Author Archives: legallysociable

David Brooks: blue inequality versus red inequality (exemplified by places like Naperville)

Posted on by

David Brooks approaches inequality in America a little differently than the 1% vs. 99% of Occupy Wall Street. He suggests that there are two big kinds of inequality and the suburban/smaller city kind is more important:

In the first place, there is what you might call Blue Inequality. This is the kind experienced in New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Dallas, Houston and the District of Columbia. In these places, you see the top 1 percent of earners zooming upward, amassing more income and wealth…

Then there is what you might call Red Inequality. This is the kind experienced in Scranton, Des Moines, Naperville, Macon, Fresno, and almost everywhere else. In these places, the crucial inequality is not between the top 1 percent and the bottom 99 percent. It’s between those with a college degree and those without. Over the past several decades, the economic benefits of education have steadily risen. In 1979, the average college graduate made 38 percent more than the average high school graduate, according to the Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke. Now the average college graduate makes more than 75 percent more.

Moreover, college graduates have become good at passing down advantages to their children. If you are born with parents who are college graduates, your odds of getting through college are excellent. If you are born to high school grads, your odds are terrible…

[Compared to the attention paid to the wealthiest 1%], the fact is that Red Inequality is much more important. The zooming wealth of the top 1 percent is a problem, but it’s not nearly as big a problem as the tens of millions of Americans who have dropped out of high school or college. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the 40 percent of children who are born out of wedlock. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the nation’s stagnant human capital, its stagnant social mobility and the disorganized social fabric for the bottom 50 percent.

Interesting analysis. Some quick thoughts:

1. Though I didn’t quote it above, Brooks argues further that getting mad at the 1% is easier than dealing with issues like family and education that affect so many people. Brooks is probably right here. This doesn’t necessarily mean that people shouldn’t be upset about the top 1%  but Brooks is suggesting they could do much more good focusing on the bigger, yet more difficult to deal with, issues.

2. Is Brooks dealing with the same kind of concerns expressed in the Moynihan Report that was vilified for years?

3. If Brooks thinks that college is the answer, I’d be interested to see his plan of action in order to pay for all of this and provide the educations necessary to getting to a college experience. Brooks is not alone in suggesting college is the answer but this is not an easy plan to accomplish either.

4. It is interesting that Naperville is mentioned among other Red State cities. Naperville is located in a clearly Republican county (though the Republican lead isn’t what it used to be) but is also in a state that consistently has gone Democratic in recent years. Additionally, Naperville is wealthier than the other cities Brooks lumps it in with: the median household income is just over $100,00o in a city of over 140,000 people . Within these red states, Naperville would be a good example of a place that has thrived with college educated residents with many of them working in professional or high-tech positions either in Naperville or nearby suburbs.

A shift from the size of the McMansion to the quality of the large house

Posted on by

The Tennessean takes a look at a trend I have been hinting at for a while: people may willingly buy smaller homes but they also want an increase in quality.

After a slowdown caused by the recession, neighborhoods of million-dollar houses are being developed in Davidson County again. But please don’t call them McMansions.

Not long ago, homes in the million-dollar range were easy to spot because of their size, typically 6,000 square feet or more. Today, the average size has shrunk to between 3,500 and 5,000 square feet of space, according to developers.

That’s the size of many less expensive houses, but homes with seven-figure price tags have individual architectural designs and other features that won’t be found in a typical subdivision house, says Alan Looney, president of Castle Homes…

Buyers are interested in quality of construction, not quantity of square feet, says Eric Bentley, construction consultant for home builder Carbine & Associates.

Is this an improvement for those who decry the architecture or design of McMansions or the environmental impact of these larger houses? The improved quality of these large homes may just fit Bourdieu’s ideas that quality and aesthetics are more important to the educated classes rather than the size and functionality that those with money might go after. At the same time, this is taking place during an economic downturn and we don’t know the profiles of these buyers – are these people who had also had plenty of money before the recession and are only now buying houses because they desire quality and not size? Or is the downtown leading a whole bunch of people to reconsider their priorities when money is more scarce?

