Brief: More on measuring how aesthetic the zeitgeist has been over time

Returning to a previous attempt to measure how aesthetically minded people have been over time by using diversity in baby names, let's see if the frequency of relevant words in the newspaper of record agrees. I searched the NYT for "aesthetic" and "beautiful" back to 1852, and here are the results:






"Aesthetic" trends upward from the beginning through the early 1910's -- only some of which may have to do with Aestheticism in the arts -- and then declines until the mid-1940's, after which there is a gradual rise through the mid-1990's, and then an explosion from then until the present. "Beautiful" shows a pretty similar history, except for an initial decline during the 1850s (although the number of articles is much smaller in the beginning). It also has two apparent upward shocks: one in mid-1920's -- perhaps reflecting the 1925 world's fair in Paris that popularized Art Deco? -- and the other in the late 1970's. In the graph with moving averages, you can see how similar their trajectories have been. (They are also similar after 2000, but I left that stage out in order to better highlight the ups and downs in "aesthetic," which are hard to see against the recent explosion.)

They also agree well with the movements in the baby name diversity graph. Those data only go back to 1880, but there too we saw a rise from 1880 through the early 1910's, a slump through the mid-1940's, a moderate increase from then until the late 1980's, when it shot up even faster.

After the dizzying changes of industrialization during the latter half of the 19th C., and especially with the outbreak of WWI, many in the West became disillusioned with embracing global interconnectedness and cultural dynamism. Roughly from WWI through WWII, we became more inward-looking and focused on normalcy. We left that behind after winning WWII somewhat restored our faith in global relations and cultural change, and even more so during the most recent era of increased globalization.

There really does seem to be something about a cosmopolitan zeitgeist that makes people more concerned with aesthetic matters -- and clearly not just because the artists can now find mercantile patrons. It's not as though America in the Roaring Twenties wanted for wealthy donors. And a cynic would say that when the culture is becoming more cosmopolitan, status-seekers will try to one-up each other by showing off just how diverse their tastes are.

But I think it's more due to encountering new and exciting things from those other groups you're doing business with. And not only those across the world, but even from strange parts of your own country. Besides, it's not as if rich status-seekers are driving those trends in baby name diversity -- they're too small to count in data taken from social security cardholders. Ordinary people too get swept up in the age of aesthetics, as Virginia Postrel documents in The Substance of Style. To follow her most provocative example, Wal-Mart's website offers about five different streamlined styles of toilet brushes and as many different styles of toiletpaper holders. Wal-Mart shoppers are far below the elite in rank, and because hardly anyone will get the chance to see their brushed stainless steel toilet brush or abstract tulip-shaped toiletpaper holder, these items are unlikely to be only so much ammunition in the status war.

Brief: A season-of-birth effect in music preferences

The GSS asks people what their astrological sign is, allowing us to investigate season-of-birth effects. For instance, babies born in inclement weather may have different developmental shocks than summer-born babies do, and that could influence how they turn out as adults.

I looked for a season effect in personality traits, and although people are not uniformly the same across all birth months, there is either a very tiny pattern or larger but seemingly random differences. Nothing with a clear rising-and-falling pattern of great amplitude. For those things, season-of-birth at best plays a very small role in how you turn out.

But I did find a strong effect for whether you love classical music ("birth month" is the month that has the majority share of days belonging to a zodiac sign):


There are equally tall peaks among those born in February and those born roughly half a year later in July. There's a local trough among April births and a global trough among those born roughly half a year later in November. Maybe having weekly data would help us better resolve what the period of the cycle is, but it looks like half a year (5 months between peaks and 7 months between troughs). It can't be a particular type of weather that makes someone really dig classical music, since February is winter and July is summer. So perhaps the mechanism has to do with being exposed to extreme weather vs. mild weather as an infant (winter and summer vs. spring and autumn).

Also notice how wide the differences are: 10.9% for Scorpios vs. 21.2% for Cancers and 20.7% for Aquariuses -- nearly double. Imagine if season-of-birth doubled your chance of turning out some other interesting way, from 1 in 10 to 2 in 10 -- say, going to college or developing some disease. These are not small effects.

I stress that this is probably not mediated by intelligence or general personality traits like an openness to art or a taste for excitement, as these don't show this pronounced seasonal pattern. Nor do relevant behavioral variables like whether you went to a live performance of classical music or opera, whether you visited an art museum, whether you attended a dance performance, etc. Presumably those draw many other people in addition to those who are possessed by their love for classical music.

Music touches us in a strange way; it's not like literature that taps directly into our brain's language module, nor is it like visual art that taps directly into our visual center, face recognition module, and so on. It is very hard for music to tell a narrative as clearly as literature or a painting can. At best it can provoke a connected sequence of emotions. And unlike other music forms, classical relies heavily on harmony. Keeping track of the separate but interacting layers of melody is probably something our brain is not designed by natural selection to do; it's like following a conversation between four people who are talking at the same time. Perhaps it takes a certain degree of screwiness in the brain to really get that appeal of classical music, and that enduring extreme weather as a newborn helps that happen.

GSS variables used: zodiac, classicl

Estimating black-white racial tension from 1850 to present

Previously I looked at how much attention elite whites have given to blacks since the 1870s by measuring the percent of all Harvard Crimson articles that contained the word "negro." That word stopped being used in any context after 1970, which doesn't allow us to see what's happened since then. Also, it is emotionally neutral, so while it tells us how much blacks were on the radar screen of whites, it doesn't suggest what emotions colored their conversations about race.

When tensions flare, people will start using the more charged words more frequently. The obvious counterpart to "negro" in this context is "nigger." It could be used by white racists, non-racists who are quoting or decrying white racists, by blacks trying to "re-claim" the term, by those debating whether or not the term should be used in any context, and so on. Basically, when racial tension is relatively low, these arguments don't come up as often, so the word won't appear as often.

I've searched the NYT back to 1852 and plotted how prevalent "nigger" was in a given year, though smoothing the data out using 5-year moving averages (click to enlarge):


We see high values leading up and throughout the Civil War, a comparatively lower level during Reconstruction, followed by two peaks that mark "the nadir of American race relations." It doesn't change much going through the 1920s, even though this is the period of the Great Migration of blacks from the South to the West and Northeast. It falls and stays pretty low during the worst part of the Great Depression, WWII, and the first 10 years after the war. This was a period of increasing racial consciousness and integration, and the prevalence of "negro" in the Crimson was increasing during this time as well. That means that there was a greater conversation taking place, but that it wasn't nasty in tone.

However, starting in the late 1950s it moves sharply upward, reaching a peak in 1971. This is the period of the Civil Rights movement, which on an objective level was merely continuing the previous trend of greater integration and dialogue. Yet just as we'd guess from what we've studied, the subjective quality of this phase of integration was much more acrimonious. Things start to calm down throughout the '70s and mid-'80s, which our study of history wouldn't lead us to suspect, but which a casual look at popular culture would support. Not only is this a period where pop music by blacks had little of a racial angle -- that was also true of most of the R&B music of most of the '60s -- but was explicitly about putting aside differences and moving on. This is most clearly shown in the disco music scene and its re-birth a few years later during the early '80s dance and pop music scene, when Rick James, Prince, and above all Michael Jackson tried to steer the culture onto a post-racial course.

