A new study in the journal Political Communication by David Lazer et. al., a group of authors endeavor to answer an important question:

Do people influence each other’s views so that they converge over time or do they primarily affiliate (by choice or happenstance) with those of similar views?

The find the former to be the case:

We find significant conformity tendencies: Individuals shift their political views toward the political views of their associates…. We also find that political views are notably unimportant as a driver for the formation of relationships.

This is a heartening finding. It suggests that the “confirmation biasr” effect, where citizens seeks out views that already reinforce their own, is restricted to political information. The fact that we as US citizens are apolitical generally means we have more of a chance to “have our minds changed” by a friendship network. The trick is encouraging the formation of diverse, broad-based friend networks that would encourage broader, better vetted, political views

What do you think of this finding? Do you seek out friends based on their political views or have your friends shaped your political outlook? Or is it impossible to untangle?

The depth and breadth of communication in New York City will never cease to amaze me. The sheer rush of sounds, bodies, lights, smells, and architecture that relentlessly impose themselves upon one’s self, from all directions, continually situate citizens in hybrid spaces between agency and structure, the familiar and the new. What has surprised you about public communication in New York or your own city?

I find this passage from Nick Couldry’s new book book Why Voice Matters a particularly apt description of modern politics.

Human beings can give an account of themselves and of their place in the world… Treating people as if they lack that capacity is to treat them as if they were not human; the past century provides many shameful examples of just this. Voice is one word for that capacity, but having a voice is never enough. I need to know that my voice matters in various ways. Yet we have grown used to ways of organizing things that ignore voice, that assume voice does not matter. We are experiencing a contemporary crisis of voice, across political, economic and cultural domains, that has been growing for at least three decades.

I may be getting cynical in my old age, but I sense that our hyper-connected digital age disperses voice rather than enhancing it.

What do you think of this passage?

Donald Miller introduces me to my favorite poem for the moment by Billy Collins. As a social scientist who formerly wrote poetry, I sometimes find academic writing stultifying. You spend must of your graduate and pre-tenure life writing for others, even while you are supposed to be “finding your own voice.” The great joy of academia is when you at last figure out how to research and write in a way that is methodologically sound while also being courageous, personal and pure.

Purity

My favorite time to write is in the late afternoon,
weekdays, particularly Wednesdays.
This is how I go about it:
I take a fresh pot of tea into my study and close the door.
Then I remove my clothes and leave them in a pile
as if I had melted to death and my legacy consisted of only
a white shirt, a pair of pants, and a pot of cold tea.
Then I remove my flesh and hang it over a chair.
I slide it off my bones like a silken garment.
I do this so that what I write will be pure,
Completely rinsed of the carnal,
uncontaminated by the preoccupations of the body.
Finally I remove each of my organs and arrange them
on a small table near the window.
I do not want to hear their ancient rhythms
when I am trying to tap out my own drumbeat.
Now I sit down at the desk, ready to begin.
I am entirely pure: nothing but a skeleton at a typewriter.
I should mention that sometimes I leave my penis on.
I find it difficult to ignore the temptation.
Then I am a skeleton with a penis at a typewriter.
In this condition I write extraordinary love poems,
most of them exploiting the connection between sex
and death.
I am concentration itself: I exist in a universe
where there is nothing but sex, death and typewriting.
After a spell of this I remove my penis too.
Then I am all skull and bones typing into the afternoon.
Just the absolute essentials, no flounces.
Now I write only about death, most classical of themes
in language light as the air between my ribs.
Afterward, I reward myself by going for a drive at sunset.
I replace my organs and slip back into my flesh
And clothes. Then I back the car out of the garage
And speed through woods on winding country roads,
Passing stone walls, farmhouses, and frozen ponds,
All perfectly arranged like words in a famous sonnet.

What do you think? Does this poem apply in any way to academic writing? Or is this simply an illustration of effective fiction/literary writing? I personally think that social scientists can “remove their flesh” via the questions they ask, the conclusions they draw, and the way they seek to apply the knowledge they create.

In two more days, many of us, especially those of us connected to New Orleans, will observe the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.  Will we be forever changed by the anniversary?  It’s hard to say.  Were we changed by the hurricane and flooding of the cultural heart of the U.S.?  You better believe it.

