Have a Witty Halloween

Deskilling and Feminizing an Occupation

In our Social Structure class we are considering Barbara Reskin's "Labor Markets as Queues" and Warren Farrell's Why Men Earn More.

Reskin notes that an occupation draws more women when it is "deskilled." This also leads to pay going down. She treats this as evidence of discrimination against women.

Farrell notes that an occupation draws more women when the task is made easier and working conditions get better. This also leads to pay going down. He treats this as evidence of what happens when the supply exceeds the demand for a job.

In general, Reskin treats lower women's wages as discrimination against women, even though it costs employers more to hire men at higher wages.

Farrell points out that if employers could really get the same work from women, or any kind of workers, for lower wages, the employers would hire them. If it is not illegal to hire from the less-likely group, then some employers will break ranks with custom to save money and reap a competitive advantage.

Of Course Monogamy is Realistic - It is What Most Married People Have Done Through Human History

The perennial hope of the self-indulgent, especially, rich, self-indulgent men, that some moral authority will let them have all the benefits of marriage while fooling around is being fed by "science" again. But monogamy, the human norm through all times and places, is not about to fade away. Monogamy is not "unrealistic"; it is just a challenge.

Fifteen

The excellent Taylor Swift has a good new song that will do more good than an abstinence-only sex ed class:



You take a deep breath and you walk through the doors
It's the morning of your very first day
And you say hi to your friends you ain't seen in a while
Try and stay out of everybody's way

It's your freshman year and you're gonna be here
For the next four years in this town
Hoping one of those senior boys will wink at you and say
"You know, I haven't seen you around before"

'Cause when you're fifteen and somebody tells you they love you
You're gonna believe them
And when you're fifteen feeling like there's nothing to figure out
Well, count to ten, take it in
This is life before you know who you're gonna be
Fifteen

You sit in class next to a redhead named Abigail
And soon enough you're best friends
Laughing at the other girls who think they're so cool
We'll be outta here as soon as we can

And then you're on your very first date and he's got a car
And you're feeling like flying
And you're momma's waiting up and you're thinking he's the one
And you're dancing 'round your room when the night ends
When the night ends

'Cause when you're fifteen and somebody tells you they love you
You're gonna believe them
When you're fifteen and your first kiss
Makes your head spin 'round
But in your life you'll do things greater than
Dating the boy on the football team
But I didn't know it at fifteen

When all you wanted was to be wanted
Wish you could go back and tell yourself what you know now

Back then I swore I was gonna marry him someday
But I realized some bigger dreams of mine
And Abigail gave everything she had to a boy
Who changed his mind and we both cried

'Cause when you're fifteen and somebody tells you they love you
You're gonna believe them
And when you're fifteen, don't forget to look before you fall
I've found time can heal most anything
And you just might find who you're supposed to be
I didn't know who I was supposed to be at fifteen

Your very first day
Take a deep breath girl
Take a deep breath as you walk through the doors

Thanks to Smartmarriage for the alert

Serial Divorceniks Ruin the Divorce Rate for Us All.

Ten percent of Arkansans have been married 3 times or more. Five percent of all Americans have been married that much.

I think that explains the famous "50% divorce rate," which is puzzling since most marrieds never divorce. The small numbers of serial divorceniks do it so often that they bring everyone's average down to what seems like a crap shoot.

This reminds me of the solution to the statistical puzzle of the higher intercourse rate of men than women. Gay men account for a small portion of the gap. A bigger part of the gap is closed by a small number of women who have sex with many men - that is, prostitutes.

I think it would be helpful to calculate two divorce rates, one for all marrieds, and one for all marrieds except those who have divorced multiple times.

D.C. Marriage Rate Is Low Because People Leave the City When They Marry

The marriage rate in the District of Columbia is half that of the average of states - a bit over a quarter, vs. a bit over half, of all people. Newsweek blogger Katie Connolly got the explanation mostly right, but her analysis was overshadowed by her comment that D.C. is segregated by apartheid.

Connolly cited three factors that reduce the marriage rate in Washington, D.C. Most of the city residents are African American, and a high proportion of them are poor, the two groups with the lowest marriage rates in America. Second, whites who live in the city are disproportionately highly educated young, Democratic, and women - three groups who do marry, but marry late. Third, the homosexual population of D.C., at about 8%, is double the proportion you would find in a state.

The main reason the D.C. marriage rate is low, which Connolly cites but does not lean on as the main reason, is that it is a city, and a poor one at that. When black D.C. residents marry, have children, and start to move up in class, they leave the city for the suburbs, especially Prince Georges County, MD, which probably has the largest black middle class of any county in America. When white yuppies from all over come to Washington to work on public policy they find a fine city to live and work in - until you have children. Then they move to the suburbs.