But then the late '80s usher in a resurgence of identity politics based on race, sex, and sexual orientation ("political correctness," colloquially). The peak year here is technically 1995, but that is only because of the unusual weight given to the O.J. Simpson trial and Mark Fuhrman that year. Ignoring that, the real peak year of the racial tension was 1993 according to this measure. By the late '90s, the level has started to plummet, and the 2000s have been -- or should I say were -- relatively free of racial tension, a point I've made for awhile but that bears repeating since it's not commonly discussed.

Many people mention Obama's election, but that was pretty late in the stage. Think back to Hurricane Katrina and Kanye West trying but failing to foment another round of L.A. riots, or Al Sharpton trying but failing to turn the Jena Six into a civil rights cause celebre, or the mainstream media trying but failing to turn the Duke lacross hoax into a fact that would show how evil white people still are. We shouldn't be distracted by minor exceptions like right-thinking people casting out James Watson because that was an entirely elite and academic affair. It didn't set the entire country on fire. The same is true for the minor exception of Larry Summers being driven out of Harvard, which happened during a remarkably feminism-free time.

Indeed, it's hard to recognize the good times when they're happening -- unless they're fantastically good -- because losses loom larger than gains in our minds. Clearly racial tensions continue to go through cycles, no matter how much objective progress is made in improving the status of blacks relative to whites. Thus, we cannot expect further objective improvements to prevent another wave of racial tension.

Aside from the long mid-20th C hiatus, there are apparently 25 year distances between peaks, which is about one human generation. If the near future is like most of the past, we predict another peak around 2018, a prediction I've made before using similar reasoning about the length of time separating the general social hysterias that we've had -- although in those cases, just going back to perhaps the 1920s or 1900s, not all the way back to the 1850s. Still, right now we're in a fairly calm phase and we should enjoy it while it lasts. If you feel the urge to keep quiet on any sort of racial issues, you should err on the side of being more vocal for right now, since the mob isn't predicted to come out for another 5 years or so, and the peak not until 10 years from now. As a rough guide to which way the racial wind is blowing, simply ask yourself, "Does it feel like it did after Rodney King and the L.A. riots, or after the O.J. verdict?" If not, things aren't that bad.

Looking at absolute levels may be somewhat inaccurate -- maybe all that counts is where the upswings and downswings are. So I've also plotted the year-over-year percent change in how prevalent "nigger" is, though this time using 10-year moving averages to smooth the data out because yearly flucuations up or down are even more volatile than the underlying signal. In this graph, positive values mean the trend was moving upward, negative values mean it was moving downward, and values close to 0 mean it was staying fairly steady:


Again we see sustained positive growth during the Civil War, the two bookends of the nadir of race relations, although we now see a small amount of growth during the Harlem Renaissance era. The Civil Rights period jumps out the most. Here, the growth begins in the mid-1940s, but remember that it was at its lowest absolute levels then, so even the modest increases that began then show up as large percent increases. The PC era of the late '80s through the mid '90s also clearly shows up. There are several periods of relative stasis, but I see three periods of decisively moving against a nasty and bitter tone in our racial conversations: Reconstruction after the Civil War (admittedly not very long or very deep), the late '30s through WWII, and the "these are the good times" / Prince / Michael Jackson era of the mid-late '70s through the mid '80s, which is the most pronounced of all.

That trend also showed up television, when black-oriented sitcoms were incredibly popular. During the 1974-'75 season, 3 of the top 10 TV shows were Good Times, Sanford and Son, and The Jeffersons. The last of those that were national hits, at least as far as I recall, were The Cosby Show, A Different World, Family Matters, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and In Living Color, which were most popular in the late '80s and early '90s. Diff'rent Strokes spans this period perfectly in theme and in time, featuring an integrated cast (and not in the form of a "token black guy") and lasting from 1978 to 1986. The PC movement and its aftermath pretty much killed off the widely appealing black sitcom, although after a quick search, I see that Disney had a top-rated show called That's So Raven in the middle of the tension-free 2000s. But it's hard to think of black-focused shows from the mid-'90s through the early 2000s that were as popular as Good Times or The Cosby Show.

But enough about TV. The point is simply that the academic material we're taught in school usually doesn't take into account what's popular on the radio or TV -- the people's culture only counts if they wrote songs about walking the picket line, showed that women too can be mechanics, or that we shall overcome. Historians, and people generally, are biased to see things as bad and getting worse, so they rarely notice when things were pretty good. But some aspects of popular culture can shed light on what was really going on because its producers are not academics with an axe to grind but entrepreneurs who need to know their audience and stay in touch with the times.

Brief: When were the most critically praised albums released?

To follow up on a previous post about when the best songs were released (according to Rolling Stone), here are some data from the website Best Ever Albums. They've taken 500 albums that appear on numerous lists of "best albums ever," which is better than using one source alone. If an album appears on 30 separate such lists, that indicates pretty widespread agreement. Here is how these top-ranking albums are distributed across time:




Music critics clearly prefer the more counter-cultural albums of the late '60s and early '70s, as well as those of the mid-'90s, although they do give credit to the more mainstream hard rock albums of the late '70s. It's not surprising that the 1980s don't do as well -- the nadir coincides with New Wave music -- since their appeal was too popular and upbeat -- and we all know that great art must be angry or cynical or weird. That may be somewhat true for high art, but when it comes to popular art like rock music or movies, I think the critics inappropriately imitate critics of high art. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is not high art -- sorry.

Within the bounds of what pop music can hope to accomplish, I think the late '70s through the early '90s -- and to a lesser degree, the early-mid 1960s -- did the best. The later Beatles, Nirvana, etc., to me seem too self-conscious to count as the greater and deeper art forms that they were aspiring to.

Still, whether or not the critics are on the right path, these data show a remarkable consensus on their part -- otherwise, one person's list would hardly overlap with another's. I would say that appreciation of art forms is not arbitrary, just that -- in this case -- they reach agreement in the wrong direction!

Brief: Which Western countries care most about preserving the media?

A recent NYT article reviews a German study of how willing people in various countries are to pay for "online content" -- news reporting, videos, songs, etc. In the German-language PDF linked to above, a table shows how people in the countries studied describe their preferences for getting online content. The columns read: free with ads, free with no ads, pay with no ads, pay with ads, and none of above. You can probably figure out what the country names are.

There's a fair amount of variation in how much of the population is willing to pay at all, or conditional on paying or not paying, whether they'll accept advertising. To see what explains this, I've excluded people who answered "none of the above," leaving only those who expressed an opinion. In the table below, I've lumped the two "free" groups together and the two "pay" groups together. I've also calculated a "delusional" index, which answers the question, "Of those who want free content, what percent expect it to not even have advertising?" Obviously someone has to pay for news articles to get written, and some free-preferers recognize that advertising is the only viable alternative to not paying for typical media products yourself. So, those who answer "free, no ads" are expecting media producers to behave like charities.

