Cat vs. dog people -- clues from pet items at two hip young retailers

I've been looking into the differences between cat people and dog people, trying to boil them down to the most basic causes. Some groups are more cat-loving than their counterparts, although there's typically enough overlap to require a more fine-grained look, a discussion of exceptions, and so on.

Well, not with the two groups we're going to look at first. I couldn't believe how totally separate they were.

Two personality traits appear to underlie their many behavioral differences: cat people are more empathetic and curious about people, and dog people more oriented toward things; and cat people are more content with a simple life, and dog people are more status-striving. There's a third one that might be reduced somehow to one or both of the other two: cat people are more sensitive to holding things sacred, taboo, and pure, while dog people are more permissive and profaning.

Again, that'll take an extended series of comparisons to provide all the rich convincing detail, but for now we'll run a fairly controlled experiment. We want to make sure that the two groups we're comparing are very similar in most of the unimportant ways -- age, race, class, sex, etc. -- and we'd like for there to be a fairly honest signal of how cat-loving or dog-loving they are, not just asking them if they like one or the other.

The clothing retailers Urban Outfitters and American Apparel target the same demographic group -- young, white, educated, urban, liberal, more female than male. And they both have pet sections on their websites: here is UO's "pet shop," and here is AA's pets section. Presumably the selection reflects what the audience is into, or else they'd be losing money stocking the wrong stuff.

Every one of the 66 items at American Apparel are not only dog-related -- they are for the dogs themselves to wear. At Urban Outfitters, there's 1 item that is both cat and dog-themed, 2 that are neither, and of the remaining 60, 45 of them (or 75%) are cat-themed and 15 dog-themed. Only a few of the cat items are meant to be used by the cat (pet houses), while a good chunk of the dog items are meant for the dog itself (cape, bowtie, etc.).

Doggie sweatsuit from AA

Ceramic cat knob from UO

So, cat people do not treat their pets as pawns in a status contest played by the owner, while one of the primary motivations of dog people is to use their pet as a fashion accessory to broadcast the owner's lifestyle to their rivals in the status competition. It doesn't matter which arena they're battling it out in; that will only affect which choice of dog they bring along to duel it out with the other dog owners. E.g., pitbull for ghetto thugs, Pomeranian for childless yuppie women, and so on.

Cat-related merchandise is not foisted on the pet, but worn by the owner to signal the tribe they belong to (cat lovers). It is not part of a status contest because the t-shirt, sweater, etc., does not show the owner's specific cat -- like "Drop what you're doing, world, and look at my awesomely unique pet." It's either a generic cat or a well known cat, neither of which belong to the owner, and hence not one that the wearer is trying to show off or brag about in public.

Even though the two retailers cater to folks in the same demographic groups, there are other sets of striking differences between the typical shopper at each store. This tells us what types of people are likely to be single-mindedly dog-loving vs. mostly cat-loving.

Comparing the target audience at Urban Outfitters (first) and American Apparel (second), on the following dimensions, we find...

Heterosexuals (mostly) vs. queers, boy-phobic straight girls, and outright fag hags

Relatively muted gays vs. flamingly annoying gays

Vintage vs. trendy

Traditional vs. progressive

Retains classics vs. dumps iPod every couple years

Late '60s, '70s, '80s, early '90s vs. "That is so five minutes ago"

Lived-in vs. shining and new

Rustic, Mediterranean vs. Scandinavian modern

Geometric patterns vs. solid planes

Rock vs. techno

Arts and crafts / DIY vs. mass production

Nonchalant, mysterious vs. attention-whoring, obvious

Basic sense of shame vs. rationalizes shamefulness

Holds things sacred vs. whatever, get rid of it, it doesn't matter

Amateur photographer vs. selfie-snapper

Record player vs. iPhone as dream gift

Transparent irony (affectionate) vs. campy / blackface

No gym, no yoga, no jogging vs. owns array of specialized work-out gear

Girls: lets eyebrows and bush grow semi-naturally vs. plucked and napalmed (despite ad campaigns)

Guys: no manscaping, may have beard vs. trims pubes, shaves chest

And so on...

Some of these themes will keep coming up, but they won't be so black-and-white. It's good to start with a rather extreme group comparison since that lays out the rough outlines, with finer details to be left filled in by more realistic comparisons.

Children of divorce happier as adults if they attended church growing up

Since the share of children growing up under divorced or never-married parents has been growing for decades, we ought to try harder to find ways to lessen the maladjustment that children of divorce experience. They didn't ask for their homes to become broken, so they shouldn't have to pay the costs.

One of the most severe and enduring forms of damage done by divorce is rupturing the child's sense of social connectedness, for certain within the nuclear family but also tending to rip them away from their existing social circle and community in the process of changing residence. Hence, whatever can be done to provide the child with a larger social group to belong to, ought to soften the hard landing they're about to take.

Going to church not only embeds the kid within their larger community, but protects the bond with a sacred aura. It's not just any old group that he's meeting up with. They're setting aside their ordinary forms of interacting with each other in order to commune with the supernatural. This makes the kid feel like their membership is less tenuous there than in other settings, leading them to expect greater support during difficult times.

The General Social Survey asks a question about how happy you are in general. I restricted respondents to whites who were not living with both parents when they were 16 years old. They have another question about how often you attended Sunday school or religious instruction growing up.

