That's great

 In May, the Guardian published a list of the 100 best novels "as voted for by authors, critics and academics worldwide."  They just gave ranks, but I was interested in total scores--how much difference is there between first and 10th place, or 10th and 100th?  I also wondered if there were novelists whose votes were scattered among a number of different works, so they would do better in a ranking by authors.  This article by Jarrett Kobek  has a link to a spreadsheet with the choices of individual voters.  I calculated scores as 10 points for a first choice, 9 for second, .... 1 for 10th.*  

There were 172 voters, who selected 670 different novels.  The distribution was highly skewed--the leader was Middlemarch, with 446 points, and at the other end there were 67 novels that got a single point (ie, one voter placed them tenth).  To make the top 100 required only 18 points--twelve novels had exactly that total.  Turning to authors, 474 received votes.  The top 25:

                                        N    points Guardian

George Eliot                 60    469 83.45
Virginia Woolf                64    407 84.35
Jane Austen                    63 390 82.50
Leo Tolstoy                    47     379 65.95
Toni Morrison                 57    361 75.05

James Joyce                 39 295 53
Charles Dickens         44 269 57.45
Marcel Proust                 27 201 37.05
Gustave Flaubert         22 159 29.95
Vladimir Nabokov         27 157 34.85

Henry James                 29 151 36.55
Gabriel García Márquez 23 126 29.30
Charlotte Brontë         21 121 27.05
F Scott Fitzgerald         21 120 27.00
Herman Melville         18 116 23.80

Emily Brontë                 15 114 20.70
Fyodor Dostoevsky         17 110 22.50
Laurence Sterne         18 109 23.45
Franz Kafka                 18 107 23.35
George Orwell          20 104 25.20

Kazuo Ishiguro         19 97 23.85
Chinua Achebe         15 94 19.70
Salman Rushdie         15 86 19.30
Miguel de Cervantes 11 84 15.20
Muriel Spark                 16 83 20.15

On the other side, here are some well-known novelists who didn't get much support:

                                points
Balzac                        7
Stephen Crane            9
Richard Wright          10
Zola                            13

In 1998,  the Modern Library offered a list of the top 100 novels published in English in the 20th century.  Novels from that list that got no support in the Guardian survey include Brave New World (#5), Darkness at Noon (8),  An American Tragedy (16), Native Son (20--Wright's points in the Guardian poll were for Black Boy), Henderson the Rain King (21), Sister Carrie (33), All the King's Men (36), The Heart of the Matter (40), and Lord of the Flies (41).  

One pattern that seems clear is that realist novels of the 19th and early 20th century don't get much support from the Guardian voters.  Why not?  The basic realist plot is that an outsider tries to get somewhere but is defeated, partly by social injustice but partly by his/her flaws and bad decisions.  I think that accounts for their poor showing in the Guardian survey:  educated middle class people are increasingly uncomfortable with anything that seems to express a critical view of disadvantaged people.  Another pattern is that novels by Americans and Europeans which are set in the rest of the world don't do well in the Guardian survey.  In addition to the examples of Henderson the Rain King and The Heart of the Matter, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano ranked 11th in the Modern Library list and got only 9 points from the Guardian, which puts it about 250th.  There's one big exception:  Heart of Darkness gets 42 points, for a rank of 40.  I think there's a reason for that:  it's about the damage done by colonialism.  Conrad gets only 9 points for all of his other novels (Modern Library had The Secret Agent ranked 46th, Nostromo 47th, and Heart of Darkness at 67th).  Finally, two novels with political themes do well in the Guardian ranking:  1984 at 16th and The Handmaid's Tale at 36th. But that's about it--several of the Modern Library picks that got no support in the Guardian survey seem at least equally relevant to contemporary politics.  Overall, the Guardian list seems to reflect the view that writers should "stay in their lanes."  

*The Guardian used a different formula:  1 point for being chosen and then a bonus of 0.5 for first, 0.45 for second, .... 0.05 for tenth.  That doesn't make sense to me--it makes the difference between 11th and 10th more important than the difference between 10th and first.   