The table also shows GDP (PPP) per capita, on the hunch that richer countries will be more willing to pay for news, videos, and so on. In economics jargon, this online content is a "normal good" that sees a rise in demand when a population gets wealthier (an "income effect" pushes the demand curve up). The table is ordered from most to least willing to pay.

Country	GDP / cap	% Pay	Delusional
Sweden	37,334	25	20
Netherlands	40,558	20	36
Great Britain	36,358	19	43
USA	47,440	18	27
Belgium	36,416	15	33
Italy	30,631	15	46
Greece	30,681	13	27
Bulgaria	12,322	12	41
Czech	25,118	11	56
Germany	35,539	10	56
Turkey	13,139	9	54
Romania	12,600	9	48
France	34,205	8	56
Portugal	22,232	8	52
Hungary	19,553	8	52
Spain	30,589	6	61
Poland	17,537	5	57

It sure looks like wealth plays a key role, so let's look at how GDP relates to both willingness to pay and how delusional the free-preferers are:


Since the willingness to pay and the delusional index cannot vary outside of the range [0,1], I use the Spearman rank correlation instead of the Pearson correlation. The correlation between GDP and the percent willing to pay is +0.67 (two-tailed p less than 0.01). Between GDP and the delusional index, it is -0.49 (two-tailed p = 0.05). People in richer countries are more willing to pay, and they are less deluded about where stuff comes from -- that is, typically not from charities.

The surprises are worth looking at. At the top, we see mostly Anglo and Nordic countries, and at the bottom the more southern and eastern parts of Europe. However, France ranks pretty low, and Germany doesn't do much better, even though we Americans think of those countries as having more sophisticated media tastes, and as treasuring the institutions of the media -- Gutenberg in Germany, for example. We also think of ourselves as much more bratty when it comes to the media -- that because our sophistication level is so low, we're only a tiny bit willing to pay, and any more than that we'll junk the news in favor of some other cheap form of entertainment.

It looks like the ones that have more pro-market views are more supportive of paying for online content. The French and Germans may like the idea of keeping the media alive and thriving, but Americans are more willing to do what it takes to ensure that happens.

Brief: How does racial ideology vary by income level for blacks and whites?

One school of thought says that ideology is something that the poor are more likely than the rich to rely on -- e.g., Marx's view that religion is the opiate of the masses -- while another holds that ideology is costly, so that the wealthier you are the more you can indulge in it. Let's see how this works out with the ideology of racial consciousness among blacks and whites as a function of income.

The General Social Survey asks how important ethnic group membership is to your sense of who you are. Here is how whites (1st) and blacks (2nd) respond, split up into the upper, middle, and lower thirds of the black income distribution:




As whites become richer, they rely less and less on their ethnicity to define themselves, while the opposite is true for blacks. Blacks of all income groups are more likely than whites to be highly racially conscious (i.e. by answering "very important"), but this gap widens as we move up the income scale -- from about 30 percentage points among the poorest third to over 50 percentage points among the richest third. There is greater race polarization among the rich than among the poor, which rules in favor of the idea that ideology is costly and so that the rich consume more of it than the poor. (Wealthy whites do not consume pro-white ideology but rather an ideological form of cosmopolitanism.)

This result is similar to the Republican - Democrat gap that widens as you move up the income scale, as shown by Andrew Gelman and colleagues in Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State. They come to the same conclusion that arguing over Starbucks, gas-guzzling SUVs, etc., is due to post-materialism -- something you indulge in after your basic financial needs are well taken care of.

Another question asks if you believe harmony in the US is best achieved by down playing or ignoring racial differences. This is the Rodney King view, the opposite of the Malcolm X view. Here are the results for whites (1st) and blacks (2nd):



Whites feel virtually the same across income groups, while richer blacks are less likely to agree with the Rodney King view and more likely to stand strongly against it. Again we see greater race polarization as we look at higher-earning people, which reinforces the post-materialist take on how and why ideology varies across income levels.

GSS variables used: ethimp, ethignor, race, realinc

Diversity in aesthetic tastes over the last 130 years: Evidence from names

Updated

Virginia Postrel argues in The Substance of Style that we have entered a new aesthetic age, where design objects are available to a mass audience, where those consumers no longer consider just the price but also the look and feel of the stuff they buy, and so where producers don't compete with each other only on price but also on how aesthetically pleasing their products are. (Think of how many stylish toilet brushes you can buy at Wal-Mart or Target.)

She wrote this in 2003 and claims it began sometime in the mid-to-late 1990s. That trend seemed to take off even more during the recent financial euphoria, and although it's surely taking a beating during the recession, it'll be back once we feel safe spending again.

One thing I kept asking myself was, "Is this really so new?" As a general rule, you should be skeptical of all stories about how we're "entering a new age." After all, what about the 1920s and '30s, which Postrel admits could have been a previous age of aesthetics? She counters that design wasn't enjoyed by nearly as large a fraction of the population as it is today, and that the range of products that were designed with aesthetics in mind also was more limited than today. What about the more mass-market design of the 1950s and '60s? She says that the choices available weren't nearly as varied and driven by customization as the ones we have today.

I've decided to take a different approach by looking at baby names, a program pioneered by Stanley Lieberson to investigate fashions (summarized in his excellent book A Matter of Taste). Unlike toilet brushes, cars, or paintings, names you give your baby don't cost money. They carry non-monetary costs -- you wouldn't name your kid Adolf, and it's not because you'd have to plunk down big bucks to register that name. Still, they are a lot closer to the ideal test of someone's desires where you ask them to "pretend that price isn't an issue."

Postrel sees the choice to endow an object with aesthetic qualities as "making it special." That has two consequences: it will tend to create turnover, as people start to make things special by making them different from what they were like yesterday; and it will tend to make things more diverse, as individuals try to look different from each other today. Lieberson has already provided graphs from many European countries on the turnover in names over time, going back centuries. The take-home message is that roughly before the industrial era, there was little to no turnover in names. (He measures turnover as the number of names in this year's Top 10 that were not present in last year's Top 10.) With industrialization, the fashion in names took off. The turnover rate really shoots up sometime in the mid-20th C., but it's not clear if it's something different or just the rapid-growth phase of a single, sustained exponential increase.

That's not too surprising, and it underscores the importance of not believing in "new era" stories. To a first approximation, there was the transition to agriculture, and then the transition to industrial capitalism -- and that's it. That's basically all we see in Lieberson's turnover data -- there is a pre-industrial stage with no turnover and an industrial stage with high turnover, and that's about all.

What about the diversity of names? Even if there were no turnover in the Top 10 names, we could still see people introducing more and more new names in order to make their children special. Recall that a big part of Postrel's story is that in our new aesthetic age, we really value standing out from others at the same point in time, not simply moving from one universal style to another over time. Lieberson does have some graphs on how highly concentrated names are, but the data are much more regional than national, they only cover some of the 20th C (although a decent chunk of it), and the measure isn't as precise as it could be. (He uses the percent of all names that are held by the Top 20 names, as well as the percent of all names that are given to only one person.) The rough pattern is that diversity of names seems somewhat static from roughly 1920 through either 1945 or 1960, and by no later than 1960 we see a tendency toward greater diversity.