Going more frequently didn't affect the share who said they were "very happy" as adults. And at any rate, what's the difference between "very happy" and "pretty happy"? It did affect the share who said they were "not too happy," marking a clear boundary with the other two choices. The more frequently you went to Sunday school growing up, the happier you ended up as an adult. Those who said they weren't too happy made up 18% of "never" attenders, 13% of "sometime" attenders, 11% of "most of the time" attenders, and 10% of "always" attenders.

Treating the "not too happy" response as a threshold within a normal curve of happiness, we can turn those percentages into z-scores and find out how far apart the averages are for the various groups. For example, the "never" and "always" attenders are separated by a gap of 0.36 standard deviations. If we thought of happiness as a kind of "height," it's as though the "never" attenders were 1.1 inches shorter on average than the "always" attenders.

What would that imply for more extreme forms of unhappiness? Instead of the average, look out to 2 standard deviations unhappier than the average of kids who always went to Sunday school. At 2 s.d., just over 2% will be this depressed. This point will only be about 1.6 s.d. away from the average of "never" attenders, raising their prevalence to 5%. Folks that depressed with be more than twice as common among "never" attenders than "always" attenders. The myriad costs to the individual, their social circle, and the broader society rise sharply as you look at more and more depressed people. They may be more or less out of the job market for good and be totally cut off from the whole world. So even what seems like a small jump -- from 2% to 5% -- may have even greater costs that follow.

Raising your children's happiness in adulthood by that much just by sending them to socialize with their age-mates in Sunday school must be one of the most effective ways to make sure you don't mess them up too badly by breaking up their home and ripping them out from their community. It's just one hour a week, and you the parent don't even have to pay attention to the sermon or believe anything you're hearing, as long as you don't bad-mouth the whole experience afterward in front of your children. For all we know, maybe the effect takes hold even if the parents didn't stay for services themselves, just dropped the kid off and picked them up after running some errands.

Still, the least you can do is park your butt in the seat at church for an hour a week while your kid develops social connections within a sacred setting, and winds up happier as an adult. However, since we don't know what the relative timing of events were for the survey respondents, we don't know that it would work if you only started taking them to Sunday school once you got divorced. Probably the respondents had been going since they were little, before their parents' divorce. So you'll have to make it a regular thing -- just in case, because you never know if yours will become another broken home statistic.

Unfortunately, things don't seem to be heading that way. The "always" and "most of the time" attenders took a drop during those born in the 1960s, although at least it stayed flat after that through late '70s births. The question was only asked in 1988 and 1998, so nobody born after 1980 shows up among respondents. I have a hunch that Sunday school was even rarer for Millennials growing up in the '90s and 2000s. Parents these days are so smug about not needing religious practice in their kids' lives.* They're teaching them how to read and write, memorize factoids, and show poor manners inside the house and out -- so like, what else could socializing with peers in church possibly add to their lives?

Young children of divorce must really be taking a beating these days. At least in the '80s, they weren't locked inside the house their whole lives. And those people and places outside the home were willing to pick up the slack left by the divorcing parents. There was church, sports teams, Scouts, the library, school (back when kids could socialize at school), friends' homes and their parents, the mall, and on and on.

Where is a kid from a broken home supposed to turn to these days? Helicopter parents seal off all external influences, leaving the kid trapped in a social-emotional void. Perhaps there ought to be a legal requirement of divorced or single parents to register their children at a Sunday school program. If the parents aren't going to provide the stability and care for the child to grow up to be as well adjusted as a child from an intact family, somebody or something else has to make up for it. Religious youth programs are among the most time-tested, so why not start there?

I know it sounds ridiculous to talk about legislating this kind of stuff, but it's not the '80s anymore, so kids are no longer free to seek out alternative sources of connectedness when the parents bail on them. Today, helicopter parenting and cocooning are compounding the disconnecting effect of divorce on children. Extreme times call for extreme measures to correct them.

* Forget beliefs -- the effect above was shown for practice, and most kids don't understand complex beliefs... or adults for that matter, when it comes to religious beliefs. It's behavior, practice, and ritual that make the difference.

GSS variables: happy, family16, sunsch16, race

The Christmas "Buy me this" list, and the disappearance of spontaneity

When I was growing up, there might be one or two things that we knew we were getting for sure, a handful of other things we'd put on a wish list (some we'd get, some not), and at least half of our gifts came without being asked for -- that is, spontaneously.

But spontaneity makes folks who suffer from OCD get all frustrated, and surprises creep them out, so that form of gift-giving has given way to the orderly "Buy me this" list. Sure, you might get a handful of things unsolicited, but they're minor / background gifts. Typically gag or novelty items, or inoffensive and generic stuff, both of which are not meant to be gifts for you in particular. The things meant specifically for you, the individual, are requested by you and fetched by the gift-giver.

Where has the sense of anticipation, mystery, and surprise gone on Christmas morning? (Sperg response to all three: "Borrring. Where's the stuff I told you to buy me?")

It's like a diva actress drawing up a shopping list and handing it over to a team of assistants who will go out and tick the items off, only with cash out of their own pockets, rather than her credit card. It's too forward, presumptuous, and perfectionist to harmonize with the spirit of gift-giving.

