Tread carefully when it comes to deciding for poor people what their consumption preferences should be.

From Why Don't They Come? by Ian David Moss, Louise Geraghty, Clara Schuhmacher and Talia Gibas

These researchers seem both deeply committed to a particular concept of equality as well as deeply committed to evidenced-based decision-making, a regrettably rare combination. In this particular instance, they are exploring how to make the arts, broadly defined, as accessible to the poor as to the rich. The summary of their findings:

People with lower incomes and less education (low-SES) participate at lower rates in a huge range of activities, including not just classical music concerts and plays, but also less “elitist” forms of engagement like going to the movies, dancing socially, and even attending sporting events.

This is despite the fact that low-SES adults actually have more free time at their disposal, on average.

Cost is a barrier for some low-SES individuals who want to participate in the arts, but not as many as you might think. If we could somehow make it so that low-SES adults were no more likely to decide not to attend an exhibit or performance because of cost than their more affluent peers, it would hardly change the socioeconomic composition of audiences at all.

A major contrast to this dynamic is television. Ironically, the for-profit commercial TV industry is far more effective than our subsidized nonprofit arts organizations at engaging economically vulnerable members of our society. Not only do low-SES adults watch more TV, low-SES adults who don’t attend arts events watch even more TV than low-SES adults who do.

Where to go from here? We’d like to better understand why people make the choices they do before offering recommendations. At the very least, though, we can say that television should receive far more recognition than it does for its role in shaping the cultural lives of socioeconomically disadvantaged adults.

"We’d like to better understand why people make the choices they do before offering recommendations." What a pleasant, but rare, modesty.

The common explanation for lower income individuals not participating in "arts" are: 1) cost, 2) accessibility, and 3) intimidation. What this detailed research seems to be finding is that none of these three explanations adequately explains lower participation.

Scattered through their detailed report are a number of insights.

Poorer people accessing the arts is often seen as an American problem but it appears to be a common OECD problem.

Looking at income levels shows a similar correlative relationship: those earning between $20,000 and $50,000, who make up one-third of the US population, made up just a quarter of 2012 benchmark arts audiences in 2012. Statistics from the UK, Ireland, and the Netherlands tell a similar story.

In addition to the traditional arts, (live attendance at ballet, opera, musical and nonmusical plays, classical music, jazz, museums, and galleries), the researchers have used a much broader definition including reading books, going to the movies, taking an arts class, playing a musical instrument, singing, dancing socially, taking or editing photographs, painting, making scrapbooks, engaging in creative writing, or making crafts. What they found was that people with lower incomes were less likely to participate in any of these activities, than those with higher income.

They address another commonly assumed cause, time availability.

According to a longitudinal study of time-use data by Almudena Sevilla, Jose I. Gimenez-Nadal, and Jonathan Gershuny, discretionary time has increased for all Americans over the last fifty years, and while hours of leisure time were once fairly equal across education levels, low-SES people have since enjoyed dramatic gains. By their estimation, low-SES men with at most a high school education have gained an hour more than their college-educated peers during that time; the corresponding differential for women is 3.4 hours.

Bottom line: all signs point to low-SES people having relatively more free time at their disposal and lower rates of arts attendance than their high-SES counterparts. That would seem to offer pretty strong evidence against the notion that time constraints are the primary factor keeping this demographic away from live performances and exhibits.

Going into the details of cost as a potential barrier:

So the way to get everyone participating in the arts is to invest more in free events and outreach programs to underserved populations, right? Not so fast. While it is clear that cost does affect the ability of some low-SES adults to engage with the arts, or at least live exhibits and performances, it’s not at all clear that removing cost as a barrier would make that much of a difference.

Consider this: “When Going Gets Tough” reports that there is only a 6 percentage-point gap between the lowest and highest income quartile for those who had free admission to the most recent arts exhibit they’d attended (64% in the lowest income quartile vs. 58% in the highest income quartile). While the difference in attendance at free performances is more pronounced in the GSS data, the most recent SPPA survey tells a different story: the rate of arts attendance at free music, theater, or dance performances actually increases as income and education levels go up. Moreover, this phenomenon has been observed in arts research going back at least half a century. For their seminal early 1960s investigation of cultural economics, Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma, William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen surveyed more than 30,000 attendees at 160 events in the US and UK and found that not a single free performance was able to draw an audience that was more than 10% “blue-collar.”

