Author Archives: legallysociable

Our world: the Beatles can get $250k for the use of an original recording on a TV show

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I’ve seen/heard several discussions of the use of the Beatles song “Tomorrow Never Knows” to close the most recent episode of Mad Men. Here is some of the story behind how the show was able to get permission to use the song – for $250,000:

 “It was always my feeling that the show lacked a certain authenticity because we never could have an actual master recording of the Beatles performing,” Matthew Weiner, the creator and show runner of “Mad Men,” said in a telephone interview on Monday. “Not just someone singing their song or a version of their song, but them, doing a song in the show. It always felt to me like a flaw. Because they are the band, probably, of the 20th century.”…

Near the end of the “Mad Men” episode, titled “Lady Lazarus” and written by Mr. Weiner, the advertising executive Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm) finds himself struggling to understand youth culture and is given a copy of the Beatles album “Revolver,” a new release in the summer of 1966.

But instead of starting his listening experience with the album’s acerbic lead-off track, “Taxman,” Draper instead skips to its final — and, shall we say, more experimental — song, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” contemplating it for a few puzzled moments before he shuts it off. (That psychedelic song, with its signature percussion loops and distorted John Lennon vocals, also plays over the closing credits of the episode.)…

To win the company’s approval in this case, Mr. Weiner said, “I had to do a couple things that I don’t like doing, which is share my story line and share my pages.” He added that he received the approval from Apple Corps last fall, about a month before filming started on the episode.

Several thoughts:

1. Does this show that the Beatles still matter? On one hand, yes: the creator said he wanted to have an authentic Beatles song on his show. On the other hand, this is a show about the 1960s – it is a period piece, a “retro cool” show, not a show about the modern day that would show the current relevance of the Beatles. The creator suggests they are the band of the 20th century, inviting questions about who might be the artist of the 21st century.

2. Contra #1 above, the Beatles can still get $250k for the use of their song. Is this about the greatness of their work or because they have been so tight in who is able to license their music? Are the copyright holders of the Beatles music (some combo of Michael Jackson’s estate and Sony?) simply waiting for McCartney and Starr to die so they can reap a windfall from licensing?

3. The article doesn’t discuss this but the selection of “Tomorrow Never Knows” is particularly interesting. This song would never make it on a Beatles “greatest hits” album (it is not on the 1 album or the Red or Blue albums of the 1970s). It is buried at the end of the Revolver album. At the same time, many books and critics acknowledge that this song is a turning point in the group’s career. It was actually the first recorded song for Revolver, an album noted by many critics as the greatest album (or one of the top 3) of all time. It was a sharp departure from earlier Beatles music: in a few short years, the group had moved from “I Want To Hold Your Hand” to Lennon singing about ideas from The Tibetan Book of the Dead with all sorts of studio effects like backward guitar around him. My guess is that the playing of song means that Don Draper’s is about to take an interesting turn (along with the rest of the 1960s).

4. A question about copyright: will the Beatles music ever become part of the public domain? It would be a shame if it does not.

5. How long until we live in a world when nobody knows about or cares about the Beatles? I’m particularly interested in the changes that will happen when the Baby Boomer generation fades away…

Comparing the mass-produced ranch to the mass-produced McMansion

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I’ve recently seen several articles about the ranch house (I discussed Atomic Ranch magazine a few weeks ago) but this one, “Ranch housing style makes a comeback,” led me to thinking why the mass-produced ranch may be popular and the mass-produced McMansion is not. Here is a brief explanation from the article:

Cicaloni is not alone in her appreciation for the ranch. Though it will never be as popular as the ubiquitous Colonial here in New England, the ranch is making a return. The simple home is being embraced by young people attracted to the mid-century modern vibe; by aging boomers who no longer want to deal with stairs; and, as always, by those looking for an affordable home…