To solve these problems somewhat, I turn to the Social Security Administration's archive of popular baby names. These are national data, so the sample size is a lot larger than Lieberson's regional data, and the regional differences are smoothed out. They also cover more time -- 1880 to 2008. And I've used a more standard measure of variation when the data are not quantitative (like names), as well as develop a measure of my own that is more flexible.

The standard measure I use is one of many ways to measure "qualitative variation," where the data are not numbers. It is thus impossible to compute how far a given datum deviates from the mean, and thus impossible to compute the variance. For data that are numbers -- height, IQ, etc. -- the variance tells us how spread out vs. how similar the values are. In the Appendix, I discuss what the two measures I use are, the standard one and my own. The only thing you need to know is that bigger values mean greater diversity.

With that out of the way, let's see what the historical pattern of conformity vs. diversity has been in aesthetic tastes. There are separate data for males and females, so I also show what the female - male gap has been:




First, note that the female line is always above the male line, a pattern that shows up in Lieberson's turnover data too. Parents give greater fashionableness to their daughters' names, and are less enthusiastic about their sons standing out.

There certainly has been a sharp increase during the past generation, starting around 1983 for boys and 1987 for girls. But that's nothing new. There was a more modest upturn from just after WWII until the early-mid 1980s. Moreover, there was another pronounced increase going back at least to 1880 (and probably before -- remember that the turnover data tracked industrialization), which fizzled out around 1905 for girls and 1910 for boys. From then until the post-WWII era, diversity actually stagnated or slightly declined. This trend obviously goes against what we'd expect from our view of the 1920s and '30s as a previous age of aesthetics. At least in the sense of "making special" as distinguishing things from one another in the same time period, the turn-of-the-century through the post-WWII era was conformist compared to the dizzying changes of the earlier industrializing stage or the turbulence that would follow.

In looking at the female - male gap, we are looking at another facet of culture -- namely, how egalitarian-minded people were with respect to sex (and perhaps in general). We see a narrowing of the gap from at least as far back as 1880 until 1915. From then until 1969, we see a general widening of the gap, although there are noticeable egalitarian dips during the depth of the Great Depression in the early-mid 1930s and during WWII. From 1915 until WWII, the widening gap is caused by boys receiving more similar names, with little change among girls. To me, that suggests traditionalism -- don't make girls' names any more fashionable, and drive boys names away from being fashion symbols.

From WWII to 1969, though -- i.e., during the Baby Boom -- the widening gap is caused by girls receiving more diverse names at a faster rate than boys are. This is a compromise between tradition and change -- clearly it's a break with the traditional values by making boys names more subject to fashion, but you don't notice it so much because girls' names are becoming even more subject to fashion.

Once the earliest Baby Boomers (born around 1945) reach child-bearing age (around 25), or in 1970, we see a steady reversal. Boomers wanted to equalize the outcomes of their own babies, and this was mostly due to slowing down the fashionableness of girls' names. That's what they tried elsewhere -- recognizing that females are more compliant than males, you should force females to be more like males rather than vice versa. Boomers were more likely to favor "bring your daughter to work day" than "give your son a dollhouse to play with."

There is a brief widening of the gap from 1987 to 1996, and this corresponds to the generation I've elsewhere called the disco-punk generation. They are too young to be canonical Boomers and too old to be Generation X-ers. I've estimated that they were born between about 1958 and 1964, so the typical member born in the early '60s would have started having kids in the late 1980s. This generation is very different from Boomers and X-ers, not having been ideological or attention-whoring when they were coming of age around 1980.

However, once the prototypical Gen X-er, born in 1971, starts having kids in 1997, the gap starts to close again. Remember, they were the ones who made Third Wave feminism a success.

So, the female - male gap shows us that our aesthetic preferences reflect larger social and cultural changes, such as how ideological we are about sex equality.

Even the overall data, which don't show such sensitivity to smaller-scale social changes, still reflect social change, although at a much larger level. The industrializing and globalizing stage was completed around the turn of the century. The change in the connectedness of the global economy was far greater from 1830 to 1920 than from 1920 to today. And most of the major innovations that came with industrialization were in place by then too. Those allowed design objects to reach a wider market, as well as greater customization with each passing year. We see this saturation of the industrial trends by the flat lines from roughly 1910 to 1945.

After WWII, we did start another round of changes away from manufacturing and toward services, and toward consumption of more "frivolous" goods and services than more basic ones, as the former became cheaper. What Postrel calls the new age of aesthetics really began in the mid-1980s, perhaps reflecting our greater taste for fashion items as we began to borrow more to buy more.

To conclude, we've found hard data showing that Postrel's hunch was right about the last generation being more and more aesthetically minded. But contrary to her "first time ever" theme, there was fantastic change during the industrializing stage too. Unfortunately the data don't go back to the beginning of that stage, which would probably show the trend even more clearly. But like I said before, that's the expected picture -- there's the shift to agriculture and the shift to industrial capitalism, and the rest are just hiccups.

Update: The historical pattern of rising diversity from the late 19th C through WWI, a stagnation or slight decline from then until WWII, and then another stage of sharp increase, mirrors the pattern of American openness to international trade. We became more integrated from the late 19th C through WWI, became more isolationist and protectionist from then until WWII, and then began reducing barriers to global trade. Perhaps there is some abstract "openness to differences" that characterizes the zeitgeist -- wanting to trade with people all over the world vs. economic nationalism, as well as wanting to explore a wider range of baby names vs. having more parochial tastes.

Appendix

Here are the graphs using the standard statistic. The patterns are harder to see because the lines have to obey a ceiling of 1, whereas the statistic I used lets them go wherever they want as long as they're not negative. The female - male gap doesn't reveal the influence of the disco-punk generation, but the other patterns are there.




The standard statistic is:

(N / (N - 1)) * (1 - sum((share)^2))

Here, N is the number of names. The Social Security Administration gives the top 1000 names, so it's 1000. A name's "share" is what fraction of the sample has that name. We square each name's share, add them up, subtract from one, and multiply by N / (N - 1). This gives us the probability that two randomly chosen individuals will have different names. If it's 0, everyone has the same name, while if it's 1, everyone has a unique name. I include the graphs based on this statistic as an appendix since they show roughly the same patterns but not as clearly, given how constrained the possible values are.

I don't like this statistic because it's forced to lie between 0 and 1, whereas the variance of a distribution just has to be non-negative. We want to let the measure grow infinitely large in order to capture cases where the data are that spread out. I made up my own statistic, but there are probably others like it out there already; not having a PhD in statistics, I don't know what they're called. The idea is similar to the first one. Start with the shares, and see what would happen at the two extremes of "everyone is the same" vs. "everyone is unique."

