Monthly Archives: February 2012

Someone finally says it: “Huge houses are morally wrong”

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If you read enough about McMansions or mansions, you might get the idea that there is a moral dimension underlying the critiques. One commentator finally just comes out and explain this moral view: “huge houses are morally wrong.”

Which is to say, the rich are welcome to live well, but not ridiculously well. Aside from the hundreds of lives of poverty-stricken Bangladeshis or whatever that likely could have been saved had our nation’s billionaires deigned to downgrade from a massive mansion to a mere McMansion, the people, eventually, just won’t stand for it. Your monuments to excess will become beacons for the pitchfork-wielding mobs, rich folks.

Don’t be stupid. Or too greedy. Huge houses are immoral just like gold plated cars are immoral and massive private jets are immoral. Because you don’t need them, and the money you waste on them could actually save people’s lives. This is an ideal towards which we all need to strive; not buying a mall-sized home is the easiest possible way to adhere to it. You can save those starving peasants and afterwards you will still be rich. So do it. Or don’t complain when the raging poors finally rage onto you.

The moral basis of this argument is attributed to Peter Singer. The argument seems to be this: that money that was put toward the giant house could have been used for more good if it had been given to those who truly need it. It’s too bad we don’t see what Singer thinks is the “maximum wealth” someone should be able to hold onto. Interestingly, the argument cited above in the two summary paragraphs seems to be a little different: you shouldn’t have a big house because the masses will resent you and come get you. You can’t appear greedy as people will hold it against you. The difference in tone is between being able to help more people with the money you saved by not buying the huge house (positive) versus you had better not buy that big house because it will be taken away from you (negative).

Morally, what’s the biggest house you can/should have? Is this house too big while these houses are morally superior? Can the size or price of your house be mitigated by its features or what you do with it? Does it differ by region to adjust for cost of living? Does your profession matter or whether you acquired the money yourself or it is “old money”?

More evidence that Americans don’t like answering survey questions about income

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While looking at data about the wage gap between men and women, two researchers discovered that respondents to the American Community Survey may not been completely correct in stating their incomes or the incomes of others in their households:

The authors, whose study will be published in the journal Social Science Research, identified these biases by examining data from the American Community Survey, which is also conducted by the Census Bureau. Respondents are interviewed multiple times, one year apart. When the researchers looked at how responses to these questions changed across the subsequent interviews (controlling for other factors), they found that people answered more generously for themselves than other people had for them.About half of the data on this income question in the American Community Survey have long come from “proxy reporters” — people answering on behalf of others in their household. In the early ’80s, a majority of these proxy reporters were women. “They were simply around to answer the phone call,” Reynolds said, noting that women had not entered the work force full time back then to the extent that they have today.

On the whole, these female survey respondents likely under-reported the income of their husbands, and over-reported their own — creating the skewed impression that the gender gap in America was much smaller in the early ’80s than it really was…

Once Reynolds and Wenger had calculated the extent of these biases, they went back to the data we’ve long used to measure the wage gap and readjusted it. Over time, as more women have entered the labor force, men have also become more likely to answer these surveys for themselves. And that impacts the data, too. The existing analysis — based on what the authors call the “naïve approach” to this data — suggested that the wage gap in America between 1979 and 2009 closed by about 16 percent (or $1.19 per hour). Wenger and Reynolds put that number instead at 22 percent (or $1.76). And so we have been 50 percent off in this basic calculation.

Interesting finding. As I tell my students, how you collect the data matters a lot for your conclusions. How much will other researchers be willing to change their data and conclusions based on this “quirk” in the data? No other researcher had ever thought about this before or have others considered the issue and moved forward anyway?

Researchers need to be particularly careful in dealing with questions about income. The researcher will have to find some sort of compromise where you can get the most fine-grained data while making sure that people are still willing and able to answer the question. If you ask about specific incomes, you are likely to get a lot of missing data as people are not comfortable answering. If you ask too broadly (say by having really large categories), you may not be able to do much with the data.

Does this suggest that other surveys that ask a single person to report on their whole household may also be skewed?

The negative attention that building a big home can draw

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While reading an article about some big homes that are still being built in the United States (are there enough wealthy people doing this to counteract data?), there is an interesting part about the negative attention these homes can draw.