“Popular publications portrayed a confident and easygoing way of life that could be accessible to one and all; of particular interest was the casual California lifestyle, implying prosperity, glamour and optimism as embodied in a sunlit and breezy ranch house where indoors and outdoors blended effortlessly,” Betsy Friedberg of the Massachusetts Historical Commission wrote in a 2003 issue of Preservation Advocate. “In the 1950s, I think, [ranches] were considered fresh,” says Zimmerman. “They were built at the same time as Capes, which looked very traditional. If you were a person who was up to date and interested in the latest thing, then, yes, a ranch is the thing you would have chosen in 1952.”…

BUT EVENTUALLY, thanks to tract housing like in the infamous Levittowns, people didn’t see the charm anymore. The 1962 song “Little Boxes,” inspired by a drive through a postwar development in California, ridiculed the conformity: Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same. There’s a green one and a pink one, and a blue one and a yellow one. And they’re all made out of ticky tacky, and they all look just the same…

But the other thing is that taste in homes, like fashion, is cyclical. “All building styles go through a period when they are unpopular,” says Zimmerman. “At one point, Victorian houses were thought of as white elephants and hard to heat and not set up for modern living and not in tune with the landscape. So, in the ’60s, we lost a lot of Victorians.” And so, the ranches often derided as “ranch burgers”?—?as in mass-produced by a fast-food chain?—?were replaced with homes that came to be known as “McMansions.’’

So it’s simply a matter that ranch houses are on an up-cycle? It is somewhat amusing to think that these simple houses could be an antidote to an era of supersizing house size and debt.

I’m sure some critics of suburban houses would argue that ranch homes and McMansions share several important characteristics. To start, they are associated with sprawl and tract subdivisions. McMansions may be an easy target today but there were plenty of critics of the Levittowns and similar subdivisions built after World War II. In this sense, the problem may not be with the homes themselves per se but rather with the way of life that promotes building mass-produced houses. Second, both ranches and McMansions are not prized for their design or architecture due to their mass-produced nature as well as their unpleasing aesthetics (though these differ: ranches are meant to be more simple while McMansions are meant to impress or be flashy).

It would be interesting to see figures about how quickly housing stock is replaced in the United States. For example, how many ranch houses were built and how quickly were they replaced? What can this tell us about how quickly McMansions might be replaced?

Financial planning with a hint of sociology?

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Economists and sociologists may have very different views of the world but what about combining some of both in financial planning? Here is a financial planner who argues he has an extra edge because he incorporates insights from sociology and a few other fields:

William Pitney, Financial Coach and President of Focus YouNiversity, LLC (FocusYOU), continues to enhance his expertise as a Sudden Money Advisor. Pitney attended the one-day workshop held in Portland, Oregon on April 19th as a requirement of the 12-month coaching program. The program is designed to provide a deeper understanding of the Financial Planning Process developed by Susan Bradley, CFP® and founder of the Sudden Money® Institute (SMI).

During the workshop, Pitney acquired new skills for navigating clients through financial and life transition events, allowing them to feel more confident as they move forward. SMI provides Pitney with access to the latest research, tools and processes to guide clients through Sudden Money and life events.

Traditional financial training and advice address the facts and figures of money only. SMI provides advanced training that also addresses the emotional and human side of money. “The skills and protocols I’ve acquired through Sudden Money enable me to advise clients in transition more effectively and makes it more comfortable for them as they go through these turbulent and often life altering transitions,” said Pitney.

As a Sudden Money Advisor, Pitney is among a select few professionals with expertise combining the fields of financial planning with cutting-edge research in neurology, sociology and psychology. These techniques integrate the technical, rational aspects with the human experiences of the person in transition.