Plus the odds of two or more gift-givers buying the same thing go way up when there's a small finite list of things to buy the recipient. So now they have to hold a conference and text or email back and forth about who got item #1, I got item #4, Hey I already bought #4, Well that's the only one I can afford, OK I'll cancel my order for #4 and get #7 instead, etc...

And then there's the fail-safe option of "Just give me money and I'll buy my own gifts after Christmas." Like you guys would just bungle the job, so I'll take over instead. Once again, money could not be more generic of a gift (ditto gift cards). I actually did give my brothers cash one Christmas, though only because they were acting like such sarcastic, ungrateful brats beforehand that I figured they didn't deserve a thoughtful gift. Write a letter to Santa Claus.

The new way also sparks ingratitude afterward because typically not all of the wish list items will be received, and those that you do get, you might not have ranked the highest. At best you feel completely neutral when you get the things you really wanted (they were predictable outcomes, the prediction came true, no emotional rush), and at worst unsatisfied with the things that you only kinda wanted. When everything is preordained, it doesn't feel like a wish that came true.

"Yeah, I guess I'm OK with not getting everything I want, but if they had to leave some things out, it should have been those Skullcandy headphones. I mean, I guess they're OK, but I really could've used the PS4 controller more. Maybe next year... ah screw it, I'll just buy it myself. I swear, it's like they're trying to be idiots sometimes..."

All that brat deserves is to get sodomized by a giant block of coal. Really, what's the next development -- rank-ordering the items on your "Buy me this" list?

And not getting everything you asked for builds character. It teaches you that you can't just go barking around orders to others and keep getting your way. It also gives you experience in being a polite recipient when you don't really care for what the giver got you. Displeased Millennials cannot conceal their frustration in cases like that in real life, and I'll bet their helicopter parents just asked them what they wanted for Christmas growing up, and ticked items off the list. It's made them into sore losers and poor winners.

"NINTENDO SIXTY-FOOOOURRRR!!!!!"

I wonder if the impaired social skills of a cocooning society also makes the gift-givers less able to figure out what to get other people. I don't mean perfect mind-reading -- if they want something that badly, they can buy it themselves. But "the kind of thing that so-and-so would enjoy, perhaps without even knowing about it." Or even joke gifts -- the kind of thing that so-and-so would find funny. Inside joke gifts are more personal still -- you don't tease people you don't care about, and it relies on shared experiences and common awareness. (If you come from a Scotch-Irish family, you know how important prank gifts are for expressing affection without getting all sappy.)

I don't think this is one of those phenomena that require a conscious Movement to reverse. Just don't give out "Buy me this" lists yourselves, and don't adhere so rigidly to them when they come in from others. First folks have to unlearn their perfectionism, then they can relearn how to enjoy surprises.

New Haven PD: Media coverage feeds crime

From a report about the knockout game hitting the Yale area:

Sergeant Al Vazquez of the NHPD Detective Bureau shared residents’ concerns about media sensationalism. The best way to prevent further “knockout” attacks is to educate New Haven residents as well as the media, Vazquez said. He explained that the media helps perpetuate the trend by continually covering it.

And if reporters would just stop covering hurricanes out in the oceans, they'd never reach our shores. Media sensationalism is practically goading the storms our way! Just don't give them the attention they're seeking, and they'll end their dramatic performance.

Why girls stay in emotionally abusive relationships (Warning: disillusionment ahead)

At the BlindGossip site, there's a series of four posts about an insecure young pop star and her boyfriend who, despite constantly demeaning and manipulating her, continues to enjoy her company. It's Demi Lovato, a singer I've heard of but never heard her music, and Wilmer Valderrama, the squat Hispanic dork from That '70s Show that used to be on 15 years ago.

Here is the most recent post in the series, where the website writer says that Demi reads the website, so guys, in the comments please tell her how great she is, and how she deserves 1000 times better than this ugly has-been slimeball. All four posts establish how emotionally demeaning he is toward her, and how she keeps caving in.

And just like the socially naive type that you might expect to live vicariously through celebrity drama websites, they all swoop in, showering her with effusive paragraph-long comments about how attractive, talented, popular, lovable, and worthy she is, and how she deserves 1000 times better than a dude named Wilmer.

And all are completely incredulous as to how she could continue to stay with a bum. If he were more attractive, wealthy, powerful, famous, violently dominant toward other males, etc. -- OK, a little constant demeaning might be the price she's willing to pay. But to stay with an across-the-board loser seems like an enigma to them, especially given how young, attractive, wealthy, famous, etc., she herself is.

I googled around and found similar puzzlement among males, females, young, old, liberal, conservative, etc. Everybody is completely clueless on this issue.

So I'll come right out and explain why -- girls who stay in these relationships crave the constant rescuing behavior, and the hyperbolic ego-reassurance, coming from those in their social circle whenever the girls engage in or hint at self-destructive behavior. They have a profound fear of abandonment by those who are supposed to be caring for them, so they constantly test them by degrading themselves, and making their social circle prove that they really do care and will swoop in to rescue and reassure them that they truly are lovable, worthy, deserving of so much better, and so on.

Now, these rescuers who are always being called upon, do not do so for other people they know -- because everyone else they know is not a hystrionic attention-seeker. The girl who purposefully lowers herself is trying to extract way more care and attention than her social circle would normally be prepared to give her. But because she's allowed herself to descend to such pathetic depths, they figure they can't just ignore her and continue to be her friend or relative.