One obvious drawback of building big: unwanted attention. Neighbors sometimes chafe at the idea of an edifice down the street the size of the White House. Reacting to McMansions that went up in the housing boom, some communities, like Chevy Chase, Md., passed rules that regulate more strictly how big houses can grow, says John McIlwain, a senior resident fellow specializing in housing issues at the Urban Land Institute.

Near where Mr. Pritzker’s home is under construction, neighbors are up in arms over another of Mr. McCoy’s projects, a roughly 70,000-square-foot compound (downsized from 85,000 square feet) awaiting permitting for Prince Abdulaziz ibn Abdullah ibn Abdulaziz Al Saud, son of the king of Saudi Arabia. The compound is on three lots and would include a main home of 42,000 square feet—part of it underground—a guest house, pool cabana, gate house and another residence of up to 20,000 square feet. The prince’s lawyer, Benjamin Reznik, notes other residences in the neighborhood are super-sized and says opposition has been “fomented” by neighbor Martha Karsh, the wife of Oaktree Capital Management founder Bruce Karsh. Ms. Karsh has hired publicists to attract attention to the project, he adds. “Newt Gingrich wishes he had that campaign going,” says Mr. Reznik.

George Mihlsten, a lawyer for a community coalition and Ms. Karsh, says the coalition hired his firm and that Mr. Reznik has hired outside help too, including a community-relations firm (Mr. Reznik says that was in response to Ms. Karsh’s campaign). “He likes to focus on Martha, but the truth is he and his client have created the controversy by proposing an outlandish plan and going behind the backs of the community to try to get it built,” Mr. Mihlsten says in an email, likening the scope of the project to a small community shopping center. More than 1,500 residents of Benedict Canyon signed a petition expressing their opposition to the project as it was originally proposed, according to a representative of the coalition.

The scope of these projects makes them extremely complex to construct. Finding or assembling the property can take several years, and the design and construction of a super-size project can take up to five years or more, builders say. (These days, lower labor costs in some areas can mean quicker turnaround times or better value.) Just finding parking for the 100 to 200 tradespeople that can be on-site for a big job, compared with the eight to 20 people typically working on a 4,000-square-foot home, can require planning; commandeering church parking lots is one standby.

If you have enough money, can’t you just budget some resources for dealing with the neighbors and/or going to court to make sure your home is built? But if your neighbors are also wealthy, perhaps you are in trouble…

The article hints at the regulations that many municipalities have put in place in order to limit these large homes. This leads me to several thoughts. First, are there communities that have intentionally left no or few regulations in place in order to make it easier for the construction of bigger homes? Another way to think about this would be to look at communities that have had public discussions about regulations for larger homes but then decided to do nothing. Are there communities that actually want these larger homes? Second, are these extra-large homes extremely concentrated in a few communities that have more relaxed regulations? Third, has someone ever looked into whether the level of opposition to a proposed big house is proportionally related to the size? For example, a house that is 500 square feet larger than the surrounding homes might receive one-quarter of the NIMBY attention of a proposed house 2000 square feet larger.

Sociologist: “housing segregation is still a reality”

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A sociologist responds to a recent study about declining residential segregation by suggesting there are still barriers to reducing segregation:

This divergent cinematic representation of Baldwin Hills illustrate the propinquity of the black middle class and the black poor and provides a dramatic example of a widespread phenomenon: that the black middle class is a spatial and social buffer between the white middle class and the black poor…

The treatment of blacks in the housing market provides strong evidence that discrimination played and continues to play an important role in explaining why blacks and whites live in highly segregated neighborhoods…

A residential segregation research finding that I have always found interesting and equally offensive is that Asians, Latinos, and whites all rank blacks as the racial group least desired to have as neighbors. This finding holds up even taking class into consideration: when middle class blacks move into white neighborhoods, whites are still inclined to move…

When you take all this into consideration, it is clear that there is much more to this story than the headlines trumpeting record low levels of residential segregation. Blacks are still more likely to have black neighbors than white ones. And by no means does lower black segregation suggest that we live in a “post-racial” society—a term that Tim Wise recently called a “nonsense term devised by those who would simply rather not deal with the ever-present reality of racism and ongoing racial discrimination.” The take home message should be that race (and class) still matter in terms of residential housing patterns. Yes, segregation is decreasing, but it is still alive and well.

