Category Archives: Politics

Implications of “illegal immigration hits net-zero”

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Here is another consequence of the American economic crisis: the flow of undocumented immigrants to the United States has hit “net-zero.”

One million Mexicans said they returned from the US between 2005 and 2010, according to a new demographic study of Mexican census data. That’s three times the number who said they’d returned in the previous five-year period.

And they aren’t just home for a visit: One prominent sociologist in the US has counted “net zero” migration for the first time since the 1960s.

Experts say the implications for both nations are enormous – from the draining of a labor pool in the US to the need for a radical shift in policies in Mexico, which has long depended on the billions of dollars in migrant remittances as a social welfare cornerstone.

“The massive return of migrants will have implications at the micro and macro economic levels and will have consequences for the social fabric … especially for the structure of the Mexican family,” says Rodolfo Casillas, a migration expert at the Latin American School of Social Sciences in Mexico City.

Sociologist Douglas Massey provides more details about what has happened:

The migration explosion that since the 1970s had pushed millions of men, women, and children into the United States has fizzled, says Douglas Massey, a sociologist at Princeton University and codirector of the long-term, binational Mexican Migration Project. “We’re at a turning point, and what unfolds in the future remains to be seen. But I think the boom is over.”

Mr. Massey’s research shows that after the US recession hit, the illegal population fell from about 12 million to 11 million, where it has hovered since 2009. (About 60 percent of the illegal population is Mexican.)

Similarly, Homeland Security estimates released in March suggest that while the number of unauthorized immigrants living in the US grew 36 percent between 2000 and 2011, from 8.5 million to 11.5 million, that growth plateaued in 2010 and 2011.

“With no change in either direction, we’re roughly at a net zero,” says Massey, and adds that it’s something unseen since the late 1950s.

This bears watching. Now that I think about it, we have heard little about this topic on a national scale in recent months. Do the majority of Americans only care about this issue under certain circumstances? Thinking more broadly, does American news coverage focus on only a narrow set of issues (such as jobs, political responses and approval ratings, spending vs. accumulating debt, possible solutions) during an economic crisis rather than looking at the broad range of social spheres, including the relationships between the United States and other countries, affected by a downturn?

Ireland’s President Michael D. Higgins has a master’s degree in sociology

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I’m always on the lookout for famous people with sociology degrees. Being the President of a country counts: Ireland’s President Michael D. Higgins is considered a sociologist.

Higgins holds a graduate degree in sociology.In his academic career, he was a Statutory Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and Sociology at University College Galway and was a Visiting Professor at Southern Illinois University. He resigned his academic posts to concentrate fully on his political career.

Higgins received a master’s degree in sociology from Indiana University in 1967:

“On behalf of Indiana University, I would like to congratulate IU alumnus Michael D. Higgins upon his election as the ninth president of Ireland and culmination of a long and distinguished career as a politician, lecturer, author and human rights activist,” McRobbie said. “Over the course of four decades, President-elect Higgins has dedicated himself to championing Irish culture and passionately defending human rights causes in many parts of the world. He is also renowned for the many intellectual contributions he has made to modern political, philosophical and literary discourse. All of us at IU wish him the greatest success as he prepares to apply his extensive knowledge and experiences to his new role as Ireland’s senior ambassador.”

Higgins received a master of arts degree in sociology at IU Bloomington in 1967.

Higgins is also apparently an honorary life member of the Sociological Association of Ireland.

I wonder if anyone has done a study on the effectiveness of leaders with sociological degrees. Sociology is an unusually broad field, containing insights for many areas of social life as well as for social interactions. I would hope that sociologists can do unique things because of their training…

US government (and “statistical bureaucracy”) looking to measure well-being

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The federal government is looking into ways to measure well-being as a new indicator of social life:

Funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, a panel of experts in psychology and economics, including Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, began convening in December to try to define reliable measures of “subjective well-being.” If successful, these could become official statistics.

