NASA recently posted a video on Flikr showing 28 years of development in Las Vegas as seen from space:
When Landsat 5 launched on March 1, 1972, Las Vegas was a smaller city. This image series, done in honor of the satellite’s 28th birthday, shows the desert city’s massive growth spurt since 1972. The outward expansion of the city is shown in a false-color [i.e., red = green space like parks and golf courses] time lapse of data from all the Landsat satellites.
The New York Times’ Lens Blog has photos and a write-up of “New Deal Utopias”:
Known as Greenbelt Communities, these three federally built developments combined the suburb’s closeness to nature with the social and economic advantages of cities. Built originally for displaced farmers and poor or working families, they encouraged cooperation and community spirit. They also provoked accusations of socialism, and any further developments were stopped after a court ruling declared the federal government’s role in building these developments unconstitutional.
It’s always interesting to see a major media treatment of one’s backyard (many of the Greenbelt, MD photos were taken within a half mile or so of the residence my wife and I just moved into at the end of December). I don’t feel like I’ve lived here long enough to have any major insights to add to the article, but it does strike me that Greenbelt, MD is a very tight-knit and walkable community.
Many bloggers are starting to tease out the social and infrastructure implications of driverless cars, including David Alpert over at the Atlantic:
[Driverless cars] will bring many changes, but when it comes to the car’s role in the city, they may just intensify current tensions.
David suggests that new technology will simply exacerbate current trends by “trigger[ing] a whole new round of pressure to further redesign intersections for the throughput of vehicles above all else”:
If autonomous cars travel much faster than today’s cars and operate closer to other vehicles and obstacles, as we see in the [University of] Texas team’s simulation , then they may well kill more pedestrians. Or, perhaps the computers controlling them will respond so quickly that they can avoid hitting any pedestrian, even one who steps out in front of a car.
In that case, we might see a small number of people taking advantage of that to cross through traffic, knowing the cars can’t kill him. That will slow the cars down, and their drivers will start lobbying for even greater restrictions on pedestrians, like fences preventing midblock crossings.
Our metropolitan areas could then look, more and more, like zoos for humans interlaced with pathways for the dominant species, the robot car.
Personally, I think one of these scenarios (i.e., “travel much faster…[and] kill more pedestrians”) is unlikely. Initially, driverless cars will almost certainly be much more expensive than equivalent conventional vehicles. A car that is both (1) more expensive and (2) more dangerous seems unlikely to sell well, to say nothing of the likelihood that such lawsuit-magnets would be sued utterly out of existence. To catch on with a mass market, driverless cars will at least need to uphold safety’s current status quo.
As far as David’s second fear (“metropolitan areas [that] look, more and more, like zoos for humans”), I’m unclear how much that differs from current development patterns. While there are plenty of examples of “walkable” cities, much of contemporary American infrastructure is extremely unfriendly to pedestrians, cyclists, and other non-car users. To the extent that cars dominate today’s roads, a move to driverless cars seems only to continue, rather than augment, that trend.
Sociologist Neil Gross, whose work on this subject I have cited before, disagrees with Rick Santorum’s claim and argues that “college doesn’t make you liberal“:
But contrary to conservative rhetoric, studies show that going to college does not make students substantially more liberal. The political scientist Mack Mariani and the higher education researcher Gordon Hewitt analyzed changes in student political attitudes between their freshman and senior years at 38 colleges and universities from 1999 to 2003. They found that on average, students shifted somewhat to the left — but that these changes were in line with shifts experienced by most Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 during the same period of time. In addition, they found that students were no more likely to move left at schools with more liberal faculties.
Similarly, the political scientists M. Kent Jennings and Laura Stoker analyzed data from a survey that tracked the political attitudes of about 1,000 high school students through their college years and into middle age. Their research found that the tendency of college graduates to be more liberal reflects to a large extent the fact that more liberal students are more likely to go to college in the first place.
