Haidt argues Anthro and Soc are the worst academic monocultures

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Jonathan Haidt discusses the monoculture of academia and names two disciplines that may be the worst:

JOHN LEO: To many of us, it looks like a monoculture.

JONATHAN HAIDT: Yes. It is certainly a monoculture. The academic world in the humanities is a monoculture. The academic world in the social sciences is a monoculture – except in economics, which is the only social science that has some real diversity. Anthropology and sociology are the worst — those fields seem to be really hostile and rejecting toward people who aren’t devoted to social justice.

JOHN LEO: And why would they be hostile?

JONATHAN HAIDT: You have to look at the degree to which a field has a culture of activism.  Anthropology is a very activist field. They fight for the rights of oppressed people, as they see it. My field, social psychology, has some activism in it, but it’s not the dominant strain. Most of us, we really are thinking all day long about what control condition wasn’t run. My field really is oriented towards research. Now a lot of us are doing research on racism and prejudice. It’s the biggest single area of the field. But I’ve never felt that social psychology is first and foremost about changing the world, rather than understanding it. So my field is certainly still fixable. I think that if we can just get some more viewpoint diversity in it, it will solve the bias problem.

Interesting view from the outside as Haidt says later in the interview, “Anthro is completely lost. I mean, it’s really militant activists.” From the inside, a lot of sociology faculty and students seem to be at least partly motivated by wanting to address particular social issues or problems. Whether that clouds their research judgment more than social psychologists – who just want to understand the world, as any scientist would claim – would be interesting to explore.

If you haven’t read it, Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind is fascinating. He argues that opposing sides – say in politics or academic disciplines – have different narratives about how the world works and this causes them to simply talk past each other. In a 2012 piece, Haidt describes the moral narratives of the American political left and right:

A good way to follow the sacredness is to listen to the stories that each tribe tells about itself and the larger nation. The Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith once summarized the moral narrative told by the American left like this: “Once upon a time, the vast majority” of people suffered in societies that were “unjust, unhealthy, repressive and oppressive.” These societies were “reprehensible because of their deep-rooted inequality, exploitation and irrational traditionalism — all of which made life very unfair, unpleasant and short. But the noble human aspiration for autonomy, equality and prosperity struggled mightily against the forces of misery and oppression and eventually succeeded in establishing modern, liberal, democratic, capitalist, welfare societies.” Despite our progress, “there is much work to be done to dismantle the powerful vestiges of inequality, exploitation and repression.” This struggle, as Smith put it, “is the one mission truly worth dedicating one’s life to achieving.”

This is a heroic liberation narrative. For the American left, African-Americans, women and other victimized groups are the sacred objects at the center of the story. As liberals circle around these groups, they bond together and gain a sense of righteous common purpose.

Contrast that narrative with one that Ronald Reagan developed in the 1970s and ’80s for conservatism. The clinical psychologist Drew Westen summarized the Reagan narrative like this: “Once upon a time, America was a shining beacon. Then liberals came along and erected an enormous federal bureaucracy that handcuffed the invisible hand of the free market. They subverted our traditional American values and opposed God and faith at every step of the way.” For example, “instead of requiring that people work for a living, they siphoned money from hard-working Americans and gave it to Cadillac-driving drug addicts and welfare queens.” Instead of the “traditional American values of family, fidelity and personal responsibility, they preached promiscuity, premarital sex and the gay lifestyle” and instead of “projecting strength to those who would do evil around the world, they cut military budgets, disrespected our soldiers in uniform and burned our flag.” In response, “Americans decided to take their country back from those who sought to undermine it.”

This, too, is a heroic narrative, but it’s a heroism of defense. In this narrative it’s God and country that are sacred — hence the importance in conservative iconography of the Bible, the flag, the military and the founding fathers. But the subtext in this narrative is about moral order. For social conservatives, religion and the traditional family are so important in part because they foster self-control, create moral order and fend off chaos. (Think of Rick Santorum’s comment that birth control is bad because it’s “a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”) Liberals are the devil in this narrative because they want to destroy or subvert all sources of moral order.