In other words, such girls are emotional parasites on their social circle. If they're a celebrity, that extends to trying to extract ego reassurance from the entire society. It's shameful for her to degrade herself at all, but doubly shameful when she does so in order to parasitize the emotional reserves of those who are closest to her. Other people might need to draw on those reserves, and it's draining to the supplier every time they're called upon. Staying in an emotionally abusive relationship is one of the most selfish and manipulative behaviors a person could ever show. It's "fishing for compliments" through false humility, dialed up to 11.

Let's compare the ugly truth with some of the popular self-serving rationalizations, shall we?

1. The girl is terrified of being alone. Wrong: she can attach herself blindly to the next loser who walks down the hallway, who won't be emotionally abusive. Being in a relationship doesn't require him to be a demeaning manipulator -- does it get any more "no duh" than that?

2. The girl is inexperienced, and the seasoned jerk is taking advantage of easy prey. Guess again: these girls tend to be sexually and romantically precocious (and tend to get into drugs, which a naive angel would not).

3. The girl is insecure and desperate for attention, no matter how negative it is. Obviously, on one level. But she wants the attention from her social circle, not him. Craving attention doesn't require that it come in a demeaning and degrading form (no duh). It's not hard to find positive attention.

4. The girl has a desire beyond her control to "fix him," so she stays in order to nurture the sociopath into a kind soul. The impossibility of that task is obvious to anyone, no matter how delusional. Rather, giving this reason reflects the shameless grab for ego reassurance. She's looking for everyone to tell her that she's sacrificing her own well-being like some latter-day Mother Teresa, but girl, it just ain't worth it. It's naked self-righteousness, making herself out to be a martyr when she's just an emotional parasite.

Et cetera...

Why doesn't she move on to find a man who'll treat her right? Quite simply, she thinks that all men are unreliable scum. What would be the point in trying to receive heartfelt validation from a boyfriend? But she does expect her social circle to be comforting and reassuring, so she'll rely on them instead to give her feedback about how worthy and lovable she is. Yet she can't get a constant stream of that without regularly jeopardizing her emotional well-being.

Hence the never-ending cycle of drama in her life -- and it's not malingering or "crying wolf" either. She really is bent on a certain degree of self-destruction (but not so high that it would actually do her in -- that would halt the flow of reassurance, and that would suck).

She winds up only associating with the scummiest of men who have a red-blooded libido, not normal men who still have their balls intact. She has to give it up so that the guy will stay in the relationship; otherwise he'll bail before he gets to constantly demean her, and she won't be able to trigger the rescue behavior of her social circle. She has no intrinsic sex drive or joy for sex, though; it's only a means to the end of getting rescued from the ugly monster.

This also means that she will date men indiscriminately, meaning that any old scumbag will do. Demeaning treatment will get her the rescuing reassurance she craves from her social circle, and they don't care who the guy is. It's just, "He's demeaning you? Girl, you deserve 1000 times better than him, you're the bestest friend and the most beautiful person inside and out!" The interchangeable nature of her boyfriends reinforces her view that men are scum -- they're all the same, all substituteable slimeballs. But she chose them to play a faceless role (the jerk boyfriend who'll make her friends and family swoop in to rescue her), rather than for some distinct and individual mix of traits that only he has.

She will also wind up with lots of emotional tampon guy friends, and a gaggle of gay bffs, both of whom are too developmentally stunted to realize that she doesn't want a healthy rewarding relationship with a boyfriend. And the same goes for her girl friends -- only those who have that naive "swoop in" instinct, and not the more mature or cynical ones. (Fortunately for the parasite, most girls are not very mature or cynical.)

These are lessons that have to be learned the hard way by those who are or would be in this girl's social circle. And they're one of the most disillusioning experiences you could ever go through, so naturally a good deal of those who could learn, will not. Cognitive dissonance hurts.

For those who have a natural willingness to hear other people's cry for help, and do what they can to support them, it's disorienting to go through your first encounter with one of these girls. It opens your eyes to how easily taken advantage of an empathetic person can be these days. Good thing I'm only empathetic and not kneejerk sympathetic.

I could just sniff something out about a couple girls like this, in 8th grade and later in 9th or 10th grade. Then once you become aware of the possibility, you check everyone out from then on -- and sadly, at least during the '90s and the 21st century, most of these girls who give off signs of needing rescued are complicit in their own degradation. It's not the '80s anymore, when a girl may have been over-powered by a guy and raped, or otherwise have become a helpless victim.

So much of the social climate of the Millennial era has been dominated by this cult of fake victims. It turns out the guy didn't keep going after she'd said "No," or pried her legs apart when she'd tried to shut them and push him away. Nope, she just got into a drunken hook-up that she regretted the next day. (Remember that all those so-called cases involving "date rape drugs" turned out to be lies.) And Rodney King wasn't some well-intentioned bystander targeted by over-zealous cops. Nope, he was high on PCP and had been leading them on a long, high-speed chase. And AIDS wasn't the outcome of a homophobic rain cloud hovering over the Tenderloin, or hushed-up CIA labs -- nope, they were spreading that shit to each other, up the butt like perverts. Now the news comes out, too, that Matthew Shepard was likely killed by a couple of queer drug dealers, not redneck fag-bashers.

