Author Archives: legallysociable

Best sociological finding I heard at ASA 2019

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Not surprisingly, the most interesting sociological finding I heard at the annual ASA meetings this past weekend involved research into suburban life. More specifically, Weininger and Lareau looked at how middle-class parents choose where to live:

ASAsession19

As they explained in their presentation, we might imagine these relatively educated and well-off families would look at all sorts of data regarding neighborhoods, compare their relative merits, and then choose one. Instead, they found these families would rely on limited vouching for particular locations from ties in their social networks – sometimes fairly weak ties – and then make decisions based on that. This could even occasionally lead to mistakes.

I look forward to hearing more about how this all works and what this leads to. There is interesting material to consider here including:

-What if there are conflicting network recommendations (either different preferred locations or different opinions on the same location)?

-How does the process change when the respondents do or do not have much local knowledge of the communities they are considering?

-Does this effect hold for middle-class residents of different racial and ethnic groups?

-Can networks help people move into more hetereogeneous locations or do they primarily help reinforce homogeneity?

Baseball teams going with smaller stadiums, more mixed-use development

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As fewer fans may be willing to go to baseball games, teams are moving toward focusing on development around the stadium:

The Atlanta Braves and Texas Rangers, leaning significantly on public funding that came without taxpayer referendums, ditched parks built in the 1990s for smaller digs framed by the game’s new revenue engine – mixed-use developments at least partially controlled by the team. The Braves are in their third season at SunTrust Park (capacity, 41,000, replacing Turner Field’s 53,000) while the Rangers in 2020 will open Globe Life Field, a retractable-roof facility that will seat 40,000 compared to its predecessor’s 49,000-seat capacity…

For the Diamondbacks, A’s and perhaps a significant number of clubs that may replace – or revamp – their Camden Yards-era parks, finding the sweet spot of atmosphere, accessibility and inclusion will be paramount in a sport with an aging and occasionally alienated fan base.

The primary focus of the article is on how teams are trying to attract more fans to altered ballparks that offer a more exciting in-game experience. But, I find the passage above more interesting: as fans become fickle regarding attendance, the big long-term money may just be in the real estate surrounding the park. Even at high levels of attendance, a sports stadium only generates revenue a certain number of dates a year. Baseball has a lot more dates than football but the stadium still sits empty for more than 75% of the year.

Many teams and park owners have already shifted toward stadiums as concert venues as well as homes to other sports in the off-season. But, imagine the sports stadium more like an exciting shopping mall where people come to hang out in an exciting and safe space and they consume. Just like the shopping mall that features food, entertainment, and retail, the stadium could become a year-round home for entertainment, food, and shopping that has a great draw at the center: a professional sports team that happens to play there for part of the year.

One piece that may be missing from a number of ballparks as well as shopping malls: adding residential units near the facility could help boost the customer base and create a neighborhood feel. A number of stadiums are surrounded by parking lots. At least a few are located right next to other stadiums of professional teams so the stadiums can share parking lots. Instead, imagine apartments and condos right near stadiums: some residents would be excited to live right near the energy of a stadium and these residents also would partake of local businesses. This does not have to look like the neighborhood around Wrigley Field but there is certainly a lot of room for more neighborhoods to generate revenues for tams long after the games are over.

And then there can be conversations about whether public money should be used to finance real estate development in addition to sports stadiums. Do communities benefit from mixed-use developments around stadiums or does the money line the pockets of owners?

A reminder of the absurdity of sports

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The MVP Machine is a good look at the data feedback player development angle in Major League Baseball today. Roughly two-thirds through the book, there is a reminder about what sports actually are:

It also strikes me as silly that I’m so excited about being a bit better at hitting a ball covered in cowhide with a wooden stick, an ultimately meaningless activity that American culture collectively decided would be worth many millions of dollars when performed with a certain skill. Rational or not, though, the fulfillment is real.

Similar descriptions could render all major sports as absurdist activities. And yet, they are viewed by millions, they are tied to local status and civic togetherness, and there are billions of dollars tied up in them. Sports today are big business, big entertainment, and big stakes for fans all rolled up into one. But, I imagine some sports moments could be made better with this reminder of what sports are at their most basic level.