Is there any evidence that incorporating sociological factors into financial planning leads to increased returns? If so, this could be lucrative for some sociologists down the road…

 

Argument: the rise of the American rental economy

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Even though ownership seems engrained in the American psyche, Daniel Gross argues that recent economic troubles are pushing the United States to a rental economy which may just thrive in the years to come:

In the American mind, renting has long symbolized striving—striving, that is, well short of achieving. But as we climb our way out of the Great Recession, it seems something has changed. Americans are getting over the idea of owning the American dream; increasingly, they’re OK with renting it. Homeownership is on the decline, and home rentership is on the rise. But the trend isn’t limited to the housing market. Across the board—for goods ranging from cars to books to clothes—Americans are increasingly acclimating to the idea of giving up the stability of being an owner for the flexibility of being a renter. This may sound like a decline in living standards. But the new realities of our increasingly mobile economy make it more likely that this transition from an Ownership Society to what might be called a Rentership Society, far from being a drag, will unleash a wave of economic efficiency that could fuel the next boom.

While downgrading the place of ownership in the American psyche may sound like a traumatic task, the cold, unsentimental fact about the American dream is that Americans never really owned it in the first place. For the past three decades, especially, consumers haven’t so much bought their quality of life as they’ve borrowed it from banks and credit card companies. And since the Great Recession, Americans have been busy rebuilding their balance sheets and avoiding new financial encumbrances. When American consumers can’t—or won’t—borrow to purchase the goods and services they’ve come to consider part of their standard of living, how does the economy get back on its feet?…

It’s tempting to view the rise of rentership as an economic step backward. Renters can’t build up equity, and they have less control over their living standards than owners. Renting is generally seen as something you do when you’ve failed as a homeowner or are not yet ready to be one. But I’d argue the rise of rentership is a sign of a system adapting—albeit too slowly—to new realities.

The U.S. economy needs the dynamism that renting enables as much as—if not more than—it needs the stability that ownership engenders. In the current economy, there are vast gulfs between the employment pictures in different regions and states, from 12% unemployment in Nevada to 3% unemployment in North Dakota. But a steelworker in Buffalo, or an underemployed construction worker in Las Vegas, can’t easily take his skills to where they are needed in North Dakota or Wyoming if he’s underwater on his mortgage. Economists, in fact, have found that there is frequently a correlation between persistently high local unemployment rates and high levels of homeownership.

An interesting argument.

I wish Gross would explore the implications of this further. Perhaps for the “average” American, renting will make sense  in the future. It has several clear advantages: it doesn’t require one to take on a lot of upfront debt. This is most clear with mortgages: how many people will want to take on that amount of money when conditions can change quickly? (Does this idea about renting have any application for the other popular debt topic these days: college loans?) Second, it allows consumers to pick and choose more. If you are renting with a yearly lease, you have some freedom to adapt to changing circumstances. (There also could be some negative pressures due to rising rents, actions of landlords, etc.) If there is something that Americans like even more than ownership, it is choices. You can also see this trend in media options: we are moving away from a system of ownership to buffet or a la carte models where you can access thousands upon thousands of songs and movies on demand. Third, this seems like a classic American argument: the times are changing and there is money to be made by more quickly seizing on the new realities!

But there could also be some downsides to this. First, someone must still own things like housing units and rights to digital media. Will ownership be consolidated in the hands of a few? What happens if the few want to restrict access to their products? Does a society based more on the renting of housing units inevitably require things like rent control? Second, there is a long cultural history in the United States that ties renting to transience and lack of concern for the local community. For example, many suburban communities have resisted the construction of apartments because the perception is that people who live in apartments don’t contribute long-term to a community in the same way that homeowners do. (Of course, there are other reasons suburbanites resist apartments, including issues of race, class, and property values.) At its most blatant, homeownership was seen as a bulwark against Communism. These cultural biases can be overturned but it won’t necessarily come quickly or easily. Third, are there other aspects of life that would have to change to accommodate a shift to renting? Can widespread renting of homes work in suburbia? Can Zipcar exist in less dense areas? In other words, is this just about renting or about large-scale adjustments to American society based on new realities?

This bears watching. Is this the end of the dream of some of an ownership society?

