politics

He got a B-minus. Which wasn’t so bad! He was only out-performed by 15% of his class: 5 B-pluses, 2 A-minuses, and exactly zero As.  In contrast, a whopping 33% got a C or worse.

It turns out, JFK was already benefitting from grade inflation — the slow shift in the average grade point average in higher education — even in 1940. The chart below, borrowed from gradeinflation.com, shows that the average grade had gone up by 0.1 on  a 4.0 scale between 1935 and Kennedy’s not-so-fateful grade report.  Since then, however, has gone up another 0.7 points.

I’m well-known ’round campus for being a hard grader, but I’m no Professor Emerson.

Thanks to Matthew Beckmann for helping Kennedy’s paltry performance (I kid) see the light of day.  And to Jay Livingston for bringing it to my attention.  See also our post on pants inflation.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Tipped off by Dmitriy T.M., I enjoyed a Slate slideshow depicting and contextualizing the shrinking of the middle class and the growing advantage of the very top earners in the U.S. over time.  We’ve highlighted this slideshow before, but I thought this image deserved its own post.  Drawing on data from 1948 to 2005, put together by Larry Bartels, Slate shows that all income brackets prosper under both Democratic and Republican leadership, despite the idea that Republicans are fiscally responsible and Democrats irresponsible.  Under Democrats, however, nearly everyone is much more prosperous.  The highest income brackets are, given the margin of error, equally prosperous and all other brackets are significantly more so.

The figure reminds us that stereotypes about Republicans and Democrats don’t reflect reality and economic prosperity isn’t a zero sum game.

More slides at Slate.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

A while back Kale let us know that the New York Public Library had made their images collection available online.The collection has images on a huge array of topics, from fashion to the military to slavery to insects to a whole category for stilts, and including political cartoons, illustrations from publications, photographs, and so on.

Kale found the collection particularly interesting as a way to look at historical racism and rhetoric about race relations in publications aimed at White readers. This 1875 cartoon, titled “A Privilege?”, presents segregation as actually protecting African Americans from the scourge of alcohol:

Text:

A PRIVILEGE?

Wife, “I wish you were not allowed in here.”

It’s a fascinating example of the use of institutionalized racial inequalities that hurt African Americans to, instead, garner sympathy for White women and children and present African Americans as, really, better off.

Another, published in Life in 1899, implies African American men are burdens on their families, making their wives take on the role of providing for everyone:

Text:

Parson Featherly: De Lawd hab took yo’ husban’ an’ lef’ yo’ wid six chilluns; but ‘membah, Sistah, dat dar’s some good in all de Lawd does.

“I does, Parson. I realizes dat dar’s one less for me to perwide foh.”

This 1860 cartoon from Harper’s Weekly shows an African American woman (presumably a slave) in the South using the “Bobolitionists” — that is, abolitionists, who wanted to outlaw slavery — as a threat, a type of monster that will come steal him if he’s not good:

Text:

“Now den Julius! If yer ain’t a good litte nigger, mudder’l call de big old Bobolitionist and let um run away wid yer.”

I’m sure it must have been very comforting to some readers to think of slaves viewing abolitionists as threats rather than potential allies.

Other cartoons mock African Americans’ physical attributes, marking them as laughable or even grotesque:

Text:

“Would de gemman in front oblige by removing de hat?”

“Would de same gemman oblige by puttin’ de hat on agin?”

(Details.)

Text:

“Now we’ll see ef dat sawed off Peterson man kin escape de issue dis time.”

(Details.)

There are also examples that criticized U.S. race relations, such as this 1848 cartoon from Punch [Note: a reader thinks this might be about France, which banned slavery in 1848, but the NYPL has it listed as relevant to U.S. slavery, so there may be so lost context here]:

Enjoy!

[Note: A commenter has expressed concern that I ended this post with “Enjoy!” I apologize for my insensitivity. I meant it in terms of “Enjoy browsing this fascinating archive,” of which racist imagery is only a small part, not, I hope it would be clear, “Enjoy looking at racist cartoons!” I wasn’t thinking about how it might appear immediately after those set of images, and I should have been more careful.]