Holding so tightly to different understandings of the world means that compromising is very difficult.

Should we take joy in photos of a dying suburban shopping mall?

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One photographer has been chronicling the last days of a mall in the Chicago suburbs:

It can be a tough thing to see a historic building being demolished, but what about when a suburban mall meets the wrecking ball? After a 63-year run, The Plaza shopping mall in suburban Evergreen Park has been demolished to make way for a newer, more modern outdoor mall. While there are many like it, The Plaza was notable for being one of the early indoor shopping malls in the Chicago area, and despite its staying power, the mall had become underutilized over the last several years. So called “dead malls” are nothing new, and if anything, they’re becoming more and more common. With the age of internet shopping and the massive reverse migration of residents leaving the suburbs for the city, many suburban malls have fallen into disrepair and have few, if any, major anchor stores left. One photographer, Martin Gonzalez, has been keeping up with the demolition of The Plaza and has been posting photos over the last several months. Here’s a quick look at some of his images of the fallen Plaza mall.

The pictures suggest ruin and decay, images Americans might more commonly associate with places like Detroit rather than the suburbs. But, the question that starts this article gets at this issue: should we take pleasure in seeing the suburban shopping mall – example of American consumerism, tacky architecture, and the social lives of teenagers with nowhere else to go – destroyed? That this mall failed could be used as evidence that critics of the suburbs were right: the whole system was not sustainable. Yet, there is fallout from this: how will the land get used? What happens to those jobs? Where is the local money that used to be spent here now going? Does the demise of the suburban shopping mall lead to more concentrated and authentic spaces (perhaps the New Urbanist dream) or increased fragmentation (big box stores and online shopping)?

See posts from the last year or so – here, here, and here – about the struggles of suburban shopping malls.

Highway sign fonts and other fixes for American roads

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The use of Clearview font on highway signs is ending:

In a notice posted in the Federal Register on Monday, the U.S. Federal Highway Administration announced a small change that has huge implications for the nation. The agency terminated an order it had issued back in 2004 approving the use of a new font in highway signs. Now those signs are going to change. Again…

Clearview was made to improve upon its predecessor, a 1940s font called Highway Gothic, at a time when an aging Baby Boomer generation meant lots of older drivers on the road. Certain letters appeared to pose visibility problems, especially those with tight interstices (or internal spacing)—namely lowercase e, a, and s. At night, any of these reflective letters might appear to be a lowercase o in the glare of headlights…

Officials in Canada and Indonesia have promoted Clearview as a standard. Transport, which was designed for U.K. roads by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert, is the most famous example of a systemic transportation font standard. Clearview evolved as an outside recommendation, a best-practices approach from the private sphere, not as a regulatory shift. In the U.S., Meeker says, institutional interest in better standardization is tepid.“Traffic design is the greatest public manifestation of government on any given day,” Meeker says, “and yet it’s the most dreadful, tired, unresearched, undesigned part of the public interface with government.”

For a country that emphasizes driving, Americans can be oddly disinterested in best practices for road design. Perhaps that love of the freedom that driving offers carries over to thinking about roads: every driver for themselves. Beyond this story about moving away from an easier-to-read font, here are some other ways American roads could be improved:

–Road diets – limiting or taking away lanes – would actually help limit traffic and can improve safety.

-Encouraging mass transit use (though often difficult) can help reduce congestion.

–Zipper merges are more efficient for drivers.

-Paying for road maintenance now may not be thrilling or seem as pressing as other concerns but it can pay off down the road.

–Synchronizing traffic signals can reduce congestion and save time.

-Certain road signs, such as those asking drivers to slow down for children, do not necessarily help. In fact, they may be ignored or even distract.

Science joke that leads to sociology

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A review of a sci-fi novel uses a joke to help make the argument that sociological issues underlying scientific and technological issues:

There’s an old joke in science: Applied physics is called chemistry, applied chemistry is called biology, and applied biology is called sociology.

