Monthly Archives: June 2014

Cantor’s victorious opponent, an economics professor, to face off against Democrat sociologist professor

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The academic disciplines of sociology and economics don’t always get along so it will be interesting to watch an economics and sociology professor square off in Virginia’s 7th district:

In sociology, education is often championed as the best path to a vibrant society—an idea Trammell clearly subscribes to. He is running on a platform of college access, student-loan forgiveness, and special-education reform. In 2012, Trammell published a book, The Richmond Slave Trade: The Economic Backbone of the Old Dominion. (More recently, he has planned to write a vampire novel.) Trammell’s ancestor, Thomas Trammell, was an indentured servant when he arrived in Fairfax in 1671.

Brat joined the faculty at Randolph-Macon in 1996 after receiving his Ph.D. in economics at American University. Since then, he’s taught classes on micro- and macroeconomics, public finance, and business ethics. And he coauthored a paper titled, “An Analysis of the Moral Foundations in Ayn Rand”. Back in January, Brat told the National Review that while he doesn’t consider himself a Randian, “he has been influenced by Atlas Shrugged and appreciates Rand’s case for human freedom and free markets.”…

The idea of a Republican economics professor facing off against a Democratic sociology professor presents a near-perfect microcosm of American political thought. What matters most in governance—the good of the market or the good of society? Should government serve to keep the free market as uninhibited as possible, or to impose checks on the market to protect citizens? Is education or entrepreneurship a more important path to individual and collective success? These are questions ripe for a Poli-Sci 101 discussion.

Perhaps a bit overstated (the next, and last, paragraph of the story goes on to tell who has the highest score at RateMyProfessor.com) but it sounds like the two have different perspectives on the world.  Given their disciplines, it could be easy to caricature the two sides without seeing what exactly the points of agreement and disagreement are between the two candidates. Is it easy to argue its education versus free markets or would voters generally support both? It is not immediately clear how much voters care much about this academic food fight –  both candidates are PhDs after all.

If you are curious, here are the demographics of Virginia’s 7th House District which skews Republican and more white, educated, and wealthy than American averages.

According to the United States Census Bureau’s 2010 data for the 111th Congress, the total population of the district is 757,917. Median age for the district is 39.2 years. 74.3% of the district is White, 17.1% Black, 3.9% Asian, 0.3% Native American or Alaskan, and 2.1% some other race with 4.9% Hispanic or Latino. Owner-occupied housing is 72.0% and renter-occupied housing is 28.0%. The median value of single-family owner-occupied homes is $188,400. 88.1% of the district population has at least a high school diploma, 36.7% at least a bachelor’s degree or higher. 9.9% of the district are civilian veterans. 12.7% are foreign born and 20.1% speak a language other than English at home. 9.9% are of disability status. 68.2% of the district is in the labor force, which consists of those 16 years and older. Mean travel time to work is 26.2 minutes. Median household income is $64,751. Per capita income is $33,628. 5.3% of the population account for families living below the poverty level, and 7.6% of individuals live below the poverty level.

So perhaps the sociologist, compared to an economist, starts at a disadvantage.

Average American net worth #4 in the world; median net worth #19

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In another case of mean versus median, looking at the average or median net worth of Americans leads to different conclusions:

Americans’ average wealth tops $301,000 per adult, enough to rank us fourth on the latest Credit Suisse Global Wealth report.

But that figure doesn’t tell you how the middle class American is doing.

Americans’ median wealth is a mere $44,900 per adult — half have more, half have less. That’s only good enough for 19th place, below Japan, Canada, Australia and much of Western Europe…

Super rich Americans skew average wealth upwards. The U.S. has 42% of the world’s millionaires, and 49% of those with more than $50 million in assets.

Both figures are true but they tell very different stories. America at #4 or #19?

Some other interesting tidbits later in the article:

1. Homeownership helps other countries pass the U.S. in median wealth since some have higher rates of homeownership (like Ireland and Spain) and their housing markets didn’t experience such a bubble.

2. Americans can borrow money more easily than some. This means we might be able to get our hands on more but leads to more debt which subtracts from our net worth.