This whole tangled web of lies could only have been spun with the supporting branches of trust that had reached its peak in the late '80s, as folks tried to help one another out at the grassroots level, since the powers that be had proven to be too ignorant, too powerless, or too corrupt to do so for us. Petty criminals took advantage of that atmosphere of trust by presenting themselves as normal people, often in need of help ("Can you help me change this tire?").

But the final and most sickening betrayal was by all of these fake victims from the '90s onward. They weren't criminals, but they were more numerous and sucked more of your blood over the long term. It was pure intuition as a teenager that led me to keep those people at arm's length, but with the benefit of hindsight and hopefully some greater maturity, I can articulate it now.

If you do find yourself tied to such a person, though, like if they're family, what's the best response? I don't know, but I suspect telling them that you won't give them attention or respect until they get out of the relationship. Not in a mean-spirited way, just calmly and firmly, to let them know their manipulations won't work. For all I know, though, that might just drive them to even more self-destructive behavior, to call your bluff. Anyone with more experience being tied to such people, feel free to chime in. I try to avoid them at all costs.

Bowdlerizing Christmas songs

The other day at the supermarket, they were playing Christmas songs at one of those listening stations at the end of an aisle, where you can buy the CD that you're hearing. It was on "Winter Wonderland" when I passed by, and I thought I heard something weird -- "something something he's a circus clown..."

It took a few moments for it to sink in that those aren't the real lyrics. It's supposed to go:

In the meadow we can build a snowman,
And pretend that he is Parson Brown.
He'll say "Are You Married?" We'll say "No man,
But you can do the job while you're in town!"

The song was originally written in 1934, just one year into the falling-crime period of the mid-century. Farther into the shift toward Dr. Spock and smothering mothers, in 1953 they re-wrote the bridge so that children wouldn't be scandalized by marriage, or perhaps to remove the slightest reference to religion (mid-century Christmas songs are almost all secular):

In the meadow we can build a snowman,
And pretend that he's a circus clown.
We'll have lots of fun with Mister Snowman,
Until the other kiddies knock 'im down!

That's the patronizing version I heard the other day in the supermarket, a sign of the neo-Dr. Spock times. What kind of rhyme is "snowman" with "snowman" anyway? Do they think children are too dumb to appreciate the subtle cheesiness of "snowman" and "No man"? We all got it when I was growing up. By the '80s, the kiddie version had been retired -- what gives today?

I searched LexisNexis to see when this version began making a comeback. The Bowdlerized lyrics (along with the original ones) appear in non-American Anglo countries in 1999 and continue regularly through the 21st century, as part of a larger printing of Christmas song lyrics. A 2009 article in the Kerrville Daily Times (Texas) makes a guessing game of "which song has these lyrics?" -- and it only includes the "circus clown" version in the hint for "Winter Wonderland." Then a 2011 article in the Enid News & Eagle (Oklahoma) tries to make fun of how unacceptable some old Christmas lyrics would sound to today's ears, and it too only refers to the censored version (i.e., would knocking down the snowman run afoul of the anti-bullying agenda?).

The trend had probably caught on somewhat earlier at the grassroots level before it was noticed and reproduced in the mass media (that's typical for person-to-person transmission). So the change began sometime in the mid-to-late 1990s, as helicopter parenting became the norm.

Bowdlerizing an already inoffensive song is the height of paranoid over-parenting, not to mention a blow (however minor) against traditions -- and in the name of what? Cutesy infantilized "progress." The first attempt was made nearly 20 years after the original, and our recent revival comes 70 to 80 years after. Not like they released two versions around the same time, a la the censored "radio edit" of songs with curse words.

All of these minor blows to tradition add up to a nearly unrecognizable Christmas season these days compared to even 20 years ago, and none of it for the better. We're not supposed to care that wholesome song lyrics etched into our minds are being scrubbed away as though they were profane graffiti. After all, these days we get to enjoy peppermint mochas, peppermint bark, and peppermint cream cheese frosting -- three cheers for diversity and progress!

Bloodsport and societal instability: Mixed martial arts in the Millennial era

[Future posts will look at gladiator sports in Ancient Rome and no-holds-barred wrestling during the Gilded Age. But let's start with more familiar events.]

The rise over the past 20 years of mixed martial arts as a spectator sport would look odd to an observer from the 1950s. It's an unarmed gladiator spectacle, something that would have felt out of place when people were supposed to rein in their individualistic competitive instincts. Even boxing went through a lull during the mid-century, didn't pick up again until the '70s, and reached the status of a bloodsport spectacle only during the '80s (most memorably with Mike Tyson).

At first that looks like it tracks the violent crime rate, yet gladiator-style entertainment has only increased since the '90s -- not only with mixed martial arts, but also popular video game franchises like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat.

If the '40s through the '60s group together against the '80s through the 2000s, then it doesn't reflect the cocooning-and-crime cycle but rather the status-striving-and-inequality cycle as described in Peter Turchin's work.

What is it about a climate of rising status competition that brings out a taste for such entertainment in the public? It looks like a reflection of the prevailing moral code, which is to do whatever it takes to get ahead and to never be satisfied with what you've got. You can always climb one rung higher on the status ladder, if you don't mind stepping on one more skull to get there.