But as the United States ventures into the squishy realm of feelings, statisticians will first have to define happiness and then how to measure it. Neither is a trivial matter. There is even some doubt whether people, when polled, can accurately say whether they are happy…

The panel, organized by the nonprofit National Academies, has already met with two of the key figures in the U.S. statistical bureaucracy: Robert Groves, the director of the U.S. Census Bureau, and Steve Landefeld, the director of the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the federal agency that puts out the gross domestic product figures.

According to proponents, a measure of happiness could help assess the success or failure of a range of government policies. It could gauge the virtues of a health benefit or establish whether education has more value than simply higher incomes. It might also detect extremes of inequality or imbalances in how people divide their time between work and leisure.

I’m not sure why there is opposition to this. There are plenty of social scientists who study this topic and have developed established measures of “happiness.” I’ve written on this topic a number of times looking at the effect of income on happiness, how religion leads to greater life satisfaction through interaction with others, and an argument that we need to study flourishing rather than happiness. As I’ve noted before, measuring happiness requires looking at both short- and long-term satisfaction. This panel may have to work on applying these measures onto a national scale but they are not creating a whole new field of study.

The cost issue may be driven more by the current budget troubles than anything else. If you are studying the effectiveness of programs and policies, why not include a measure of well-being? We tend to measure many things in terms of economics and pragmatic factors alone. Overall, it could make government statistics more holistic. A measure of well-being doesn’t have to be the only number that matters in the future but it can play an important role.

Three other thoughts:

1. The panel might consider avoiding the term “happiness” as this seems too subjective to a lot of people. In popular usage, the emotion is considered to be ephemeral. Instead, stick with well-being or life satisfaction.

2. Tying this panel to the idea of the “pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence seems silly. This doesn’t provide evidence for or against this sort of panel.

3. I’m very amused at the mention of a “statistical bureaucracy.” This might be the worst nightmare for some people: statistics plus government. Just a reminder: one member of the bureaucracy, Robert Graves at the Census Bureau, is a sociologist with a lot of experience with surveys.

 

Evangelicals and Catholics first joined forces in the suburbs

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In the middle of an article about how Rick Santorum has appealed to evangelicals, one of the factors mentioned is geographic: evangelicals and Catholics both moved to the suburbs after World War Two.

The plate tectonics of social mobility also figure into the Santorum surprise, note scholars like the political scientist John C. Green of the University of Akron. In the post-World War II years, many Catholics moved out of insular urban neighborhoods while many evangelicals left their rural and small-town homes for the suburbs and exurbs. In subdivisions, in office parks, in colleges, the young people of the two religions began to encounter one another as benign acquaintances rather than alien enemies.

It is no coincidence, then, that a Santorum voter like Carissa Wilson has grown up in the suburban sprawl between two cities with strong Catholic heritages, Dayton and Cincinnati. Like the Michigan autoworkers in 1980 who made a break with Democratic tradition to vote for Ronald Reagan, Miss Wilson just may be the embodiment of a new wave.

In other words, evangelicals and Catholics met and learned to like each other in the suburbs. United by suburban values and perhaps a dislike for both cities and rural areas, these two groups settled into the land of single-family homes and found that they could find common ground on some social and theological issues.

This brings several questions to mind:

1. Are Catholics and evangelicals more interested in preserving suburban values than finding common theological ground? Perhaps this is crassly put but the way the argument is written in the article, it suggests that the suburbs came first before the social and theological common ground.

2. How do race and class play into the process? In other words, while both groups came from different places to the suburbs, they were probably mostly white and the educational status of both groups was rising. Does this mean that the older city/rural divide was transcended by common status interests based on race and class?

We need a more complex analysis of how taxes affect income inequality

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One current blogosphere discussion about whether taxes could help reduce income inequality would benefit from more complex analyses. Here is the discussion thus far according to TaxProf Blog:

There have been a number of reports published recently that purport to show a link between rising inequality and changes in tax policy — especially tax cuts for the so-called rich. The latest installment comes from Berkeley professor Emmanuel Saez, Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States.

Saez and others who write on this issue seem so intent on proving a link between tax policy and inequality that they overlook the major demographic changes that are occurring in America that can contribute to — or at least give the appearance of — rising inequality; a few of these being, differences in education, the rise of dual-earner couples, the aging of our workforce, and increased entrepreneurship.

