Going with the Trends: Unpopular Opinions

One thing people are doing to pass the time on facebook is to list the things they don't like but other people do.  Seems like a bloggable topic, so here we go:

UNPOPULAR OPINIONS. 10 things I dislike that most people like:

1. Raw tomatoes--never liked them in salad, on burgers, or anywhere else.  Tomato sauce is something else entirely.
2. Updating because I forgot my fave--I hate Montreal bagels.  They are hard, they have seeds on them (poppy or sesame) and taste burnt.  Yuck.  
3. Tomato juice.  After my bachelor party, I got pictures of the event to help me understand what had happened, given that I didn't remember much of the night.  Nothing criminal, thankfully.  But apparently, they had me drink blood mary's.  Nope, yuck, never.  But I guess I was game after much beer and tequila.  Ok, I did break one law--don't mix your drinks.  And I paid for it.
4. Cilantro.  I am not allergic to it, just don't like the taste.
5. Berries.  I just never want to eat berries.  I like berry-flavored candy, but I don't like the bits of fruit themselves.
6. Foreign films.  I am a bad intellectual as I don't like to read subtitles while watching a movie.  There are exceptions, of course.  I will see Parasite when it is available.  Shin Godzilla was most enjoyable as it was really more about dysfunctional Japanese policy-making than Godzilla.
7. Reality tv shows.  I did watch a season or two of Survivor since I had serious FOMO as it was being discussed by my friends.
8. Hockey.  Ok, I don't hate it, but I don't like it either.  And I live in Canada.  
9. Skating.  I have bad ankles, never learned to be competent.  Skiing is one thing, skating is something else.  Again, makes me a bad Canadian. Surprised that they let me become a citizen.
10. Exercise.  I like playing sports, but I don't like any form of exercise that is exercise for the sake of exercise--jogging, lifting weights, etc.  That is why I bike--it allows me to see different stuff and do something that is fun and does not feel like exercise.  How am I exercising through the pandemic?  So far, mostly using the treadmill while watching Clone Wars.  
11. Impressionism.  Give me either Flemish landscapes or funky modern art.  I have never liked the impressionist stuff.  Blech. 

Too Many Political Scientists?

Check out this figure:

Law and Courts

Will Moore (who posted the link first), Christopher Zorn and I have been tweeting about this.  To me, this looks awful, given how the academic job market has been, especially of late.  Will suggests this is a post 9/11 thing, which implies that more interest in government, government jobs and such may be playing a role here.  Christopher suggests that the numbers include folks entering MPA programs--Master's in Public Administration.  This depresses me further, because we have seen heaps of government job cuts the past few years. 

What is going on?  I have no clue, but the bump from 2008 to 2009/10 levels might be as folks flee the law school market.  We know that one is collapsing.  Overall, we have seen a near-doubling of people in MA/MPA/PhD programs in Political Science/Public Administration in a bit more than a decade.  Does the Dept of Homeland Security require MA's?  Department of Defense?  Are these all new military officers needing some extra PME (professional military education) in the enlarged military? 

I surely hope that this MA figure is really just that--MA figures and do not stand for a similarly upward trend in political science PhD students.  That would suck bigtime for the profession.  Given the stability in Anthro and Sociology along with the relatively steady increase in Econ students, it could very well be that the big change is at the MA level and not the PhD level.

Ah, too much and too little information all at once.  Any better guesses than mine?  And yes, that would be any guess.

The New World Map

With a new country, South Sudan, we have a new map thanks to the Guardian and to Roland Paris for tweeting the link.  I always enjoy looking at maps and trying to figure out when they were made, given the changes in the world. 

The new world map on Prezi

What are most notable are some of the lists at the bottom:

• First, no big pattern of new countries.  Recognitions of one or two have not lead to a cascade.  The big wave of the end of the Soviet Union/breakup of Yugoslavia/velvet divorce led to what?  A dribble of Eritrea and Palau in the early 90's and then East Timor did not lead to many new secessions.  Montenegro and Kosovo finally gained independence after the de facto breakup of the rest of Yugoslavia more than a decade earlier.  South Sudan is not going to cause a cascade of new secessionist movements either.  What would a potential secessionist learn from SS's experience: fight for more than forty years, endure a few broken treaties, and happiness will come your way?   I don't think so.  I will stand by my anti-contagion argument, even if it does not hold up so well for democratization/authoritarian demise.
• Second, Bahrain is among most densely populated countries?  That might help to explain its particular path the past six months or so.
• Third, Afghanistan is not among the ten poorest countries, in terms of gross national income per capita.  I don't know if it is the poppies or the international assistance or both.  Almost shocking that a country with so much resource wealth, Congo, would end up 2nd, but that is what a few civil wars and heaps of corruption can do.  Depressing.  Diamond are not oil as Sierra Leone has learned.  
• Fourth, that Vietnam is eighth on the list of refugee senders is a bit surprising.  Aren't there other countries that are worse off, producing more refugees (other than the first seven)?  I guess less people returned to Afghanistan than I had thought.  
• Fifth, Germany has received almost 600,000 refugees?  This is the most of any non-neighbor (Pakistan, Iran, Syria lead), the most of any developed country, more than twice that of the US despite having less than a third of the population.  Germany gets heaps of abuse for all kinds of reasons (caveats in Afghanistan, opposing the Libya mission, selling tanks to the Saudis just as they are repressing protestors in their neighbors, see forthcoming blog post), but taking such a large dose of refugees is pretty impressive.  Of course, as social scientists have long known, refugees tend to end up mostly in places that are less well off: Pakistan, Syria, Jordan, Kenya, and CHAD!  China, US, and UK round out the list.  No, not Canada, but probably close to the top ten.