Or, if you are really fortunate, and Mrs. G. and I were, you move to Danville, KY to raise your kids.

Happy Quasquibicentennial, Presbyterian Church of Danville

Today was our 225th birthday celebration. I got to teach the Sunday School version of all of that history in 50 minutes. That kind of class requires a great deal of compression.

Danville is in the center of Kentucky (that is why Centre College is so called). Kentucky is a border state. Churches in the border states have a strong reason to pursue a moderate course on divisive issues. And no issue was more divisive for the first two hundred years of the congregation's history than racial division. Kentucky was a slave state, and some members of the church were slaveholders. The leaders of the church, and the college they created, were abolitionists, even in the 18th century. They were moderate abolitionists, for gradualism and colonization. The church split in the 1850s, partly over abolition. It stayed split through the long years of Jim Crow segregation. After the Second World War, though, the old division was largely healed among the Presbyterians of Danville. After several false starts, the two congregations reunited in the 1960s, well before the national denominations did.

The Presbyterian Church of Danville began in 1784. The northern and southern Presbyterians finally caught up with our congregation and reunited in 1983. Racism is far from over in America, and there are no doubt pockets of it still in the Presbtyerian Church (U.S.A.). But the spirit of racism is gone. The reunion of the northern and southern branches sealed that change.

I date the new era of the Presbyterian Church of Danville, and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), from that date. Happy 25th, Presbyterians!

Fun for Word Nerds: The Fake AP Stylebook

'Hafta' should be avoided, as it might offend the anti-globalization contingent.

If accuracy / Is what you crave / Then you should call it / Myanmar Shave

Actually, "bloviate" has no meaning at all. The word was just a prank on Aristotle that took on a life of its own.

And so forth, and so forth. Enjoy.

Bourdieu and Passeron 5: The Pedagogocratic Ambition

This week I will be blogging on Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron's Reproduction in Education, Culture, and Society, which we are studying in my macrosociological theory class.

The learned classes have “the pedagogocratic ambition of subjecting all acts of civil and political life to the moral magisterium of the University.”

They made up the word pedagogocratic. It is a lovely word.

It is not wrong to wish that smart people run society. What is wrong is being arrogant about being smart or educated. The moral magisterium of the University is properly one voice in the argument about how things should be run. I think it proper that it be one of the most influential voices. But pedagogocracy would not be superior to democracy, or more precisely, republicanism.

Bourdieu and Passeron 4: To Succeed in School You Need a Skill Not Taught in School

This week I will be blogging on Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron's Reproduction in Education, Culture, and Society, which we are studying in my macrosociological theory class.

The higher classes also are likely to learn the language of school - the extended code, the ability to think and speak abstractly, the ability to think beyond your own circumstances, the ability to put yourself in the position of a quite different Other. It is the language in which this blog is written. They come to school with a hidden advantage. Their primary habitus matches the school habitus.

Bourdieu's signal contribution to sociology is the idea that cultural capital is the way that the richer classes can turn their economic capital into a productive social advantage. And when they teach that cultural capital to their children, the children reap that advantage. Part of the advantage comes in their greater ease in school. Their primary habitus matches the school's habitus, which is normally the authorized habitus of the dominant culture.

Beyond their greater ease with what the school does teach, advantaged kids come to their school years at ease with important cultural knowledge that the school does not teach. Their primary habitus is full of all the cultural knowledge that involved, informed parents drag their kids too. Beyond that, the primary habitus of the most advantaged children has an attitude toward learning culture that makes school success and social success much easier.

To really succeed in school, you need a code that the school does not teach.

Bourdieu and Passeron 3: Critically Thinking About Culture is Already Cultured

This week I will be blogging on Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron's Reproduction in Education, Culture, and Society, which we are studying in my macrosociological theory class.

"The man who deliberates on his culture is already a cultivated individual."

Bourdieu and Passeron argue that schools pick some aspects of the culture to teach, which establishes the core of cultivated taste. The content of what schools teach tends to reinforce the dominance of the dominant class. The schools create a "habitus" of seeking to be cultivated, of seeking to better know and understand the official culture.

Part of the official culture, though, is critical thinking about the official culture. This is more true of higher education than lower, and more true of elite education than mass education.

