How does the U.S. compare to other developed countries on measures of social justice? According to the New York Times, not very well. The visual below compares countries’ poverty rates, poverty prevention measures, income inequality, spending on pre-primary education, and citizen health. The “overall” rating is on the far left and the U.S. ranks 27th out of 31.
For the last week of December, we’re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2011.
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In Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, Ori and Rom Brafman discuss a contestant on Qui Veut Gagner des Millions?, the French version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, who asks the audience for help with the question, “Which of these revolves around the Earth?” His options are the sun, the moon, Venus, and Mars. While it might be surprising that he doesn’t know, more shocking is the result of the audience poll — 56% say the sun:
How can we explain this? The easiest answer, and the video’s title, is that French people appear to be stupid, or were never informed about the Copernican Revolution. But the Brafmans have an explanation based on different cultural attitudes toward reality shows and, ultimately, ideas about fairness.
The general outlines of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? are the same regardless of country. But distinct cultural patterns have emerged in how audiences act when asked for help. In the U.S., contestants can count on the audience’s goodwill; regardless of the question asked, audiences appear to do their best to help contestants out and the Brafmans report that data shows the audience is right over 90% of the time. I must admit it had never occurred to me that audiences would do anything other than try to be helpful. Though I don’t watch game shows now, as a kid I regularly watched The Price Is Right, among others, with my family, and we always inherently rooted for the contestant, cringing if they seemed to make a bad choice and rejoicing if they won big. We truly wanted these complete strangers to win.
But not all national audiences are so cooperative. When the show was introduced in Russia, contestants quickly learned to be wary of asking the audience for help because Russian audiences frequently mislead them, intentionally giving the wrong answer. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the players or the questions they ask for help on.
In France, audiences seem to fall in the middle. They don’t regularly attempt to trick players, as Russian (and according to my googling, Ukrainian) audiences do. But unlike U.S. audiences, they don’t seem willing to help under any circumstances, either. They appear to intentionally give the wrong answer if the contestant asks for help on a question the audience perceives as too easy. If they think the player ought to know the answer they give the wrong response, apparently thinking the contestant deserves to lose if they’re so stupid. In the video you can hear audience laughter when Henri decides to go with the results of the audience poll.
Ori and Rom Brafman suggest this relates to notions of fairness, which have been shown to vary widely by culture. They say that in the U.S., we think it’s fair for people to win large sums of money even if they seem dumb, while in France, there is more concern about whether the individual deserves to win. They consulted historians of Russian society who suggest audience behavior there results from a general mistrust of those who gain sudden wealth. However, they provide no data to directly connect the audience members’ intentional wrong answers to cultural perceptions of fairness more broadly, so I’m somewhat hesitant about this theoretical leap. If you’re an enterprising grad student looking for a dissertation topic, perhaps you can take this project on and get back to me with your results.
But I think this topic is also interesting for the way it highlights the intersection of globalization and local cultures. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, like other reality shows such as the various varieties of Idol, are international franchises (Millionaire is owned by Sony), designed to be easily transferable to and implemented in many countries with the same basic blueprint — simply add local talent and you’ve got a successful TV show. But as the variation in Millionaire shows, differences inevitably creep in as a global product or process is used or interpreted on the local level, sometimes in superficial ways but other times to a degree that significantly alters the original product.
Children in American movies are typically superior to adults. The kids are not only all right, they are wiser, less corrupt, and more competent. “Home Alone” is a classic example, where the plucky, resourceful kid triumphs over both the vindictiveness of the burglars and the mindlessness of his parents. (An earlier post on children in films is here.)
“The Descendants,” the recent film with George Clooney (I saw it last night), starts more like a French film, where children are, well, children, and it’s the parents who must endure and learn to cope with the kids’ immaturity and thoughtlessness.