I have bought hundreds of music albums for less than $5 each

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I still purchase CDs. I am buying more than just a few CDs a year; I have over 1,000 albums total. I have not purchased any digital tracks nor have I joined the recent vinyl bandwagon and I have barely used any streaming music service. Isn’t this an expensive (and space taking) habit?

As I thought about all of these albums, I realized that in the last 15 years or so I have bought at least two hundred albums for less than $5. These cheaper CDs primarily come from two sources:

-Used book/music stores.

-Library sales.

This means the music I am buying tends to fall into several categories:

-Music people are looking to get rid of. It is always interesting to see what people are willing to sell and donate and what people do hold on to. Just as a quick example: certain classic rock bands always have plenty of CDs on hand for sale while others are hand to find. I am not buying all the extra copies of Top 40 albums people quickly ditched but I can find good albums by worthwhile artists.

-Music that does not command a high price. This usually means I am purchasing music that is not currently popular (it takes a while for music to filter down to lower prices) or music that was never that popular.

And here is why I will likely continue in this pattern of buying cheap music (even with all the space the songs take up):

-The purchase is usually cost effective. If I can get a CD for under $5 and I like more than 4 songs on the album, I come out ahead. (This assumes people still want to purchase music rather than pay a monthly fee or deal with advertisements to stream from over a million tracks.)

-I have a physical copy of the music. I find the trend toward streaming/renting all content a bit concerning for consumers and if I can find cheaper CDs, I will purchase them to help insure I have a copy.

-I generally like the process of going into stores to look at music. I know online shopping is convenient but finding an unusual and cheap CD is still a fun experience (and I do not devote too much time to this).

At some point soon, this might all end if CDs are phased out. Until then, I will keep looking for good music for cheap prices.

Analysis suggesting suburban women could decide 2020 election

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The suburbs continue to be a key geographic battleground in national politics. Analysts suggest suburban women may decide the 2020 presidential election:

Many professional, suburban women — a critical voting bloc in the 2020 election — recoil at the abrasive, divisive rhetoric, exposing the president to a potential wave of opposition in key battlegrounds across the country.

In more than three dozen interviews by The Associated Press with women in critical suburbs, nearly all expressed dismay — or worse — at Trump’s racially polarizing insults and what was often described as unpresidential treatment of people. Even some who gave Trump credit for the economy or backed his crackdown on immigration acknowledged they were troubled or uncomfortable lining up behind the president.

The interviews in suburbs outside Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Detroit and Denver are a warning light for the Republican president’s reelection campaign. Trump did not win a majority of female voters in 2016, but he won enough — notably winning white women by a roughly 10 percentage-point margin, according to the American National Election Studies survey — to help him eke out victories across the Rust Belt and take the White House…

The affluent, largely white and politically divided suburbs across the Rust Belt are widely viewed as a top battleground, the places where Trump needs to hold his voters and Democrats are hoping to improve their showing over 2016.

If large numbers of suburban women are turned off by the action and rhetoric of the current president, it will then be interesting to see if his opponents craft messages to specifically target these same voters. If parties and candidates generally think they know what urban and rural voters want to hear, how will they adjust to suburbanites who are living in fairly complex and varied settings?

For example, the concerns of residents in more affluent suburbs may not match that well with larger political and cultural issues parties and candidates want to address. What if these voters are more akin to “dream hoarders” who want to secure their own positions more than they care about larger issues?

Describing the relationship between economics and sociology as one between siblings

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A long profile of economist Raj Chetty includes a section on his look at the concept of social capital:

Chetty has found that opportunity does not correlate with many traditional economic measures, such as employment or wage growth. In the search for opportunity’s cause, he is instead focusing on an idea borrowed from sociology: social capital. The term refers broadly to the set of connections that ease a person’s way through the world, providing support and inspiration and opening doors.