The purpose of the joke?

Each is more complex, vague, and unpredictable than the last. The problems Robinson lays out proceed neatly along that ladder of intricacy.

Scientific knowledge and technological breakthroughs may not matter much if social groups don’t know what to do with them or use them well to help benefit society.

Mass transit use down in the Los Angeles area

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It can be tough to get Americans to use mass transit. See the case of Los Angeles: billions have been spent in recent years and use is down.

The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the region’s largest carrier, lost more than 10% of its boardings from 2006 to 2015, a decline that appears to be accelerating. Despite a $9-billion investment in new light rail and subway lines, Metro now has fewer boardings than it did three decades ago, when buses were the county’s only transit option.

Most other agencies fare no better. In Orange County, bus ridership plummeted 30% in the last seven years, while some smaller bus operators across the region have experienced declines approaching 25%. In the last two years alone, a Metro study found that 16 transit providers in Los Angeles County saw average quarterly declines of 4% to 5%…

The decline suggests that Southern California policymakers are falling short of one of their longtime goals: drawing drivers out of their cars and onto public transportation to reduce traffic congestion, greenhouse gases and the region’s reliance on fossil fuels…

Southern California certainly isn’t alone. Public transportation use in many U.S. cities, including Chicago and Washington, D.C., has slumped in the last few years. But the question takes on new significance in Los Angeles County, where politicians and transportation officials are considering whether to seek another half-cent sales tax increase in November that could raise $120 billion for major transportation projects, including several new rail lines.

Cheap gas is not helping. I’ve been thinking in recent days that if there was any time to increase gas taxes to provide needed money for roads and other transportation projects, now is the time.

More broadly, most Americans seem to want to drive themselves when they can. Even though the total costs of owning a car add up, driving offers status and freedom. In a society where those are two key values, mass transit may not be able to compete when there isn’t the kind of density found in New York City or San Francisco.

Mexico City changes its name

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Last week, Mexico City officially received a new name:

President Enrique Peña Nieto officially changed the capital’s name to “Mexico City” on Friday as part of a reform to devolve power from the federal government, allowing the city’s mayor to name senior officials including the police chief…

The reform moves Mexico City – the area of nearly nine million people surrounded on three sides by the grungy suburbs of Mexico State – closer towards becoming a state in its own right…
Campaigners – mostly on the left – started pushing for an end to the Federal District after the devastating 1985 earthquake, after an inept federal response left millions to fend for themselves. Leftwing movements rose from the wreckage, achieved political reforms and won the first mayoral and assembly elections in 1997…

Some analysts warned of potential confusion caused by adding a capital called “Mexico City,” to a country already named Mexico, whose biggest state is the “State of Mexico”.

It sounds like nothing may change from the outside. However, relationships between the city government and federal government as well as city residents and other residents of Mexico may be impacted.

Perhaps city residents who live in a major city that also doubles as a national capital have a unique urban experience? This article suggests that Mexico has a centralized system, centered in Mexico City, which may mirror other countries (London in England, Paris in France, etc.) where the most important city is also the capital. In contrast, other countries have capitals outside of their major city with the United States as a prime example with a space away from New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

“The deepest causes of inequality…are entirely out of the reach of city governments.”

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At the end of a long essay against the actions of liberals in American cities comes this summary:

Liberal mayors seem utterly unaware of how poorly positioned cities are to address income disparities. The deepest causes of inequality, such as globalization and cultural disparities, are entirely out of the reach of city governments. They are seduced by mission creep. Progressive politicians are unwilling to stick to their real work of improving the core functions of municipal government, namely K–12 public education and public safety, and maintaining the basic infrastructure and services—parks, libraries, and the like. The rise of 21st-century urban progressivism points toward a future characterized by shoddy local services, increased regulation of city economies, and the consolidation of inequality.