Like the inventors of the first statistic, I hit on the idea of squaring the shares and summing them up. (It's the obvious way to go if you start down this path.) With an infinitely large number of names, the extremes are 0 for all-unique and 1 for all-same. By taking the log of this, we get new extremes of negative infinity for all-unique and 0 for all-same. Multiply by -1, and they all become non-negative values that increase as the diversity increases, just like a variance is supposed to be:

- ln( sum ( (share)^2))

The sum of the squared shares is the probability that a randomly chosen pair share a name, and we'll just label that p. Then my statistic, which I call the name diversity index, is:

ln( 1 / p)

Again, the key is that it's 0 when everyone is the same and tends toward infinity when everyone is unique, just like variance.

Brief: When did elite whites start obsessing over blacks?

It's routine nowadays to hear well-to-do white people casually slipping into conversation that their best friend is black, or worrying out loud about how we can improve the lot of blacks in a discriminating society. Clearly that wasn't so at some point -- blacks were out of sight, out of mind. So when did the shift take place? The story we're told in school is that it took the Civil Rights movement to wake white people up. Let's look at the Harvard Crimson archives to see.

Here we have a group of New England white elite college students -- just the group who first paid attention to black causes. I simply searched the Crimson for "negro" and plotted this number as a percent of articles with the neutral word "one," using 5-year moving averages to smooth out the data. Here is the result:


The sharp drop at the end is obviously just an artifact of the word "negro" becoming taboo after the Civil Rights movement. The peak year is 1963, when Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I have a dream" speech during the March on Washington. Also not very surprising. But it's not as if whites were unaware of black issues before then, and were suddenly awakened or caught off-guard by the events of the mid-1950s and after. Far from it: the sustained upward trend begins immediately after the Great Migration of blacks from the southeast into the northeastern US and California. There is another jump around 1940, with greater growth afterward, probably reflecting the Second Great Migration of blacks out of the southeast.

There's also a small rise-and-fall in interest that peaks around 1900, but this could be due to the smaller sample size during these early years. A graph (not shown) of the raw count of "negro" articles shows no hump there, although the swing upward after 1920 or so is apparent.

When you see the graph, it may not seem very surprising -- as blacks came into more frequent contact with Northern whites, it seems natural that Harvard undergrads would start paying more attention to them. This cannot be due to the perceived economic threat that the newly arrived blacks posed, as with the string of race riots that erupted when working class whites saw blacks as labor market competition. Poor blacks from the south were not going to get into Harvard. So, this attention must reflect some combination of paternalism -- "how can we take care of these new people?" -- and cultural, if not economic, anxiety -- "what does this migration mean for our way of life?"

But the graph is very surprising if you only relied on what you were taught in school -- i.e., that whites were lulled into complacency for a long time, thinking that their poor treatment of blacks wouldn't come back to bite them, only to be shocked out of their slumber by Rosa Parks and Malcolm X. That story is wrong, as the data show. The steady increase began decades before the Civil Rights movement, which was more of a culmination than a beginning. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X were jumping on a bandwagon that had been picking up speed for decades. It was the Jazz Age, not the Civil Rights era, that woke whites up to black culture.

This serves as a reminder that sea changes in society are rarely due to the actions of single, charismatic individuals, but rather reflect interactions among people at the grassroots level, as Tolstoy believed. The individuals who get holidays named after them are just celebrities that we single out, not the ones who got the bandwagon going in the first place. We can't know their names because it rarely starts off as a concerted movement with planners or leaders.

The changing social climate of young people from 1870 to present

[This will end up being quite long, so I will post it in three stages for easier digestion. Expect two updates during the week. First update on generations added.]

OK, so the title is a bit ambitious, but I've finally found a way to measure this. Anyone who's read my personal blog knows that one of my obsessions is documenting what's going on among young people. They typically leave very little in terms of a written record, and as adults most people erase the memories of their adolescence -- to the benefit of their mental health -- and replace them with whatever accords with their grown-up worldview. For example, they may imagine adolescents as relatively innocent creatures, whereas their memories -- if unearthed -- would remind them of what an anarchic jungle secondary school was, in contrast to the much more tranquil social lives of adults.

So, the need for a clearer picture of young people's lives is great, yet clearly unmet. As luck would have it, The Harvard Crimson (the undergraduate newspaper) has placed all of its content online, stretching back to the paper's origin in 1873, and it is fully searchable. This allows me to search for some signal of the zeitgeist year by year and plot the strength of this signal over time. If you read my three-part series at GNXP on the changing intellectual climate, as judged by what appears in academic journals, the approach is the same. (Here are those articles: Death of Marxism, etc., A follow-up, and Popularity of science in studying humans.)

In short, I count the number of articles in a given year that have some keyword -- "Marxism," for example -- and then standardize this by dividing by a very common neutral word. This protects against seeing an imaginary trend that is simply due to the newspaper pumping out many more articles over time (or fewer in hard times). Ideally, I would standardize by using "the" since it appears in every article and therefore gives us the total number of articles, answering the question "What percent of all articles in that year contained this keyword?" Unfortunately, the Crimson search engine won't allow me to use "the," but it did let me search for "one," which is also a highly frequent word and will be a decent substitute. Before getting into the meat of the post, here is the number of articles found by searching for "one" across time:


We were correct to standardize somehow, given the huge increase since the early 1990s (probably reflecting the greater ease of desktop publishing with cheap computers and software).

A real improvement over the previous series that used JSTOR is that the Crimson archives run right up to the present, whereas JSTOR typically has a 5-year lag between the article's being published and being archived in JSTOR. The only limitation here is that we only see what's going on among upper-middle class young people, rather than all of them, but I'm mostly looking at events or topics that permeate our society, rather than academic fads as before. (Although I will probably look into that as well using the Crimson database.) So these youngsters ought to be fairly representative.

Moving on to the substance, I've put together graphs on three broad topics that are of great importance to young people. Adults also tend to worry about where the next generation stands on these topics. They are identity politics, religion, and generational awareness.

Identity politics

Everyone knows that the 1960s brought a sea change in college student culture, but I don't think anyone has presented a clear picture of how the concern with racism, sexism, etc. began or how it has changed over time to the present. In particular, most people (in my experience) over-estimate how prevalent identity politics were in the '60s, while forgetting how widespread the corresponding hysteria was in the early 1990s.

I began at the earliest date that the word appears or 1960, whichever came first, and end in 2008. The y-axis shows the count of articles with the keyword divided by the count of articles with "one." I chose the following identity politics keywords: "racism" or "racist," "sexism" or "sexist," "homophobia" or "homophobic," "date rape," and "hate speech." I also made a composite which sums all of them up. Here are the results:


"Racism" increases sharply through the '60s, peaks in 1970, and declines moderately through the '70s and '80s. However, starting in the late '80s, there's another surge which peaks in 1992. After the early '90s panic, though, the preoccupation with racism has declined substantially, so much so that it is now back down to its pre-late-'60s level. You'll recall how little widespread disruption there was in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the Jena Six, and the Duke lacrosse hoax, despite every professional activist -- and even Kanye West on a televised awards show -- struggling to whip up society into another revolution. But 2006 had none of the racial hysteria to fuel it that 1992 did, so it was impossible to spark another round of race riots in L.A.