Studies also show that attending college does not make you less religious. The sociologists Jeremy Uecker, Mark Regnerus and Margaret Vaaler examined data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and found that Americans who pursued bachelor’s degrees were more likely to retain their faith than those who did not, perhaps because life at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder can be rough in ways that chip away at religious belief and participation. They report that students “who did not attend college and two-year college students are much more likely — 61 and 54 percent more, respectively — than four-year college students to relinquish their religious affiliations.”…
The main reason for this development is that attacking liberal professors as elitists serves a vital purpose. It helps position the conservative movement as a populist enterprise by identifying a predatory elite to which conservatism stands opposed — an otherwise difficult task for a movement strongly backed by holders of economic power.
Is this enough research to satisfy critics or do the studies not really matter in the face of political concerns?
While these studies might show that students are not all being pushed into liberalism, I imagine conservatives might bring up other arguments. For example, professors have a certain level of prestige in society and so if a majority are proponents of liberal opinions, then society could be swayed in certain directions. Policy decisions might be made. Public opinion could be influenced (though this might require suggesting that Americans are easily swayed). Or another issue: colleges and universities receive federal funding and so liberal professors can access taxpayer money to promote their causes.
Academics tend to brush aside these arguments by suggesting they can still be objective researchers (and I tend to agree) regardless of their own political or personal opinions. But there is still a perception issue here that academics could work harder to dispel. At times, I think it wouldn’t take much: show some respect for religion, stop suggesting that people with traditional or conservative ideas are all ill-intentioned, hint that popular culture and the suburbs aren’t a complete wasteland, and don’t be condescending.
Here is an argument that compares McMansions to Iranian oil:
The United States would like to perform a magic trick, and our economy might depend on its success. The illusion? We want the world to think Iran’s oil is practically a Las Vegas McMansion.
Now, nobody is going to confuse a barrel of crude with a four story desert abode. Las Vegas houses have been widely shunned and practically unsellable. As a result, their prices have plummeted for the few remaining buyers. We want the same thing to happen to Iran’s oil: We want it to become so unpopular that Iran is forced to sell it only at a significant discount.
Perhaps it seems odd that the United State should hope Iran sells any of its oil. After all, we’re using sanctions to turn Tehran into a pariah within the global financial system, making it next to impossible for them to actually export crude, with the hope that it will force the country’s leaders to drop their nuclear program. But you can’t cut the world’s fifth largest oil producer entirely out of the global petroleum market and not expect prices to surge even more than they already have.
Instead, our government wants Iran to keep shipping oil to some of its major customers — but for cheap. “Policymakers need to ensure that they are not creating an embargo of Iranian oil but, instead, implementing these sanctions so that Iranian oil becomes a distressed asset,” Foundation for the Defense of Democracies Executive Director Mark Dubowitz, who advised Congress while it drafted the sanctions legislation, told Bloomberg today.
An unusual comparison. I can see the general point: we want Iranian oil to stay in the market but we don’t want Iran to benefit from being able to sell it for high prices. So we need Iranian oil to carry a stigma so that the price has to be dropped.
But the comparison breaks down if you think this through to the end. Most critics would argue that McMansions shouldn’t be built in the first place. At this point, we can’t stop Iran from producing oil but we can effect how it is sold, similar to the ways in which McMansions have publicly been denigrated. However, we have more control over McMansions: if we really wanted to as a country, we could ban the construction of McMansions (though this would most likely have to happen at the local level).This makes me wonder if McMansions could ever be considered okay or even popular. If I remember correctly, the New Urbanist authors of Suburban Nation suggested McMansions might be acceptable if they were modified slightly to fit into traditional looking neighborhoods that encouraged civic participation. This particular comparison ties the popularity of the McMansions to their price; so they would be acceptable as long as they are cheap? Perhaps then the housing could be considered affordable housing, not just the province of the wealthy or nouveau riche, even if critics are correct in suggesting that such houses are poorly built, poorly designed, and are often in sterile neighborhoods.
