Society – Page 37 – Common Infirmities

Demographic fallacies and classical music

I was just reading an article in Slate with the title “Classical Music in America is Dead”. The argument boils down to two points:

Classical music listeners are a small portion of the population.
Relatively few young people in the audience.

With regard to (1), I thought it interesting that he writes

Just 2.8 percent of albums sold in 2013 were categorized as classical. By comparison, rock took 35 percent; R&B 18 percent; soundtracks 4 percent. Only jazz, at 2.3 percent, is more incidental to the business of American music.

What’s interesting is that, while jazz is certainly a minority taste, and its trajectory in American culture has closely paralleled that of classical music in the 20th century, I don’t think anyone would claim that jazz is dead.

He quotes the critic Richard Sandow, who makes a demographic argument that

And the aging audience is also a shrinking one. The NEA, ever since 1982, has reported a smaller and smaller percentage of American adults going to classical music performances. And, as time goes on, those who do go are increasingly concentrated in the older age groups (so that by now, the only group going as often as it did in the past are those over 65).

Which means that the audience is most definitely shrinking. Younger people aren’t coming into it. In the 1980s, the NEA reported, the percentage of people under 30 in the classical music audience fell in half. And older people also aren’t coming into the classical audience. If they were, we’d see a steady percentage of people in their 40s and 50s going to classical events, but we don’t. That percentage is falling.

Of course, this is vastly overstated. “Younger people” are “coming into it”… in smaller numbers than before. It’s an absurd fallacy (not uncommon, and addressed first (to my knowledge) in theoretical ageing research by Yashin et al. in the 1980s) that you can determine the longitudinal dynamics for individuals by looking at the cross-sectional age distribution.

Consider a model where individuals are recruited into classical music at a constant rate over their lifetimes, ending with 10% of the 80-year-olds. (We’ll leave the older population out of it.) Then about 11% of the adult audience would be under 30. Suppose there were now a change, just so that children under 15 were no longer being recruited into classical music, but after that age they continued to be enter at the same rate as before. Then the fraction of the adult audience under 30 would be halved, to about 5.5%. The number of people in their 40s and 50s going to concerts would decline by about 15%.

I’m not arguing that this is what is going on. A lot of the story is probably the general splintering of the music audience, and the fact that people increasingly prefer to stay home for their entertainment. (This is one reason why I have argued that the classical music establishment’s reliance on enormously expensive orchestras and opera companies is a mistake.) Just that you can’t make inferences about individual trajectories over time without data about individual trajectories.

A plan to completely segregate British schools

It’s hard to believe this is not a cynical ploy:

The wealthiest parents should have to pay the same fees to send their children to a top state school as they would to an independent school, a leading headteacher has proposed.

Independent schools should also offer a quarter of their places to children from the poorest of backgrounds, according to Anthony Seldon, the master at Wellington College.

In a report published by the Social Market Foundation (SMF), Seldon calls for a radical wave of reforms to end the divide between state and independent schools, enhance social mobility and offer young people a more rounded education.

Maybe he’s just trying to “bring new money into the state system, as well as incentivise state schools to perform better”, as he says, while being too naive to understand the consequences. Seems unlikely. He also says his plans would “reduce the domination of places at the top state schools by the children of well-off parents”. Indeed it would, since children of well-off parents would be almost completely absent from state schools.

If you think the well-off aren’t paying enough for education, why not just raise their income taxes? Why specifically penalise them for sending their children to state schools? There is already a prejudice — often unfounded — that private schools provide superior education. Forcing out the upper classes — and that’s clearly what would happen, if they were to be charged the same fees for a school that is less exclusive, and thus apparently inferior. The only ones who would benefit would be the independent schools, which would no longer need to compete with the state sector on price. How convenient!

If you want to know what the benefits really are of British independent schools, a colleague made it clear to me a while back, when he said he sends his children to private school so that they learn “self confidence”. I was reminded of this recently when someone spoke to me about having heard about research about “perceived fair wages”. “Someone who’s earning £30,000 a year isn’t going to apply for a job with a £60,000 salary. He knows it’s out of his league, that he doesn’t have the skills for that.” Now, I’ve encountered this notion of “perceived fair wages” in the analysis of wage inequality: in particular, that women often are paid less because they are conditioned to expect lower wages. (For example here.) But this fellow thought it was simply a matter of everyone having a good sense of their proper place.

