Kieran Healy

24/7 Solar Madness

Via Jim Lindgren at Volokh, some article from the Rocky Mountain News about Al Gore’s recent call for the U.S. to be fully running on renewable energy within a decade. The piece itself is hackery (though it does deftly compare Gore to Chairman Mao) but contains the following gem:

Stanley Lewandowski, the general manager of the Intermountain Rural Electric Association, is one of the few utility officials willing to suggest that the prophet of global warming is strutting about like an emperor without his clothes. “Al Gore’s statement of obtaining 100 percent of our power from renewables in 10 years has as much a chance of happening as the sun shining 24 hours a day,” Lewandowski quipped. “It’s nonsense.”

Excellent.

Seriously, Beware Finland

“Beware Finland” jokes Matt Yglesias in a post about education policy. But, frankly, this is good geopolitical advice. Just ask the Soviets. Or consider the following statistics.

I’d watch out for them, if I were you.

Last Best Wordle

Henry beat me to the punch by about five minutes, dammit. Here’s my wordley representation of my book, Last Best Gifts.

I didn’t look at the site closely enough to see if I could get a PDF of the output, but it would be nice to have one.

Norm Enforcement is Hard, but People do it Anyway

Via John Gruber, here is Lance Arthur standing in line for three hours for a new iPhone. He gets inside the door of the Apple Store and finds someone has skipped into the queue right behind him.

So, the interminable line outside comes at last to an end, the Apple Security guard walks over and counts “One, two, three, four, five,” and I am lucky Number Five, allowed access at last to the inside of the store. … I am now at the end of another line. Much shorter, certainly, but also much crueler, for now I can see others getting their phones … my feet hurt and my shoulders are aching and even now, so near the end, I’m asking myself, why did I do this? Is it all worth it? Am I the idiot, now?

I am contemplating this, sinking into a sudden round of pre-buyer’s regret or something like that, when I turn around and find a stranger standing behind me. Certain, he is nothing at all like the young Asian girl I was joking with for precious hours of my life. And the game commences.

“Are you standing in line?”

“Yeah.”

“Were you standing in line behind me outside for three and a half hours.”

“Yeah, I was.” Grin.

He stares at me. I instantly hate him. A lot. I hate everything about his self-congratulatory smart-assed grin and his cheating little heart and his idea of how life should work for him, where he can outsmart us all and get what he wants and get away with it. “No, you weren’t.”

“Yeah, I was.”

I point out to the front of the store. “She was behind me in line. You weren’t.”

“Are you gonna tell on me?” He asks this while still grinning that grin. I want nothing more than to kill him with something sharp.

“I am.” I start looking for someone to tell.

“How does it hurt you?”

I look at him like he’s insane. “I waited for hours. You didn’t. If you want one, that’s what you have to do. You don’t wander into the front of the line.”

“How does it hurt you?”

He’s trying to show that I shouldn’t care about anyone else. Like he does. “It hurts her. It hurts everyone behind her. Look at her. Turn around and look at her. She’s the one standing outside with her arms folded across her chest.”

He doesn’t turn around. He’s still grinning. I’m feeling adrenaline pumping through me. I feel shaky and hot and angrier than I have in, like, ever. She’s standing out in the line frowning as I argue with him. I start waving my arms to get someone’s attention. Where are all the blue shirts now? Why does no one see what’s happened? My God, this is important! Someone pay attention!

“So, you’re really going to tell on me.” He says it like I’m the dick. He says it like we’re in this together, him and me, like we’re suddenly pals and this is like school and he’s the cool crowd and I’m the little fat nerd all over again. God, it’s infuriating!

“You bet your ass I am.”

He shakes his head, grinning still, and turns around and leaves the line. I watch him like a hawk as he saunters across the blonde wood floors and exits the store.

I should feel victorious and redeemed, but I still feel angry. How did he do that? Make me feel like the bad guy. I think about the people outside. Did it make any difference, really? Is the line suddenly moving faster, like he was the only bowel blockage? There’s no one, now, to point all this rage at anymore. He’s gone.

“How does it hurt you?” That, my friends, is the coolly rational voice of homo economicus. While H.E. has his virtues, and can often help you think straight, sometimes you just have to tell him to fuck off.