Two days ago, our household received the quarterly newsletter from DuPage County. While the front page of the DuPage Review trumpets “DuPage County Cuts $10.7 million from 2012 Budget,” the back page had this interesting statement: “Did You Know? Only 2.8% of your property tax bill goes to DuPage County.” See the figure below:
What exactly is the County trying to convey here? Pointing out this figure means: (a) you should not be concerned at all since this is a small amount (b) you should not care much if we ask for a little more (c) you should be impressed that we use such a small percentage, particularly compared to other taxing bodies. .
The focus here is on the small number (only 2.8%!) but it might also lead a lot of people to ask what my wife asked: why does the County need 2.8% anyway? The rest of the newsletter offers some hints: taking care of county roads, dealing with stormwater, and facilitate things like senior services and electronic recycling. The county budget for 2012 is $434.7 million and you can find more specific details here.
I wonder how many DuPage County residents know what goes on at the county level. Outside of occasional local issues, how many people actually have to be concerned about what the County does? Add in the fact that Illinois has the most local taxing bodies in the country (outpacing second place Pennsylvania by over 2,000) and it can be really hard to figure out how the County, township, Forest Preserve, Park Districts, municipalities and the other taxing bodies fit together and utilize property tax money.
Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum recently suggested that going to college pushes people away from the church and faith. Those who study the subject disagree:
Santorum told talk show host Glenn Beck on Thursday that “62% of kids who go into college with a faith commitment leave without it.”
Thom Rainer, president of LifeWay Christian Resources, a Nashville evangelical research and marketing agency, said, “There is no statistical difference in the dropout rate among those who attended college and those that did not attend college. Going to college doesn’t make you a religious drop out.”…
The real causes [of leaving the faith]: lack of “a robust faith,” strongly committed parents and an essential church connection, Rainer said.
“Higher education is not the villain,” said sociologist William D’Antonio of Catholic University of America. Since 1986, D’Antonio’s surveys of American Catholics have asked about Mass attendance, whether they rate their religion as very important in their life, and whether they have considered leaving Catholicism. The percentage of Catholics who scored low on all three points hovers between 18% in 1993 and 14% in 2011. But the percentage of people who are highly committed fell from 27% to 19%.
Recent research also disputes this: several 2011 studies found that those with education are actually more religious than those with less education.
So what was Santorum getting at with his statement? Three thoughts:
1. Conservative Christians commonly cite alarmist statistics to show that the church needs to redouble its efforts or to demonstrate that the church is under attack. See this classic article “Evangelicals Behaving Badly with Statistics,” a good article titled “Curing Christians’ Stats Abuse,” and the book Christians are Hate-Filled Hypocrites…
2. He is hitting back against “elitist academia,” responding to but also feeding the perception college classrooms are filled with atheists and agnostics who want to disabuse students of their faith. Of course, there are many people of faith in academia. This is a larger battle over a perceived liberal, atheist elite versus a faith-filled “average America.”
2a. If Santorum were correct, does this mean that people of faith should not send their kids to college? Or alternatively, do these ideas continue to boost attendance at religious colleges?
3. To compound matters, Santorum was talking to Glenn Beck and this argument was aimed at Beck’s audience. At the same time, it appears Santorum made this a more general argument on the campaign trail:
“President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob,” Santorum said Saturday at a campaign stop in Troy, Mich. “There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor that [tries] to indoctrinate them.”
In the end, this seems like another plank in a moral argument, rather than a political or social argument, for Republicans.
Mark Hemingway takes aim at Portland, Oregon in a long cover story in the Weekly Standard:
Unlike the New York Times, I write not to praise the place but to note the litany of things that plainly have gone wrong. Also to alert anyone else who’s listening: Right now, America’s civil and social engineers are beavering away trying to turn your city or town into the next Portlandia.
Mark’s piece is a rambling barrage that roughly summarizes as follows:
A few thoughts re: development policies. Mark suggests “[t]hings began to unravel in 1973, when the Oregon legislature required cities in the state to set development boundaries with the goal of preserving farmland.” Portland responded by “cancel[ing] a major interstate freeway project” in order to start a light rail system. Mark objects to this decision because (a) the light rail has low ridership (“It’s called ‘light’ rail not because the trains are less heavy, but because it’s more lightly used by the public than, say, New York’s subway or Washington, D.C.’s Metro”) and (b) it allowed “Oregon’s integrated land use and transportation planning system [to be] manipulated to award [a former-politician-turned-consultant’s] clients hundreds of millions in state and city contracts relating to light rail expansion and the accompanying high-density developments.”