Looking for a new area of study? Try Twitterology

Posted on by

If it is in the New York Times, Twitterology must be a viable area of academic study:

Twitter is many things to many people, but lately it has been a gold mine for scholars in fields like linguistics, sociology and psychology who are looking for real-time language data to analyze.

Twitter’s appeal to researchers is its immediacy — and its immensity. Instead of relying on questionnaires and other laborious and time-consuming methods of data collection, social scientists can simply take advantage of Twitter’s stream to eavesdrop on a virtually limitless array of language in action…

One criticism of “sentiment analysis,” as such research is known, is that it takes a naïve view of emotional states, assuming that personal moods can simply be divined from word selection. This might seem particularly perilous on a medium like Twitter, where sarcasm and other playful uses of language often subvert the surface meaning…

Still, the Twitterologists will continue to have a tough row to hoe in justifying their research to those who think that Twitter is a trivial form of communication. No less a figure than Noam Chomsky has taken Twitter to task recently for its “superficiality.”

For more sociological thoughts about Chomsky’s comments, see this post from a few days ago.

Here is my quick take on Twitterology: it has some potential for gathering quick, on-the-ground information. But there are two big issues that this article doesn’t address:

1. Are Twitter users representative of the whole population? Probably not. Twitter feeds might be good for studying very specific groups and movements.

2. How can one make causal arguments with Twitter data? If we had more information about Twitter users from profiles, this might be doable but Twitter is less about Facebook-style profiles. We then need studies that collect the information about Twitter users as well as their Twitter activity. If we want to ask questions like whether Twitter was instrumental or even helped cause the Arab Spring movements, we need more data.

Twitterology may be trendy at the moment but I think it has a ways to go before we can use it to tackle typical questions that sociologists ask.

Prediction: housing prices in for a third dip

Posted on by

According to one firm, the housing market in the United States will get worse soon:

According to Fiserv, a financial analytics company, home values are expected to fall another 3.6% by next June, pushing them to a new low of 35% below the peak reached in early 2006 and marking a triple dip in prices.

Several factors will be working against the housing market in the upcoming months, including an increase in foreclosure activity and sustained high unemployment, explained David Stiff, Fiserv’s chief economist…

The first post-bubble bottom was hit in 2009, when prices fell to 31% below peak. The First-Time Homebuyer Credit helped perk prices up by mid-2010, but by the time the credit expired, prices fell again.

In the second dip, which was reached last winter, prices were down 33% before staging a mild rally that was artificially spurred as banks slowed the processing of foreclosures following the robo-signing scandal, which found that loan servicers were rapidly signing foreclosures without properly vetting them.

This is a long term issue for the country to address and it’s hard to imagine that recent political rhetoric on the matter will help.

What could be particularly interesting in this whole affair is how the drop in values or a slight recovery will differ by region. While we have already experienced this, we could be in for long-term disparities where certain metropolitan regions like Washington D.C. which has risen to the top of rankings of wealth are in stark contrast to older Rust Belt places (like Youngstown) and also newer depressed places (like Las Vegas). One size fits all housing policies are likely not enough to help everyone.

Contrasting styles: Emanuel vs. Daley in with whom they meet and consult

Posted on by

The Chicago Reader has an interesting piece looking at who Mayor Rahm Emanuel meets with – and how this differs from Mayor Richard M. Daley’s approach:

In many ways, Emanuel’s schedule strikingly contrasts with his predecessor’s. Richard M. Daley is a Chicago guy, born and raised. Except for his college years in Providence, Rhode Island, he’s stayed here all of his life. And it shows in the people who had his ear: in addition to pols and big-shot business leaders, his meeting schedule was packed with the ministers of small churches, local school leaders, and owners of neighborhood businesses like the local sausage shop (see “Daley’s A-List”).

Emanuel, on the other hand, grew up in the north suburbs, went to college in New York, and spent the better part of the last two decades in Washington, first as an aide in the Clinton White House, then as a congressman, and finally, for almost two years, as Obama’s chief of staff.