Status-striving has neither a moral basis nor a larger goal which motivates the action. Higher and higher status is glorified and pursued as an end in itself. (Rationalizations abound, as usual, but we're interested in what people think and feel in reality, not hypothetically.) That's what distinguishes gladiator entertainment from other forms that look like combat.

Football at least has team vs. team behavior (although even there it's getting more self-promoting and show-boating), and professional wrastlin' has both a (flimsy) narrative or dramatic arc along with age-old moral motives such as avenging a betrayal. A normal person watching along can easily understand why these two guys are trading blows, which is blunted by being staged.

Viewers tune into the UFC to watch two guys try to beat the shit out of each other, hopefully with blood spilled onto the mat and no stoppages by the party-pooping ref. The combatants are more skilled and tactical than the ghetto thugs on World Star Hip Hop, but it still looks like a physical version of debate club, where the purpose is to skewer the other side in a debate for its own sake -- not to achieve greater understanding of the topic, to defend their honor after having been slandered by the other side, etc. Just pointless individualistic competition and self-promotion.

Bullying can serve a larger pro-social function -- yet we're supposed to discourage bullying. Is it because there's a point? Like some tranny trying to scandalize his high school, and some guy kicking his ass so he'll stop polluting the social atmosphere -- evil. But one guy elbowing another guy's face for no reason other than to win status points and money -- good (or at least permissible).

Community defense -- Us vs. Them -- is pro-social. Why don't we see the UFC fans beating back the black punks responsible for the knockout game? Shit, they're only 13 years old -- wouldn't be hard for a posse of fit 20-something white dudes to go out on patrol, whether to just stare them down as a warning, or go with the "best defense is a good offense" strategy and give blacks a taste of their own knockout game medicine. Italians in the New York area used to do that off-and-on back in the '80s, but now they're more obsessed with Jersey Shore-style show-boating.

Perhaps a casual interest in practicing mixed martial arts serves to train you for the dog-eat-dog world that we live in these days. But we're not talking about what hobbies a handful of people practice, but the entertainment spectacles that so many are fascinated by, and that owners and promoters go to such lengths to hype up.

There's a conspicuous consumption angle to bloodsports as well, since they're typically held in larger-than-life venues like Caesars Palace in the '80s or Mandalay Bay today, commanding high ticket prices, and often with celebrities in attendance. Elites compete against each other to see whose casino or arena can stage the most spectacular fight night. That's also true for team spectator sports (the most ostentatious being the Super Bowl), and was not seen during mid-century or even 1960s football culture, when the national anthem was sung by military bands rather than pop music celebrities.

And there's a subtle aspect of widening inequality here too. The fighters are generally from lower or working-class backgrounds. In times of narrowing inequality, they'd get good long-term union jobs and be all set. When no one's looking out for their well-being, though, it's OK if they get bruised up locking horns with one another, whether in officially sanctioned fights or run-of-the-mill violence around their neighborhood. Again, if there were some point to it, then taking a bruising isn't something to automatically fret over. But when it's pointless, undirected anger and aggression, it corrupts that person's spirit and corrodes what little is left of the social fabric where they live.

Widening inequality is not just a result of the top soaring, but of the bottom sinking. And it's not only about money, but health and quality of life, as well as feeling part of a strong community. Once you look beyond money, it turns out that there is no "floor" on the status pyramid -- that it's hovering over a bottomless pit. If you thought it was bad seeing the poor get poorer, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Degradation and corrosion know no depths.

Related: A post on hazing as a form of elite in-fighting rather than solidarity building.

Adultery as a part of status competition and inequality

An earlier post looked at children of divorce and single motherhood. That was less feasible in the 19th and early 20th-century period of rising inequality because on an absolute level, they lived more precarious lives. But that didn't stop them from committing adultery.

I admit that the data here are hard to estimate directly. Indirectly, we have how common of an obsession it was in the literature of the time. Here is an unobjectionable list from About.com of the Top 10 Adultery Novels. Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina are the best known, and most clearly show adultery as a form of status striving on the part of the woman who isn't content with the modest life provided by her husband, and wants higher status, more conspicuous consumption and leisure, and so on. Effi Briest didn't make the list, but is also from the late 19th C.

The theme was a staple of Victorian, Gilded Age, and Edwardian / Ragtime literature, then started to peak and fade during the '20s and especially the '30s, becoming more or less unheard of during the mid-century. Divorce was also not a common theme during the mid-century, taking off only during the '70s. Victorian adultery and Millennial divorce are both forms of hypergamy, hence of status striving, so we shouldn't get too caught up in whether one version was more common in the 19th C. and another in the 21st. We should also not lose sight of the fact that hypergamy in either form fell during the Great Compression, reaching a minimum in the mid-century. *

How does rising adultery lead to rising inequality? It's just the counterpart of men competing more viciously in the economy. When men become discontent with a modest life, striving begins, and a few climb up, up, up, while the losers stay put. The losers will probably try to then push others down, so that they can at least enjoy a little relative status boost. They might want those below them not just below them, but way below them -- locked up in debtor's prison, serving time in the work house, or whatever.

For women in an age before they earned much income, their status was tied to who they could marry, or sleep around with in exchange for a finer material life. When women become discontent with modest living, they strive to marry higher and higher-status husbands, or at least become their mistresses. This raises the ceiling of the female status distribution. As for the women below them, they try to marginalize them even further down the hierarchy, ostracizing them to ensure that they can only get jobs as prostitutes, which is as bad for their status as being locked up is for a man's. Or at least tolerate the existence of red light districts -- "If there are women working there, it automatically raises my status in comparison." This causes the floor to fall on the distribution.