A good education embeds one more fully in the dominant culture. A good education includes the ability to reflect on that dominant culture. More importantly, a good education inculcates the desire to reflect on that dominant culture. When we reflect critically on the pedagogic work of education itself, we see, say Bourdieu and Passeron, that its content bolsters the domination of the dominant class.

Reflecting on your culture makes you cultivated. Critical thinking about cultivation is itself a cultivated taste, and doing it makes you more cultivated still. Reading Reproduction in Education, Culture, and Society as part of a school class is both an act of subversion of the dominant culture, and a deeper participation in the kind of cultivation that the dominant class cherishes the most and has the most opportunity to engage in.

Bourdieu and Passeron 2: The Competition for Taste

This week I will be blogging on Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron's Reproduction in Education, Culture, and Society, which we are studying in my macrosociological theory class.

Bourdieu and Passeron argue that the school imposes uses its cultural authority to impose an orthodoxy of taste.

Other, competing, institutions often have a somewhat different taste. They can try to promote their specific taste as a counter-orthodoxy. They are at a great disadvantage, though, because the school, being the school, has a superior cultural authority to establish the standard body of authorized knowledge, including authorized taste. Every art class picks some art to teach, whether they intend to promote an orthodox style or not.

So, instead, competing cultural institutions often adopt a different strategy. They promote an alternative approach to taste. They promote eclecticism and syncretism, instead of any orthodoxy.

This seems to me a useful idea. I can think of uses beyond the realm of taste as such. I have often noticed that people who promote diversity or multiculturalism often drop that emphasis as soon as they are in power. Instead, they try to make their ideological position obligatory and orthodox for all.

There should be a way to differentiate institutions and people who are genuinely committed to eclecticism, syncretism, diversity, multiculturalism, from those who only strategically adopt those positions when they are out of power.

Bourdieu and Passeron 1: All Teaching Is Symbolic Violence

This week I will be blogging on Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron's Reproduction in Education, Culture, and Society, which we are studying in my macrosociological theory class.

Proposition Zero:

“Every power to exert symbolic violence, i.e. every power which manages to impose meanings and to impose them as legitimate by concealing the power relations which are the basis of its force, adds its own specifically symbolic force to the power relations.”

Reproduction in Education, Culture, and Society was first published in 1970. In their Afterword to the 1990 edition the authors note that the most misunderstood idea in the book was "symbolic violence." They were misunderstood to be saying that some teaching - the teaching that reproduced the domination of the dominant class - imposed a culturally arbitrary content with a false authority, an authority that ultimately rested on force. Bourdieu and Passeron clarified that they were asserting the more radical proposition that all teaching imposes a culturally arbitrary content with a false authority, whether it be from the dominant class or from any attempt to subvert the dominant class.

The reason they call this "violence" is to draw a parallel between the school and the state (which are, of course, often the same institution). Max Weber said that the state is the institution with a monopoly of legitimate physical violence. The school, Bourdieu and Passeron argue, is the institution with the monopoly of legitimate symbolic violence. Each uses its authority to assert the dominant culture and to suppress threats to that dominant culture.

I quarrel with Bourdieu and Passeron for calling this action of teaching "violence." The term is almost always inappropriate and unnecessarily provocative.

My larger quarrel with them, though, is over the idea that all of the content of teaching is a cultural arbitrary imposed to bolster the social position of the teaching class and those they represent. The authors are making a large metaphysical claim that there are no fundamental truths that transcend class position.

I accept just about every claim of epistemological modesty that it is extraordinarily difficult to know with certainty what it fundamentally true. I contend as a claim of faith that there are some truths, though. I am happy to have my contentions compete with other faiths in the marketplace of ideas. Bourdieu and Passeron also allow what they call the "reality principle" or "law of the market": if the market validates a kind of teaching, it has more authority. But they do not grant that this authority reflects on the truth of the claim - only that it helps people believe it is true. Yet they also think that it is hopeless to try to teach with authority that all truth is relative.

I don't think Bourdieu and Passeron's claim about the truth of their own claims about truth are coherent.

1/3 of the World is Christian, 1/4 of the World is Muslim

I think there are a few basic numbers about religion that everyone should know. Here are two of my hypothetical top ten.

Let's Panic About Babies!

This is a wonderful, silly website about children and parenthood. The opposite of cutesy. My sister, a tough mom, recommended it.

I particularly like the ads from their "sponsors," such as these:

Jane Doe Now Wants to Know Anonymous Sperm Donor's Name. Too Bad.

A woman who conceived through an anonymous sperm donor is now suing to get his identity. She says "I don’t think it right that any person should be forbidden from knowing their fathers’ identities or family health information."

Hard cheese.