The good people of Createquity are left with a quandary.

Createquity’s definition of a healthy arts ecosystem imagines a world in which “each human being today and in the future has an opportunity to participate in the arts at a level appropriate to his/her interest and skill” (emphasis added). Our concern about disparities of access to the arts stems from the potential for life circumstances to interfere with such choices. The revelations in this research, however, suggest that there is a significant proportion of economically disadvantaged people who do not take the initiative to experience the arts, even when time and cost are not issues.

Our analysis of the GSS data underlying “When Going Gets Tough” shows that a lack of explicit interest is far and away the dominant factor keeping low-SES populations away from arts events. Just under a third of the overall sample neither attended an exhibit or performance in the past year nor could recall one they wanted to attend but couldn’t. Among the bottom income quartile, however, this number was nearly half – and for people who hadn’t finished high school, it was over 65%!

Unlike most motivated researchers who wish to find answers consistent with their expectations, the Createquity people are brutally honest.

The truth is that we don’t know much about why low-SES people make the choices they do about how to spend their free time. Are they watching television because they truly enjoy it and happen to find it more fulfilling than going out to a concert, a museum, or a movie theater? Or are they doing so as a reluctant concession to circumstance, with TV being the only art form they can afford to consume (or the only one they don’t have to schedule in advance)? Or perhaps something in between – a “learned” and socially reinforced preference that has as much to do with identity as anything specific to the experience itself?

“When Going Gets Tough” offers some support for the last of these propositions. Survey respondents who self-identified as middle or upper class were much more likely to attend an exhibit or performance than those who identified as working class. This finding held even after controlling for income and education:

For example, among individuals whose household income was around the national median, approximately 60% identified as working class and 36% as middle class. Despite having very similar household incomes, only 48% of those identifying as working class attended at least one exhibit or performance, compared with 67% who identified as middle class.

Perhaps some low-SES individuals don’t attend arts events simply because they don’t think of themselves as the “kind of people” who attend arts events. Which brings us back to the question: is that a problem?

All centrally designed and administered policies are subject to catastrophic failure arising from inadequate understanding of the complexity of human systems. In foreign aid in general, and economic development in particular, there is a huge literature surrounding such systematic failures in central planning. No matter the consistency of the outcomes, there is a pathological reluctance to acknowledge such failure. "If we just tweak this aspect of our effort, it will be different next time." But next time is never different.

Createquity, bless them, make a recommendation that is almost never seen in other fields of pathological altruism.

We would urge would-be social engineers to tread carefully when it comes to deciding for poor people what their consumption preferences should be. (An instructive example here is the movement in New York City and elsewhere to reduce soda consumption, which has faced pushback from the very low-income communities it’s intended to help.) How far can one go to increase participation by underrepresented audiences before those efforts stop being perceived as generous and start coming off as patronizing? Until we know more about low-SES people’s subjective experience of their free time — whether they would spend their time differently if they had the opportunity, and whether there’s a place for the arts in those dreams — we advise against making too many assumptions.

The frustrated favor radical change

I recently came across a beat up old copy of Eric Hoffer's classic, The True Believer. Still early days in reading it. I can see why it attracts such acclaim. He is a master of eloquent and reasoned argument. I keep reading sentences with my head nodding in agreement. I am unsettled by the absence of empirical evidence but that is my personal bete noire. Several passages from the first chapter.

There is in us a tendency to locate the shaping forces of our existence outside ourselves. Success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state of things around us. Hence it is that people with a sense of fulfillment think it a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.

Those who are awed by their surroundings do not think of change, no matter how miserable their condition. When our mode of life is so precarious as to make it patent that we cannot control the circumstances of our existence, we tend to stick to the proven and the familiar.

The powerful can be as timid as the weak… Where power is not joined with faith in the future, it is used mainly to ward off the new and preserve the status quo.

Fear of the future causes us to lean against and cling to the present, while faith in the future renders us receptive to change.