The net effect is to widen inequality among women, similar to the hollowing out of the middle class in the paid-labor economy. Among men there are more vagrants and more billionaires, among women there are more prostitutes and more wives-of-billionaires.

My hunch is that during the Progressive Era, reducing inequality was not only a matter of reining in the dog-eat-dog striving of men in the economy, but also the bitch-eat-bitch striving of women in the domestic world. We ought to remember that as we try to undo the way society has been heading. As we burn the bailed-out bankers at the stake, yea shall we also brand yon materialistic hussies with the scarlet letter. (Not out of self-righteousness, but to contain social instability.)

Then there's adultery / divorce on the part of the husband who isn't content with his wife and wants to trade up -- gotta boost your status by 1 point with an incrementally prettier babe at your side. The time trends appear to be the same for male as well as female adultery / divorce. It's not as though men become more and more likely to trade up during one time, and women during another.

I do wonder, though, about the magnitude of the changes for men and women. It's more in man's nature to cheat, so it probably doesn't rise and fall as dramatically across time periods. Women tend not to cheat as much, so they have much more room to rise during a period of increasing adultery.

What little we can tell from real-world estimates supports this. The General Social Survey asks a question if you've ever cheated on your spouse while married. The data only go back to 1991, so we can't see a fuller picture of how it does or does not track the trend for status competition and inequality. Still, men show no change from 1991 to 2012, at a little over 20% saying they ever have. Women began at around 10% and have steadily risen to around 15% now saying they ever have. (Data restricted to ever-married whites.)

Men's adultery stems from being horny, women's from wanting access to finer things in life. Even in the rare case where she's married to a wealthy man and cheats with a lower-status but better loving man, that's still a form of not being content with a modest lot in life -- of wanting to have her cake and eat it too.

* I reject the argument that popular culture tells us nothing about the society it came from, let alone that it gets things backward -- as though there were few prostitutes and mistresses in the Gilded Age, and soaring levels during the Fifties. People are generally tuned into what the major problems are of their day, and don't worry about problems from 200 years ago or 100 years into the future. If writers want to find an audience, they have to cater to contemporary concerns.

GSS variables: evstray, year, sex, race

Declining meritocracy in an age of greater status striving

There's a discussion at Steve Sailer's about the rise and fall of meritocratic tests in hiring, riffing on this article in The Atlantic. It was low around the turn of the 20th C., peaked in the mid-century, and fell out of favor sometime during the '70s. Most of the article is about how Big Data may help revive and re-vamp test-based hiring, but for now it's more of a nerd obsession than a widespread business practice.

By the way, what was the prevailing way of hiring around the peak of intra-elite competition and inequality, in the early 1900s? For workers, it was ruthlessness in a melee:

Near the turn of the 20th century, one manufacturer in Philadelphia made hiring decisions by having its foremen stand in front of the factory and toss apples into the surrounding scrum of job-seekers. Those quick enough to catch the apples and strong enough to keep them were put to work.

I'm sure they would have made great Black Friday shoppers. And for managers?

In those same times, a different (and less bloody) Darwinian process governed the selection of executives. Whole industries were being consolidated by rising giants like U.S. Steel, DuPont, and GM. Weak competitors were simply steamrolled, but the stronger ones were bought up, and their founders typically were offered high-level jobs within the behemoth. The approach worked pretty well. As Peter Cappelli, a professor at the Wharton School, has written, “Nothing in the science of prediction and selection beats observing actual performance in an equivalent role.”

Buy-outs by behemoths, where the former leaders are absorbed into lesser roles within the newer bigger trust -- sound familiar? If people's thirst for ever greater status and wealth is insatiable, this Borg-like assimilation is inevitable.

But resistance was not futile. During the 1920s, the elites agreed to rein in their pyramid-climbing, for the stability of the society, after the explosive climate of World War I and its aftermath. Not long after, inequality began steadily falling. What new norms were adopted by the middle of the century?

By the 1950s, it was not unusual for companies to spend days with young applicants for professional jobs, conducting a battery of tests, all with an eye toward corner-office potential. “P&G picks its executive crop right out of college,” BusinessWeek noted in 1950, in the unmistakable patter of an age besotted with technocratic possibility. IQ tests, math tests, vocabulary tests, professional-aptitude tests, vocational-interest questionnaires, Rorschach tests, a host of other personality assessments, and even medical exams (who, after all, would want to hire a man who might die before the company’s investment in him was fully realized?)—all were used regularly by large companies in their quest to make the right hire.

During the Great Compression of roughly 1920 to 1980, ruthlessly jockeying for status was taboo. That belonged to the Gilded Age with its robber barons, courtesans, and other professional strivers. Now you were supposed to be more content with what you had, and not step on someone else's skull just to so you could own a second car.

Perhaps the rise of meritocratic testing was a way the elites found of dampening the internecine status-striving that newly blew the country up in the wake of World War I. "Quit your complaining -- the test says you belong in this range, and that's where you go. Don't bother trying to act like a courtier."

Objective tests have a natural ceiling, where no extra amount of resume-padding, networking, and butt-kissing will alter your destiny. It contains elite status jockeying.

