I stumbled upon this story again when looking for an example of cultural production for one of my classes. This is a fascinating tale: “How the Mona Lisa became the world’s most famous painting.”
Author Archives: legallysociable
Why the Washington Metro doesn’t yet reach Tysons Corner
As part of an argument that seems to really be about the difficulties of large-scale bureaucracies in responding to change, Michael Barone explore why the Washington Metro has had difficulty in reaching suburban destinations like Tysons Corner, the prototypical edge city.
Shopping malls as glamorous places in India
After fifty plus years of living with the shopping mall, perhaps they have simply become second nature to Americans. But, when they are built in places like India, it is fascinating to see how the mall fits into a different context:
Making “fake steak” socially acceptable
In an article about how “fake steak”/engineered meat may just be the solution to food problems in the world, a sociologist briefly discusses the social objections to the meat:
Sociologist: social media is not socially isolating
In a debate over the merits and consequences of living alone, sociologist Keith Hampton argues that social media is not socially isolating:
Gapers delays, rubbernecking all about group behavior
A social scientist suggests that the human propensity for rubbernecking is all about group behavior:
Turn your house into a billboard
Perhaps you have seen cars or trucks that have been turned into a billboard but what about a house? A marketing company thinks there is a niche here, particularly with homeowners who need some extra cash:
Someone finally says it: “Huge houses are morally wrong”
If you read enough about McMansions or mansions, you might get the idea that there is a moral dimension underlying the critiques. One commentator finally just comes out and explain this moral view: “huge houses are morally wrong.”
Which is to say, the rich are welcome to live well, but not ridiculously well. Aside from the hundreds of lives of poverty-stricken Bangladeshis or whatever that likely could have been saved had our nation’s billionaires deigned to downgrade from a massive mansion to a mere McMansion, the people, eventually, just won’t stand for it. Your monuments to excess will become beacons for the pitchfork-wielding mobs, rich folks.
Don’t be stupid. Or too greedy. Huge houses are immoral just like gold plated cars are immoral and massive private jets are immoral. Because you don’t need them, and the money you waste on them could actually save people’s lives. This is an ideal towards which we all need to strive; not buying a mall-sized home is the easiest possible way to adhere to it. You can save those starving peasants and afterwards you will still be rich. So do it. Or don’t complain when the raging poors finally rage onto you.
The moral basis of this argument is attributed to Peter Singer. The argument seems to be this: that money that was put toward the giant house could have been used for more good if it had been given to those who truly need it. It’s too bad we don’t see what Singer thinks is the “maximum wealth” someone should be able to hold onto. Interestingly, the argument cited above in the two summary paragraphs seems to be a little different: you shouldn’t have a big house because the masses will resent you and come get you. You can’t appear greedy as people will hold it against you. The difference in tone is between being able to help more people with the money you saved by not buying the huge house (positive) versus you had better not buy that big house because it will be taken away from you (negative).
Morally, what’s the biggest house you can/should have? Is this house too big while these houses are morally superior? Can the size or price of your house be mitigated by its features or what you do with it? Does it differ by region to adjust for cost of living? Does your profession matter or whether you acquired the money yourself or it is “old money”?
More evidence that Americans don’t like answering survey questions about income
While looking at data about the wage gap between men and women, two researchers discovered that respondents to the American Community Survey may not been completely correct in stating their incomes or the incomes of others in their households:
The authors, whose study will be published in the journal Social Science Research, identified these biases by examining data from the American Community Survey, which is also conducted by the Census Bureau. Respondents are interviewed multiple times, one year apart. When the researchers looked at how responses to these questions changed across the subsequent interviews (controlling for other factors), they found that people answered more generously for themselves than other people had for them.About half of the data on this income question in the American Community Survey have long come from “proxy reporters” — people answering on behalf of others in their household. In the early ’80s, a majority of these proxy reporters were women. “They were simply around to answer the phone call,” Reynolds said, noting that women had not entered the work force full time back then to the extent that they have today.
