Why is the Affordable Care Act (ACA) more widely known as “Obamacare”? After all, we don’t call Medicare “Johnsoncare” or Social Security “Roosecurity.”

President Obama, who is currently on a traveling charm offensive to promote the ACA, offered a hypothesis yesterday: “Once it’s working really well, I guarantee you they will not call it ‘Obamacare.'” If we extrapolate a bit from his remark, the ACA is more widely known as “Obamacare” because his opponents want to associate the law with the President who is widely loathed on the Right and earns mixed reviews from the general public (though polls consistently show that the vast majority of Americans find Obama personally likable). Bad President, bad law, so the thinking goes. Or perhaps the term conjures the image of Obama crossing the country with a stethoscope and kicking down doors, forcing blood pressure readings on us. That is to say, “Obamacare” may generate fears of the worst kind of “nanny state.”

But here’s an alternative explanation for the persistence of the term. Consider that his own supporters use the term, no doubt creating love for the law on the Left. Unlike Social Security and Medicare (single-payer systems of direct entitlements), the ACA is actually a complex mixture of taxes and subsidies, public-private exchanges, and regulations on the private insurance industry. In other words, it’s no one thing.

As the time goes on, I suspect “Obamacare” will fall by the wayside and “ACA” is a bit too wonky to stick. But what the popular name will ultimately be depends on what the public (or the political claimsmakers who inform them) see as the marquee feature of the legislative package. I would guess the healthcare exchanges will come to be more important than most believe. So, I’ll lay my odds on “Health Exchange” as the thing currently known as “Obamacare.”

Visit the related post at The Open Window Exchange.

Nearly every year, I teach a month-long summer school course overseas. During May 2013, I taught a course called “The Global City” in London. One of the key ideas we introduce (using Dean McCannell’s stellar book, The Tourist) is that the tourism industry actively constructs a version of London for tourist consumption. Red telephone booths, charming historicism, proper fellows with umbrellas doffing their hats, Orwell, Churchill, Beckham. Nearly all tourists attempt to push past the layer of the obviously constructed to what they deem as “authentic.” Depending on who the tourist is, s/he may define “authentic” differently. The “truth” is that there are many Londons (not just the historic, natty, white one presented in the West End) and “authentic” is a social construction.

After my course, my wife and I took a vacation in Italy. In a brief essay on The Open Window Exchange, I reflect on some discoveries about the search for the authentic and American cultural imperialism during a visit to one of the most lavish McDonald’s in the world in Rome. The Open Window Exchange is a new venture by some recent Concordia grads and I hope all TSP readers will give it a chance.

Almost exactly a year ago, The Society Pages published my feature, “The Sociology of Silver,” about statistics, public discourse, and pop statistician Nate Silver. Around the time of the 2012 Presidential Election, Silver received a great deal of attention (and generated controversy in some parts) for the stunning accuracy of his predictive models. This week, he once again set the chattering class achatting for his big move away from The New York Times and to ESPN.

For those who have followed Nate Silver’s work closely, it was not terribly surprising to learn last week that he had decided to return to realm of sports where he began. If there was a surprise, it was that he willingly decided to step away from the prestige of working for The New York Times, the nation’s paper of record. But then, ESPN has its own merits including an increasingly sociological perspective in some of its programming (maybe I’ll say more about that in another post).

In the wake of his departure, many media watchers have been trying to describe his legacy at The Grey Lady. One common trope is that he challenged the values of political journalism and was sometimes resented for it. In a rather gossipy column, The Times’ Public Editor Margaret Sullivan writes, “[Silver] was, in a word, disruptive … A number of traditional and well-respected Times journalists disliked his work.” If political journalists depend on toss-up elections, narrated with daily rundowns of unimportant events magnified into “game-changers,” then Silver’s model, which showed a clear Obama win beginning in June 2012, made them look foolish. As Silver told NPR’s Morning Edition today, “At some point, I began to push back and to kind of launch a counter-critique of some of the conventions of horse-race journalism and punditry. I have less of a critique of traditional shoe leather journalism.”

Here, Silver, distinguishes among 1) data-driven journalism, 2) horse-race journalism, and 3) traditional shoe leather journalism (a.k.a. investigative journalism). To distill a bit, he’s saying that he’s smart, the shoe leather journos are hard workers, and the race watchers are insipid and bow to market demand for spectacle. Such a typology is partially about drawing status distinctions within the journalistic field, but it also recognizes a growing divide not so much between Nate and everybody else, but among the types of methodologies used by journalists. As I wrote last summer, the development of advanced statistics, widespread availability of fast computers and readily accessible data, and a smaller, but more technocratic marketplace of ideas paved the way for journalists to adopt data-driven methods. “Silver may have been the first to post Stata output on the New York Times’ web site, but if he hadn’t, someone else surely would have.” In his eulogy to Silver’s tenure at the Times, Ezra Klein gets it exactly right when he says that Silver wasn’t doing anything unique statistically. His main achievement is a journalistic one: “What Silver figured out was how to make data-driven election journalism into a daily product that could satisfy political obsessives.”