Here's a reminder of what the Great Compression business culture was like at the executive level, from Fortune magazine in 1955. You get a good feel for mid-century cocooning and isolation, but you also can't help but notice how self-effacing and reining-it-in the elites were compared to the robber barons or our neo-robber barons today.

During the late 1960s for elites, and a little later for everyone else, the restraints of the Great Compression came undone, probably as folks had forgotten or were unaware to begin with of the soaring inequality and social-political instability of the period running from the Civil War through the Gilded Age and culminating after WWI.

Peter Turchin, whose basic "structural-demographic" framework I'm borrowing here, has a series of posts on the topic of how and when elite competition and over-production of elites began. Straightforward measures like enrollments (per capita) at law schools, business schools, and medical schools, not to mention the higher ed bubble in general, all point to the 1970s as a transition era. By about 1980, the break with the mid-century restraint was complete.

What then became of hiring based on objective tests?

Remarkably, this regime, so widespread in corporate America at mid-century, had almost disappeared by 1990. “I think an HR person from the late 1970s would be stunned to see how casually companies hire now,” Peter Cappelli told me—the days of testing replaced by a handful of ad hoc interviews, with the questions dreamed up on the fly. Many factors explain the change, he said, and then he ticked off a number of them: Increased job-switching has made it less important and less economical for companies to test so thoroughly. A heightened focus on short-term financial results has led to deep cuts in corporate functions that bear fruit only in the long term.

Over the past several decades, companies don't want to invest in testing out potential hires, when they're so footloose about where they work (see the rest of the article for numerical data, or consult your own experience). All that costly scientific testing wouldn't pay off until it discovered and hooked a good fit for the long term. Instead, new hires always have their eyes peeled for the next job, always on the move to find an angle on reaching one rung higher on the status ladder. Not content with a decent job at a good company.

With the return of unbounded status striving, hiring is more and more driven by "playing the game" factors, as though you were a latter-day courtier:

Perhaps the most widespread bias in hiring today cannot even be detected with the eye. In a recent survey of some 500 hiring managers, undertaken by the Corporate Executive Board, a research firm, 74 percent reported that their most recent hire had a personality “similar to mine.” Lauren Rivera, a sociologist at Northwestern, spent parts of the three years from 2006 to 2008 interviewing professionals from elite investment banks, consultancies, and law firms about how they recruited, interviewed, and evaluated candidates, and concluded that among the most important factors driving their hiring recommendations were—wait for it—shared leisure interests. “The best way I could describe it,” one attorney told her, “is like if you were going on a date. You kind of know when there’s a match.” Asked to choose the most-promising candidates from a sheaf of fake résumés Rivera had prepared, a manager at one particularly buttoned-down investment bank told her, “I’d have to pick Blake and Sarah. With his lacrosse and her squash, they’d really get along [with the people] on the trading floor.” Lacking “reliable predictors of future performance,” Rivera writes, “assessors purposefully used their own experiences as models of merit.” Former college athletes “typically prized participation in varsity sports above all other types of involvement.” People who’d majored in engineering gave engineers a leg up, believing they were better prepared.

There's another reason, well discussed by conservatives, for the decline of objective testing: namely the fact that whites tend to do better than blacks:

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which exposed companies to legal liability for discriminatory hiring practices, has made HR departments wary of any broadly applied and clearly scored test that might later be shown to be systematically biased. Instead, companies came to favor the more informal qualitative hiring practices that are still largely in place today.

I'm starting to think the whole "disparate impact" thing is a rationalization to do away with merit-based hiring, in an era of greater status striving. The charge of "b-b-but, it's racist against blacks!" is just a shameless smokescreen that the strivers know will sell well with the target audience.

For example, my impression is that other countries without many Non-Asian Minorities share our disdain for objective testing, etc. It makes it even harder to do objective testing in America, but I'm convinced that it's a second-order thing. The main source is the discontent of elite strivers who want to be able to dazzle the HR rep with their fifty pounds of filler and connections.

And the military continues to use IQ testing. The usual argument is that their jobs are too important to let diversity worship fuck them all up. But you could say that about all kinds of industries, and in fact the military isn't exactly beating back the Indians, Nazis, or Commies these days. I think it makes better sense to see it as part of the military's wish to keep status-striving from getting too out of control -- that could get violent and destabilizing to the political order. Income inequality within the military must be far less than in the private sector, since the top-ranking generals still don't make as much as hedge fund managers.

Aside from the noxious atmosphere produced by the striving mode of thinking and behaving, it neuters the ability of people to do just do their damn jobs well and get paid decently for it. The current regime does not reward competency but rather resume-padding and networking.

Like, isn't it striking how much stuff they invented between 1920 and 1980, on a per-decade basis? The '80s weren't so bad, but then that was just the beginning of the trend toward where we are today, politically and economically. And the last 20-odd years? Jack. All we're better at these days is how to socialize costs and privatize benefits, and how to best dress it up in fashionable ideology -- see the housing bubble, bank bailouts, etc. Neo-con corporate cocksucking mates with liberal diversity worship -- imagine the beautiful offspring they'll create!

At any rate, there's another sign to watch for, to anticipate the unwinding of this spiral of intra-elite competition -- a renewed sincere interest in objective meritocratic testing.