While I’m certainly no expert on either Portland or light rail ridership statistics, a cursory web search turned up this Wikipedia article suggesting that Portland’s system ranks 4th in ridership among similar U.S. systems and ahead of (much larger) cities such as San Diego (5th), Philadelphia (6th), and Dallas (7th). And as far as the revolving door between local politics, consultancies, and developers goes, it strikes me that this is a problem that has little to do with light rail as such. The placement of new roads and highways is similarly susceptible to backroom-dealing that favors the wealthy and well-connected. Mark makes no effort to explain why corruption (whether of the “small-c” or “big-C” variety) poses a bigger or more inherent problem with publicly funded mass transit projects (e.g., light rail) than with publicly funded car-based projects (e.g., highways), and I fail to see an argument so obvious that it needn’t be even implied (let alone spelled out).
A few thoughts re: Portland’s “generally hostile business climate.” Mark begins by quoting extensively from a 2010 op-ed written by the chairman of Nike, a company started and headquartered in Portland, which opposed an increase being considered in the state income tax. Whatever the merits or demerits of the tax increase or this two-year-old op-ed, it is hard to understand why Mark cites this as his leading example of Portland’s hostile business climate in particular rather than Oregon’s in general.
Worse, this op-ed is the closest Mark comes to criticizing Portland directly. In the subsequent paragraphs, he (a) tells the story of his own grandparents as an example of the “upwardly mobile, working-class life now seems out of reach for much of the city,” (b) notes that income is unevenly distributed in Portland (“Don’t tell Portland’s scabies-infested Occupy camp, but between 1980 and 2007, the share of wealth earned by Portland’s middle quintile declined by about 20 percent, while the top 1 percent’s share doubled”), and (c) rises to defend “the traditional working class” from “the new hipsters.”
One final note. Mark does begrudge respect to Portland’s small businesses, though he apparently can’t resist a few barbs:
While it’s hard not to root for entrepreneurial initiative wherever you find it, in Portland it carries a whiff of desperation. I submit that the real reason Portland has a thriving artisanal economy is that the regular economy is in the dumps. Portland’s hipsters are starting craft businesses in their garages and opening restaurants not merely because they “reject passive consumption” but because they can’t find jobs, the kind that offer upward mobility.
Perhaps Mark should re-read that 2010 op-ed he cited. Before Phil Knight was a multi-billionaire and the chairman of a Fortune 500 corporation, he was just another small business owner with “a whiff of desperation” about him:
Forty-six years ago [as of 2010], when Mark Hatfield was governor, I started a small business in Oregon. In our first year, sales totaled $8,000. I am proud that [Nike] eventually became a major employer in the state.
It has been my hope that other entrepreneurs would similarly pursue their dreams in Oregon.
Today, across the U.S. and not just in Portland, “the regular economy is in the dumps” and people “can’t find jobs, the kind that offer upward mobility.” If “a small city like Portland” has enough entrepreneurs to open “671 food trucks”, I say we should encourage them. The last thing we need is for the supposedly conservative Weekly Standard to ape the Willamette Week in its quest to publish “series of bitter, petty, pessimistic rants that generally s**t on everything.”
Since the Supreme Court recently decided to take on a case that involves using race in college admissions, I was intrigued to run across a new sociological study that suggests people with more education are not more likely to support affirmative action.
