environment I have a particular understanding of the concept. It refers to all people living together peacefully without exploitation of one person by another, each able to reach his or her full human potential, in a society in which everyone has their basic material and nonmaterial needs satisfied, feels secure, safe, happy, and fulfilled as human beings. In addition, the concept also implies harmony between people, the environment, and the other species we share the planet with. People need fully to understand, and act in such ways that indicate, that they are embedded in nature and dependent upon it—not just to obtain natural resources needed for human life, but also that their lives are made richer and protected by biodiversity and the smooth and efficient functioning of the many cycles of nature such as the water and nutrient cycles.

But he is not.  For this is how Brooks continues:

This kind of conservative cherishes custom, believing that the individual is foolish but the species is wise. It is usually best to be guided by precedent.

And of course he earlier stated that

They believed that people should lead disciplined, orderly lives, but doubted that individuals have the ability to do this alone, unaided by social custom and by God.

In other words, religion and social customs should rule.  Thus,  Saudi Arabia is a harmonious human ecosystem.  Indeed, any hierarchical system could qualify as harmonious in Brooks' view.

All this is quite sneaky.  Consider what his rules would mean for women's rights.  Religions usually give women fairly limited rights and traditional social customs do no better.  That's the kind of traditional conservatism David Brooks supports, my dears, because he thinks it could get the Latino population excited about the Republican Party.

It's the so-called social conservatism that Brooks models for us in his fashion show, except that there is no "there" there. 

And neither are these nonexistent new clothes really new.  Haven't we fought the so-called culture wars to an exhaustion?  Don't we still debate whether women's place should be in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant, and whether gays should have stayed in their closets?  From where I sit, this branch of Republicanism is well and alive and certainly quite familiar to all of us once we realize that Brooks is deceiving us with all his talk about "harmonious ecosystems" and the very odd idea that non-conservatives don't want people to work hard or to get educated or to not have children until they are ready for them.

That's three criticisms of the conservative emperor's new clothes, by the way: 

1.  Brooks uses misleading communitarian terms about something which might better be described as a Confucian view of the society as inherently ordered and ranked by religion and social norms.   There's a Straussian flavor to all this.*

2.  He chooses to omit any reference to the forced-birthers, anti-gays and anti-immigrant forces among today's Republicans.  They don't exist!  Instead, once there was a golden age of bigotry which we should return to.

3.  He creates straw-people which he then demolishes.  Liberals are not opposed to hard work or stable families or an educated populace and liberal policies do not result in large numbers of people not finishing school or getting divorced.   For example, Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the nation, despite being viewed as today's Sodom among the social conservatives (who do not exist, according to Brooks).
------
*The Wikipedia article on Strauss sounds to me a bit one-sided.  What I refer to here is the idea that religions are necessary to keep the masses (not the conservative leaders or thinkers) under control, whether one believes in them or not.

A Post About Me

I fell down the stairs a few days ago,  carrying a tray loaded with china.  My bare feet slipped and the heels decided to fly instead of obeying gravity.

My martial arts falling skills came in handy!  I managed to land myself half-way down the tumble, and all that was hurt was one elbow, one spot on my back which took most of the impact and my palms which slapped down hard.  Weird how I had my head raised without even thinking about it!

One never knows which expenses turn out the most profitable...

For the kind-hearted among you, I'm fine.  The china?  Not so fine.

What was fascinating about that mishap was the ability many of us have of very clear thinking in a very short amount of time.   I become a computer in emergencies.  Time to shake afterwards!