So, those (including Silver himself) who have said that he attacked the idea of horse race coverage of the election or emphasized data over narrative are dead wrong. Silver’s coverage was day-to-day coverage of ups and downs in a horse race where one horse was pretty consistently winning. Moreover, his coverage was desirable to a particular consumer base precisely because it animated data with narrative. In some ways, Silver embodies the very journalistic values he claims to critique. His primary innovation was to integrate a new type of methodology into the journalistic field and such “paradigm shifts” are not usually well received. But just watch as isomorphism takes hold. The New York Times will hire a new Nate Silver (Drew Linzer maybe?). The Washington Post will hire a stats guy for Ezra Klein’s wonkblog. And eventually, the methodological innovation becomes commonplace and no longer threatening.

As Silver noted on Morning Edition, the sportsworld largely accepted statistics as an essential analytical tool over a decade ago (See: Moneyball). If he fits in better at ESPN than the Times, it won’t be because his new colleagues are invulnerable to market demand or as enlightened as he about not falling into horse race rhetoric (hell, sometimes they cover actual horse races!), it will be because his methodology is more accepted.

On this morning’s The Today Show, the nation’s second place intellectually-barren morning fear-mongerer, Matt Lauer pointed out that the debate over same-sex marriage is far from settled with 36% of Americans opposing it. Conservative activists have made similar arguments, noting that whatever the polls might say, ballot measures reveal a higher degree of opposition to marriage equality. As Gary Bauer told Fox News Sunday:

“I’m not worried about it, because the polls are skewed. Just this past November, four states, very liberal states, voted on this issue and my side lost all four of those votes. But my side had 45, 46 percent of the vote in all four of those liberal states.”

In a WashPost blog post titled
“Is support for gay marriage oversold?“, Aaron Blake and Scott Clement summarize the work of political scientist Patrick Egan who finds that due to social desirability issues in polling and greater election turn-out by conservative activists, polling results do, in fact, underestimate opposition to same-sex marriage.

But I’m not worried. Whatever the Supreme Court may decide, in the long-term, public opinion is solidly on the side of justice. As Sarah Kliff demonstrates on Workblog, demographic trends strongly favor advocates for same-sex marriage. Beyond demographics, there may be some institutional reasons to believe expect greater acceptance of same-sex marriage in the future.

Why?

1) Attitudes evolve. We all know about President Obama’s “evolution” on the issue of same-sex marriage, but, to a great extent, the rest of the country has followed suit. As seen below, every single age group has grown more supportive of same-sex marriage in the past ten years and particularly in the last four. Since 2000, according to Pew Research, support in my Grandma’s generation has grown from 21% to 31%. That’s huge! As several charts on Kliff’s post reveal, one of the best predictors of supporting same-sex marriage is knowing that a friend or family member is gay. With greater numbers of Americans coming out, we would expect more attitudes to “evolve.”

2) Old people oppose same-sex marriage. But old people die. Among people born since 1981, support for same-sex marriage is currently 70%. Even a majority of Republicans under 30 support same-sex marriage.

3) Radical Professors and the Liberal Media. Sometimes Fox News gets it right. My Facebook feed, composed almost entirely of college students, college graduates, and Professors, is red as hell today with the Human Rights Campaign Marriage Equality sign. While surveys of professors are few and far between, one survey of Constitutional Law Professors found 87% support same-sex marriage. While sociology certainly skews Left, I suspect the academy as a whole is more support of marriage equality than the country. Likewise, though many media depictions of gays and lesbians are deeply stereotypical, there’s no question that industry elites who produce TV, movies, and print publications tend to favor same-sex marriage. As former New York Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent once wrote, “The [New York] Times present the social and cultural aspects of same-sex marriage in a tone that approaches cheerleading … That’s all fine, especially for those of us who believe that homosexual couples should have precisely the same civil rights as heterosexuals.” With popular shows like “Modern Family” and “Glee” offering favorable depictions of healthy same-sex relationships alongside positive examples of same-sex couples in Amazon Kindle and JC Penny commercials, the mass media increasingly paints a picture of life in same-sex relationships that is unthreatening. While there are any number of examples of homophobia in the academy and the mass media both are agents of socialization that largely favor same-sex marriage. To bastardize Marx, as go elites, so goes the nation.