So how do you get to be a self confident banker who refuses to roll over and let The Man cut his multi-million pound bonus? Presumably, that’s the job of the independent schools.

Math and taxes

Oxford University has a new mathematics building. It’s very nice, looks like it would be a good place to work. But I found it fascinating to learn that the building is split in half, one part for teaching, one for research, with undergraduates basically forbidden to enter the research part. It’s a bit of a nuisance for the faculty, who need to give tutorials, and would sometimes find it convenient to do it in their Maths Institute office rather than in their college. Why is it? The story — I can’t vouch for its truth, but I’ve heard this from several people — is that it is for tax reasons. Apparently, research is considered a charitable activity, while teaching is… I don’t know, commercial activity? By splitting the building this way, they were spared paying VAT (close to 20%) on the construction.

This suggests an updated version of an old Jewish joke:

(Student tries to enter the research side of the Maths Institute Building.)

Receptionist: Where do you think you’re going? You’re not allowed in there.

Student: I’m looking for my brother. He’s a graduate student here.

Receptionist: Why don’t you ring him?

Student: He’s probably in one of the interaction zones, which have been designed to facilitate informal discussion outside the framework of traditional office spaces.

Receptionist: You could ring his mobile.

Student: As you are probably aware, the lovely metal cladding on the interior walls has exactly the right dimensions to block all mobile telephone and computer wireless radio signals. (True, apparently.) Please, I just need to go in for two minutes.

Receptionist: Well, okay. But don’t let me catch you learning in there!

What is income?

A strange paradox has opened up in the magnificently cruel US healthcare system. The Affordable Care Act was supposed to subsidise people with modest incomes (above the federal poverty line) to purchase private health insurance. Those below the poverty line — in fact, 138% of the poverty line — were supposed to be moved onto free health insurance with Medicaid. But Medicaid is administered by the states, and quite unexpectedly many states with Republican governors have refused the Medicaid expansion, out of pure political spite, making a hash of this system: Now individuals in those states whose income is below the federal poverty line still don’t get Medicaid (unless they qualify for Medicaid under the old rules, which are much more restrictive), but they can’t get the health care subsidies because they don’t earn enough.

Ignoring the huge human suffering that is being intentionally inflicted, I find this situation fascinating, because it’s something that shouldn’t exist in the world imagined by quantitative finance. How can you have too little income to receive public assistance? After all, this isn’t about net income. They don’t have to do anything with the money. It just needs to be recorded as income. Someone can give me a cheque for $1000, in payment for “personal services”, and I can give it back to pay his bill for “financial services”. There. I’ve just gotten another $1000 in income. You’d have to put some extra organisational effort in to make sure that you don’t incur any tax obligations.

But the point is, in the world of high finance, there isn’t a category of “income”. There’s just money. And they don’t leave money on the table just because there’s not enough in one particular accounting category. But the poor don’t just lack money; they don’t have people to structure their transactions in beneficial ways.

American exceptionalism: Harassing tourists and others

A discussion broke out on The Dish about the high-handed and sometimes abusive treatment that foreigners entering the US are subjected to, even citizens of international peers, like the EU, compared with the treatment that Americans (and others) receive entering most European countries. All foreigners entering the US are, by law, treated as “an intending immigrant” when they arrive, and need to prove otherwise. Now, a former immigration official has replied with a justification:

Congress demands by law that every applicant for a tourist visa (or any nonimmigrant visa) be considered “an intending immigrant” until they prove otherwise. With good reason – a lot of them are intending immigrants. Why is it Americans have such an easier time traveling to other countries than citizens of those countries have traveling here? Because Americans go home, that’s why.

Even when US citizens work off the books for a year or two overseas, they almost always wind up coming home. The same can’t be said of most foreigners who come here, even Europeans.