I suspect this author would argue that liberals also don’t know how to correctly address social issues at the national or global level. Setting that aside, is the argument correct that cities can’t truly address inequality?

On one side, cities sit within a larger social system. Even the biggest cities – New York City, London, Hong Kong, etc. – operate within a global economic, political, and cultural system that they may influence strongly but don’t control completely. Global capitalism is influential everywhere and affects flows of capital and jobs.

On the other side, major cities are large economic engines in their own right – see several rankings here – and have significant budgets to utilize with millions of residents. Even as there is a global system, the decisions cities make as well as the unique resources they can draw upon can lead to disparate outcomes. Can they individually completely eliminate inequality? Probably not but they can use the means at their disposal to shape life in their borders.

Maybe this issue should be put another way: if inequality is not addressed at the municipal level, who is going to address these issues? At whatever level it happens, certain actions by city governments could help.

Can powerful storms improve neighborhood relations?

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Amid the tremendous snowfall on the East Coast, one might wonder: does a storm of that size bring people together?

A 1998 study looks at the short- and long-term effects of a major ice storm in the northeastern New York community of Potsdam. The storm completely totaled the area’s electrical grid and left many homes without power for two weeks in the dead of winter. The sociologist Stephen Sweet compared a survey on community perceptions administered three years prior to the storm to one administered just one month after it. After the storm, Potsdam residents saw their town as a more caring, friendlier, and more interesting place. But perceptions of Potsdam quickly returned to normal.

“When structure changes out of its normal form, behaviors shift and new types of social relations quickly emerge,” Sweet writes. (Think: snowmen in Hell’s Kitchen; plows kindly swerving to avoid them.) “However, once structure returns to its customary form, perception of social relations shift back in accordance with the familiar,” the sociologist concludes. (Read: as the snow melts, New Yorkers will return to being buttheads.)

Other research suggests that the degree of post-storm kindness is entirely dependent on the preexisting cohesion of the urban community. In 2013, the sociologist Eric Klinenberg took a close look at a deadly 1995 Chicago heatwave, which killed 739 people. Sadly and unsurprisingly, the neighborhoods that lost the most people were black and poor. But they were also markedly less socially cohered. The Englewood area, where the most people died, was one that had lost 50 percent of its population between 1960 and 1990…

In other words: Disaster preparedness helps, but whether a city can ride out a crisis also depends on interpersonal relationships. “Social cohesion is a critical component of building resilience,” Judith Rodin, the head of the Rockefeller Foundation and former president of the University of Pennsylvania, told The Atlantic last year. “You can look at communities that are literally adjacent and see a difference. Resilience is about building these capacities before the storm, before the shocks, before the stresses.”

Klinenberg’s book Heat Wave is an interesting look at this topic. As suggested above, factors including prior social relationships, race and class, and the connection of particular neighborhoods to the larger community as a whole matter.One interpretation of the research presented above: nature might do its own thing but social interactions and community life are pretty durable.

But, I wonder if the kind of and scale of disaster also matters at all. One thing that is unique about storms is that everyone is affected and has little control over nature. The outcomes might be very different – think different neighborhoods of New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina – but everyone had to respond in some way. If I had to guess, I would think neighbors of similar backgrounds – class, race, etc. – might be more neighborly in the wake of a storm. Does a larger storm lead to more community togetherness (even if the blip is temporary) as opposed to one that doesn’t do as much damage or where the effects are more localized?

And if there is any increase in community togetherness for a little while, what does this get translated into? It is very unlikely to overcome deep seated social divides. Does it lead to different policies? A few impassioned local news stories or editorials praising the efforts of neighbors to help each other? In Heat Wave, Klinenberg discusses the responses of the city of Chicago which includes city-coordinated cooling centers for the public to use. But, it is another matter to ask whether such centers improve community overall.