For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they must be intently discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power. They must also have an extravagant conception of the prospects and potentialities of the future. Finally, they must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their vast undertaking. Experience is a handicap.

"The frustrated favor radical change." That description sounds like it covers a lot of the noisiest members of academia and the punditry.

The answers are in our questions

A brief but entertaining example of the importance of framing questions.



Surveys can provide useful information but the you have to be cautious. The world answers the questions we do ask without taking into account the questions that we perhaps ought to ask.

Truth is great, and will prevail if left to herself

Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom by Thomas Jefferson. Drafted in 1777 and enacted in 1786. One of the three accomplishments Jefferson instructed to inscribed on his tombstone (the two others were author of the American Declaration of Independence and father of The University of Virginia. I have highlighted a couple of passages that seem especially prescient and pertinent today. To make it more contemporary, substitute ideology for religion.

An Act for establishing religious Freedom.

Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free;

That all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and therefore are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being Lord, both of body and mind yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do,

That the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time;

That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions, which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical;

That even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor, whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness, and is withdrawing from the Ministry those temporary rewards, which, proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind;

That our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry,

That therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence, by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages, to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right,

That it tends only to corrupt the principles of that very Religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments those who will externally profess and conform to it;

That though indeed, these are criminal who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way;

That to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own;

That it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order;

And finally, that Truth is great, and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them:

Be it enacted by General Assembly that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities. And though we well know that this Assembly elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of Legislation only, have no power to restrain the acts of succeeding Assemblies constituted with powers equal to our own, and that therefore to declare this act irrevocable would be of no effect in law; yet we are free to declare, and do declare that the rights hereby asserted, are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right.

The college had attempted to "silence [the eagle's] own story."

Tumult At Oberlin In Wake Of Emotional Support Animal Companion Initiative by Ken White had me going all the way up to paragraph four.

It has often been said that some in the communal conversation are almost beyond satire and White supports that observation.

A new initiative calculated to promote healing and inclusiveness has instead led to controversy, legal threats, violence, and reported feelings of unsafeness on the campus of Oberlin College.

[snip]

With that, Oberlin launched an ambitious plan to supply each student and faculty member with an animal companion to support their emotional, spiritual, and socioeconomic needs, drawing from a large population PETA recently liberated from various forms of servitude across the midwest. Excited undergraduates lined up outside the Nifong Student Empowerment Cooperative, waiting their turn to choose and bond with a companion. "We needed this. We needed this to get through this year from hell," remarked Sophomore False Consciousness Studies major Lauren Haller, as her friends jazzhanded in an affirming manner.

The Nifong Student Empowerment Cooperative was the first clear clue followed by False Consciousness Studies major. OK, now I am ready to switch gears and read for a laugh.

Unfortunately, ESCAPE has not provided the solace for which it was designed. Problems began the first day when Little Mister Derrida, a wolf hybrid companioned with popular Classism Professor Forrest Moore, savagely attacked senior Pietro Salvador's emotional support rabbit Che. "It's unreasonable, and in fact very offensive, to expect Little Mister Derrida to deny his nature in order to confirm to social expectations that make the majority comfortable," protested Professor Moore, who declines to classify his companion as either wolf or not-wolf. Salvador, who could not be reached for comment, reportedly informed his RA that he had not found the experience emotionally supportive.

There were other violent confrontations between companions of different backgrounds and life experiences throughout the week. Moreover, many students reported that their classmates had not offered the welcoming and accepting community that is the hallmark of Oberlin. Sophomore Henry Trask's attempt to bring his emotional support pig to a Comparative Religion class led to a largely unproductive and mostly screamed debate about the inherent tension between Trask's right to emotional support and his classmates' protected right against offense. Freshperson Darlene Oswalt filed a federal civil rights complaint when a professor asked her to take her raptor outside, saying that the college had attempted to "silence [the eagle's] own story." Moreover, students with sensory differences have reported hygiene anxieties. "The residence halls reek from feces and urine," said one student who asked to remain anonymous. "And this time not just that one graduate dorm."

Read the whole thing.