Even in economic crisis people are still drawn to New York City

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Even in the midst of tough economic times, plenty of people are still drawn to New York City:

So what is it that lures us here and keeps us beholden? Recently, the opportunity arguments have been harder to sustain. In March of last year, the unemployment rate in the city stood at 8.6 percent; 12 months later it jumped to 9.8 percent. Nationally, the unemployment rate has declined during the past year, to 8.1 percent in April.

But the past few years, defined by economic challenges, have seemed only to burnish the city’s appeal. An analysis of American Community Survey data by Susan Weber-Stoger of the Queens College Department of Sociology reveals that more people moved to New York City (over 223,000 of them a year on average) after the financial crisis in 2008 and through 2010 than did from 2005 to 2007, an increase of 10 percent.

Simultaneously, the number of people who have left the city since the recession decreased by 25 percent. Of those who have come, most have been from 25 to 34 years old, more than two-thirds of them with college or graduate degrees. More than a third of those who’ve arrived have come from abroad.

When I discussed some of these numbers with Miriam Greenberg, a sociologist who has written extensively about the branding of New York, she cited the highly strategized efforts the current mayoral administration has made to sell the city to the world. This may explain, in some sense, why people have come, but it doesn’t tell us why they remain, with their Zipcar memberships and disillusions.

If I had to venture a guess why this is the case, I might make this argument: New York City (and other big cities) are viewed as places where opportunities are. Even if the unemployment rate is higher (and I doubt many people checked before going there), the assumption is that there are more jobs to be had and there is a broader range of jobs available (particularly compared to smaller cities or more rural areas). Therefore, the potential for a good job is higher. This is process that is not unique to the United States; the incredible rates of urbanization around the world are also partly due to perceptions that cities may be the only places where jobs are available.

We could also flip this question around: should cities try to attract more people if there are not enough jobs for everyone? Greenberg suggests that the city has effectively marketed itself but in the long run, is this a sustainable strategy if there are not jobs (and other needs such as housing) for everyone who comes?

Of food trucks and lawbreaking

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It’s no secret that the U.S. economy continues to struggle, particularly on the jobs front.  It’s not surprising, therefore, that lots of people are getting in touch with their inner entrepreneur and are seeking employment via their own small businesses.  Food trucks, although looked down on by some, clearly are a part of this self-starter trend, particularly in certain urban areas like Portland and New York.

Which is why I found a recent NPR Planet Money podcast on food trucks in NYC so interesting. From the transcript:

[T]he city sets lots of rules about where food trucks are not allowed — then lets the truck owners duke it out over the scraps.

You have to be 20 feet away from subway stations and building entrances. Two hundred feet from schools (call it the ice-cream truck provision). And the NYPD just started giving out tickets for selling food from metered parking spots.

“Following all the regulatory constraints that are currently enforced at this moment, there really is not any place for a food truck to park,” says David Weber [author of the Food Truck Handbook].

In other words, NYC on one hand licenses an activity (vending from food trucks) and on the other hand makes this activity illegal (through parking regulations that provide literally no legal spots from which to vend).  Of course, what this really means is (1) that food trucks continue to operate but (2) that they do so in technical violation of the law and subject to the whims of law enforcement’s discretion.

As a lawyer, this infuriates me.  It undermines the rule of law in a number of ways:

  • It tells citizens that one has to break the law simply in order to run a business.
  • It implies that there are two classes of law (laws one must obey and laws one need not) without providing a clear principle on which is which.
  • It institutionalizes an incentive for corruption and discrimination since every food truck operator is now a technical lawbreaker subject to law enforcement’s “discretion” (and thus harassment, solicitation for bribes, etc.).

To be clear:  I do not know whether any corruption or discrimination is taking place, and I am not accusing anyone of anything.  (Indeed, I have no direct knowledge of the situation on the ground and do not live in NYC.)  Taking David’s assertion at face value, however, it is clear that such facts would incentivize corruption and discrimination at the institutional level.