Clooney is Matt King, and the name is a deliberate irony. Kinglike, he must decide the fate of a huge tract of pristine Kauai land that his family has owned for many generations. The money from the sale will make him and his many cousins and their families rich. Which developer will he sell the land to?But as a husband and father he is far being monarch of all he surveys. His wife has been in an accident and lies in a coma. His two daughters are unapologetically impudent and insufferable. As the film starts, Scottie, age ten, has sent a nasty, obscene text to a classmate. Alex, seventeen, now at an expensive private rehab/therapeutic school, first appears on screen drunk, having sneaked out of her room at night with another girl. Then there’s Sid, Alex’s friend, a slightly older boy, all stupidity and insensitivity, a chubby incarnation of Beavis and Butthead.Then the film magically transforms the kids. Each has been introduced as obtuse, obscene, or obnoxious. But now Alex, it turns out, knows more than her father does, at least in one crucial area – that his wife, now on life support, had been cheating on him.
The kids change from being French, a burden for the grown-up, to becoming almost classically American, not superior but equal. They are now his partners. Teens and adult are a team trying to discover the identity and location of the seducer so that King can confront him. The teenagers are suddenly much less difficult and much more helpful, while King sometimes appears uncertain and even silly, peering over hedges to spy on his wife’s lover. He asks his daughter for advice. He even asks Sid what he should do.(You can get some sense of this transformation in the trailers here and here, which also outline the rest of the story.)
Still, the movie doesn’t go pure Hollywood. It does not present the world as a character contest where good faces evil, where the right action is clear and the only question is how the hero will come to make it. Instead, it shows a grown-up trying to understand and cope with problems and people he cannot really control.
As we enter the last frenzied days of Christmas shopping, Dmitriy T.M. thought it was worth looking at international comparisons in spending on the holiday. The Economist posted a graph based on Gallup polls and other data sources about how much individuals in various countries in Europe, plus the U.S. and South Africa, plan to spend on Christmas shopping this year, plotted against national GDP. Overall, Christmas spending correlates with national wealth, with the Netherlands being a noticeable outlier (spending less than we’d expect) and Luxembourg in a spending league of its own:
The media generally talk about the economy in national terms — as if economic trends affect us all equally and we all share a common interest in supporting or opposing the same economic policies. This comforting view tends to promote political passivity — since we are all in the same “boat,” it makes sense to leave policy making to the experts.
A recently published study on income distribution by economists Anthony Atkinson, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez stands as a welcome corrective. Uwe E. Reinhardt discusses some of the main implications of their work in his New York Timesblog.
Reinhardt’s Figure 1 shows average annual income growth for households in the United States and the different experiences of the top 1% and the bottom 99%. From 1976 to 2007, average household income grew at an average annual rate of 1.2%. Over the same period, the top 1% of households experienced an average annual income gain of 4.4% while the bottom 99% of households gained only 0.6% a year. Household income gains were higher in both subperiods (1993-2000 and 2002-2007), in large part because these subperiods were recession free.
Figure 2 shows the share of total income growth in each time period that was captured by the top 1% of households. Over the years 1976 to 2007, these households captured 58% of all income generated. Their share was an astounding 65% in the period 2002 to 2007.
This skewed income distribution means that average income figures present a highly misleading picture of the American experience. As Reinhardt explains:
So if an American macroeconomist — a specialist who tends to think of nations as people — or high-level government officials or politicians mimicking a macroeconomist boasted on a television talk show that “average family income grew by 3 percent during 2002-7, more than in most European economies,” about 99 percent of American viewers, reflecting on their own experience, would probably scratch their heads and wonder, “What is this guy talking about?”
Figure 3 highlights the growth in real GDP per capita and median household income from 1975 to 2007. The data show a growing divergence between what working people produced and what the average household received from that production. Real GDP per capita rose by an annual compound rate of 1.9% while real median household income increased by less than 0.5%.
As Reinhardt points out: “Other than national pride in league tables, that 1.9 percent average economic growth does not mean much for the experience of the median household in the United States.”
This brings us back to the issue of whether it makes sense to talk in “national” terms, especially given the dominance of the top 1% of households. According to Anthony Atkinson, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez:
Average real income per family in the United States grew by 32.2 percent from 1975 to 2006, while they grew only by 27.1 percent in France during the same period, showing that the macroeconomic performance in the United States was better than the French one during this period. Excluding the top percentile, average United States real incomes grew by only 17.9 percent during the period while average French real incomes — excluding the top percentile — still grew at much the same rate (26.4 percent) as for the whole French population. Therefore, the better macroeconomic performance of the United States and France is reversed when excluding the top 1 percent.