Sounds pretty convincing. But is it true? How would he know? I’m always suspicious of categorical claims like this, even when I make them myself.

How about if we compare the number of people from different countries living abroad. According to the French government, there are 1.6 million French citizens living abroad, so about 2.7% of the population. About 2 million Germans (not counting the 600,000 or so Russians who are officially considered “Germans” by ancient descent), so about 2.5%. And Americans? According to the Bureau of Consular Affairs (part of the State Department) there are 7.6 million Americans living abroad. Divided into a population of 316 million, we get about 2.4%. Even if some of these estimates are off, it’s clearly not a qualitative difference.

Sorry, America, the world just isn’t as into you as you like to imagine.

Somebody to blame

Jonathan Cohn — one of the best-informed voices on healthcare in American journalism — has a new article in The New Republic about the reductions in provider networks that insurers are imposing, due to constraints in the Affordable Care Act. Except, as he points out,

Even before Obamacare, employers and insurers were already moving in the direction of limiting networks and penalizing costly hospitals like Cedars. Kominski notes that his employer, the University of California system, aggressively restricted its provider network two years ago. The change affected thousands of employees—and was one of many such decisions employers made around the country. But it didn’t generate a national controversy. The city of Los Angeles just took Cedars off the network for one large plan in order to keep premiums for city employees low. And while it’s possible Obamacare accelerated a trend toward limited networks for direct consumers, it’s also possible that insurers would have made that switch anyway—and that they’re introducing these changes now, in one big wave, because Obamacare gives them a convenient excuse.

This is a genuine bias, particularly in American democracy, toward leaving problems unaddressed, because as soon as you start trying to deal with the problem, voters will hold you responsible for any remaining defects.

I remarked on this shortly after I came to the UK, that it seemed to me that the British underrate the NHS, because any health problem that occurs anywhere in the country, whether it’s unhygienic conditions in a hospital, or GP surgeries not being open at sufficiently convenient hours, is blamed on “the NHS”. That is a strength, but it’s also a temptation for politicians to offload the responsibility onto “the market”. The political culture hasn’t gone that far in this country, but that’s why there’s a major US political party whose political philosophy is, conveniently, essentially “There’s nothing we can do”.

(Physicist David Deutsch has written a book-length quantum-utopian manifesto whose main lesson seems to be that the fundamental criterion for the progress potential of a political system is the extent to which it makes it clear, when things go wrong, who is to blame.)

This is a well-known problem in torts law — a public danger that has never been touched is nobody’s responsibility. If you try to make it safer, but cannot eliminate the danger entirely, suddenly it has become your responsibility if someone is injured. I first encountered this many years ago, when The Economist published a somewhat surprising plea for a planetwide defence against rogue asteroids. Like (I think) most people, on the rare occasions when I do think about asteroid strikes, I generally do not consider the legal implications. The article pointed out, though, that while an unmolested asteroid that obliterates London is an Act of God, as soon as some government tries to divert it, it becomes a legal liability.

This is an issue that I’ve never seen raised in the famous trolley problems that moral philosophers love to natter about. If you’re the trolley driver then you have a real moral dilemma. If you’re a bystander who happens to see a switch that could be thrown, you’d best call your lawyer first. She’ll tell you, under no circumstances should you touch anything. If 5 people die, that’s not your fault. If you save the 5 but kill one — if you even hurt the one’s finger — his family will sue you.

On learning to play an instrument

I was intrigued by Mark Oppenheimer’s article in The New Republic “Stop Forcing Your Kids to Learn a Musical Instrument” when it appeared in September, and a reread it now that it has been reposted. Obviously, the “forcing” alluded to in the headline sounds pretty bad, and few people would advocate it. But the article is not about forcing; more like “strongly encouraging”. Oppenheimer is willing to continue financing his daughter’s violin and ballet lessons, but he won’t encourage it. And he does not believe that it is worthwhile, unlike the weekly Hebrew lessons, or more valuable than watching comedies on television. I can accept his feelings on this point, and I wonder myself sometimes what motivates some parents to push their children into certain activities, given attitudes that are little different from Oppenheimer’s.