More seriously, the emotional dynamics of a situation like this are very interesting. Norms are not easy to enforce when then target of the enforcement is insouciant or otherwise resistant to the threat of being shamed or embarrassed. Lance’s experience (suddenly feeling like he’s the jerk, anger channeling into embarrassment, etc) is likely very common.

This strong, unpleasant emotional reaction could be thought of as part of the cost of enforcing a general norm when you personally don’t have much to gain from doing it, and thus a reason to pass it by. But there seems to be more to it than that, as the emotional upset also pushes the interaction forward. The relationship between the emotional state of each participant and their self-presentation is also interesting: did Lance come across as upset as he felt, I wonder? How was the queue-jumper feeling behind his grin, once he got called out? Did he get a queasy rush of adrenalin in the pit of his stomach, too?

If I were Randy Collins, or Erving Goffman, I might say that this is one of those cases that reveals how attuned people are to the microdynamics of interactions, how predisposed we are to consensus, and how much most people want to keep things running smoothly in order to avoid or quickly repair breaches. Many norms depend on some kind of common-knowledge of commitment or an internalized aversion to being sanctioned. Failing that, you get some tangible reminder of the potential for punishment (e.g., warning signs, or a cop walking around, or whatever). The hardest cases seem to be like this one, where those things are lacking. You have two parties on an equal footing, no strong reason for the observer to act when a norm is violated, and indeed a nasty set of feelings in the process—especially when there’s no buildup or context-setting to get you ready for a confrontation.

Reversing Mass Imprisonment

Bruce Western writes in the current Boston Review about the prison boom and its effects, summarizing findings and extending arguments he’s been developing for a few years, and which I’ve often written about here.

There are now 2.3 million people in U.S. prisons and jails, a fourfold increase in the incarceration rate since 1980. During the fifty years preceding our current three-decade surge, the scale of imprisonment was largely unchanged. And the impact of this rise has hardly been felt equally in society; the American prison boom is as much a story about race and class as it is about crime control. Nothing separates the social experience of blacks and whites like involvement in the criminal justice system. Blacks are seven times more likely to be incarcerated than whites, and large racial disparities can be seen for all age groups and at different levels of education. One-in-nine black men in their twenties is now in prison or jail. Young black men today are more likely to do time in prison than serve in the military or graduate college with a bachelor’s degree. … Nearly all the growth in imprisonment since 1980 has been concentrated among those with no more than a high school education. Among young black men who have never been to college, one in five are incarcerated, and one in three will go to prison at some time in their lives. The intimate link between school failure and incarceration is clear at the bottom of the education ladder where 60 percent of black, male high school dropouts will go to prison before age thirty-five. … These astonishing levels of punishment are new. We need only go back two decades to find a time when imprisonment was not a common event in the lives of black men with less than a college education.

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Elementary Particles

I am all in favor of further work at the intersection of sociology and emerging work in biology, cognitive science and neuroscience. There is surely much to be learned. But, let’s face it, this seems needlessly limiting. Particle physics has been in the doldrums a bit lately, so they could do with some interdisciplinary reinvigoration. Also, their research budgets remain quite large.

Below we see a picture of the emerging Standard Model of sociophysics, with which you will no doubt be quite familiar.

I’m looking forward to spending a bit of time at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences this fall. Think of the CASBS as the CERN of social science: even as we speak, hard-working technicians are putting the final touches to the Stanford Superconducting Supersocializer, which will come online once the relevant IRB gods committees have been placated with a sufficient amount of cargo detailed forms. The SSS will propel local college sophomores at tremendous speeds into unfamiliar groups of people in an effort to plumb the structure of the elementary particles of social interaction. Despite the success of the standard model, there is much to be learned. The organization of the Quirks is of course well known, with some of the early triumphs of post-war research focused on the internal dynamics of the quirk-matrix (Up, Downer, Charm, Strange, Top Bloke, Asshole). The complex of interactions centered on W and Z remains wholly mysterious, however. The Liketons, too, pose difficult questions, though the recent discovery of observer-dependent YouTube effects has gone some way toward clarifying their role. Finally, the famous Biggs Hangeron also remains problematic, as it is not only notoriously easy to observe but in fact also impossible to ditch at parties.