As for "sexism," it only begins in 1970. Many people who weren't alive back then don't remember how little of a role women's liberation played in The Sixties. But I used to be a radical activist in my naive college days, and Z Magazine operator Michael Albert emphasized that second-wave feminism was largely a delayed response to the perceived sexism of the anti-war, civil rights, and anti-capitalist movements that formed the basis of the counter-culture's concerns. Although there is not much change during the '70s and '80s, it got a pretty high jump initially, so it's not as though there were few adherents -- there just wasn't a massive increase. But once again, starting in 1988 there's a resurgence that peaks in 1992. This is when third-wave feminism was born, and it coincided with the resurgence of racial politics.

However, just as with race, panic about sex plummeted shortly afterward and is currently even lower than its initial level. Again, recall how few massive protests there were -- if any -- about the Duke lacrosse hoax, whose bogus premise was a bunch of jocks raping a stripper. Or for that matter, how pathetic the response was to the Larry Summers brou-ha-ha of early 2005. It surely generated some controversy among academics, but even that didn't last very long, and no one outside of academia gave a shit. In particular, the students didn't care -- influence from their leftist professors notwithstanding. If the zeitgeist lacks an obsession with sex roles, their feminist professors can preach all they want, but it will only fall on deaf ears.

Paying attention to homophobia only begins in 1977 -- 8 full years after the Stonewall Riots. And remember, that was in 1969, a ripe time for liberationist and revolutionary movements. This underscores the importance of using quantitative data in reconstructing history, since most people nowadays would imagine that back in the turbulent '60s, they were surely fighting against homophobia the way that their counterparts do now. Far from it. Back in the '60s, and even for most of the '70s and early '80s, campus radicals and liberals couldn't have cared less. Again, back then it was all about civil rights, stopping the imperialist war machine, and maybe smashing capitalism -- not about gay marriage or getting more women into science careers.

As we saw with "racism" and "sexism," "homophobia" saw a sharp rise in the late '80s and peaked in 1989 or '90, before dropping precipitously afterward. Currently it is more or less where it was before the late '80s surge. Liberals and young people may support gay marriage, but the larger meta-narrative of homophobia, as the activists would say, does not interest them.

Now we come to two more specific topics. "Date rape" basically tracks third-wave feminism, although there is an isolated occurrence in 1979 (which I exclude from the graph to keep the trend clear). Quite simply, there is rape and there is not-rape. "Date rape" was a term that tried to criminalize sex that wasn't rape, but where the girl regretted it or was unsure of what was happening. Probably the guy was stinking drunk too. Importantly, claims about "date rape" drugs later turned out to be bogus, as doctors in the UK pointed out -- most of the women claiming to have been slipped a "date rape drug" had no such drug in their system, although they typically did have lots of alcohol or other hard drugs present. It was essentially a witch-hunt or moral panic. By now, we know what to expect -- a sharp rise during the late '80s that peaks in 1992 and falls off a cliff shorter thereafter. Nowadays no one takes the idea seriously.

"Hate speech" shows roughly the same pattern, although it doesn't get started quite as early. It appears suddenly in 1990, peaks in 1991, and plummets right away. Aside from an anomalous jump in 2002 - '03 (which may reflect some event specific to Harvard), it has remained very low for nearly 15 years. Compared to college students during the heyday of Generation X back in 1991 - '92, young people today are more likely to view the concept of "hate speech" as a thinly veiled attempt to censor unpopular viewpoints.

It's interesting to note the differences in scale among the five topics. The "racism" scale is 3 times as great as those for "sexism," "homophobia," and "date rape," confirming what many others have observed -- that in the struggle for a bigger piece of the identity politics pie, race has trumped sex or sexuality. The scale for "hate speech" is about 3 times smaller than the previously mentioned three topics, perhaps because it is so specific, while "racism" pops up in many more contexts.

The composite identity politics index shows roughly the same pattern that we've noted before. There's a jump during the '60s which peaks in 1970 -- this only reflects a concern with racism. There is little or slightly negative growth during the '70s and '80s, but this was only the calm before the storm. In the late '80s, another wave of panics sweep through, and there is a sustained peak from 1989 through 1992. I have often pointed out in my personal blog and less often at GNXP that the peak of the social hysteria is 1991 - 1992, and this confirms that claim.

As with other epidemics, eventually it burns out, and obsessing over identity politics is now at or below its pre-late-'60s level. This overall pattern does not change even if I remove the two topics of "date rape" and "hate speech" that might seem to bias things toward producing an early '90s peak. Hard as it may be to believe for anyone younger than the Baby Boomers, identity politics was simply a very small piece of the radical chic calling back in the '60s -- it was about civil rights, anti-war, and capital.

Generational awareness

We often speak of young people as an entire generation, but that only works when they have strong generational awareness or solidarity. Otherwise, they are merely a cohort. To give a personal example, I am too young to be part of Generation X, yet I'm a bit older than the Millennials. Almost no one my age (roughly mid-late 20s) is stuck in the culture of their adolescence and college years and never will be, in the way that many Baby Boomers are culturally stuck in 1968 and many Gen X-ers are stuck in 1992. It is possible to be a traitor to your generation if you're a Boomer or X-er, but since my cohort doesn't view itself as a Generation, the idea of defecting fails to make sense.

The same goes for the cohort born between roughly 1958 and 1964 -- their age-mates will not burn them at the stake for saying that they never liked disco music or punk rock, unlike a Boomer who said he didn't like the Beatles' later albums or a Gen X-er who said he always thought alternative rock was lame.

In any case, how do we quantify this sentiment? I simply searched the Crimson for "generation," which will turn up any time a member of a Generation writes about their age-mates as though they were a cohesive group, as well as when older people recognize the young people of today as being different and a cohesive group. I assume that its secondary use as a synonym for creation is roughly constant over time, so that changes reflect its primary use. The counts for the very early years are low, and the number of articles with "one" is also low, so I'm not so sure that the standardized measurement is telling us something real for that time period. Thus, along with the standardized graph, I've included one that shows just the counts. Here are the results:


The trendline is exponential, although other simple trends show roughly the same picture. It seems that during Gilded Age and Progressive Era, thinking in generational terms was not very common, although it does turn up toward the end of the Progressive Era. I'll get to my conjecture about this after surveying the other periods.

During the Roaring Twenties and through the Great Depression and WWII, the level is much greater than the historical trend and lasts very long. This may strike us as unexpected because we associate inter-generational conflict mostly with the late 1960s -- but if you thought young people were going crazy then, you should have seen them during the 1920s! Women started driving, smoking, swearing, and cutting their hair short like men -- take that, you dinosaurs! Jazz and later swing were just as much of a middle finger to older people as rock and roll was later on -- perhaps more so, given how much jazz broke with other forms of popular and classical music that formed the cultural background. Rock and roll, compared to its background, wasn't so different. One central way by which young people mark themselves off from older people is by inventing their own slang, and they indeed made a bunch of it in the 1920s, much of which is still with us today.