Today, we will look at the link between education and income. Recent census data comparing the educational attainment of householders and income shows about as clearly as you can that America’s income gap is really an education gap and not the result of tax cuts for the rich.

The chart below shows that as people’s income rise, so too does the likelihood that they have a college degree or higher. By contrast, those with the lowest incomes are most likely to have a high school education or less. Just 8% of those at the lowest income level have a college degree while 78% of those earning $250,000 or more have a college degree or advanced degree. At the other end of the income scale, 69% of low-income people have a high school degree or less, while just 9% of those earning over $250,000 have just a high school degree.

This analysis starts in the right direction: looking at a direct relationship between two variables such as tax rates and income inequality is difficult to do in isolation of other factors. While some factors may be more influential than others, there are a number of reasons for income inequality. In other words, graphs with two variables are not enough. Pulling out one independent variable at a time doesn’t give us the full picture.

But, then the supposedly better way is that we were just looking at the wrong variable’s influence on income and should have been looking at education instead! So after saying that the situation was more complex, we get another two variable graph that shows that as education goes up, so does income so perhaps it really isn’t about taxes at all.

What we need here is some more complex statistical analysis, preferably including regression analysis where we can see how a variety of factors at the same time influence income inequality. Some of this might be a little harder to model since you would want to account for changing tax rates but arguing over two variable graphs isn’t going to get us very far. Indeed, I wonder if this is more common now in debates: both sides like simpler analyses because it allows each to make the point they want without considering the full complexity of the matter. In other words, easier to make graphs line up more with ideological commitments rather than an interest in truly sorting out what factors are more influential in affecting income inequality.

Argument: the US should move forward by saying “Death to the McMansion”

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Patrick Doherty argues that housing is one area in which the United States can chart a needed course forward through “profound problems in its political and economic system.” The solution? “Resilient communities with smaller homes.”

Boomers and millennials, the two largest demographic groups in the country, are converging in a time-of-life moment where what they want is smaller homes on smaller lots in walkable, service-rich, transit-oriented communities. Boomers, who have just started turning 65, are empty-nesting and downsizing. But they are going to have to work much later into what they thought would be their retirement, and they fear the fate of their parents, who had their car keys taken away and ended up in the nursing home. Millennials are in the process of getting married and having kids, and according to market surveys, 77 percent simply don’t ever want to go back to the ‘burbs. At the end of the day, traditional subdivisions are isolating and expensive, while millennials are increasingly connected, are more into tech than cars, and are seeing their economic future more like their grandparents’—full of hard work and living on a budget.

Add it all up, and the National Association of Realtors estimates that—today—56 percent of Americans want the attributes of this new American dream in their next housing purchase. Yet only 2 percent of new units being built today fit these attributes. That’s a massive pool of pent-up demand, locked away by federal policy still supporting suburban growth at the expense of all other types of communities. Change the policy—without having to spend a dime—and we’re off to the races with new jobs in construction and infrastructure, plus homes and communities that reflect the way we want to live today. And they happen to be good for the planet, reducing energy, water, and waste by at least one-third.

But there is more. Three billion people around the world coming into the middle class in the next 20 years. When they do (and 200,000 people are literally leaving their villages every day), their incomes go up 300 percent—and so does their resource use. Since we’re already consuming 1.5 planets’ worth of resources, the McKinsey Global Institute is now saying we need a massive resource productivity revolution. That’s especially true in the United States, where we use 50 percent more material per unit of GDP than the top-performing EU countries. That waste could be profit.

America should be the leader of that resource revolution.

The larger argument seems to be this: the United States is locked into political and economic policies that no longer match our world. We need to adjust to two major changes in housing: (1) fewer people want to live in the type of suburbs that were built in force starting in the 1920s and then again after World War II and (2) building sprawling suburbs consumes a lot of resources that could better be used elsewhere.

Several things strike me:

1. Political and economic policies may be made as much or even more so for cultural reasons than for what is most effective or pragmatic.

