fuck freakonomics

HA! Glad to see a takedown... now I have a more eloquent way of explaining what people didn't like hearing as we watched that dumb 20/20 ad job for their new book.

Pandagon: Maybe prostitution isn't so cute.

Ahhhh, there we go. Women may “give away” sex for free, but if you want someone to act like a subservient sexbot, then you have to pay for the pleasure. Wives are so disappointing! They do things like listen to the music they like, or refuse to indulge you when you’re being an asshat. As Allie discovered, the longer she did this, and the more she charged, the more men wanted to go on long dates. Sex wasn’t all she was doing! She was being paid by the hour to pretend that morons were smart, that assholes were delightful, and that weird thing he does is orgasmic. The thrill is less renting someone’s vagina, but buying someone’s submission.

Panda points to Sady Doyle in The Guardian, "Prostitution, for fun and profit." A devastating takedown of the Freakonomics duo.

Freakonomics, of course, is the science of choosing an appropriately wacky or controversial subject (sumo wrestlers, abortion), applying a little economic analysis to it and coming up with a shocking conclusion that will make people blog about you. In that respect, the how-to-charge-for-sex piece was a no-brainer. Expressing any opinion about prostitution will bring on outrage (and attention) from one corner or another, no matter what your opinion turns out to be. Of course, if you are aiming for maximum impact, it helps to be – as Levitt and Dubner are – really, stunningly, remarkably wrong.

Part of the problem is that they base themselves around two prostitutes - a high-end one and a slum one. They become "the Goofus and Gallant of sex work." But their contexts are never described -- one is white, one black. One rich, one poor. Does that have anything to do with it? They don't say.

Hey, here's an interesting thought: Maybe LaSheena doesn't like men because she's trapped in a cycle of poverty, and one of the only ways for her to stay alive is to have sex with men, whether or not she really wants to. Maybe that's enough to make LaSheena dislike men. We'll never know, however, because Dubner and Levitt don't ask. They don't care to humanise her. She's the Goofus in the scenario. Her poverty – which is assumed to be entirely her fault – is only there to provide a counterpoint to Allie's shining example.

And as for Allie:

And as for how much Allie loves to be a prostitute ... well, we don't have her direct testimony, do we? What we have is the word of two best-selling authors, which has been edited into book form. Allie's story is so romanticised that it seems unlikely the authors bore no agenda in their interviews – or that Allie, a woman whose job is to figure out what men want from her, was unaware of it.

It's entirely possible that, faced with a couple of men who very clearly wanted one specific version of her story, she sized them up and did the same thing for them that she did for all her other clients. That is to say, she told them what they wanted to hear.

Da-aaamn. Fuck these two.

culture (war) and economics

From Yglesias, a George Packer story in the New Yorker on the disaffected Ohio working class ("The Hardest Vote"). Short story, they're pissed because they can't afford to get married and raise a traditional family.

The American Prospect ("Remapping the Culture Debate") describes how this anxiety does not lead voters to Democratic economic policies, which they see as alien to their concerns, but rather to cultural issues as markers for who cares more about their problems and thus, presumably, will solve them:

When it came to defining themselves in the nation's ongoing cultural battles -- such as the battle over “family values” -- Democrats had virtually ceded the field to Republicans, presenting an uncertain face to the public. Voters, the research showed, were looking to cultural and lifestyle markers to determine whether or not a candidate was, in fact, going to do right by the economy, the Democrats' one persistently strong area. The Democracy Corps pollsters concluded that voters saw traditional Democratic economic concerns as having little to do with them, being mainly “manifested in costly government social programs or political alliances with labor unions and minorities.” The party's inattentiveness to cultural matters had, paradoxically, left these voters with “absolutely no sense that Democrats have a viable alternative vision that would truly promote broad economic growth or increased prosperity for working Americans.”

But it looks like that may be turning around... now that things are going in the shitter. Prospect:

The new Puritanism and cultural conservatism Frank described can also been seen as symptoms of how, in today’s society, traditional values have become aspirational. Lower-income individuals simply live in a much more disrupted society, with higher divorce rates, more single moms, more abortions, and more interpersonal and interfamily strife, than do the middle- and upper-middle class people they want to be like. It should come as no surprise that the politics of reaction is strongest where there is most to react to.

Sound like any dissertations you've read recently? Heee...

1800 change in human nature

Now only if we could have a change in the nature of the human at 1600 (rimshot)

But in seriousness, here's a new article from the NYT Science section on the emerging industrial culture of the 19th century. One of his keys is the counterintuitive concept of "downward social mobility":

Generation after generation, the rich had more surviving children than the poor, his research showed. That meant there must have been constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. “The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages,” he concluded.

As the progeny of the rich pervaded all levels of society, Dr. Clark considered, the behaviors that made for wealth could have spread with them. He has documented that several aspects of what might now be called middle-class values changed significantly from the days of hunter gatherer societies to 1800. Work hours increased, literacy and numeracy rose, and the level of interpersonal violence dropped.

He has a lot about genetics that may take things a little too far. Doesn't seem like these values have to be encoded in genes for them to have the same effect. (And besides, evolution can't operate in that short a time period.) But it's an interesting thesis when read on the cultural / institutional level.