After WWII and through the first half of the 1960s -- the Golden Age of American Capitalism -- the level dips below the historical trend. The name "Silent Generation" was coined in 1951 to refer to young people at the time, and silent they were. If we must use "generation" instead of cohort, I prefer using distinct names for what I've been calling Generations -- Boomers, X-ers, etc. -- and numbered Silent Generations for everyone else (i.e., Silent Generation 1, 2, 3, ...). Of course, after them come the Baby Boomers, although surprisingly the late '60s level is not so far above the historical trend. Still, in absolute terms, it's as high as it was during the 1920s, even if it doesn't last as long.

There is a dip below trend for most of the 1980s, when Silent Generation 2 was in college. Then there's a spike in the early 1990s, reflecting Generation X finding its megaphone, to everyone's annoyance. It's hard to make out the end -- it looks mostly at the historical trend, perhaps with a recent jump. Sometime in the middle of the next decade, we'll be hit by another wave of social hysteria, and that will crystallize the young people then (say, age 16 to 24) into a new generation. We already have a name for them -- the Millennials -- but their generational self-awareness doesn't seem very deep to me right now. Voting for Obama has been the extent of them making us hear the voice of a new generation. But just wait.

I'm not too sure what causes the increasing historical trend -- maybe it just shows that the word is becoming more and more common to describe something we already talked about before, and hence the trend isn't interesting. Or it could mean that with an increasing pace of cultural change, we are able to pay better attention to generational changes, and we can therefore talk about them a lot more than before.

What's really interesting are the oscillations above and below the trend, which correspond pretty well to what we consider the heydays of Generations and Silent Generations, respectively. Trying to piece it all together, I think that generational awareness is low when times are prosperous and young people are small as a fraction of the population. This combination of good economic times and little competition means they can more easily establish themselves during early adulthood on their own. They don't feel gipped or embittered, so they aren't anti-establishment (which in practice means anti-elders). In contrast, when economic times are bad and there are a lot of young people competing to establish themselves, anxiety about the future sets in, many feel cheated -- they went to college and didn't end up making it rich -- and they have to band together to support each other.

This is really just a rough guess, and I don't have good data to present on the percent of the population that's 16 to 24, or what their average wages were, over this entire time period. And there are exceptions, of course. But looking at the whole thing, that's what I see.

Next update: religion, which will cover five topics and include a composite index.

Intelligence and patronizing the arts in red and blue states

Continuing to explore whether the stereotypes about red vs. blue states are as strong as people made them out to be in recent years, or whether factors like social class matter more, let's take a look at going out to a performing arts event. The story was that blue staters breathe the arts, if only to lord their refinement over everyone else, while red staters were more suspicious of the arts -- what with all that my-kid-could-make-that garbage funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.

However, a more plausible account is that regional status shouldn't matter so much because what allows a person to enjoy the higher arts is greater brainpower. IQ researcher Linda Gottfredson says that one of the most reliable yet quick ways to tell if someone is smart is to simply ask a few questions to see if they like classical music at all. If so, they're smart.

So which matters more -- regional culture or intelligence? Let's turn to the GSS and find out. This time I restricted the respondents to Whites only, so that race is not a confounding factor when we look at red vs. blue states. The survey asked questions about attendance for various performing arts -- going to an art museum or gallery, a dance performance, a classical music or opera performance, and a non-musical drama. Unfortunately they don't ask these questions every time, so the sample sizes are a bit smaller than for questions about belief in god. Only one group was over 100, but I've kept the groups of people that were at least of size 40. The museum, dance, and classical music questions had IQ data available, but the non-musical drama did not, so I used years of education instead (in two-year bins).

Here are the relationships for both red and blue states (in those colors, respectively):


First, we notice that attendance increases as we move up the intelligence scale, which confirms what most people think. There are apparent differences in exactly how the line increases for red vs. blue states, but because we're dealing with somewhat smaller sample sizes, I wouldn't make too much of it. At the least, there's no consistent difference -- say, if the red - blue gap widened or attenuated as we moved up the intelligence scale.

And in general, the blue line is a bit above the red line, also confirming the stereotype about blue staters being bigger arts aficionados than red staters. Still, as we saw with religious fundamentalist beliefs and hunting and NASCAR preferences, the red - blue gap is miniscule compared to the gap between below-average and above-average IQ people (which ranges from about 25% to 45%, while the red - blue gap is typically 5% to 15%).

So far, we've seen that some measure of social class -- whether income, job prestige, IQ, or education level -- is by far more powerful in causing differences between people than is regional culture. That's true for voting patterns, religious beliefs, going hunting and fishing, watching NASCAR, and now patronizing the arts.

Of course, things don't have to be this way -- it could easily be that the elites would be more like the commoners of their region and very different from the elites of other regions. If red and blue states were literally at war with each other, we might imagine that they would define their identity based on region much more than on class. As things are, though, the different regions of the country cooperate a lot with each other. That only leaves "vertical" or social class distance as the dimension along which most inter-ethnic competition will be waged. Already during the twilight years of the Cold War, Americans didn't care about a potential battle between the USA and the Russkies -- they were more absorbed in the war between white trash and yuppie scum, as they called each other.

Perhaps this is the source of the red state - blue state mythology -- people want to engage in an Us vs. Them ethnic conflict based on "horizontal" distance, not just (or even primarily) based on "vertical" distance. But since there are no more Kaisers, Fuhrers, or Soviets, we had to invent a wide ethnic gulf. Surely we weren't going to pick any old way of splitting up the country, so we chose one with some plausibility -- after all, the data analyses so far do show that there is something to the red - blue stereotypes, even if they're profoundly exaggerated.

The other large source of horizontal ethnic conflict in America is based on allegiance to local sports teams. But this won't do very well because aside from a few teams like the Yankees, there aren't a handful of superpower teams that would provide as much dramatic conflict as the Allied vs. the Axis powers. Plus sports only appeal to a fraction of the population, so it would be hard to whip up everyone into a war mindset. But mention those latte-sipping liberals in blue states, or those low-IQ Biblical literalists in the red states, and suddenly everyone's passions become inflamed.

GSS variables used: race, region, wordsum, educ, visitart, dance, gomusic, drama

Class and religious fundamentalism in red vs. blue states

In the lead-up to and just after the last presidential election, much of the quant parts of the blogosphere were talking about Andrew Gelman et al's excellent book Red State Blue State Rich State Poor State. In it, they showed that increasing income predicted increasing likelihood of voting Republican, no matter if you live in a red state or blue state. The only catch was that this trend is more pronounced in red states, and more muted in blue states.

So, despite all of the red state vs. blue state mythology that people began telling each other during the past five or so years, rich people even in liberal blue states still tended to vote fairly Republican, and working-class people in conservative red states still tended to vote fairly Democrat. In fact, the split between red and blue states increased as you went up the income scale -- it seems that the culture wars of the 1990s were mostly an intra-elite competition.

I briefly jumped on the bandwagon and showed how an interest in hunting, fishing, and watching NASCAR fit this pattern. That is, it's mostly the lower-IQ people who do these things, regardless of whether they're in red or blue states, although for a given IQ level, red staters do have a greater interest. Still, a smart red stater is far less likely to care about hunting than a lower-IQ blue stater. IQ differences matter much more than red state vs. blue state differences.