FiveThirtyEight has up a post about attitudes toward gun ownership in the U.S. Drawing on General Social Survey data, they show actual ownership of guns has gone down over time; less than 40% of American households now report having one:

You might expect that, as fewer Americans own guns themselves, support for the right to own personal firearms might decrease, as fewer people might feel a strong personal interest in the issue and restricting or banning access to guns wouldn’t, presumably, affect them directly or bring up an emotional image of agents storming into their homes.  Yet we don’t see this at all. In fact, Gallup poll data indicate that support for banning handguns has decreased over time as well, with fewer than one third of Americans supporting such a policy:

Silver suggests that changes in political rhetoric, particularly more vocal and unequivocal support for gun rights by the Republicans and less emphasis on banning guns by Democrats, may explain some of this change. I’m sure that’s part of it; but that leaves unanswered why the political rhetoric changed, particularly after 1992 (when, as Silver demonstrates, the Republican Party platform became more pro-gun/anti-restriction, while the Democrats made sure to start stressing their overall support for some basic right to gun ownership by individuals, though still pushing for some regulations). And aside from that, the biggest drop in support for banning handguns came during the ’60s and ’70s, before the change in party rhetoric, so what do we make of that?

Also see our post on concealed weapon laws, increases in gun sale background checks, and changing images of guns in pop culture.

All social movements try to frame issues in ways that benefit their cause. Controlling the discourse is an important step towards getting the outcome they want.  Previously, we’ve posted about the way that activists against the genetic modification of food have nicknamed these foods, “frankenfoods.” Recently, Steven Foster, a student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, sent us a pair of images questioning this rhetoric by comparing the imagery with the animals in question.

Frankenfish cartoon:

Images of genetically- and non-genetically-modified salmon:

While we don’t know whether anti-“frankenfood” activists are right about their concerns and it’s certainly true that these animals are genetically modified; it’s also clear that the visuals distort the facts (that is, the modified animals are not nearly as distorted as the cartoon implies).  Thinking through how the tactics by which social movement actors try to influence discourse is a fun and useful application of the sociological imagination.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

George Wiman, in searching for news about the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords’ and others, typed into Google the phrase “congresswoman assassinated.”  Google, it turns out, isn’t sure that “congresswoman” is a word.  I tried it again at midnight last night with the same result.

UPDATE: Readers discovered that Google doesn’t say “Did you mean congressman?” if you type only “congresswoman.”   The algorithm is based on language that already exists on the net and apparently “congresswoman assassinated” is not a phrase we find out there.  It’s so interesting how neutral tools — like algorithms — can nevertheless reproduce existing biases.  Because there have been so few congresswomen (too bad), and so few targeted with violence (thank goodness), typing in “congresswoman assassinated” makes it seem as if women are strangers to congress.  To sum, I’m not saying that this is some evil plan or oversight by Google, it’s an interaction between our real, unequal social world and a neutral algorithm.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

I saw this ad last year but forgot to post it. What I find interesting is the way that “peace” has been both stripped of any real meaning and presented as something easy to achieve:

So while a plaid shirt might cost you $44.50, peace is free. This makes sense only if “peace” has been turned into a completely apolitical feel-good abstraction, as opposed to an end result of social and political processes that require effort and may or may not be particularly cheap. But “peace” is, here, entirely empty of political meaning, so much so that the company could use the word in an ad without worrying that they would be accused of making a political statement about, say, either of the two wars the U.S. is currently engaged in, or the Israel/Palestine conflict, or any number of other situations that a politicized meaning of peace might bring to mind.

Talking Points Memo posted an article about a study recently released by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. The study looks at misinformation about issues related to the 2010 election among the U.S. electorate. The survey sampled 616 individuals who reported that they voted in the November elections, and according to their methodology, was chosen to be representative of the overall U.S. population. After individuals were chosen to take part, they were asked to complete an online survey; those who didn’t have access to a computer were provided with a laptop and internet access. You can read more about this method of collecting data, which uses an online program called Knowledge Networks, here.