But if this were merely confessional breastbeating it would have been a 50-word blog post, rather than an article in TNR that helps pay for those useless violin lessons. So Oppenheimer provides a few hundred words of explanation, and chaos ensues. The arguments are so badly tangled that they come out almost as an advocacy of music lessons once you’ve unknotted them. I find it hard to escape the impression that it irks him that his daughter is enjoying something that he doesn’t understand or appreciate.

He has two main arguments:

To they extent that playing an instrument is a useful skill, it is not classical music that children should be learning.
Learning to play an instrument has no value beyond itself. (Ditto for learning to dance.) The claims commonly put forward are spurious.

Let’s look at argument 2 first. Oppenheimer writes

Why are so many children taking ballet, violin, piano? Lately, I have been asking my fellow middle-class urbanite parents that question. About dance, they say things like, “Ballet teaches them poise,” or, “Ballet helps them be graceful.” And about violin or piano they say, “It will give them a lifelong skill,” or, “They’ll always enjoy listening to music more.”

It does not take a rocket scientist, or a Juilliard-trained cellist, to see the flaws in these assertions. First, as to ballet, I propose a test. Imagine we took ten girls (or boys) who had studied ballet from the ages of five to twelve, and then quit, and mixed them in with ten girls (or boys) who had never taken dance. Let’s say that we watched these twenty tweens move around their schools for a day… Does anyone really believe we could spot the ones who had spent seven years in weekly or biweekly ballet class?

Interesting thought experiment. Does anyone really believe…? Obviously the parents who told him this believe that, or something similar. (Maybe “poise” and “grace” aren’t quite so conspicuous, so they wouldn’t quite know what to predict.) Are they right? I don’t know. But it’s weird to present as proof that these other parents are wrong the results of a made-up experiment that no one actually did. Continue reading “On learning to play an instrument”

Compute the interest

Another comment based on Sharon Ann Murphy’s wonderful book on 19th century life insurance in the US: She describes an 1852 case in which the American Mutual Insurance Company tried to renege on a claim, where a preëxisting condition was found in an autopsy.

Not surprisingly, the jury sided with the beneficiaries; they “were out thirteen minutes, just long enough to compute the interest” on the original claim.

Indeed, the verdict is not surprising. What is most surprising, however, is that the jury computed the interest. I wonder how likely it is that a jury of twelve today would include even a single person capable of computing compound interest.

Why are classical music supporters obsessed with symphonies?

I was just reading this New Republic article about the financial crisis in US symphony orchestras, and it reminded me of a question that I’ve had for a very long time: Why do people who enjoy classical music lavish so much attention on gigantic symphony orchestras? Symphony orchestras have gotten polished to an extraordinary perfection, and suck up vast amounts of public and private subsidy, but chamber music performances are few and far between. There’s nothing in the nature of this musical tradition that requires emphasising the repertoire for huge ensembles. To put it differently, rock music would also be in crisis if it depended on putting together ensembles of around 100 musicians that would play to audiences of several thousand. Of course, there are a few bands that play to stadium crowds, but most of the professional activity in the most popular music genres is in small venues, with a handful of musicians and little or no support staff.

The same might be said of music in the schools. Most high schools manage to organise a school orchestra, but there’s rarely much effort put into chamber music. There, at least, the economics make sense, since dozens of children can be supervised by a single orchestra leader. On the other hand, the learning value is greatly reduced as well.

The 25th state?

Canadians used to accuse Americans of plotting to make them the 51st state — indeed, if all of Canada were to be a single US state it would only be the second largest by population. (I remember an article a decade ago or so that suggested that they talk so much about it, it must be their secret desire.)

In the book Investing in Life, about life insurance in 19th century US, there is a reference to the caution of William Bard, first president of New York Life Insurance and Trust Company, in insuring lives lived in climates potentially less salubrious than that of New York City.

For example, while Bard believed the climate of Halifax, Nova Scotia to be “as favorable to life as that of any other state” and consequently appointed an agent there in 1833, he was much more cautious about risks in western New York or the midwestern states.