4) Same-sex marriage exists (and things are okay) in big, growing states. Sixteen percent of Americans live in states with marriage equality and if Prop 8 is overturning, it will jump to 28%. And, taken together, the states with marriage equality are growing faster than those without it. More of the population will be living alongside married same-sex couples and it will become plain that the reality of same-sex marriages is as unexciting and mundane as opposite-sex marriages.

These are among the reasons that marriage equality is not a question of “if,” but “when?” What other reasons should we add to this list?

Every year around this time, I’m reminded of the opening page of Don DeLillo’s White Noise:

The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus. In single file they eased around the orange I-beam sculpture and moved toward the dormitories. The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationery and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled-up rugs and sleeping bags; with bicycles, skis, rucksacks, English and Western saddles, inflated rafts. As cars slowed to a crawl and stopped, students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects inside; the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and cassettes; the hairdryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows; the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the junk food still in shopping bags–onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints.

I’ve witnessed this spectacle every September for twenty-one years. It is a brilliant event, invariably. The students greet each other with comic cries and gestures of sodden collapse. Their summer has been bloated with criminal pleasures, as always. The parents stand sun-dazed near their automobiles, seeing images of themselves in every direction. The conscientious suntans. The well-made faces and wry looks. They feel a sense of renewal, of communal recognition. The women crisp and alert, in diet trim, knowing people’s names. Their husbands content to measure out the time, distant but ungrudging, accomplished in parenthood, something about them suggesting massive insurance coverage. This assembly of station wagons, as much as anything they might do in the course of the year, more than formal liturgies or laws, tells the parents they are a collection of the like-minded and the spiritually akin, a people, a nation.

Talk about thick culture! One of DeLillo’s strengths has always been to act as a kind of ethnographer of contemporary American life (for a hint of DeLillo’s process, see the annotation of these paragraphs here). Here, he captures not only the extensive material culture of college life, but the not-so-subtle impression management of both the students and the parents.

Welcome to the new and returning Cobbers and college students everywhere!

“Call Me Maybe,” the song of the summer, is the latest example of the music world being flipped on its head. Rather than emerging from the major-label promotion machine, its success was built through social media. So, goes this story in today’s New York Times.

Let’s hold aside for a second the holes in the the Times’ narrative. Nevermind that “Call Me Maybe” was promoted by industry-men, like Justin Bieber and Jimmy Fallon (as the story acknowledges). Nevermind that plenty of hits of the past have “trickled up” from the streets (Gladwell’s “The Coolhunt” describes that process well). Nevermind that many songs and artists have gained fame via social media in the past (as a case study in the risks of this, see Lana Del Rey’s SNL appearance). Nevermind that “Call Me Maybe” is about as conventional a pop song as there is (it’s not as if stereos on the beach are blasting Riceboy Sleeps this summer).

What the NYT has right is that “Call Me Maybe” is a powerful example of the fact that hits no longer have to come from the music industry. Social media offers an alternative pathway to success. In William and Denise Bielby’s classic (1994) work, “‘All Hits Are Flukes’: Institutionalized Decision Making and the Rhetoric of Network Prime-Time Program Development,” they argue that decisionmakers in the culture industries believe that it is impossible to predict which TV show, movie, or song will be come a hit. In this uncertain context, they make fairly conservative decisions that aim to reproduce past success (e.g., hiring established stars, making sequels, recording predictable three minute ditties, etc.).

In many ways, the “Call Me Maybe,” a-hit-can-come-from-anywhere model reaffirms the idea that “all hits are flukes” and may lead the music industry to revisit their assumptions. On the other hand, based on the Bielby’s work, we might speculate that the music industry will simply try to reproduce the success of “Call Me Maybe” by developing more aggressive social media promotion campaigns. There are some potential tie-ins here to my good buddy Ed Walker’s work on “Grass-Roots Mobilization, by Corporate America”. Just as trade industries and corporations attempt to reproduce “authentic” protest campaigns, we should look carefully for the corporate hand at work in the next big social media popstar.

At ASA this weekend, I shocked the normally unflappable duo of Doug Hartmann and Letta Page by my vehemence when I pronounced that “I disdain the term ‘hipster’ as an analytic concept.” Though I have long disliked the term, I was feeling a special sense of grievance after seeing three different papers centered on the study of hipsters. I’d like to explain here a little bit of my opposition to “hipster.”*

First, let me clarify: I particularly take issue with the noun form of “hipster” (indicating a person or group of people). I’m less troubled by the newer usage of “hipster” as an adjective (“That’s so hipster” is a common accusation among my students), indicating a particular aesthetic mode. Skinny jeans, Buddy Holly glasses, irony, liking things before they were cool, PBR, whatever —  these are a part of an aesthetic style that is widely labeled as “hipster” in the U.S. Like grunge or preppy, I have no problem with labeling a style.