Manhattan population increasing, affordable housing decreasing

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One of the wealthiest areas of the world continues to see a decrease in affordable housing and the population keeps going up:

The latest estimates put the population at more than 1.6 million people, up slightly from the 2010 census.

According to NYU’s Furman Center, in the last year alone, Manhattan lost nearly 3,000 rent-regulated apartments…

In many cases, those stabilized, often affordable homes are being replaced by “market rate” units.

From 2002 to 2012, the number of stabilized or controlled apartments in the borough plunged more than 19 percent. The number of “market” rate and ultimately significantly more expensive apartments soared more than 19 percent…

Nearly 29 percent of the borough’s population is foreign born, but experts say the wave of change could drive that number down even in traditionally immigrant neighborhoods.

“It doesn’t happen all at once; what happens is that neighborhoods change in pieces,” says City College of New York Sociology Professor William Helmreich.

The wealth flowing through Manhattan is incredible so it is little surprise that real estate prices are going up. This isn’t a phenomenon limited to Manhattan: the ultra-wealthy are developing and buying real estate in numerous big cities like London and Miami. The bigger issue is what happens to these cities. Do they become primarily the province of the wealthy or is there still space for average residents and immigrants? This discussion or struggle has been illustrated in recent years in San Francisco where actions by tech companies to bus employees to Silicon Valley has been met with resistance. The answers are not easy as many politicians need to keep and attract the jobs and wealth that help keep the city coffers full as well as look attractive to other firms. In other words, it is hard to fight growth machines.

Using video game technology to give house tours “down to the millimeter”

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The same technology used for Halo can be harnessed to give virtual home tours:

A new Seattle real-estate brokerage called Surefield hopes to improve the home-shopping experience by harnessing the power of video-game engines and computer-vision technology. Its service includes an online, 3-D, photorealistic model of the home which potential buyers can move through virtually…

“We want to give the homebuyer the ability to inspect down to the millimeter,” said Surefield CEO David Eraker, who in 2002 co-founded the real-estate website Redfin…

And by helping buyers become more selective about which homes they physically tour, home sellers “don’t have to live on eggshells to keep it looking like a hotel every day,” said Surefield COO and broker Rob McGarty, who led Redfin’s real-estate operations before he left in 2010…

Surefield’s technology actually uses a video-game engine similar to one used in modern games like Halo, where a character moves through a space in “first-person shooter mode.”

The company’s chief technology officer is Aravind Kalaiah, a Bay Area visual-computing engineer who led Nvidia’s development of a breakthrough technology in graphic processing.

Sounds like an interesting product that hopefully goes far beyond the picture slideshows available now, especially if a viewer could pan or zoom in and really see what the space was like. This also acts as an elaborate screening device for home listings. With this, potential buyers can get even more information about available properties and do more work on their own without middlemen. Yet, the buyer still needs a real estate agent or broker to get into the homes they are really interested in and relatively few buyers will want to buy a home without seeing it in person.

I wonder how this also relates to research on consumers having more choices. Imagine you could take these virtual tours of dozens of available homes. The consumer gets to see lots of options and can do so very quickly. However, the research on choice suggests giving people more choices tends to reduce their satisfaction as they are more aware of making the “perfect” choice. They might find the home choosing process more to their liking but does it lead to more satisfaction with their home in the long run?

Wait, What’s Your Problem: the Census does or does not require people to participate?

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Sunday’s What’s Your Problem? column in the Chicago Tribune featured a woman irritated by some Census workers who did sound like creepers. Yet, a Census employee is still unclear about whether U.S. residents have to participate in Census surveys:

He said census interviewers are trained to be professional, courteous, and to never use the possibility of a fine to coerce people into participating.

Olson said the American Community Survey is mandatory and there is a potential fine for people who fail to participate, but the Census Bureau relies on public cooperation to encourage responses.

The survey is important because its data guide nearly 70 percent of federal grants, Olson said.

This is a common response from the Census but it is still vague. Is participating in the Census and the American Community Survey mandatory or not? Is there a fine for participation or not? The answer seems to be yes and yes – mandatory, a fine is possible, and yet no has to really worry about incurring a penalty.