Much of his mayoral schedule is taken up by meetings and calls with wealthy out-of-towners, many of whom have donated to his campaign. Indeed, it seems Emanuel has learned from his mentor, President Clinton. Under Clinton, the White House was open to big donors who got to spend the night in the Lincoln bedroom. In Emanuel’s case, he either invites them into his City Hall office or makes time to hang out at one of his favorite haunts…

Some days, Emanuel meets with more multimillionaires within an afternoon than most of us will cross paths with during our entire lives. On June 30, for example, after the mayor spent 30 minutes in his City Hall office with U.S. Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, he took 15 minutes to meet with Marc Lasry, the billionaire CEO of Avenue Capital Group, a hedge fund operation. That was followed by 45 minutes with Stephen Ross, a New York-based real estate mogul and owner of the Miami Dolphins.

There could be two ways to view this:

1. This is good for Chicago. Due to Emanuel’s connections outside of Chicago, the city will benefit. The new mayor may spend a lot of time with out of town millionaires but these people could bring money and jobs into Chicago through this connection.

2. This is bad for Chicago. Emanuel is less involved with the “little people” of Chicago that are important for getting things done and working the patronage machine. Emanuel is more of a corporate mayor (having less time for local leaders) while Daley at least mingled with the commoners and neighborhood leaders knew they could meet with him at certain points.

I wonder how much of this should be chalked up to different styles of leadership, personal history, or simply a shift in what it means to be a politician today where Daley was following the example of his father while Emanuel is operating under the idea that politicians and businesses need to work together (perhaps the Bill Clinton model?).

The lack of seating in cities and the response by New York City

Posted on by

The New Yorker draws attention to the lack of seating in many urban settings and how New York City has responded:

A dimension that is truly important is the human backside. It is a dimension many architects ignore,” the urban sociologist William H. Whyte once observed. Planners and designers of urban space have often stinted on seating, leaving the rest of us to colonize ledges, lean against planters, perch on fire hydrants, set up camp chairs, and fold coats to dull the pain from pointy iron rails. Lately, though, New York has begun to recognize the needs of the temporarily sedentary. This is quietly becoming an excellent city for sitting…

In the latest initiative, the Department of Transportation has rolled out a new program of sidewalk seating by request. New Yorkers can go to the DOT website and suggest a location for a sleek, sculptural CityBench designed by Ignacio Ciocchini (who also authored the garbage cans and shop kiosks at Bryant Park). Each of the three side-by-side berths is made from a sheet of perforated steel, folded into a back and a seat, and separated from its neighbor by a low armrest. The benches look tough, cool, and modern, but the effect of installing 1,000 of them on sidewalks in all five boroughs will be to make the city a more relaxed, inviting place.

Some will no doubt resent the new proliferation of benches and chairs as yet another encumbrance. New Yorkers would prefer the rest of the world to think that we move at a constant lope, defying cars in intersections, and pushing past slow-moving tourists. The truth is, though, that some of us are also old or infirm or have only just learned to walk. It’s precisely because we spend so much time on our feet that we find ourselves sometimes schlepping groceries, dragging reluctant kids, nursing bum knees, and suffering in high heels. The old solution was to segregate weary shufflers in parks, leaving the asphalt to the hurried. But Whyte noted that in crowded public plazas, people don’t choose to sit out of the way of foot traffic, but rather plop down amid pedestrians who happily weave around them. The reason is that sitting down is a social act. Public seating is a crucial element of a vibrant metropolis, which is why the Department of Transportation is also now functioning as the Department of Staying Right Here.

Interesting. Compared to the sedentary suburban lifestyle which consists of a lot of sitting within houses and workplaces as well as numerous short car trips, the city life is much more on one’s feet.

Two thoughts about this:

1. This short piece doesn’t say much about how we got into this position. I suspect one reason is homelessness. Seats are places wheres the homeless can spend a lot of time during the day and sleep on at night. With the increasing criminalization of homelessness in many cities, either seats have been removed or they have been altered to not allow laying down. Cities may want seating but they want it for certain types of people to sit there.