None of this is to suggest that U.S. society is best understood in terms of a simple division between the top 1% and the bottom 99%; the latter group is far from homogeneous. Still, this division alone is big enough to establish that talking in simple national terms hides more than it illuminates about the American experience. Said differently, just because the top 1% of U.S. households have reason to celebrate the U.S. economic model doesn’t mean that the rest of us should join in the celebration.
Tara C. sent us a great excuse to revive an old post featuring public resistance to marketing that is believed to sexually objectify women. As I wrote back then, this resistance shows us how…
…adding commentary to the ubiquitous images that surround us [can help] us to notice, even if just temporarily, that our environment is toxic to our ability to think of all people as full and complete humans.
I’ll put Tara’s submission first, but do enjoy the whole collection.
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Commentary on a Special K. ad in Dublin, sent in by Tara C. (Broadsheet):
Text:
Hey there Special-K Lady.
I know you think I should diet
So I can be slim just like you.
thing is, I think I look pretty fabulous
Just the way I am
Also, Special-K tastes like cardboard
so piss off
Toban B. (a prolific SocImages contributor, by the way) sent us a set of photographs. These were snapped in Seattle, Washington by Jonathan McIntosh:
This one was written on by a teenage girl in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. It reads: “I’m sick of sexually tinted images.”
Tricia V. sent us an example of this kind of resistance in Haiti. The billboard below is in for a brand of beer called Prestige. Tricia writes: “The writing [along the bottom of] the billboard says “Ko O+ pa machandiz” which translates as ‘Women’s bodies are not merchandise.’” She was impressed at the effort exerted to climb up and write across a full-sized billboard.
NEW (May ’10)! Ang B. snapped this photo in Madison, Wisconsin:
I have criticized sloppy statistical work by some international feminist organizations, so I’m glad to have a chance to point out a useful new report and website.
Skewed sex ratios (which I’ve written about here and here) are in the news, with the publication of Unnatural Selection, by Mara Hvistendahl. The report shows some of the countries with the most skewed sex ratios, reflecting the practice of parents aborting female fetuses (Vietnam and Taiwan should be in there, too). With the exception of Korea, they’ve all gotten more skewed since the 1990s, when ultrasounds became more widely available, allowing parents to find out the sex of the fetus early in the pregnancy.
The most egregious inequality between women of the world is probably in maternal mortality. This chart shows, for example, that the chance of a woman dying during pregnancy or birth is about 100- 39-times higher in Africa than Europe. The chart also shows how many of those deaths are from unsafe abortions.
Finally, I made this one myself, showing women as a percentage of parliament in most of the world’s rich countries (the spreadsheet has the whole list). The USA, with 90 women out of 535 members of Congress, comes in at 17%.
The report focuses on law and justice issues, including rape and violence against women, as well as reparations, property rights, and judicial reform. They boil down their conclusions to: “Ten proven approaches to make justice systems work for women“:
1. Support women’s legal organizations
2. Support one-stop shops and specialized services to reduce attrition in the justice chain [that refers to rape cases, for example, not making their way from charge to conviction -pnc]
3. Implement gender-sensitive law reform
4. Use quotas to boost the number of women legislators
5. Put women on the front line of law enforcement
6. Train judges and monitor decisions
7. Increase women’s access to courts and truth commissions in conflict and post-conflict contexts.
Does American prosperity translate into long retirements? Not compared to other developed countries in the world. Flowing Data borrowed OECD numbers on life expectancy and age of retirement to calculate the average number of years in retirement for men and women across many different countries. The portion of each bar with the line is the average number of years working, while the non-lined portion represents years in retirement.
Largely because of life expectancy, women enjoy more years than men in all states except Turkey, but the number of years varies quite tremendously, from an average of zero years for men in Mexico, to an average of 26 years for women in Austria and Italy. The United States is way down on this list, not doing so well relatively after all.
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