As for the noun form, here’s the bottom line: “hipster” is a broad category that encompasses so many different groups as to be utterly worthless. It seems to me that the most common group of so-called “hipsters” are the stylish, artsy residents of urban places like Williamsburg and Silver Lake. However, these kind of bohemians are more or less a permanent part of the urban ecosystem. Aesthetic styles of bohemians shift (e.g., from grunge to alternative to hipster since the 1990s), but the demographic remains constant.

At the same, “hipster” is sometimes used to refer to people who adopt the hipster aesthetic style even if they have no real bohemian philosophical commitments. Is wearing skinny jeans alone sufficient to be a hipster? Many of my students wear “hipster” clothing and like indie rock, but also eat at McDonalds, want to work for major corporations, and watch “How I Met Your Mother.” Surely, they’re not hipsters, right?

Finally, “hipster” is sometimes used to simply refer to rich, young people engaging in conspicuous consumption. The Times Style section recently reported that bars in Montauk have banned fedoras as a sign of their hostility to “hipsters.” While the article makes it clear that the unwelcome individuals are young, wealthy, hard-partyers engaged in grotesque conspicuous consumption, it’s not clear what makes them hipsters. Anyone with the money to party in the Montauk isn’t a bohemian starving artist. Nor are fedoras a sign of a particularly avant garde fashion sense — they’re on the shelves at The Gap this summer, as mainstream a shop as there is. Hipster, in this context, simply means a young, rich, urban conspicuous consumer. 

With “hipster” being applied to so many hetereogenous groups (bohemians, rich young people, anyone who has ever worn clothing associated the hipster aesthetic), it is a term so vague as to be useless. We can continue to use the adjectival “hipster” to refer to the aesthetic style, but social scientists would be better off being more specific about the group of people they’re describing (e.g., young, rich, educated, fashion forward, liberals, bohemians, music fans, etc.).

*For the record, given the fact that most of my wardrobe comes from the clearance rack at Eddie Bauer, I’m pretty clearly not any sort of hipster.

For those who haven’t seen it yet, Kyle Green and Doug Hartmann have an excellent white paper on The Society Pages about politics and sports. They discuss several of the ways in which politicians use sports to connect with the public and how sports can become venue for political activity.

In the article, they point out that the press has widely referred to President Obama as the “Sports President.” While Obama, no doubt, enjoys watching sports, filling out March Madness brackets, and playing pick-up hoops, he is probably also aware that cultivating this image may reap political rewards by enhancing his likability or relatability with the public. This may explain why he was willing recently to sit down with The Sports Guy, Bill Simmons, for an extended interview about all things athletic.

Kyle and Doug rightly critique the assertion that Obama is the first “Sports President.” Appreciation of sports and athleticism have long been requisite interests for American Presidents. As they write, “The celebration of Obama seems to be a case of collective amnesia … if we peruse the historical archives, it seems almost every president was hailed [as the Sports President].”

Here’s where I disagree a bit. Though he’s certainly not the first “Sports President,” I think Obama might be the first “ESPN President” or “SportsCenter President.” Of course, ESPN existed under Clinton and W. Bush. But Obama hit his 20s just as ESPN was founded. So, he was the core age demographic for the network in its first two decades of its existence. To the extent that ESPN changed sports culture, it seems like Obama is the first President to be a part of that new culture.

Now, what is the sports culture created by ESPN? I’m not sure I can pinpoint it and would love to know about research that has tackled that question. It seems to me that among the biggest changes wrought by ESPN is that fans can easily be far more knowledgeable about a whole range of sports. No longer a Mets fan or even a baseball fan, many people today (especially men) can be “sports guys,” interested in and knowledgeable about more players, more teams, and more sporting activities. ESPN has also been a leading proponent of more complex statistical analysis of sports and stats-based gaming like March Madness and online Fantasy sports leagues. Finally, ESPN also seems to have bridged the gap between sports and other pop culture. With their trademark snarky asides and references to movies and TV, they have changed the fabric of sports culture, making it more playful and, perhaps, more widely accessible.

Update: In a funny coincidence, Doug Hartmann and I posted on the same set of issues within a seconds of each other. Read his take here!