2. I wonder if many cities haven’t provided as much seating to save money or to limit having to deal with problems (like homelessness) by simply leaving seating to private spaces. Of course, the problem with this is that most businesses would have you pay in order to have a seat. If public spaces are only for walking, standing, and milling around, they are less attractive and the wealthier can retreat to private settings to find seats.

“What’s Your Problem?” misses an opportunity to explain survey research

Posted on by

The “What’s Your Problem?” column in the Chicago Tribune tackles the problems of consumers. Yesterday’s column involved a woman who had been called multiple times by a survey firm even after she asked to not be called again:

Over the following weeks, Scarborough representatives called Riedell repeatedly, asking her to participate in a 15-minute phone survey.

No matter how many times she refused their overtures, the calls kept coming.

Riedell said she asked each time to have her name taken off the call list but was told that representatives were not authorized to do so.

And so it continued through late summer and early fall. By the sixth call, Riedell decided she had heard enough. She emailed What’s Your Problem?

When contacted by the Tribune, the survey firm had this reponse which did not please Riedell:

Dercher said Riedell did not leave her name and phone number when she called Scarborough’s toll-free number, which are critical pieces of information so that the company can remove a respondent from the calling list.

Although her number could be randomly picked for another survey in the future, the odds are against that happening, Dercher said.

After reading Dercher’s email, Riedell said Scarborough’s response was, well, lame.

“The response says that their interviewers are not allowed to remove the name of a respondent from their calling list since the respondent’s name is confidential, but the interviewer already has the respondent’s name and phone number, otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to reach me by phone or address me by my name when I answered the phone,” Riedell said. “Sounds like gibberish to me.”

The column is clearly geared toward Riedell’s point of view and frankly, who likes to be called repeatedly by companies or survey organizations after refusing to participate? At the same time, let’s flip this around to see it from the opposite angle:

-Riedell was selected for the survey by random digit dialing. This is not unusual and telephone surveys are not covered by the Do Not Call registry.

-It doesn’t sound unusual that the survey interviewers didn’t have the power to remove her name from their lists. They were likely handed lists of numbers and told to call until they had an answer.

-Surveys often select their initial batch of respondents and then do whatever they can to get responses from them. The US Census Bureau goes to housing units repeated times in order to collect data because they want accurate data. (Of course, one Census worker who was doing his job last year was arrested for trespassing in Hawaii.) If survey companies simply gave up on people after one attempt, they would spend a lot more time and money and doing so might mess up their calibrated samples which are meant to represent larger populations.

In the end, Riedell may not like the system but in order to collect good data, survey companies may have to contact selected respondents multiple times. Since participation is voluntary, Riedell can opt out and perhaps Scarborough does need to have a more clearly delineated method by which people can opt out. Additionally, there may be some complications because Scarborough is a market survey research firm (tagline: Scarborough Research measures our shopping, media, and lifestyle behaviors) and are not academic researchers or political researchers (though push polls are very problematic). But this column could be much more informative about how survey research works and how consumers can respond to common requests for information rather than just suggesting that this woman should be able to more easily avoid telephone survey questions.

Why many products are always “on sale” – and why buyers fall for it

Posted on by

My wife and I had a running joke going for a while with the Kohl’s circular that would come in the Sunday newspaper: every week was “the biggest sale of the year!” This is a common strategy for many retailers and consumers continue to fall for it:

“People don’t have a gut sense of absolute value. It’s just that they’re sensitive to contrast. So if you say I’m getting 40 percent off, I’m interested, no matter what the actual cost is.”

“The whole concept of a sale or a discount has become really perverted,” said Shell, a co-director of Boston University’s Center for Science & Medical Journalism and a contributing editor to Atlantic Monthly. “So what is the price? We think of price as a number, something that’s coolly objective, but it’s not. It’s a highly emotional construct. Price is manipulated to attract the consumer.

“If people see a sweater on a table for $50, they don’t buy it. If they see the same sweater was once $100, they will. We’re highly swayed by reference price. … There are some things that are almost perennially on sale, like mattresses and jewelry. We buy almost all our clothing on sale.”