In a little more than two weeks, this adopted son of New Orleans will head to Port-au-Prince.  The idea is to work with Sun Mountain International, an NGO that does work in Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa.  I’m still trying to arrange lodging as I hear Katrina anniversary news stories about the housing shortage in New Orleans.  What will I see in the capital of Haiti?  How much rubble and debris will line or even block the streets?  Are people in Haiti too preoccupied with daily survival to mark dates?  I know they are a nation attuned to history, their national history, their history of origin in rebellion and struggle for freedom.

What does the future signify for them?  Again is the quotidian struggle a mountain that rises between the people and the prospect of the future?  Port-au-Prince and New Orleans are sister cities?  How many residents of Port-au-Prince know that?  Will I serve as a reminder for the few people with whom I come into contact?

In two more days, many of us, especially those of us connected to New Orleans, will observe the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.  Will we be forever changed by the anniversary?  It’s hard to say.  Were we changed by the hurricane and flooding of the cultural heart of the U.S.?  You better believe it.

In a little more than two weeks, this adopted son of New Orleans will head to Port-au-Prince.  The idea is to work with Sun Mountain International, an NGO that does work in Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa.  I’m still trying to arrange lodging as I hear Katrina anniversary news stories about the housing shortage in New Orleans.  What will I see in the capital of Haiti?  How much rubble and debris will line or even block the streets?  Are people in Haiti too preoccupied with daily survival to mark dates?  I know they are a nation attuned to history, their national history, their history of origin in rebellion and struggle for freedom.

What does the future signify for them?  Again is the quotidian struggle a mountain that rises between the people and the prospect of the future?  Port-au-Prince and New Orleans are sister cities?  How many residents of Port-au-Prince know that?  Will I serve as a reminder for the few people with whom I come into contact?

I’d like to take this graph, place it on a 3X5 index card and show it to the random assortment of family members and acquaintances who are convinced that “goddamed welfare” is bankrupting the country.

Dylan Mathews reminds us that welfare payments constitute .7 percent of the US federal budget. And in fact the number of eligible people accessing welfare has been steadily declining (see graph). People are free to have policy disagreements with the efficacy of the state providing “temporary assistance to needy families,” but a little reality is nice sometimes.

Have any of you ever had conversations with relatives, friends or neighbors that perpetuated an “urban legend” about government spending?

To paraphrase Bill Murray in Groundhog Day…The USA is not the land of opportunity, it’s a land of opportunity. The OCED chart below tracks the relationship between parents and child earnings. The US is more mobile that England and Italy, but lags behind all the other countries in the chart.

This, of course, is one measure of income mobility (inter-generational income mobility). It doesn’t measure the ability of new immigrants to succeed in the US. Similarly, it doesn’t account for the higher heterogeneity in the US when compared to Scandinavia or even Canada/Australia. Nevertheless, it does raise questions about how whether the American “gospel of success” still resonates today?

What do you think accounts for the differences in intergenerational-income mobility between nations?

HT: Dylan Matthews on Ezra Klein’s Blog

I usually say to my students that accuse academia of having a liberal bias, “ok, I’ll give you that one, but the military, religious institutions, talk radio and corporate America have a conservative bias.” I might have to rethink the last one after this graph from Adam Bonica.

It shows a wide spread of ideology by members of corporate boards based on their giving patterns. While this doesn’t necessarily prove that corporate America is ideologically neutral, it does suggest that members of corporate boards aren’t agents of the right. This might say something about the lack of serious distinction between our two political parties when it comes to issues of corprorate governance — but that for another blog post.

What do you think this says about corporate America’s ideological views?

HT: The Monkey Cage

Miller-McCune points to a study that tests whether not thinking about a cigarette actually leads to more smoking for those trying to quit.

Each day for three weeks, participants recorded the number of cigarettes they smoked that day, as well as their stress level. One week into the experiment, one-third of the smokers were asked to “try not to think about smoking. If you do happen to have thoughts about smoking this week, please try to suppress them.” Another third were instructed to think about smoking as frequently as possible during the week. The final third received neither instruction.

But…

During that second week, “the suppression group smoked considerably less than both the expression group (those encouraged to think about smoking) and the control group,” the researchers reported. But the situation reversed itself in Week Three, as those in the suppressed-thoughts group smoked considerably more than those in the other two categories.

What does all this mean? It suggests that, for many of us, we want want we want. Rationalization and “creating awareness” about the ills of smoking are of limited effectiveness when confronted with an urge. This suggests that a suppresed urge returns in spades. Much of social science has focused on rationality to explain social behavior, largely because urges and impulses were more difficult to study empirically.

How many of you have been able to overcome a bad habit and/or an addiction through suppression? Why doesn’t it work as a technique?