Capitalists and Cultural Capital

April 29, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

This month’s Atlantic has an important article by Simon Johnson about the financial crisis and the government’s response: “The Quiet Coup: How Bankers Seized America.” He argues that in the US, just as in emerging market nations, “the finance industry has effectively captured our government.”

Johnson alludes briefly to Bourdieu: “American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital—a belief system.”

But now his fellow blogger at Baseline Scenario, James Kwak, makes the Bourdieu basis explicit.
In Distinction, Bourdieu’s best-known work, he described how economic class is reinforced by cultural capital . . . . Upper-class parents take their children to fine art museums and teach them how to talk about Rembrandt, Monet, and Picasso; later in college, job interviews, and cocktail parties, the ability to talk about Rembrandt, Monet, and Picasso is one of the markers that people use, consciously or unconsciously, to identify people as being from their own tribe.
Kwak’s ostensible starting point is a Sunday New York Times piece on Treasury secretary Tim Geithner. But Geithner is merely the most prominent example.
Geithner got the cultural education that rich people get, except instead of just going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, he was educated in the culture of Wall Street. Just like an education in art history is a marker of class distinction that is used to perpetuate class distinction, an education in modern finance is a marker of distinction that sets off those who understand the true importance of Wall Street for the American economy. As long the powerful people in Washington, including the regulators who oversee the financial industry, share that worldview, Wall Street’s power and ability to make money will be secure.

That is the importance of cultural capital.
The article and blog post should be required reading.

Freedom and War

April 28, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Reporters Without Borders publishes an annual index of press freedom. We Americans value freedom so highly that it has become the basis of our major operations (Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom). So you would expect the US would be right up there at the top.

But no, on the 2008 list, the US comes in ranked at #36, well behind most European countries, though not all (I’m looking at you, Italy). And there are some surprises in the Caribbean as well. Reporters in Jamaica or Trinidad and Tobago are freer than their counterparts in the US.

Rank Country Note
  • 1 Iceland 1,50
  • - Luxembourg 1,50
  • - Norway 1,50
  • 4 Estonia 2,00
  • - Finland 2,00
  • - Ireland 2,00
  • 7 Belgium 3,00
  • - Latvia 3,00
  • - New Zealand 3,00
  • - Slovakia 3,00
  • - Sweden 3,00
  • - Switzerland 3,00
  • 13 Canada 3,33
  • 14 Austria 3,50
  • - Denmark 3,50
  • 16 Czech Republic 4,00
  • - Lithuania 4,00
  • - Netherlands 4,00
  • - Portugal 4,00
  • 20 Germany 4,50
  • 21 Jamaica 4,88
  • 22 Costa Rica 5,10
  • 23 Hungary 5,50
  • - Namibia 5,50
  • - United Kingdom 5,50
  • 26 Surinam 6,00
  • 27 Trinidad and Tobago 6,13
  • 28 Australia 6,25
  • 29 Japan 6,50
  • 30 Slovenia 7,33
  • 31 Cyprus 7,50
  • - Ghana 7,50
  • - Greece 7,50
  • - Mali 7,50
  • 35 France 7,67
  • 36 Bosnia and Herzegovina 8,00
  • - Cape Verde 8,00
  • - South Africa 8,00
  • - Spain 8,00
  • - Taiwan 8,00
  • - United States of America 8,00
  • 42 Macedonia 8,25
  • 43 Uruguay 8,33
  • 44 Italy 8,42
  • 45 Croatia 8,50
  • 46 Israel (Israeli territory) 8,83
(You can find the full list at the RWB Website. The Wikipedia entry is better visually.)

The index is based on things like censorship (including a measure of self-censorship), murders and threats against journalists, imprisonment of journalists, and other forms of harassment. It consists “not only of abuses attributable to the state, but also those by armed militias, clandestine organisations and pressure groups.”

RWB looks around the world and draws some conclusions about the social, political, and economic conditions that make for more or less press freedom
  1. Europe dominates the free end of the list
  2. Economic prosperity doesn’t have as large an effect as you might think. (Singapore is #144, Jamaica is #21)
  3. Democracy is good for press freedom
  4. Even in democracies, two things undermine press freedom: Corruption and War
The Iraq war, for instance. The US rank of 36 is an improvement over its 2007 rank of 48.
The release of Al-Jazeera cameraman Sami Al-Haj after six years in the Guantanamo Bay military base contributed to this improvement.
Al Jazeera, Mr Al-Haj’s employer, is one of the three largest international news channels (BBC and CNN are the other two). But except in a couple of small media markets, it cannot be seen in the US. Maybe that’s why RWB includes measure of self-censorship, financial pressure, and the actions of non-government groups.

And if a businessman broadcasts Al Manar, the Hezbollah channel, he goes to prison for six years. Officially, this case is not about freedom of the press. The businessman’s crime was doing business with Hezbollah, a designated foreign terrorist group. I wonder how Reporters Without Borders will classify this case.

Bureaucrats and Health Care

April 26, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

My health care plan will make it easier for more Americans to find and keep good health care insurance. His plan will . . . force families into a government-run health care system where a bureaucrat...(AUDIENCE BOOS)... where a bureaucrat stands between you and your doctor.(AUDIENCE BOOS)
That was John McCain addressing the Republican convention last September. It’s the official party line on health care. Bobby Jindal said the same thing in the Republican response to the State of the Union speech.
Health care decisions should be made by doctors and patients, not by government bureaucrats.
Maybe these guys never have to deal with insurance companies – like George Bush Sr. not knowing about checkout-line scanners – or maybe their non-Weberian definition of bureaucrat includes only those who work for the government.

I’ve got news for them. Insurance companies are bureaucracies. And unlike the government, they are in business to make a profit. They make a profit by taking in as much as possible in premiums and paying out as little as possible in claims.

Does this goal affect the decisions of their employees (i.e., bureaucrats)? Here’s a chart from a NPR/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard School of Public Health survey.*

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

One-fourth of the people had, within the last year, experienced exactly what the Republicans are talking about: a doctor’s decision was overridden by a bureaucrat. (The 46 million Americans who have no health insurance don’t have to worry about this.)

The survey also found that the cost of medical treatment mattered.


Even among those with high incomes ($80,000 a year or more), one in eight had postponed needed care or gone without a prescribed medication.

*A copy of the report is here.

Good Cheer

April 25, 2009 Posted by Jay Livingston< On Thursday, lisa posted this ad at Sociological Images, and I’ve watched it at least a dozen times since then.
Despite Lisa’s perfectly valid critique about men and family-work, I still love this ad, and I’m not sure why. Probably because the guy’s performance has absolutely no trace of irony or role-distance. Norms of age and gender be damned, he’s just into it, whole-heartedly and unself-consciously.
We’re a bit late on this one, we sociologists. If we watched The View, we’d have picked up on it when Whoopi aired it last September. (HT Megan, who was also touched by it, probably more deeply than I was).