Highly respected, part 2

 In a recent post, I found that people who believed that they were treated with "less courtesy or respect than other people" were more likely to vote for Trump in 2016 (and probably 2020).  This post will look at it from another direction:  who is more likely to think that they are treated with less respect?*  I considered race, sex, age, and education.  My expectations were that black people, younger people, men, and less educated people would be more likely to perceive disrespect.  Age turned out to be the most important factor, followed by race, with no clear differences by education and sex.  But although the overall average is about the same for men and women, there is an interaction with age:

Young men perceive more disrespect than young women, but middle-aged women perceive more disrespect than middle-aged men.  Or looking at it in terms of the relation with age, perceived disrespect declines steadily with age for men, but stays about the same or even increases until about age 40 or 50 for women and then declines.  There's also an interaction between education and sex:  education makes a difference among men (less educated men perceive more disrespect), but not as much (maybe not at all) among women.  There are also interactions involving race:  black men perceive more disrespect than black women.  In fact, the means for white men, white women, and black women are very close, and are consistent with the hypothesis that race doesn't make any difference among women.  Finally, there's an interaction between race and education:  among whites, people with college degrees perceive less disrespect; among blacks, there's no clear difference.  I looked at possible interactions between race and age, and education and age, but found no evidence of them.  I also looked at the possibility of a three-way interaction between race, sex, and education, but the numbers are too small to say anything definite.  

A belief that you are treated with less respect than other people could reflect experience--you really are treated with less respect--or greater sensitivity--you are more likely to interpret the same treatment as disrespect.  The group differences probably reflect a mix of both, but there's no way to distinguish them in these data.

*In my previous post, I asked "whether the association involves support for conservatism in general, or a specific kind of populist conservatism... I'll try to shed light on that by looking at the association with various political views."  I did that analysis, and found that among people with college degrees, feeling that you are treated with less respect is generally associated with more conservative views, but it's not possible to be more specific, partly because the number of cases isn't that large and partly because the GSS questions on politics aren't very well suited to identifying populist conservatism.

A distinction without (much) difference

Last year I had a post about the claim that men don't have as many friends as they used to.   I noted that the 2021 survey cited as evidence of a large decline in friendship among men showed a similarly large decline among women.   That survey used different procedures from previous ones, so it's not clear that we should accept it as evidence of a real decline in friendship, but if we do, it shows a decline among people generally rather than men specifically.  

A few days ago, I read an interview of Laurie Santos, a professor of Psychology at Yale, by Derek Thompson.  Santos said there was a decline in friendship, and "that decrease is much worse for men. One study found that if you look at what’s standardly considered a good level of friendship -- do you have six close friends you could talk to? -- men have shown a decrease in that number by about half in the last couple of decades. And if you ask how many men say they have no close friendships at all, you see around 15% of American guys in midlife saying exactly that. That’s a fivefold decrease since folks have been running this survey."  Then there was this figure, summarizing the same 2021 survey I wrote about:

The share of men who reported six or more close friends indeed declined by more than half, from 55% to 27%.  The share of women who reported six or more friends declined from 41% to 24%.  That's a decline of 51% among men and only 41% among women, but it's just one possible comparison:  the share who report 10 or more declined by 62% among men and 61% among women, and the share who report five or more declined by 40% among men and 38% among women.  And the share of women reporting no close friends rose from 2% to 10%:  the same ratio of 5 as among men.  That is, the table doesn't support the general claim that any decline has been much worse among men.*  

That raises the question of why this misinterpretation is so prevalent (Santos followed this report, which is the source of the table).  The obvious factor is that people just like to talk about differences between men and women.  A second possibility is the influence of political ideology:  the idea of an especially large decline among men appeals to both liberals and conservatives, for different reasons.  Liberals are inclined to think that the traditional model of masculinity is unsuited to modern society, and we're seeing a symptom of that; conservatives are inclined to think that we've paid so much attention to the problems of women that we're neglecting the problems of men.  And moderates think that if both liberals and conservatives agree that there's a problem, we have a welcome opportunity for cooperation across ideological lines.  

*Even if you think that the comparison between six or more vs. five or fewer is especially important, you need to consider sampling error.  The 2021 survey had about 2000 people, and the 1990 survey had about 1200, so the figures for men and women are based on samples of 1000 and 600.  Then you have ratios, and differences between ratios, increasing the margin of error.  I estimate that the standard error of the difference between the ratios is about 5.5% assuming simple random sampling, but even without doing calculations it's clearly substantial.