“I think this study is important because there’s a common view that education is uniformly liberalizing, and this study shows—in a number of cases—that it’s not,” said study author Geoffrey T. Wodtke, a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan…
Wodtke’s study finds that while being better educated does not increase the likelihood that whites and minorities approve of affirmative action in the workplace, it does increase the probability that they support race-targeted job training. “The distinction between those two policies is that one is opportunity enhancing and the other is outcome equalizing,” Wodtke said. “I think that some of the values that are promoted through education, such as individualism and meritocracy, are just much more consistent with opportunity enhancing policies like job training than they are with redistributive or outcome equalizing policies like affirmative action.”…
According to Wodtke, there could be a couple of reasons why more educated blacks and Hispanics are no more likely to support affirmative action in the workplace than are their less educated peers. “One possibility is that affirmative action programs may have the unintended effect of stigmatizing people who have benefited from them,” Wodtke said. “As a result of this stigmatization, people who have seemingly benefitted from affirmative action may just lose faith in the efficacy of these programs to overcome racial discrimination in the labor market.”
Another possibility is that people with more advanced educations, regardless of race, become socialized in such a way that their own support for more radical social policies is somewhat diluted, Wodtke said. “The data suggest that one ideological function of the formal educational system is to marginalize ideas and values that are particularly challenging to existing power structures, perhaps even among those that occupy disadvantaged social positions,” Wodtke said.
I assume Wodtke addresses this in his article: who then does support affirmative action and do supporters primarily see it as a way to improve their standing in society?
I like the way this is framed in terms of equality and this is a way that I talk about inequality in my introduction to sociology class: as a country (or within other institutions) we could aim for different kinds of equality. Equality of opportunity is a more common American response and suggests that it is the role of government and other institutions to try to offer a level playing field, particularly in education, but then individuals have choices about how they respond to that. If people don’t succeed or don’t take opportunities provided for them, it is their fault. Of course, this view is limited in that it is extremely individualistic and fails to account for structural issues (race, class, gender to start) that affect the ability of individuals to respond to these choices.
On the other hand, we could set up a system that is aiming more for equality of outcome where different individuals end up at similar places. In this view, people or groups may need extra resources or help to get to these more equal outcomes. To steal an idea from my wife, this could be the difference between being equal and fair: acting equally in the classroom could mean devoting the same amount of time to each student while being fair would mean devoting more time to the students who need a little more help. (Another way to put it: if you were the student who needed the extra help, would you rather it be an equal or fair classroom?) This reminds me of a discussion from last year about the education system in Finland where the goal was not to have the highest achieving students but rather to bring up the bottom group of students and have more proficient students overall. This may also take the form of a more comprehensive safety net or baseline standard of living where citizens are guaranteed a certain level of income, health care, and housing.
Having this larger discussion about equality of opportunity versus equality of outcomes, how far we would want to lean toward one or the other as a country, and what policy routes would help us achieve our stated goal might be more productive in the long run instead of having skirmishes in court about particular policies every few years.
A sociologist argues that four traits held by Abraham Lincoln would make it difficult for him to become the Republican candidate for president today:
1. Lincoln ‘invented’ income tax…
2. He didn’t advertise his faith…
3. He wasn’t a looker…
4. He tended toward moderate positions and long, complex arguments.
I think #3 and #4 are more recent cultural trends than facts about the Republican party but #1 and #2 are interesting. Here is what they suggest and this would be helpful to remember during this upcoming presidential campaign: political parties do change their positions in response to their historical and cultural circumstances. Political parties may stand for some basic ideas and viewpoints but how these play out in response to changing cultural and historical conditions can vary. Therefore, Lincoln could push for an income tax because of a perceived time of need while current Republicans would like to limit income taxes. Additionally, strong outward demonstrations of conservative faith are relatively recent among Republicans (since the rise of evangelical voters in the late 1970s/early 1980s?) even as Americans generally prefer their presidential candidates to be persons of faith. Lincoln was elected by mostly northern voters as a Republican president (due mostly to northern voters, which goes against the image today of Republicans as southerners and midwesterners) roughly six years after the Republican Party was founded in response to issues of slavery. The Republican Party of today is far away from the particular issues of the late 1850s.
Of course, lots of people, including President Obama, like to claim Lincoln as their inspiration. As time passes, political parties and historical legacies change and are difficult to directly transpose into the present.
(This list of Lincoln’s traits was put together by a sociologist who studies Lincoln. See this earlier post about her thoughts about how Lincoln is regarded today.)
Legally Sociable 