Of course, any study of misinformation brings up the tricky question of how to identify what is “true,” and how to do so in a way that isn’t itself political. The authors explain at length:

…we used as reference points the conclusions of key government agencies that are run by professional experts and have a strong reputation for being immune to partisan influences. These include the Congressional Budget Office, the Department of Commerce, and the National Academy of Sciences. We also noted efforts to survey elite opinion, such as the regular survey of economists conducted by the Wall Street Journal; however, we only used this as supporting evidence for what constitutes expert opinion. In most cases we inquired about respondents’ views of expert opinion, as well as the respondents’ own views…in designing this study we took the position that some respondents may have had correct information about prevailing expert opinion but nonetheless came to a contrary conclusion, and thus should not be regarded as ‘misinformed.’

…

On some issues, such as climate change, there is a vocal dissenting minority among experts. Thus questions were framed in terms of whether, among experts, more had one or another view, or views were evenly divided.

The researchers first asked if respondents believed they had seen or heard misleading or incorrect information during the fall campaign. Overall, a majority of voters said they had encountered misinformation during the election, and over half said there was more misinformation this time than usual.

The results also indicated relatively high levels of misinformation on a number of questions. For instance, 40% thought the Trouble Assets Relief Program (TARP, or the bank bailout) was passed under President Obama, when it was actually passed under President Bush; 43% didn’t know that President Obama has increased the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. And overall, respondents seemed quite confused about financial policies, with overwhelming majorities of both Republicans and Democrats getting questions about taxes, the stimulus, and the auto maker bailout wrong:

However, for most items, Democrats and Republicans tended to differ on which issues they were misinformed about, in fairly predictable ways:

Finally, the study found that source of information seemed to play a role. Those who said they watched Fox News were more misinformed than any other group, and the more they watched it, the more misinformed they were — whereas with most other news sources, the more news individuals consumed, the less misinformed they were. Viewers of Fox News were more likely to believe the following (incorrect) statements (from p. 20 of the report):

most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses (12 points more likely)

most economists have estimated the health care law will worsen the deficit (31 points)

the economy is getting worse (26 points)

most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring (30 points)

the stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts (14 points)

their own income taxes have gone up (14 points)

the auto bailout only occurred under Obama (13 points)

when TARP came up for a vote most Republicans opposed it (12 points)

it is not clear that Obama was born in the United States (31 points)

This pattern persisted regardless of political affiliation — Democrats who reported watching more Fox News were more misinformed than other Democrats, though less so than Republicans who watch the same amount of Fox News.

This table shows the number of respondents who said most experts believe climate change either isn’t occurring or that the scientific community is evenly split, by source of news and how often they view that source (p. 21):

They have the same breakdown of data for each question. In general, the lowest levels of misinformation were found among those who reported high levels of consumption of news from MSNBC and/or PBS/NPR. However, as the study authors point out, for a number of questions (such as those about the effects of the stimulus program), all groups had quite high levels of misinformation.

Of course, this leaves a number of questions unanswered: are people more misinformed because they watch Fox News? Or are misinformed people more likely to watch Fox News at least in part because it is more likely to reinforce ideas they already have?

And how does the choice of these particular questions, out of all the potential questions we could ask to judge how well- or poorly-informed people are, affect the results? I suspect critics might say that many of these questions are ones liberals are more likely to get right simply by answering based on political ideology, regardless of actual knowledge — for instance, someone who is Democratic might be more likely to say the health care bill wouldn’t add to the deficit, and thus be “right,” but answer that way because health care reform was a Democratic-backed policy and thus something they supported, not because they have any concrete knowledge about it. As we see with the question about the Chamber of Commerce, when a question doesn’t fit so well with liberal-leaning views (the Chamber of Commerce tends to be more popular among conservatives), Democrats showed high levels of misinformation as well. If we asked more of those sorts of questions, would we find that Democrats (or, say, those who report PBS or NPR as their main source of information) were more misinformed than Fox viewers?

Thoughts?