Tampa McMansions block the sun, loom over older ranches

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A hot housing market in Tampa has led to a number of teardown McMansions that loom over the older homes of neighbors:

If there’s one trend that has characterized Tampa Bay’s new-home market in recent years, it’s the proliferation of huge new houses replacing or overwhelming smaller ones in established neighborhoods like Davis Islands and St. Petersburg’s Snell Isle. Many Realtors and property owners welcome the new construction, which is boosting sales and driving up value.

But it can be less than wonderful for homeowners who live next to these enormous abodes. They must endure months of banging and pounding, only to face the prospect of diminished privacy and an inevitable change in the look and feel of the neighborhood…

Because of federal flood insurance rules, the new house had to be elevated so much that its first floor was above the level of the Dodges’ 6-foot fence. “Where their feet walk is higher than our fence,” Dodge said. “The fence didn’t give us privacy any more.”…

Levine said she and Lentz aren’t opposed to new homes, only to huge ones that sit a few feet from neighboring property and loom over everything around them. The couple have stopped trimming their large fan palms, but even those aren’t big enough to block the view of their yard from the McMansion’s second floor.

These are common complaints about teardowns: the new homes are significantly larger than the original homes in the neighborhood. The pictures accompanying the story provide the image: mid-twentieth century ranch homes next to hulking McMansions (that also are now following new guidelines to help limit flooding damage). This story doesn’t contain much reference to another common complaint – changing the character of the neighborhood – but it is easy to see why having such big houses suddenly show up next door could draw negative reactions.

The next step in this process would likely involve going to the municipal level and trying to get develop restrictions on teardowns. However, this doesn’t always happen: there likely needs to be a critical mass of teardowns, enough of the existing residents of these neighborhoods may not mind selling their properties for big money, and it can be daunting to try to push forward such regulations.

“Nothing that is off-limits to political data mining”

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Your consumer data is of value to political campaigns and parties eager to reach individual voters:

But as presidential campaigns push into a new frontier of voter targeting, scouring social media accounts, online browsing habits and retail purchasing records of millions of Americans, they have brought a privacy imposition unprecedented in politics. By some estimates, political candidates are collecting more personal information on Americans than even the most aggressive retailers. Questions are emerging about how much risk the new order of digital campaigning is creating for unwitting voters as the vast troves of data accumulated by political operations becomes increasingly attractive to hackers…

“There is a tremendous amount of data out there and the question is what types of controls are in place and how secure is it,” said Craig Spiezle, executive director of the nonprofit Online Trust Alliance. The group’s recent audit of campaign websites for privacy, security and consumer protection gave three-quarters of the candidates failing grades…One firm, Aristotle, boasts how it helped a senior senator win reelection in 2014 using “over 500 demographic and consumer points, which created a unique voter profile of each constituent.” Company officials declined an interview request.

When investigators in Congress and the FTC looked into the universe of what data brokers make available to their clients – be they political, corporate or nonprofit – some of the findings were unsettling. One company was selling lists of rape victims; another was offering up the home addresses of police officers.

I think several things are relevant to note. First, it sounds like the majority of this data is not collected by political actors but rather is aggregated by them to help predict voter behavior. In other words, this data collection is happening whether political actors use the information or not. This is a bigger issue than just politics. Second, should American residents be more concerned that this information is available in the political realm or is available to corporations? The story suggests political campaigns aren’t well prepared to protect all this data but how do corporations stack up? Again, this is a larger issue of who is gathering all of this data to start, from where, and how is it being protected.

Another area worth thinking more about is how effective all this data actually is in elections. This story doesn’t say and numerous other stories on this subject I’ve read tend not to say: just how big are the differences in voting behavior among these microgroups or people identified by particular consumer behaviors? Is this the only way to win campaigns today (see media reports on political campaigns successfully using this data here and here)? Is this knowledge worth 1% in the final outcome, 5%, 10%? Perhaps this is hard to get at because this is a relatively new phenomena and because data companies as well as campaigns want to guard their proprietary methods. Yet, it is hard to know how big of a deal this is to either consumers or political actors. Is this data mining manipulating elections?