After the election, interest in this topic naturally faded, which is unfortunate because there must be plenty of other examples of red state elites looking mostly like blue state elites, in addition to voting Republican and not caring about hunting or NASCAR. Of course, aside from voting patterns, the thing that's supposed to show the widest gulf between red and blue states is religion. But since we've seen that working-class people tend to vote Democrat, even in red states, we suspect that this other part of the conventional "red vs. blue" mythology is wrong. So let's turn to the General Social Survey to see how class and religious beliefs are related in both red and blue states. *

I'm looking here at fundamentalist religious beliefs, since that was the story -- not just that elite red staters went to church more often than lower-class blue staters, but that fundamentalist beliefs pervaded red state culture, while a staunchly secular mindset characterized blue state culture. The GSS measures such beliefs in two ways -- by asking if you think the Bible is God's word and is to be taken literally, and by asking if you know God exists without a doubt (the latter might not be so fundamentalist, but it's worth looking at too). I simply found the percent of each group who agreed with each of these statements.

I measured class in four ways, just to ensure that it doesn't matter which part of class we focus on -- socioeconomic index (a measure of job prestige), real income, education level, and IQ. The SEI bins are of size 5 and range from 17 - 22 through 92 - 97, real income is measured in 1986 dollars (in $5000 bins, centered on values ending in 5 or 0), education level is simply years of school completed, and IQ is the number of vocabulary words correct on a 10-question test.

Here are the plots for how religious fundamentalist beliefs are related to these measures of class, for both red and blue states (shown with red and blue lines, resp.):



No matter which belief we look at, and no matter which measure of class we choose, the same pattern shows up: the relationship between class and fundamentalism is more or less the same in red and blue states, namely that it declines pretty steadily as we move up the class ladder. The red - blue gap is roughly the same across the class spectrum, unlike voting patterns, where there was a widening of the gap as you moved up the income scale. In all cases, the upper-class red staters are well below the lower-class blue staters in fundamentalism. So, despite all of the rhetoric about godless blue states and Bible-thumping red states, fundamentalism is mostly a class-based phenomenon.

At the same time, the red lines are generally above the blue lines, showing that when we ignore class, red states are more fundamentalist than blue states. However, this overall red - blue gap is usually under 20% at most, whereas the drop from lower-class to upper-class fundamentalism is usually at least 30%. In other words, class distinctions trump red - blue distinctions.

The two pieces that fit with the reigning mythology are easy to see -- i.e., highly secular elites in blue states and highly religious working-class people in red states. But the problem of popular stories like the red state - blue state narrative is that we only see what agrees with them, while we blind ourselves to what clashes with them. In this case, no one saw that working-class people in blue states were highly religious and that upper-class people in red states were very secular. Rather than take a narrative for granted and look for data that support it (and ignoring those that refute it), we should simply take an empirical approach and look at all the data -- only then should we come up with the story, which by that point is just a common-language phrasing of what the data say, not some grand vision of how the world is presumed to be.

* I counted the following GSS regions as blue states:

New England - Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut
Middle Atlantic - New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania
East North Central - Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin
Pacific - Washington, Oregon, California, Alaska, Hawaii

These regions are the red states:

West North Central - Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas
South Atlantic - Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida
East South Central - Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi
West South Central - Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas
Mountain - Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada

GSS variables used: bible, god, sei, realinc, educ, wordsum, region

Is there a decline in arts appreciation? Evidence from theater

Whenever I hear about whether or not the arts are in decline, I see far more anecdotes than data. And even when data are presented, they rarely go back very far -- so how do we know if a supposed decline is really a decline or merely the down-swing of a cycle? Even worse, the data typically come in 5 or 10-year intervals, so we have no clue what's going on in between. Who cares if ballet attendance is down from 1987 -- we want to know whether it has gone steadily down during that interval.

To settle this once and for all, I've put together some time series for patronizing the theater. I dug through the arts & leisure chapters across many editions of the Statistical Abstract of the United States, and I've included two ways of measuring patronizing the theater -- attendance (on the demand side) and number of playing weeks (on the supply side). I've controlled for population size by making them per capita rates, since the population doubled from 1955 to the present. The playing weeks data go back to 1955, while the attendance data go back to 1976 for Broadway and 1985 for road shows. There are some years missing here and there at the earlier times, but all are more or less complete.

Here are the plots:




The attendance data show pretty much the same pattern as the playing weeks data, which isn't surprising since they're just two ways of measuring the same thing. So I'll stick to the playing weeks data for the discussion.

The first thing we notice is a downward trend, more so for Broadway than for road shows (down about 33% vs. 16%, respectively, from their 1955 values). Because we associate theater so strongly with Broadway in particular, we may have a somewhat exaggerated view of how bad the fall has been, since Broadway fell from a much greater height than road shows.

Despite this downward trend, there appears to be a cycle imposed on top. The mid-1970s to mid-1980s especially saw a resurgence of the theater's popularity. During this time, there was also a "ballet boom" (google ballet boom 1980s), so that the theater boom was part of a greater increase in arts appreciation in general. We don't normally associate the period from 1975 to 1985 as a cultural renaissance -- well, as someone who likes punk, disco, and new wave, I do, but most don't. For all I know, people who were alive then may actually recall vividly how culturally alive the country felt. But those of us born in 1980 or later have inherited Generation X's telling of the story -- and we all know they were no fun, so it wouldn't surprise me to find out that there's little basis for their accounts of cultural vapidity during a period that saw a theater and ballet boom.

Moving forward, notice how similarly the Broadway and road show data move from 1955 through the 1980s -- the parallel movements are pretty striking. However, from the late 1980s (it looks like 1987) to today, they move in opposite directions. There could be a very simple explanation for this -- if the rhythm of the cycle is slightly different between Broadway and the rest of the country, sometimes they will be in synch and other times out of synch, even though they are not influencing each other at all. This is what produces beats in sound, as when two faucets dripping at slightly different rhythms will sometimes be perfectly in synch and later out of synch.

But I doubt this, since Broadway and the rest of the country are in synch for a little over 30 years, and only recently have they gone out of synch, with little transition, as you'd expect if this were just an instance of beats. Not knowing much about the recent history of theater, I couldn't tell you what happened in the mid-to-late 1980s that might have set Broadway off along a different path from the rest of the country.

I also doubt that Broadway patrons began to purposefully do the opposite of whatever the masses were doing, as some naive theories assume. First, the idea makes little sense because the masses are completely out of sight and out of mind for Broadway patrons -- their real conflicts and competitions are held among themselves. Second, snobbery goes back much farther than 1987 -- why was Broadway patrons' behavior so in synch with that of the rest of us for the 30 years before then?

In any event, most people today will probably prefer to watch movies in the theaters or at home rather than see live performances, so the future of theater doesn't look so hot. Still, there are large swings around this downward trend, and we could certainly see another boom -- as indeed there was among road shows in the mid-2000s. And it's not as if people will stop going altogether -- the attendance rates have always been on the order of 1%, whatever the fluctuations have been.

In the future, I'll dig up some more data but for a different arts category. The Statistical Abstract also has data on symphonic performances, so that seems like the natural next step in this look at recent cultural history.