2. That being said, changing these policies would be difficult to do overnight. There is still an ideology of the American Dream that includes owning a home. However, this may indeed be shifting toward denser homeownership but I think it would take some time (if just for younger generations to get older).

3. I would be interested in seeing a comprehensive national strategy by which this could be pursued. Perhaps this could start with removing the mortgage interest tax deduction. I’ve been thinking in recent days that this is also closely tied to gas prices and how the cost of driving affects where people want to live. Builders might need some incentives to provide different kinds of housing. Communities across metropolitan regions might need to band together to address common issues and stop fighting over residents and corporations. All of this is not easy but I imagine there are better ways to do this than simply talking about a bunch of things at once.

Sacred narratives of American liberals and conservatives

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Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues American liberals and conservatives have powerful and “sacred” cultural narratives:

A good way to follow the sacredness is to listen to the stories that each tribe tells about itself and the larger nation. The Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith once summarized the moral narrative told by the American left like this: “Once upon a time, the vast majority” of people suffered in societies that were “unjust, unhealthy, repressive and oppressive.” These societies were “reprehensible because of their deep-rooted inequality, exploitation and irrational traditionalism — all of which made life very unfair, unpleasant and short. But the noble human aspiration for autonomy, equality and prosperity struggled mightily against the forces of misery and oppression and eventually succeeded in establishing modern, liberal, democratic, capitalist, welfare societies.” Despite our progress, “there is much work to be done to dismantle the powerful vestiges of inequality, exploitation and repression.” This struggle, as Smith put it, “is the one mission truly worth dedicating one’s life to achieving.”

This is a heroic liberation narrative. For the American left, African-Americans, women and other victimized groups are the sacred objects at the center of the story. As liberals circle around these groups, they bond together and gain a sense of righteous common purpose.

Contrast that narrative with one that Ronald Reagan developed in the 1970s and ’80s for conservatism. The clinical psychologist Drew Westen summarized the Reagan narrative like this: “Once upon a time, America was a shining beacon. Then liberals came along and erected an enormous federal bureaucracy that handcuffed the invisible hand of the free market. They subverted our traditional American values and opposed God and faith at every step of the way.” For example, “instead of requiring that people work for a living, they siphoned money from hard-working Americans and gave it to Cadillac-driving drug addicts and welfare queens.” Instead of the “traditional American values of family, fidelity and personal responsibility, they preached promiscuity, premarital sex and the gay lifestyle” and instead of “projecting strength to those who would do evil around the world, they cut military budgets, disrespected our soldiers in uniform and burned our flag.” In response, “Americans decided to take their country back from those who sought to undermine it.”

This, too, is a heroic narrative, but it’s a heroism of defense. In this narrative it’s God and country that are sacred — hence the importance in conservative iconography of the Bible, the flag, the military and the founding fathers. But the subtext in this narrative is about moral order. For social conservatives, religion and the traditional family are so important in part because they foster self-control, create moral order and fend off chaos. (Think of Rick Santorum’s comment that birth control is bad because it’s “a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”) Liberals are the devil in this narrative because they want to destroy or subvert all sources of moral order.

I wonder at times if any public political debates are really about the particular issues at hand or are really proxy battles between these large cultural narratives.

It does seem easy to suggest that politicians and others needs to get outside of their own narratives and be able to compromise. However, there are benefits to being part of a larger narrative: the individual has purpose and meaning plus there is strong social support in being part of a larger group. If it were easy to cross these boundaries, people could do it more easily but there are also sanctions that groups can impose on members who stray. Current conditions suggest there may be little benefit for politicians who stick their neck out. See this recent story about how some members on both sides tried to reach a deal over the debt ceiling last summer but the larger parties helped it fall apart.

Obama campaign data mining information for fundraising, voters

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Politico reports on how the Obama campaign is using data mining in its quest to win reelection:

Obama for America has already invested millions of dollars in sophisticated Internet messaging, marketing and fundraising efforts that rely on personal data sometimes offered up voluntarily — like posts on a Facebook page— but sometimes not.

And according to a campaign official and former Obama staffer, the campaign’s Chicago-based headquarters has built a centralized digital database of information about millions of potential Obama voters.