Typical social science research, which is akin to what the Census Bureau is doing (and the organization has been led by sociologists), has several basic rules regarding ethics in collecting information from people. Don’t harm people. (See the above story about peeking in people’s windows.) And participation has to be voluntary. This can include contacting people multiple times. So is participation really voluntary if there is even the implicit idea of a fine? This is where it is less like social science research and more like government action, which is a fine line the Census is walking here. Clearing this up might help improve relations with people who are suspicious of why the Census wants basic information about their lives.

 

Facebook to hold pre-ASA conference

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Last year’s ASA meetings included some special sessions on big data and Facebook is hosting a pre-conference this year at the company’s headquarters.

VentureBeat has learned that Facebook is to hold an academics-only conference in advance of the American Sociological Association 2014 Annual Meeting this August in San Francisco.

Facebook will run shuttles from the ASA conference hotel to Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. According to the company’s event description, the pre-conference focuses on “techniques related to data collection with the advent of social media and increased interconnectivity across the world.”…

According to the event schedule, Facebook will give a demo of its tools and software stack at the conference…

There seems to be a great demand for sociologists who can code. Corey now spends a lot of time hiring fellow sociologists, according to his article. It is also the case in other big companies. In one interview conducted with the London School of Economics, Google’s Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan claimed that he just couldn’t hire enough social scientists.

This is a growing area of employment for sociologists who would benefit from getting access to proprietary yet amazing data and would also have to negotiate different structures in the private technology world versus academia.

See the bigger picture when reading media reports of new scientific findings

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Think a new study touted by the media is too sensational? Take the long view of such reports, as sociologists and other researchers do:

One solution for reporters that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention yet, but should, is the value of talking to social scientists — historians of science and medicine, anthropologists, political scientists and sociologists of science– in the process of reporting about research. Experts in these disciplines who examine the practice of scientific and medical research from outside of it are in a great position to give reporters, and by extension their readers, insight into where new scientific knowledge came from, what sort of agenda might be motivating the people involved, the cultural meanings attached to particular scientific findings, what questions were being asked—and what questions weren’t asked, but should have been.

To see how, take a look at a story from earlier this week that nicely illustrates the value a social scientist can bring to how a science story is reported: Did you hear that hurricanes with feminine names are deadlier than ones with male names because people’s sexist bias causes them not to take female storms as seriously? As Ed Yong reported in National Geographic’s “Phenomena”, it’s probably not true. Yong talked to a social scientist who helped break down the reasons why – from weaknesses of the methods to the context of other factors already known to affect the deadliness of storms. Check out the reporting and ensuing discussion here…

“Almost every time one of these studies comes out, it’s promoted as evidence that ‘X single factor’ is a decisive culprit,” said Chloe Silverman, PhD, a sociologist and historian of science in Drexel’s Center for Science, Technology & Society, whose current project is focused on people’s approaches to understanding pollinator health. “But there’s plenty of evidence that a combination of factors contribute to honey bee health problems.”…

And journalists tend to follow particular narrative conventions, such as “the discovery just around the corner” or “the intractable mystery,” Silverman noted. “But social scientists who study science are in a better position than most to both identify those tendencies and offer more realistic descriptions of the pace and progress of scientific research.”

There is probably some irony here that Drexel’s media relations is pushing this point of view even as it is a helpful correction to the typical approach journalists take to the latest scientific findings. To be honest, it takes time in sociology and other fields to develop credible hypotheses, data, and theories. Researchers interact with other research to further their ideas and build upon the work that has already been done. Reaching consensus may take years or it may never completely happen.

I wonder how much social and natural scientists could do to better communicate the full scientific process. In a world that seems to be going faster, science still takes time.

Bill Gates could buy every home in Boston and still have $1 billion left

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Redfin suggests Bill Gates could purchase all the homes in Boston but not Seattle :

If Bill Gates took every dollar of his net worth (most of which comes from Cascade Investment, his investment firm, as well as Microsoft), he could afford to buy every home in Boston — and still be worth more than a billion dollars, according to a new report from the online real estate site Redfin.

For the report, Redfin calculated the combined cost of every single-family home, condo and townhouse in a city by looking at home sales between April 1, 2013, and April 1, 2014. These sales were used as a representative sample of all homes in a city. The combined costs were then lined up next to the net worth of billionaires on this Forbes list. (You can find more about the methodology here.)