I like how this analysis is broken into three spheres: economics, discrimination, and preferences. In all three areas, the decks are still stacked against blacks, even if the situation has improved somewhat.

I was reminded in reading this analysis about the interplay of race and class. There may be less residential segregation as measured simply as whether racial groups are living near each other or not but that does not account for different classes. And even when you account for class, middle-class blacks are still more likely to live in worse neighborhoods than poorer whites. Has anyone done an adjusted dissimilarity index that accounts for class or even a dissimilarity index that uses class instead of race?

Since I’ve seen others respond to this study, I wonder how much of it is a matter of perspective: the reduced levels of residential segregation are an important marker of progress or the long history of segregation in the US means that these improved figures are only a small step in a long process that still has a ways to go.

Discovering Ella Fitzgerald while conducting a sociological survey

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Surveys are conducted in order to find out information about a population. But, you can discover other things while doing a survey including Ella Fitzgerald:

The first time I heard Ella singing I was in college, going from door to door conducting some survey for a sociology class. In one of the dorm rooms, music was playing: a woman’s voice that was so smooth, so smart, that I interrupted the sociological question-and-answer session to ask, “What is this?’’

It was Ella. The song was a dopey one: a coy ditty about gradually giving in to the pleading of an irresistibly seductive man – a lover, you think; but no, he turns out to be a guy selling magazine subscriptions. Ella made this unpromising material into something memorable: witty and delicious.

Sounds fortuitous. In addition to getting information about respondents, someone conducting a survey might learn things about themselves.

This also reminds me of the story Sudhir Venkatesh tells about getting into researching gangs that is told in Freakonomics: while conducting a survey in a Chicago housing project on the advice of his graduate school adviser, Venkatesh was kidnapped and held for several days. While usually not what you would want as a researcher, this helped Venkatesh earn the trust of the gang and he has gone on to write several books on the subject.

This makes me want to track down an article or a book where sociologists talk the interesting and strange things that happened to them while conducting surveys…

Overview of housing size data for the United States

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Atlantic Cities has a collection of data sources regarding housing size in the United States. A few quick thoughts after seeing this data again:

1. I’m not quite sure why the title of the article references McMansions when it is really about the average size of the new home. Is a home bigger than the average automatically a McMansion? Or is the demand for truly big homes lower? Why isn’t there data about the actual number of large homes being built?

2. I still wonder whether this drop is the beginning of a long plateau or slow drop or more of a reaction to a down housing market. Since the housing market may not recover for years, perhaps it is a bit of both but I wonder what would happen if the economy really improved. What would stop people with the resources to build big, green homes?

3. As long as most of the new housing starts in the United States are in the suburbs, will the average home size drop much at all? Or would we have to see a large population shift toward the cities or denser areas near the cities for this to happen?

Quick Review: The Better Angels of Our Nature

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I hadn’t looked at much from psychologist Stephen Pinker for a while but I was intrigued by his latest book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Here are a few comments about this thought-provoking work:

1. Here is Pinker’s argument: we must just be living in the safest era in human history as violent crime is down and wars affect fewer people. If you adjust for the population on earth at the time, World War II barely makes the top 10 (while typically lists put it at #1). Since World War II, fewer people are affected by violence and most people don’t know this.

2. Best argument of this book: this remarkable peacefulness is almost completely under-the-radar and people need to recognize how much safer the world has become. (I’ve noted before the incorrect perceptions regarding crime.)

2a. Pinker marshals a lot of evidence to show the declining trends in violence. In fact, Pinker talks about this for dozens upon dozens of pages. In fact, if you went by the percentage of the book devoted to each topic, you might think Pinker is more of a social scientist who studies violence and who is most interested in how societies and cultures have changed in such a way as to deincentivize violence. Overall, the number of wars have decreased, the number of wars involving great powers has decreased, the number of soldier and civilian deaths has decreased, and the length of wars have decreased. Pinker is, of course, building upon the work of many others but there are a lot of charts and figures here that I find quite convincing.