Oh, and BBC re-posted their interactive Sudan maps (I discussed this set of maps in January).  Yes, once again, Sudan really screwed the folks in the south. 

Hipster Confusion

The strangest part of the Hipster phenomenon (if it exists) is that these folks apparently like to drink Pabst Blue Ribbon and other forms of swill.  So, they want to say, "hey, I am a rebel, you guys are all so picky in your beer preferences, so I will demonstrate how ironic I am by drinking bad beer." Ok, go ahead.  More good beer for the rest of us.  I guess this is akin to previous forms of rebellion where folks got tattoos, piercings and the like.  Yep, a tough call--would I prefer getting part of my body pierced or having to drink Pabst Blue Ribbon?

Oh, and cool hats, dudes.

The World in 200 Years

Great, great video from 'lil Steve who got it from Kyle Saunders:


Shows changes in wealth and health for countries over the past 200 years.  Just a great video that is so clear and makes some important points.  One that is overlooked--the consistently lousy situation of the "blue" countries--Sub-Saharan Africa.  The US/China comparison is, of course, pretty interesting, especially how China had to recover from the Great Leap Forward.

Check it out--the most educational four minutes of youtube of the decade.

PS In a previous post, Steve suggests that my success relative to his (his take, not mine) must be due to my good looks since I am shorter than him (and shorter than the average American male, I suppose) and I certainly don't work harder than him (he was blogging about height impacting success and lil Steve is significantly taller than I am).  Of course, this assertion of his (that I am better looking) shows that he is not as good of a social scientist.  Where is the data?  (Rate your prof no longer lists counts of peppers...)  I would think if I have produced more stuff it is because I chose to be flexible about location in exchange for course reductions and more grant money, whereas he chose a particular locale rather than a place that would facilitate research.  Or it could be my beard.

Changing Attitudes

This op-ed by Charles Blow tries to explain increases in American tolerance of gays and lesbians (even perhaps homosexuals).

For the first time, men may actually be more tolerant than women of "gay and lesbian relations."

Why?  More people now know someone who is out of the closet (we always knew gays and lesbians, we just didn't know their orientation).  The second explanation is a bit more surprising--that men have become more tolerant in general of "others."  This would not seem to be reflected in the rhetoric of certain parties, but the reality of diversity (that it is actually not a bad thing) may have penetrated attitudes.  Third, well, "Virulent homophobes are increasingly being exposed for engaging in homosexuality." 

I would vote for the first two more than the third, especially the second.  That is, political correctness in the best sense of it is that it is no longer ok to say that you hate or are intolerant of a class of people.  Lots of people are critical of PC and rightly so when it means knee jerk reactions that close off debate.  BUT over the past twenty or thirty years, it has become relatively unacceptable to say racist, misogynist, and even now homophobic slurs in public.  This does not mean that racism, sexism and homophobia no longer exist (sorry, Stephen Colbert), but that the social costs of uttering such slurs have gone up.  It is just no longer seen as taken for granted that one can diminish others unless one is very certain that the people hearing the slur are all like-minded.  And that is less likely than it once was.

With all of the anti-immigration anxiety, all of the Tea Party demagoguery, all of the Obama backlash, it is nice to know that there are some broader, perhaps more enduring trends, about attitudes that are more tolerant.  And if it is driven by homophobes being driven out of the closet themselves, then that is pretty cool, too.

Blame the Boomers?

A friend of mine is having an extended discussion on his facebook page about the baby-boomers, frustrated that Gen X is being seen as following the Boomer's narrative.  This discussion seems to be part of a wave of anti-boomer resentment that may be accelerating.  That generation has always been seen as relentlessly narcissistic (am I sure I am not a boomer), having been told that they were super-special.  They are now faulted for screwing up their stewardship of the political, economic and social systems.  The vitriol has been quite abundant on the political science rumor blog and, I am sure, elsewhere, as job markets have tanked.