So for Seattle, Redfin calculated that 241,450 homes in the city are worth a combined $111.5 billion dollars. Bill Gates could afford each of the 114,212 homes they included in the Boston calculation (total cost: $76.6 billion), but he couldn’t buy every home in Seattle. The Walton family that founded Wal-Mart could afford every home in Seattle, but only if they teamed up. They could also afford every home in a lot of other cities, including Miami, Dallas and Washington.

Using the combined home prices on this list, some billionaires could settle for purchasing a few smaller cities rather than picking up one of the pricier options. Mark Zuckerberg, who reportedly spend more than $30 million last year buying up homes near his Palo Alto house, could take his Facebook money ($28.2 billion) and buy every home in nearby Berkeley ($25.9 billion, according to Redfin). Or he could decide to buy up a few Zucker-bergs (sorry) across the country, purchasing Corvallis, Ore. ($9 billion), Punta Gorda, Fla. ($10.1 billion) and Oak Park, Ill. ($7.6 billion) with $1.5 billion left over.

See the full list of billionaires and cities they could buy here. The primary purpose Redfin gives for putting this together?

Given that the average American struggles to afford a home, we wanted to illustrate just how many homes the wealthiest among us could buy.

Certainly a stark comparison between the buying power of the typical American versus the wealthiest. So is Redfin pushing hard here to criticize the .01%? It doesn’t appear that way. There is no indication how the differences between Gates, the Waltons, and others might be evened out to provide homeownership opportunities for more Americans. Or, is this more about page-clicks and driving traffic to their website? This is a relatively easy way to leverage their data capabilities and capitalize on recent talk about inequality.

Sociologist suggests three strategies for combating rural decline

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A sociologist suggests rural communities can pursue three strategies to help them thrive in future decades:

Winchester, a sociologist and analyst of demographic changes, for years has battled against the narrative of rural decline. He argues although the percentage of Americans living in rural areas has been declining, contrary to some notions, the number of rural Americans has been rising, at least until very recently…

One is immigration. Any number of communities have seen school enrollments grow and Main Streets prosper and parks fill again with kids with the arrival of immigrants.

A second is to hang on to new retirees, particularly by paying attention to their housing needs.

Rural boomers want townhomes and condos and apartments just like urban counterparts. If those desires aren’t satisfied, they’ll move and take their Social Security payments out of the community. Those federal transfer payments amount to a fifth of the income in many rural communities, Winchester said, far surpassing the importance of agriculture.

And related to the boomers’ housing needs is an opportunity to appeal to the millennial generation. Winchester thinks housing will become more available in rural areas as boomers move, providing in turn affordable housing for young people priced out of the urban market.

This would seem to capitalize on three potential areas of growth. However, I imagine these factors are related to other factors that might be more difficult to find in rural areas:

1. A broad range of good-paying jobs.

2. A broad range of amenities and businesses.

3. A relative lack of social services.

4. A relative lack of walkability or public transportation options.

Yet, rural communities have the potential to try some new strategies. As Robert Wuthnow noted, small towns are not dead just yet.

A big uptick in large homes constructed in recent years? Maybe

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With the average size of new American homes at record levels, just how many big homes have been built in recent years?

As a result, the market for smaller homes, of 1,400 square-feet and less, has shrunk to just 4% of homes built. That compares with 9% in 2005…

Meanwhile, extremely large houses — 4,000 square feet and up — have been making up a much larger slice of the new homes built.

Last year, these mega homes accounted for more than 9% of new homes. In 2005, they represented 6.6% of homes built.

Houses that are a little smaller but still verging on mansion territory, those between 3,000 and 4,000 square feet, made up 21.7% of new homes in 2013, up from 15.6% in 2005.

So these are changes in the housing market: more large homes built in recent years, fewer small houses constructed. But, are they big changes? The decrease in homes under 1,400 square feet is 5%, the rise in homes over 4,000 square feet is just over 3%, and the increase in homes three to four-thousand square feet is somewhat bigger at 6%. Does this mean McMansions are back? The data is up for interpretation with figures that could likely support either side: there are shifts taking place versus the percentage changes are limited.