Economics has long played the role of sociology’s annoying older brother—conventionally accomplished and wholeheartedly confident, unaware of what he doesn’t know, while still commanding everyone’s attention. Chetty, though, is part of a younger generation of scholars who have embraced a style of quantitative social science that crosses old disciplinary lines. There are strong hints in his research that social capital and mobility are intimately connected; even a crude measure of social capital, such as the number of bowling alleys in a neighborhood, seems to track with opportunity. His data also suggest that who you know growing up can have lasting effects. A paper on patents he co-authored found that young women were more likely to become inventors if they’d moved as children to places where many female inventors lived. (The number of male inventors had little effect.) Even which fields inventors worked in was heavily influenced by what was being invented around them as children. Those who grew up in the Bay Area had some of the highest rates of patenting in computers and related fields, while those who spent their childhood in Minneapolis, home of many medical-device manufacturers, tended to invent drugs and medical devices.* Chetty is currently working with data from Facebook and other social-media platforms to quantify the links between opportunity and our social networks.Sociologists embrace many ways of understanding the world. They shadow people and move into communities, wondering what they might find out. They collect data and do quantitative analysis and read economics papers, but their work is also informed by psychology and cultural studies. “When you are released from the harsh demands of experiment, you are allowed to make new discoveries and think more freely about what is going on,” says David Grusky, a Stanford sociology professor who collaborates with Chetty. I asked Princeton’s Edin what she thought would end up being the one thing that best explains the peaks and valleys of American opportunity. She said her best guess is “some kind of social glue”—the ties that bind people, fostered by well-functioning institutions, whether they are mosques or neighborhood soccer leagues. The staff at Opportunity Insights has learned: When an economist gets lost, a sociologist can touch his elbow and say, You know, I’ve been noticing some things.

A few thoughts on this description of a relationship between two academic disciplines:

  1. The family metaphor is an interesting choice. Both disciplines are in the larger family of social sciences. They share some common interests. They often bicker like siblings. But, they are not twins here – one is the older sibling, one is the younger. The family picture suggests the two disciplines are tied together forever but their standing within the family is a contentious one.
  2. The primary difference suggested above is one of methodology: economists look at lots of quantitative data, sociologists “embrace many ways of understanding the world.” There are methodological differences between the disciplines but also other important differences, such as theoretical assumptions about how humans and societies operate. If both fields move toward using similar methodologies, does this bridge their differences? I would guess not.
  3. The suggestion at the end is that economists need sociologists when there is something that is hard to uncover or goes beyond their models. If those conditions are not met, then relying on sociology may not be necessary. Might both fields be more open to working with each other before they run into issues? Do sociologist need economists to help them explain difficult things?

More upper middle class Americans are renting rather than owning

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Homeownership is down in recent years in the United States (with a recent uptick) and this has affected even among relatively high-income earners:

Families such as the Bauerles who want to live in solid middle-class neighborhoods with good schools and reasonable commutes are increasingly renting single-family homes. Taking advantage of this trend, the private-equity firm Blackstone Group Inc., with other investors, launched a business that is now the nation’s largest renter of single-family houses.

The number of households that have inflation-adjusted annual incomes of $100,000 or greater but are renters nearly doubled from 2006 to 2016, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

Domonic Purviance, a senior financial specialist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, said people earning the median income can no longer afford the median-priced new home, costing $323,000 last year, and barely have the means to buy the median existing home, which now about $278,000.

The overall focus of the article in on the major sources of debt facing middle-class families today: housing, student loans, and cars. Out of this trio, the suggestion is that mortgage debt may come last out of these three. Many believe they need a college education (at least) for decent jobs and to maximize their earnings. A car loan is often a top priority as driving is necessary in many locations. Even if the majority of Americans desire to own a home, they can put that off until later.

Hence, renting is on the rise. This raises two big questions in my mind:

1. It could be interesting to see in the next few decades how upper middle class residents react to not having as easy access to homeownership. Will it turn them off to owning? Will they feel resentment and, if so, who do they think is to blame? Will this change spread to other groups since the upper middle class is one hat others would aspire to?

2. For the middle class and above, renting is often viewed negatively, particularly in wealthier communities. The perception is that renters are less invested in their community and property. If more people of means rent single-family homes instead of own them, could perceptions change?

The modal age of racial/ethnic groups in the United States

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There is a big age difference in the most common age among racial and ethnic groups in the United States – particularly compared to the median.