2b. Several periods were key to this change: the Enlightenment which didn’t necessarily limit violence but brought about ideas and values that eventually contributed and the post-World War II era when the world responded to the horror by promoting international peace and human rights.

3. The catch: Pinker is committed to going beyond a social explanation in the decrease in violence and wants to argue that this has trickled down to individuals. On one hand, you could imagine a number of sociologists making this argument: changes in society and culture influence the choices available to and made by individuals. On the other hand, Pinker wants to go further and even suggest that humans have evolved away from violence. Making this connection between social and individual change is tougher to do and Pinker relies a lot on social psychology experiments such as Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Ultimatum Game. The social and cultural change arguments are convincing but taking this next step to the individual level is more problematic. Part of the problem here might be that Pinker is so committed to his own perspective that he is determined to push his points about rationality further than they can go.

4. An interesting issue: Pinker argues that one way in which violence can get out of hand is that it requires a powerful ideology. One type of ideology that Pinker makes clear he does not like is religion which he argues is false and generally contributes to violence. In his historical overviews, Pinker makes clear that religion only contributes to and legitimizes violence and may not do any good. Additionally, the revolutions in values happened solely in the secular sphere and humans today are much more able to be rational (and religion is not that).

Overall, this is an interesting, long book that presents several intriguing arguments. Pinker provides a service in helping to fight the narrative that violence is spiraling out of control and yet has more difficulty in showing how humans have evolved into more rational beings.

What happens when Tim Pawlenty comes to your sociology class

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Courtesy of modern technology, you could have been following a live Twitter stream chronicling what happens when former Minnesota governor and former Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty visits a sociology class at the University of Kansas:

“23 minutes later and I have no idea what he’s talking about,” tweeted Ray. “Freedom, drugs, a kickass pool, meatpacking, MLK.”

It sounded interesting, so I called Ray for an after-action report. The room, he said, was somewhat full and somewhat interested.

“A few hundred students are enrolled in class,” he said, “but maybe a hundred show up. I figure that a lot of the people in the class are freshmen who are just taking it to take it. They probably know Romney, they know Santorum, but Pawlenty dropped out so early that they might not know him.”

But what did the great man say? “Somebody asked him what he thought about Santorum’s victories yesterday,” remembered Gray. “He congratulated him, but he brought up the fact that John McCain lost 19 states and still won the nomination.” Gray paused. “It sounded like a backhanded compliment. And he referred to Minnesota as one of the smaller states, in terms of political power.”

A few quick thoughts:

1. Should we trust a single student’s report in a large 100-level lecture class where roughly half the students don’t attend? I always find it interesting to hear what students remember or find noteworthy.

2. Politicians are now tracked at almost every turn.

3. What exactly does Tim Pawlenty know about sociology? The class is titled “American Identity”…was Pawlenty talking about what he thinks this identity is? I would be really curious to hear (1) what Pawlenty thinks sociology is and (2) whether he thinks sociology has any value.

4. It sounds like Pawlenty was on campus to talk about how the still-to-be determined candidate for President will run a campaign and govern.

Was there really cultural consensus in America in 1963?

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Virginia Postrel takes issue with one recent claim from Charles Murray that 1963 America was some sort of golden era of cultural consensus. Postrel raises two counterpoints:

There are two big problems with this fable [of cultural consensus]. The first is that the old consensus was an illusion. Editing out anomalies was essential to the whole concept of a single culture as defined not merely by basic values but by taste and experience. Some of those anomalies were huge.

Take religion, a topic that looms large in Murray’s analysis. In 1976, Gallup for the first time asked people whether they had had a “born again” experience in which they committed themselves to Jesus Christ. It was a concept largely unknown to the popular media before the emergence of Jimmy Carter…

That’s the second problem with Murray’s fable: The cultural consensus was not just an illusion. It was an unhealthy one. Instead of promoting understanding, it fed contempt.