“Retailers are now outfoxing consumers,” said Kit Yarrow, chair of the psychology department at Golden Gate University, where she is a jointly appointed professor of both psychology and marketing. “They’ve figured out how to offer a bargain in a way that the consumer doesn’t even know what they’re buying anymore.”

So how could consumers fight back? Some common strategies:

1. In certain areas, like credit card offers and statements or the calories in restaurant meals, having sellers display more information so that the consumer can theoretically make more rational decisions based on more information. Do all consumers use this information? Does the extra information “wear off” over time, particularly in light of enticing promotions or marketing? You can hear the same argument about health care from some people – if everyone knew, doctors and patients, how much every test or treatment was going to cost, different choices would be made.

2. Use an envelope system (or a debit card) for spending money so that one has a better idea of the total spending limit. This may help overspending but does it help eliminate all “impulse buys” or the deals one purchases?

3. Aren’t consumer education classes in high schools supposed to help talk about finances and such? And do they help much? Do such classes typically talk about how marketing works and different ways to think about deals?

4. There are companies that claim to not offer deals and have “no-haggle prices” or something like that. Think of CarMax or Saturn. Since most other retailers do offer deals, some companies can take an opposite tack.

The conclusion: prices are a social construction and taps into basic human impulses to avoid losses (paying the higher price)

Is the American Sun Belt boom over?

Posted on by

One of the biggest changes in the American population in the last sixty years has been the migration to the Sun Belt. But new data suggests that this boom may have come to an end:

Between 2007 and 2010, Florida lost more people to internal migration than it gained, for the first time since the 1940s. Nevada, too, which had been growing for decades, had a net migration loss of 30,000 in 2009. And Arizona had a net gain of just 5000, way down from 90,000 five years before.

Meanwhile, New York and California both saw their net losses shrink in 2009 by more than half since 2005.

The analysis, based on Census Bureau and IRS data, was conducted by the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire.

What explains the shift? The Sun Belt states, of course, were hit hard by the housing bust that helped trigger the recession and its aftermath. The early aughts housing boom was responsible for much of the growth in places like Clark County, Nev., and Maricopa County, Ariz. in the first place.

But just as important, migration as a whole, which has been on the wane for three decades, has really tailed off since the downturn began.

The economic crisis has limited mobility across the United States, particularly for the less wealthy who are then more tied to existing jobs and homes.

It will be interesting to see whether this trend continues or (1) the Sun Belt will grow again in the future or, in a longer shot, (2) older cities in the Midwest and Northeast (“Rust Belt”) regain some of the population that shifted south and west. In other words, once people have some more freedom to move, what will they choose to do and what social forces will push or pull them in certain directions?

Is feminism over?

Posted on by

A short piece in USA Today suggests many young women today don’t want to be labeled as feminists:

The feminist has been portrayed as a woman who was “unhappy, angry, humorless and didn’t shave any part of her body,” says Terry O’Neill, national president of the National Organization for Women, which this weekend marks its founding 45 years ago with an event at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla.

The stereotype, she adds, “became very powerful.” And it’s hard to get past for many young women today…

Sociologist Michael Kimmel of Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, N.Y., finds that reaction widespread. “Most of my women students have said ‘Feminism was your generation’s issue and we won. We can now do anything we want,'” he says…

Wendy Brandon, an associate professor of education and women’s studies at Rollins, says the women’s movement has evolved to focus more on what’s termed the “intersectionality” of gender, race, class and sexual orientation.

Quick thoughts:

1. We need more data on this. This article has completely anecdotal evidence.At the same time, I’ve heard similar responses from my students.

1a. I easily found a 2002 report from Gallup on the issue. As of 2001, 25% of women considered themselves feminists. This was down from 31% in 1991. This suggests that the term has been on a decline for a while. Or perhaps many women were never willing to call themselves feminists?

1b. However, the data also suggests that when asked about specific issues (pay, etc.), more people say work still needs to be done. So the label is more of the issue, not the issues raised.

2. If the label itself is a problem (similar to the connotations with the descriptor “liberal”?), why not look for a new term? Or run advertising campaigns to change the image of the term?

3. How much have arguments within the feminist itself hampered their efforts?