In U.S., most common age for whites is much older than for minorities

 

 

 

 

There were more 27-year-olds in the United States than people of any other age in 2018. But for white Americans, the most common age was 58, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data.

In the histogram above, which shows the total number of Americans of each age last year, non-Hispanic whites tend to skew toward the older end of the spectrum (more to the right), while racial and ethnic minority groups – who include everyone except single-race non-Hispanic whites – skew younger (more to the left).

The most common age was 11 for Hispanics, 27 for blacks and 29 for Asians as of last July, the latest estimates available. Americans of two or more races were by far the youngest racial or ethnic group in the Census Bureau data, with a most common age of just 3 years old. Among all racial and ethnic minorities, the most common age was 27…

Non-Hispanic whites constituted a majority (60%) of the U.S. population in 2018, and they were also the oldest of any racial or ethnic group as measured by median age – a different statistic than most common age (mode). Whites had a median age of 44, meaning that if you lined up all whites in the U.S. from youngest to oldest, the person in the middle would be 44 years old. This compares with a median age of just 31 for minorities and 38 for the U.S. population overall.

The paragraphs above provide multiple pieces of information that explain the distribution displayed above:

-The different groups have different skews, suggesting these are not even distributions.

-The mode is much higher for whites.

-The median agrees with the conclusion from the mode – whites are on average older – but the gap between whites and other groups drops.

All three pieces of information could inform the headline but Pew chose to go with the mode. Is this with the intent of suggesting large age differences among the groups?

Henderson, NV: do not go all in with public money for a baseball stadium

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The large Las Vegas suburb of Henderson is interested in acquiring a major league baseball team and willing to use a lot of taxpayer dollars to do it:

Renderings show a retractable-roof baseball stadium near St. Rose Parkway and Bermuda Road in rapidly growing west Henderson, which city officials envision as a hub for sports and entertainment. The proposed site, one of four floated by the city, sits behind the future headquarters and practice facility of the NFL’s Raiders.

According to the presentation, Henderson hired a consultant to conduct a financial analysis, assuming the ballpark would have 32,000 seats and space for 4,000 standing-room-only ticket holders. The Diamondbacks would serve as the primary tenant for a 30-year term and the stadium would be publicly owned and exempt from property tax.

The consultant estimated the ballpark would cost about $1 billion to construct…

The Diamondbacks expressed interest in creating a development at a potential new home, pointing to the entertainment district near the Atlanta Braves’ SunTrust Park as inspiration, according to documents that detailed the team’s wish list for prospective suitors.

The city said it ultimately views itself as capable of drawing major sports franchises because of a business-friendly approach, attractive demographics, socioeconomic characteristics and available land.

It sounds like the suburb of over 300,000 residents sees at least three benefits of such a move:

1. It would boost the status of the suburb. Few suburbs could boast of a collection like this with an MLB team, an NFL practice facility, and an ice rink connected to an NHL team. This could then help attract businesses and residents.

2. The potential for development around a major league stadium. Imagine restaurants, retailers, and residences near the stadium.

3. Becoming a unique location with a growing metropolitan region. As suburbs compete for corporate headquarters, residents, retailers, and entertainment centers, a stadium would stand out. It is easy for critics to stereotypes as collections of subdivisions and strip malls but Henderson would have a different collection of sites.

Yet, the research is clear: sports stadiums enrich sports teams, not communities. Suburbs that have tried this tend to run into problems (see recent examples of Glendale, Arizona and Bridgeview, Illinois). Teams will use cities and suburbs against each other to get better deals – just as big companies like Amazon do – and also leave those places behind if they can get better deals.

So before Henderson throws up to a billion dollars at a major league team, they should think twice. Can the suburb handle that amount of debt if it does not work out? Could that money be spent elsewhere on development and/or amenities that would benefit a broader swath of their residents? Is being a high-status suburb more important than being a quality place to live?

The (illustrated) story of one man’s quiet protest in front of a 12 home McMansion subdivision

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The New York Times recently featured one man opposed to McMansions on Bainbridge Island, Washington. Here is the start:

McMansionProtestStoryStart

Protesting does not have to be complicated and persistence goes a long ways.