I support the movement to spell out more explicitly what the duties of sperm donors are, and just exactly how secure their anonymity is. But I think it wrong to try to get the court to break a contract or invent a rule. Making rules is what the legislature is for.

Louisiana Justice Denies Interracial Marriage

A justice of the peace in Louisiana will not marry interracial couples because "I don't want to put children in a situation they didn't bring on themselves. In my heart, I feel the children will later suffer."

So, so wrong.

Louisiana has given us more racial weirdness than any other state. Plessy v. Ferguson became a federal issue when Louisiana's counting of racial fractions pitted the "black" railroad car against the "quadroon" Homer Plessy. Louisiana law still recognizes racial fractions down to 1/32nd, though they are mostly dead letter. Mostly, but, as we see, not quite.

I hope this one can be laughed out of practice, and Justice Keith Bardwell can be shamed out of office.

Spirituality Makes Her Clothes Fall Off

I am not sure if this scientific study is really ripe, but it sure does have an interesting hook.

LiveScience, an MSNBC blog, reports on a study from Jessica Burris at the University of Kentucky on what correlates with sex for a sample of 353 undergraduates. Among other questions, Burris gave them a Spiritual Transcendence Scale measure (with which I am not otherwise familiar). This is the eyebrow-raiser:

For women, however, spirituality was the strongest predictor for the number of sexual partners, the frequency of sex, and the tendency to have sex without a condom.

Burris reads both spirituality and sex as ways women seek intimacy.

I am inclined to think that sexually loose college women get detached from the churches they were raised in, but didn't want to go all the way to atheism, so they stopped at "spiritual."

Either way, I hope someone follows up on this with a fuller study.

Death Penalty Sunday School

In Sunday School this morning we were honored with a real pro talking about the death penalty.

Steve Bright, a Danville native and now president of the Southern Center for Human Rights was talking about some truly dreadful death penalty cases. The big picture of the death penalty doesn't look much better. The people on death row and already executed are almost all poor guys with terrible lawyers. They are criminals, and did horrible things. The injustice is not that they are in prison. The injustice is that rich guys who do the same thing can afford competent lawyers who plead them into life sentences rather than execution. The further injustice is that many of the poor guys committed their crimes in the few places where the prosecutor seeks the death penalty - especially if you live in Houston, the death penalty capital of America.

The most striking sociological point that Bright made was that juries that convict in death penalty cases are mostly in white-flight counties around non-white cities. The fear that led to the flight in the first place gets played out in court when the overwhelmingly white juries sentence to death predominantly non-white vicious criminals with bad lawyers.

I asked if there were any practical way to reserve the death penalty for the most dreadful crimes - Timothy McVeigh, Ted Bundy, Charles Manson. Bright said, in effect, probably not. For one thing, the most dreadful criminals have been able to plead to life imprisonment in exchange for revealing further details of their crimes. For another, more important reason, it is up to the local, elected prosecutor to decide whether to seek the death penalty or not.

As a centrist, I think it would be possible to write a very narrow statute specifying when the death penalty could be sought that would distinguish cold-blooded mass murderers from stoned junkies who shoot clerks in the course of robbing liquor stores. That is a question best addressed by the professionals.

What was clear to me, though, is that even if you think that the death penalty is appropriate in a few rare circumstances, as I do, the current way we use the death penalty is grossly unjust.

Mind-Boggling Christo-Kitsch

A painter named Jon McNaughton has created "One Nation Under God." It shows Jesus, in glory, delivering the U.S. Constitution. He is backed by a body of dead patriots, some real and some symbolic. In the foreground are good people and bad people. My kind, alas, are presented in the latter group. Look for The Professor. He is the one right in front of Satan.

McNaughton explains all this symbolism in detail. There is a wonderful rollover feature on the picture itself, explaining each one. Even the sky is explained: "Fifty stars represents the fifty states of the union. Some shine brighter than others."

I do, seriously, praise McNaughton for a competent painting with a public meaning. I like this genre - the School of Athens is one of my favorite inspirational paintings. The text, alas, has many errors, both typographical and historical. But I appreciate the effort to make an argument in painting.

Two side notes:

Shame on the heirs of Martin Luther King for forbidding McNaughton to include King's image with the other Founding Fathers. McNaughton was obliged to name his exemplary soldier "King" in honor of MLK - surely a weird symbol-bearer for a notable war critic.

There is a good satire of McNaughton's rollover text at Shortpacked.

This may truly be the most important new painting of the twenty first century. How do I know that? Because McNaughton says so in an "interview with the artist" that he has with himself.