On the whole, these female survey respondents likely under-reported the income of their husbands, and over-reported their own — creating the skewed impression that the gender gap in America was much smaller in the early ’80s than it really was…
Once Reynolds and Wenger had calculated the extent of these biases, they went back to the data we’ve long used to measure the wage gap and readjusted it. Over time, as more women have entered the labor force, men have also become more likely to answer these surveys for themselves. And that impacts the data, too. The existing analysis — based on what the authors call the “naïve approach” to this data — suggested that the wage gap in America between 1979 and 2009 closed by about 16 percent (or $1.19 per hour). Wenger and Reynolds put that number instead at 22 percent (or $1.76). And so we have been 50 percent off in this basic calculation.
Interesting finding. As I tell my students, how you collect the data matters a lot for your conclusions. How much will other researchers be willing to change their data and conclusions based on this “quirk” in the data? No other researcher had ever thought about this before or have others considered the issue and moved forward anyway?
Researchers need to be particularly careful in dealing with questions about income. The researcher will have to find some sort of compromise where you can get the most fine-grained data while making sure that people are still willing and able to answer the question. If you ask about specific incomes, you are likely to get a lot of missing data as people are not comfortable answering. If you ask too broadly (say by having really large categories), you may not be able to do much with the data.
Does this suggest that other surveys that ask a single person to report on their whole household may also be skewed?
The negative attention that building a big home can draw
While reading an article about some big homes that are still being built in the United States (are there enough wealthy people doing this to counteract data?), there is an interesting part about the negative attention these homes can draw.
One obvious drawback of building big: unwanted attention. Neighbors sometimes chafe at the idea of an edifice down the street the size of the White House. Reacting to McMansions that went up in the housing boom, some communities, like Chevy Chase, Md., passed rules that regulate more strictly how big houses can grow, says John McIlwain, a senior resident fellow specializing in housing issues at the Urban Land Institute.
Near where Mr. Pritzker’s home is under construction, neighbors are up in arms over another of Mr. McCoy’s projects, a roughly 70,000-square-foot compound (downsized from 85,000 square feet) awaiting permitting for Prince Abdulaziz ibn Abdullah ibn Abdulaziz Al Saud, son of the king of Saudi Arabia. The compound is on three lots and would include a main home of 42,000 square feet—part of it underground—a guest house, pool cabana, gate house and another residence of up to 20,000 square feet. The prince’s lawyer, Benjamin Reznik, notes other residences in the neighborhood are super-sized and says opposition has been “fomented” by neighbor Martha Karsh, the wife of Oaktree Capital Management founder Bruce Karsh. Ms. Karsh has hired publicists to attract attention to the project, he adds. “Newt Gingrich wishes he had that campaign going,” says Mr. Reznik.
George Mihlsten, a lawyer for a community coalition and Ms. Karsh, says the coalition hired his firm and that Mr. Reznik has hired outside help too, including a community-relations firm (Mr. Reznik says that was in response to Ms. Karsh’s campaign). “He likes to focus on Martha, but the truth is he and his client have created the controversy by proposing an outlandish plan and going behind the backs of the community to try to get it built,” Mr. Mihlsten says in an email, likening the scope of the project to a small community shopping center. More than 1,500 residents of Benedict Canyon signed a petition expressing their opposition to the project as it was originally proposed, according to a representative of the coalition.
The scope of these projects makes them extremely complex to construct. Finding or assembling the property can take several years, and the design and construction of a super-size project can take up to five years or more, builders say. (These days, lower labor costs in some areas can mean quicker turnaround times or better value.) Just finding parking for the 100 to 200 tradespeople that can be on-site for a big job, compared with the eight to 20 people typically working on a 4,000-square-foot home, can require planning; commandeering church parking lots is one standby.
If you have enough money, can’t you just budget some resources for dealing with the neighbors and/or going to court to make sure your home is built? But if your neighbors are also wealthy, perhaps you are in trouble…
The article hints at the regulations that many municipalities have put in place in order to limit these large homes. This leads me to several thoughts. First, are there communities that have intentionally left no or few regulations in place in order to make it easier for the construction of bigger homes? Another way to think about this would be to look at communities that have had public discussions about regulations for larger homes but then decided to do nothing. Are there communities that actually want these larger homes? Second, are these extra-large homes extremely concentrated in a few communities that have more relaxed regulations? Third, has someone ever looked into whether the level of opposition to a proposed big house is proportionally related to the size? For example, a house that is 500 square feet larger than the surrounding homes might receive one-quarter of the NIMBY attention of a proposed house 2000 square feet larger.