Australian architect argues banks are pushing him to design McMansions

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One Australian architect argues that he doesn’t want to build McMansions but banks are pushing him to do so:

CANBERRA’S appetite for McMansions may have lessened but architects are complaining that it is now the banks – not the clients – who are pushing them for extra more bricks and mortar.

President of the ACT chapter of the Australian Institute of Architects Tony Trobe said he had been effectively forced to change designs to give clients extra bedrooms they did not want or need, just so they could get finance from their banks for the build.

”The banks are saying ‘no’ because they think it’s not as easy to sell a stylish two bedroom house as is to sell a three bedroom house with a garage,” he said…

Australian Bankers’ Association chief executive officer Steven Munchenberg said there was no hard and fast rule about needing at least three bedrooms.

”Nobody in the industry is saying ‘no more two bedrooms’ but the banks will take into account the re-salability of the home,” he said.

This sounds like an interesting conundrum: the architect wants a certain design but the bank wants to make sure the home can be sold down the road. Having three bedrooms makes the home more attractive to families and others who might extra space (a guest room, an office, etc.). Could the banks simply be hedging their bets here, meaning they want to ensure they aren’t stuck with an underwater mortgage or foreclosure down the road?

I do have one question: having three bedrooms in a home automatically makes it a McMansion? Having three bedrooms sounds pretty normal to me…

New Microsoft lab in New York City to study social media and social science

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Microsoft is opening up a new laboratory in New York City that will focus on the intersection of social media and social science:

Microsoft Research is opening a new lab in New York City, headed by ex-Yahoo senior scientists. The star crop of researchers includes sociologist and network theorist Duncan Watts, computational scientist David Pennock, and machine learning expert John Langford…

Microsoft’s research hubs are behind several of the company’s successful products. The Kinect and Bing were both developed for years as research projects before Microsoft turned them into products…

The NYC lab recruits bring in mathematical and computation tools that could work magic with existing social media research already underway at Microsoft Research, led by folks like Gen-fluxer danah boyd. “I would say that the highly simplified version of what happens is that data scientists do patterns and ethnographers tell stories,” boyd tells Fast Company. While Microsoft Research New England has strengths in qualitative social science, empirical economics, machine learning, and mathematics, “We’ve long noted the need for data science types who can bridge between us,” boyd explained in a blog post announcing the NYC labs.

Data available via social networks like Twitter and Facebook finally offer a discrete measure of how people interact with one another, and how influence flows through their web of social links. As Watts explains it: “We want to understand how these phenomena work, we have to take a very large scale view of the world but have to refine our viewing a very fine grained way.”

Microsoft has hired 15 founding members (8 of those names are public), but that number is likely to grow in the coming months “like a university department in good times,” Chayes said. (Microsoft Research’s other units vary in size from 40 to 400 members of staff). The lab will draw on collaborators at the University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers, Princeton, New York University, and Columbia who’ve expressed an interest in working with the NYC labs.

This sounds like a fascinating opportunity to bring together a number of notable researchers across disciplines to tackle new issues and data.

I wonder how many academics would bristle at this news simply because of the connection to Microsoft, the supposedly big bad company that has tried to force its way in the computing world and is seen less favorably than “cooler” firms like Yahoo, Google, and Apple. At the same time, it is only with the resources available at these sorts of companies that you could put together labs like this and grant employees (Google is particularly famous for this) time to do their own creative work. How much of the work in this lab will be expected to be funneled into Microsoft products versus the general world of academia? Well-known researchers like danah boyd and Duncan Watts have made it work in the past but how different is it to work for a corporation versus an academic institution? I assume there must be some nice perks, including salary…

Dome sweet dome?

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Wired points to a recent Toronto Star article about the financial and environmental benefits of dome-style housing:

It’s earthquake-proof, tornado-proof, fireproof, can be buried into a hillside, and it’s impervious to insect and animal attacks.