It all means Obama is finding it easier than ever to merge offline data, such as voter files and information purchased from data brokers, with online information to target people with messages that may appeal to their personal tastes. Privacy advocates say it’s just the sort of digital snooping that his new privacy project is supposed to discourage…

There’s an added twist for Obama: He’s making these moves at the same moment his administration is pushing the virtues of online privacy, last month proposing a consumer bill of rights to protect it.

This has been brewing for some time: back in July 2011, Ben Smith reported that the Obama campaign was advertising for “Predictive Modeling/Data Mining Scientists and Analysts.”

I really want to ask: what took so long? This is a gold mine for candidates.

I’ll be curious to see how far these hypocrisy charges go. If companies are going to make money off the Internet, don’t they have to have some of these abilities to put information together? Which group do people trust less to have their information: corporations or political parties?

“Copyright math”

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Since this blog regularly covers issues ranging from intellectual property law to statistics, Rob Reid’s recent TED talk on “Copyright Math” seems particularly salient:

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/GZadCj8O1-0

Do politicians understand how polls work?

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A recent CBS News/New York Times poll showed 80% of Americans do not think their family is financially better than four years ago:

Just 20 percent of Americans feel their family’s financial situation is better today than it was four years ago. Another 37 percent say it is worse, and 43 percent say it is about the same.

When asked about these specific results, Harry Reid has this to say about polls in general:

“I’m not much of a pollster guy. As everyone knows, there isn’t a poll in America that had me having any chance of being re-elected, but I got re-elected,” he told TheDC.

“I think this poll is so meaningless. It is trying to give the American people an idea of what 300 million people feel by testing several hundred people. I think the poll is flawed in so many different ways including a way that questions were asked. I don’t believe in polls generally and specifically not in this one.”

The cynical take on this is that Reid and politicians in general like polls when they are supportive of their positions and don’t like them when they do not favor them. If this is true, then you might expect politicians to cite polls when they are good but to ignore them or even try to discredit them if they are bad.

But, I would like to ask a more fundamental question: are politicians any better than average Americans in understanding polls? Reid seems to suggest that this poll has two major problems: it doesn’t ask questions of enough people to really understand all Americans (a sampling issue) and the questions are poor which leads to biased answers (an issue of how the questions are worded). Is Reid right? From the information at the bottom of the CBS story about the poll, it seems pretty standard:

This poll was conducted by telephone from March 7-11, 2012 among 1009 adults nationwide.

878 interviews were conducted with registered voters, including 301 with voters who said they plan to vote in a Republican primary. Phone numbers were dialed from samples of both standard land-line and cell phones. The error due to sampling for results based on the entire sample could be plus or minus three percentage points. The margin of error for the sample of registered voters could be plus or minus three points and six points for the sample of Republican primary voters. The error for subgroups may be higher. This poll release conforms to the Standards of Disclosure of the National Council on Public Polls.

Yes, the number of respondents seems low to be able to talk about all Americans but this is how all major polls work: you select a representative sample based on standard demographic factors (gender, race, age, etc.) and then you estimate how close the survey results are to the actual results if we asked all American adults these questions. This is why all polls have a margin of error: if you ask less people, you are less confident in the generalizability of the results (which is why there is a larger 6% gap for the smaller Republican primary voters subgroup) and if you ask more people, you can be more confident (though the payoff of asking more people usually diminishes between 1200-1500 respondents so it is not worth asking more at some point).

I don’t think Reid sounds very good in this soundbite: he attacks the scientific basis of polls with common objections. While polls may not “feel right” and may contradict anecdotal or personal evidence, they can be done well and with a good sample of around 1,000 people, you can be confident that the results are generalizable to the American people. If Reid does understand how polls work, he could raise other issues. For example, he could insist that this is a one-time poll and you would want to measure this again and again to see how it changes (perhaps this is an unusual trough?) or you would want other polling organizations to ask the same question and triangulate the results between the surveys (like what Real Clear Politics does by taking averages of polls). Or he could suggest that this question doesn’t matter much because asking about four years ago is a rather arbitrary point and philosophically, does life always have to get better over time?