Cognitive Pollution Checklist

Awesome summary. From A Rough Guide to Spotting Bad Science from BITSS.

Click to enlarge.

Following this checklist get's you 80% of the way to vetting an argument claim.

Bring back local political competition

Mathematics has an uncomfortable way of bringing clarity to issues we might not otherwise wish to address. This truism is illustrated in The Truth About Race, Gerrymandering and the Democrats by Jonathan S. Tobin.

But as the Washington Post reported on Friday, the party hopes that a strategy based on lawsuits will eventually change the balance of power in the House, if not soon, but after the next redrawing of district lines around the country following the 2020 census. But while the Post article details how legal challenges might undermine successful Republican efforts to gerrymander districts in their favor, it leaves out one essential element to the equation. The Democrats problem isn’t so much nefarious GOP maneuvers to create favorable boundaries for their candidates, as it is the Voting Rights Act that has created so many majority-minority districts. If all the lawsuits are successful, it will be African-American and Hispanic Democratic officeholders that are the big losers, not the Republicans.

As even the Post article noted, the current Democratic court challenges to various districts around the country don’t amount to enough seats to tip the House in their direction even if they were all successful. But the goal is to set in place legal standards that would forbid states from lumping a large percentage of their African-American voters in to a few districts, leaving the rest dominated by white voters.

There’s no question that this practice has been a godsend for Republicans and a disaster for the Democrats. African-Americans are a huge part of the Democrats’ base throughout the country. In the south, they have become virtually their sole bulwark of support. Thus, grouping them together in a few districts has the effect of making the Democrats non-competitive everywhere else.

But what was left out of the Post article is the fact that this idea wasn’t invented in a backroom by some evil GOP genius bent on marginalizing blacks and empowering conservatives. Instead, it was more or less invented by liberal judges who interpreted the Voting Rights Act as mandating not just the right of everyone to vote but the creation of an electoral environment in which minorities could be set up to succeed.

I do not like race-based solutions and while I understand the historical context that led to majority-minority districting and the good intentions behind it, I have always thought such districting inconsistent with the Constitution and ultimately self-defeating.

My perspective is that what is most critical is not representation by skin color or religion or whatever other semi-arbitrary fancy of the political day might be but rather, competition. You want districts that foster competition. To that end, I have always thought that a random reshuffling of district boundaries every ten years (subject to a couple of parameters such as geographical compactness and obviously number of voters) would be very beneficial. Not knowing if they would be in the same predictable boundaries with the same voters would, likely, lead politicians to a more balanced and considered calculation of any action as it might impact all voters, not just the current ones that they can rely on.

The gerrymandering that occurs now has led to the consequence that very few seats are successfully contested. Unless they are caught in enormously embarrassing or illegal circumstances, a politician is secure until he chooses to retire. Secure politicians lead to rent seeking and regulatory capture to the detriment of all citizens.

There are other consequences. The effort to establish majority-minority districts has indeed successfully changed the face of the House of Representatives and if you are concerned solely with appearances, then that can be chalked up as a success. But if you are concerned that all citizens are equally represented, then there is cause for concern. Because African-Americans overwhelmingly vote Democrats, majority-minority districts weaken the balance of Democrat office seekers and substantially sidelines the representation of African-American concerns in the political process. Why? Democrats assume that they are the only party for African-Americans and therefore take those votes for granted. While they remain cognizant of African-American concerns, those concerns are not duly weighted in political calculations. If you believe African-Americans won't vote for anyone else no matter what you do, you simply don't have to focus very much on those concerns.

For Republicans the calculation is different. If they are never going to receive more than 10% of the African-American vote, then there is no return on invested time and money in courting those voters. Instead, all the focus is shifted to other voters.

Between Democrats assuming they have a lock on African-American votes no matter what and Republicans assuming they will never get any return on courting African-American voters, African-American concerns receive short shrift. Congress looks more diverse but that appearance of diversity is not reflected in the implementation of policies that actually might benefit African-Americans.

Random boundaries might lead to a decimation of the number of African-Americans in Congress but it might also lead to a dramatic increase in the actual representation of African-American interests. The candidate running for a district that is 45:55 (of either party) is going to be much more solicitous to the minority interests than the candidate running for a district that is 90:10.