One piece of evidence is right on page 2 of the book: “The Beverly Hillbillies,” the highest-rated TV show the week Kennedy was killed. As Murray points out, nearly a third of American households watched it on CBS every week — astounding numbers by today’s standards. “The Beverly Hillbillies” was not just popular. It was, by most measures, the biggest hit in sitcom history. By its fourth week on the air, it had knocked Lucille Ball out of her top spot, and it only fell from the top 10 in its ninth and final season. It even saved “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” a flop in its original slot, by providing a big lead-in audience in an era when it was hard to change the channel. In a true consensus culture, everyone would have loved it…

Critics damned “The Beverly Hillbillies” as utter trash. The New York Times called it “steeped in enough twanging-guitar, polkadot gingham, deliberative drawl, prolific cousins and rural no-think to make each half hour seem as if it contained 60 minutes.” Variety declared it “painful to sit through.” Newsweek said it was “the most shamelessly corny show in years.”

So while Murray wants to tell a story of a dividing America, Postrel is suggesting there has always been an America divided between the elites and the masses. It seems to me that there would be ways to collect data to answer this question about whether the divide today is more pronounced than in the past and whether it is more problematic today than in the past.

This reminds me of all the suburban critiques that quickly emerged after World War II. While there are indeed viable issues to raise about suburban life (whether it is a good use of land and resources, whether it could be planned better, whether concessions could be made so that it is accessible by more than just cars, whether it could offer opportunities for the elderly and teenagers, that it should be welcoming to all people, etc.), there is also some scorn in this analysis. There was a lot of concern about “mass culture,” how the average American was being tempted by low-brow culture. Marxist commentators labeled this as the trade-off of “lawns for pawns.” These viewpoints tended to come from upper-class, urban commentators who couldn’t understand why so many Americans wanted the suburban lifestyle that these commentators argued was simply a glittering facade with no depth. One sociologist who jumped into this fray was Herbert Gans. Writing about the suburban experience (after living in Levittown, unlike many of the negative commentators) or popular culture, Gans debunked some of the myths. Using sociological data and theory, Gans poked holes in some of this commentary, suggesting that perhaps society wasn’t rapidly unraveling and that we were all doomed to live in the land of Idiocracy.

This is a reminder of a few things:

1. Analyzing American culture all at once is a tough task that requires good data and nuance.

2. Closing this gap between high and low culture may be a worthy task but it is not an easy one.

3. America will have to move forward while balancing these multiple perspectives of high and low culture. Either side demonstrating contempt for the other (think about attacks on “academic elites” or “mass culture”) isn’t helpful.

Conservatives fight against perceived UN efforts to herd people into urban areas

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A number of conservatives are fighting hard against green efforts that they claim are part of a larger UN plan:

Across the country, activists with ties to the Tea Party are railing against all sorts of local and state efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy. They brand government action for things like expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space as part of a United Nations-led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities.

They are showing up at planning meetings to denounce bike lanes on public streets and smart meters on home appliances — efforts they equate to a big-government blueprint against individual rights…

The protests date to 1992 when the United Nations passed a sweeping, but nonbinding, 100-plus-page resolution called Agenda 21 that was designed to encourage nations to use fewer resources and conserve open land by steering development to already dense areas. They have gained momentum in the past two years because of the emergence of the Tea Party movement, harnessing its suspicion about government power and belief that man-made global warming is a hoax…

The Republican National Committee resolution, passed without fanfare on Jan. 13, declared, “The United Nations Agenda 21 plan of radical so-called ‘sustainable development’ views the American way of life of private property ownership, single family homes, private car ownership and individual travel choices, and privately owned farms; all as destructive to the environment.”

This is one of those stories that simply made me say, “Huh?” when I first read it. But the article suggests this is now mainstream in conservative circles as Newt Gingrich has mentioned it in a debate and the Republican National Committee has addressed it.

I would be interested in hearing more about whether this is really about sprawl (conservatives want the right to live in the suburbs/more rural areas) or about related issues like international law, the power of the UN, the environmental movement, and liberty. It also suggests that sprawl is not simply about where one can live but symbolizes a whole way of life that is associated with freedom.

I didn’t realize this was tied to a larger movement but this helps provide some background for why some Naperville residents have been so vehemently opposed to smart meters (read some of their arguments here). This group has gathered over 4,000 signatures on their petitions and they make a sort of slippery slope argument: it may be smart meters today but soon the government wants to get all of your information and influence your decisions in the future.

A last question: what is so threatening to freedom about bike lanes?