Cost efficient, easily maintained, earth-friendly and extremely endurable….While typical new homes exceed an EnerGuide rating of 65 to 70 [link], high energy-efficient homes can push over 75, and R2000 houses can exceed 80, an Ottawa dome house hit 88 when constructed in 2006.

According to the article, the main problems with constructing a dome home are the local regulators and lenders suspicious of its current novelty:

[Collin] Cushnie and [Sunny] MacLeod [of the Great Lakes Dome Co.] realize that widespread appeal will only come through acceptance as an alternative to “stick and bricks” construction. In fact, they usually have to coach the local building inspector and mortgage holder for approval.

One common complaint leveled against McMansions is how “tacky” and “ugly” they are.  Given all the benefits of dome housing (environmental and otherwise), it will be interesting to see if domes can overcome similar perceptions and achieve widespread acceptance in the marketplace.

Hochschild highlights new individualized service jobs like “wantologist”

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Sociologist Arlie Hochschild has written a new book, The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times, that explores the rise of jobs to meet our individualized needs:

Don’t know what you want out of life? No problem. Hire a wantologist!

This new profession actually exists in 2012. Just fork over a little cash (a couple hundred an hour or so) and this individual will help you figure out your most important goals in life – and help you get closer to achieving them.

Sound like a bunch of hooey? Consider Esther James, a wantologist in San Jose, California. She has a PhD in psychology from NYU, practiced for twenty years as a Jungian psychologist, trained as an executive coach – earning $250 an hour – and has now transitioned into full-time life coaching in the wake of the economic downturn, as she explained to sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild.

Hochschild, based at the University of California, Berkeley, profiles James and many other personal service providers in an enlightening new book, The Outsourced Self, which describes how the market has risen to meet the needs of increasingly harried and needy Americans…

Hochschild puts these out-of-the-blue service professions in the broader context of a society right now that “undermines community, disparages government, marginalizes nonprofits, and believes in the superiority of what’s for sale.” As she told The Fiscal Times in an interview, “The wantologist’s profession is fledgling at the moment, but it’s very real – it’s its own speciality. I’ve seen the ‘wantology workbooks.’ I’ve talked to the clients. Services like this are only going to proliferate. A lot of things that seemed weird yesterday aren’t weird today.”

The themes of this book sound similar to Hochschild’s previous books, The Managed Heart and The Second Shift, that also address the intersection of individuals and a changing social context. In this new book, it sounds like Hochschild is arguing that we lose something as a society when important individual tasks are outsourced to free up the time for us to do “better” things.

The interview with Hochschild is worth reading in full but there would seem to be another aspect to this shift that is not addressed. Wouldn’t these sorts of services primarily cater to those with the economic resources to pay for it? Hochschild mentions how dating websites could also fall into this category (and these are relatively accessible) but in order to hire a life coach or personal organizer or “wantologist,” you would have to have some extra money. Or, perhaps these services could be quickly becoming “necessary,” meaning that people have to cut back elsewhere in order to achieve certain priorities. For example, this might include a family that feels it is a necessity to hire a college application consultant for their high school student since college is such an important decision and predictor of chances later in life. If these services are becoming more normal, than it could be another marker between social classes: can you afford to outsource some of the mundane or necessary tasks of lives off to others? And who is expected to work in these service jobs? Perhaps this is simply a more palatable, market-based solution to the issue of the wealthy hiring servants in the past.

This also reminds me of two other things:

1. Could this be viewed as an example of extended cognition, the idea that we as humans are effective at utilizing other resources to tackle certain issues for us (even as basic as writing ideas down on paper so we don’t have to devote extra brain space to remembering these things) and freeing ourselves for other things?

2. A.J. Jacobs wrote about an experiment in personal outsourcing (with more detail in his book The Guinea Pig Diaries: My life as an Experiment).