This is simply a mathematical issue. It imputes no negative motives to any individual. And these mathematical issues of democracy (proportionate representation, first-past-the-post, etc.) have long been known, explored and documented. There are numerous good books out there discussing the various trade-offs between different types of districting and voting. There is nothing new under the sun.

I think Tobin is right. Majority-minority districts have substantially decreased the competitiveness of both Democrats and Republicans by making those seats safe. What I would like to see, by whatever policy change, is an increase in partisan competition at all levels and for all roles. Partisanship in itself is a rather nasty beast but it is worse when politicians settle down comfortably in the modern equivalent of "rotten boroughs", safe from transparency and accountability, and free to pursue their rent seeking and regulatory capture ways regardless of the impact on the citizenry.

There is nothing wrong with Ferguson or Detroit or Chicago or San Francisco or Baltimore that a little political competition won't cure. It has nothing to do with race and little to do with the particularities of a particular party and everything to do with absence of political competition.

Millennials who regard talking on the phone as a barbarism akin to the chamber pot

An interesting set of observations arising from the UK election at the end of last week, Pollsters Are Worse Than Ever by Megan McArdle.

I’ve seen few people asking what seems like the more pertinent question: What if polls can’t be fixed?

The second half of the 20th century was the golden age of survey data. But toward the end of the century, changing technology began to threaten the accuracy of polls. We now have caller ID, voicemail, and millennials who regard talking on the phone as a barbarism akin to the chamber pot. The modern American workday also compresses housekeeping and socializing into a few narrow hours, during which people are less likely to humor an unsolicited caller. In part because we've also seen the proliferation of robocalls in the survey industry and beyond.

Pollsters say that by carefully calibrating for the missing responders, they can still get accurate results. But what if it’s getting too hard?

Ideas - If they are true, they are not fungible; if they are false, they are worthless

From Marketplace of ideas by David Warren. One of those essays where I am not fully consonant with the general drift, but can enjoy many particular passages.

We aren’t in a “marketplace of ideas.” If they are true, they are not fungible; if they are false, they are worthless.

I don’t just mean, sold for money. Many currencies are used to obtain things in this world, and money is among the cleanest: it can be seen, quantified, and accepted or rejected. Most financial corruption is straightforward. There is no difficulty in discovering the motive. The people who do it may lead otherwise commendable lives. That is, if you think bourgeois is commendable.

[snip]

Violence is also a currency, as Messrs Daish, Qaeda, Boko Haram, &c, remind us every day. It can be more efficient than money in getting what you want, and is quicker than queueing, though like money it requires good management to get the best results. Which is just where psychopaths most frequently go wrong: they do not think ahead.

[snip]

Even violence may seem clean compared to other twists. I have come to think moral posturing is the dirtiest of all currencies or persuaders. It has the largest fallout. By mimicking the good, and providing cover for bad behaviour, it spreads. Hypocrisy comes into this: most, if not all who present themselves as moral exemplars are hypocrites, indeed: but hypocrisies can be exposed and derided. Rather, I think, the moral exhibitionism is the primary evil. It invites applause, and with applause, imitation.

In the world of media and politics I have passed through, the biggest rewards were available almost exclusively to stuntmen (and stuntwomen) of this kind. Few of the most successful, it seemed to me, were in it for money alone; though few failed to see the main chances. Often, vanity got the better of them: they did not see the shoals in the course of self-promotion. For many, it was a short journey, to where something more mephitic came into play; something like a desire to be worshipped. Causes they might think they served, but they weren’t much moved by the consequences.

The Oberlin College choir responds to the Christina Sommers controversy

Heh. Mockery is often the best form of argument, artful mockery even more so. This purports to be The Oberlin College choir responds to the Christina Sommers controversy and I hope for the sake of Oberlin's brand reputation that indeed their choir had the gumption to respond to the campus nonsense in this gentle fashion. If it isn't the Oberlin Choir, then Oberlin has a new benchmark of performance towards which to strive.

I suspect we will see this played a lot since it is such a pleasant rejoinder to nonsensical faux outrage.