Several people, including Doug Hartmann, Brayden King, and Jeremy Freese, have commented on the booing of David Brooks at ASA as he received the award for “Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues”. I’m late to chiming in here in part because of the arrival of the new school year and partially due to a desire to reflect on the issue a bit. The consensus seems to be that booing was a poor tactic for registering discontent with Brooks as an award recipient and that the Left-wing dogmatism of sociology is troubling. On both counts, I agree. What I’ve yet to hear is an account of why people booed. While I have no systematic evidence to support this claim, I see the booing as a symptom of a clash between different worlds of sociology. Like society as a whole, sociology is profoundly stratified and, occasionally, underlying resentments manifest themselves in mundane forms (e.g., white or wheat bread, Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays, giving David Brooks an award or booing him).

Though there are many divisions within sociology, one I have personally experienced is how utterly bizarre ASA is to a faculty member at a small liberal arts college. For most of us at SLACs, we’re more likely to apply Marx, Durkheim, and Weber to contemporary social problems than we are to be aware of the latest issue of ASR or AJS. We are deeply invested in the learning and lives of our students and course releases are unthinkable. Big NSF grants and the latest greatest modeling techniques using Stata or R seem like a foreign language. At ASA, as we encounter our grad school buddies who now work at research schools, we listen to their insider gossip and stories of whiz-kid grad students with a mixture of awe and self-conscious insecurity. For many SLAC faculty members, ASA is a project in sense-making. All too often, we are painfully aware of our own marginality within the discipline.

Don’t go feeling bad for us. Speaking for myself, I love that I am a teacher first and foremost. I’d rather talk with colleagues and enthusiastic young people about contemporary politics than contemplate the results of multi-level models. But life at a SLAC is a different world of sociology than life at a R1.

For many of us teachers, David Brooks is a regular figure in our brand of sociology. He’s not someone who we read merely for leisure whose columns exist quite apart from our work. He is someone who tends to misrepresent scientific findings and sociological theory to buttress often conservative opinions that would steer American society away from social justice and equality. Being disgusted with the latest David Brooks column really means something to us. So, when ASA gave him an award, it felt like one more sign of how marginal we are.

And it’s not just SLAC or community college faculty. The same holds true for many sociologists who study gender, racial, and class inequalities as well as some qualitative researchers who feel marginalized in Top Journal Sociology. The boos at the awards ceremony were not truly aimed at Brooks. They were aimed at ASA for picking him. They voiced greivance and resentment over a feeling of alienation within sociology. The boos speak not so much to the Left-leaning ideology of the discipline (which, let’s face it, is longstanding), but to the stratification within it.

Now, I personally believe in a sociology that is scientific and seeks the truth absent of political ideology (not one in which sociology courses are indoctrination sessions). But I also believe in a sociology where questions spring forth from deeply-held values and one where we use our findings to pursue a more informed, democratic, and just society. I think David Brooks believes more or less the same, even if he is less scientifically rigorous and arrives at some different conclusions. We shouldn’t have booed him, but if ASA more fully represented all sociologists, I doubt he would’ve received the award.

Here’s something you don’t see everyday: The Vice-President of General Motors, Bob Lutz, calling higher gas prices in the U.S. in the long term. In most developed nations, there are substantially higher gas prices than in the U.S in order to pay for the long term costs of gas usage (such as environmental clean-up). On the other hand, Americans have long enjoyed bargain basement gas prices — and probably for a good reason. As Lutz tells us, “The whole U.S. system is based on the premise of cheap gasoline.” What he means is that unlike Europe where trains are readily available and affordable, the automobile is the central means of transportation in America. Whereas the Dutch have a long term love affair with the bicycle, Americans swoon over the latest car.

But it wasn’t always that way. In a deeply disquieting chapter from Joe Feagin and Robert Parker’s Building American Cities: The Urban Real Estate Game, they describe the ways in which the “auto-oil-rubber industrial complex” worked tirelessly to disrupt the extensive systems of electrically-operated mass transit developed in most American cities between the 1880s and 1940s. In just one example, Feagin and Parker tell the story of how Los Angeles went from having more than a thousand miles of trolley car track and 2,800 scheduled runs a day in the early 1920s to having a system based on diesel buses in the 1940s due to systematic efforts by General Motors, Firestone Tires, and Standard Oil. GM was ultimately convicted in federal court of conspiring to convert trolley systems to diesel buses — the sales of which GM had a monopoly on.

And now, here’s the VP of the very same company, saying that we need to raise gas prices. Lutz believes that it will be affordable once we have a full range of fuel efficient hybrid cars. But maybe we should all be even more excited about the coming of high speed rail.