Category Archives: Politics

In defense of Portland

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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:

  1. Portland gets a lot of attention from the media, particularly the New York Times and via the TV show Portlandia (paragraphs 1-14).
  2. Portland is crazy-town (“quietly closing in on San Francisco as the American city that has most conspicuously taken leave of its senses”) (paragraphs 15-20)…
    1. …because of its development policies, particularly light rail (paragraphs 21-37);
    2. …because of its “generally hostile business climate” (paragraphs 38-53); and
    3. …because of its lax sexual mores (paragraphs 54-84).

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.”

  • (A), the fact that the WWII generation could be both “upwardly mobile” and “working-class” is well documented, as is the fact that similar opportunities are vanishingly scarce for younger America today.  While I am certainly happy for Mark’s grandparents, it’s hard to imagine that today’s public school teacher and bus driver will, in 35 years, “retire to a farm…[and] rais[e] quarter horses.”  And it’s not likely that choosing to live in Peoria rather than Portland will make any difference.
  • (B), the fact that income is unevenly distributed in Portland only proves that Portland is normal relative to the rest of the U.S., not that it is a statistical outlier.  Moreover, without further explanation, it is unclear why Mark thinks uneven wealth distribution contributes to a “generally hostile business climate.”
  • (C), as his sole example of hipster-on-working-class attacks, Mark cites a five-year-old Willamette Week article which makes reference to “drunken red-neck[s].”  Apparently, Mark did not read the prologue to the article, which clarified that it was a humorous “series of bitter, petty, pessimistic rants that generally s**t on everything—and hopefully poke holes in the Portland hype” in order to “persuade prospective Portlanders not to crowd out our way of life for a little longer.”  Whatever one thinks of this brand of humor, it’s as surprising as it is clear that Mark missed this context and tone.

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.”

Affirmative action and equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcome

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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.

Could Abraham Lincoln secure Republican nomination today?

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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.)

“Scientists and scientific studies have a minimal effect on public opinion” about global warming

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While one might think that scientific data and reports are convincing, a sociologist argues that these matter little in the debate over global warming:

“Scientists and scientific studies have a minimal effect on public opinion,” says Drexel University sociologist Robert Brulle, lead author of a new climate attitude study in the Climatic Change journal. “What really drives public opinion on climate change are the ways that political elites describe the science.”…

In the current Climatic Change journal, Brulle and colleagues looked at 74 public opinion surveys from 2002 to 2010, in a bid to figure out the contradiction in opinions between experts and everyone else…

“The science doesn’t matter because the science isn’t the real issue,” Brulle adds. “It’s about politics and money.” All we have with climate change, he suggests, is politicians taking sides in an economic debate over whether we should spend money to address climate change, or not (with one side very strongly opposed), and hiding behind a smokescreen of debate about settled science to avoid making those issues clear.

Brulle is suggesting that instead of debating how much we should respond to global warming (which seems like an interesting debate to have in itself), the debate has turned to the credibility of the actual science. So if conservatives admit that there is warming, then they would have to admit that money needs to be spent on fighting it and they don’t want to do that? There seem to be two issues here: the actual data and then the value judgments about what should be done.

I’ve been seeing reports on Brulle’s findings for several months now. If he is correct, are politicians taking notes about how to change public debates? At the same time, I imagine it is more difficult to make the case for spending money on environmental concerns with such economic issues (see the Keystone pipeline debate).

I wonder if there are other areas where there is something similar going on and scientific studies have little impact. If there is a common view that science is the province of liberals and elitists, how many people will trust what it has to say?

When a sociological survey about Hong Kong angers Chinese authorities

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Politics can interfere with research studies and findings. For an example, here is a case of a sociological survey done in Hong Kong that has gotten the attention of Chinese authorities:

In December, a Hong Kong sociologist by the name of Robert Chung found himself at the center of a political storm. A study commissioned by Chung, director of opinion research at a leading university in the territory, discovered that the number of people who identify themselves primarily as citizens of Hong Kong was higher than it’s been for the past 10 years. The survey showed that the number of those who viewed themselves as Chinese had fallen to 16.6 percent. That’s a 12-year low and less than half of what it was three years ago.

Since then the territory’s communist press has launched a vicious attack on the pollster. “Political fraudster” and “a slave of dirty political money” are just two of the Cultural Revolution style epithets trotted out against Professor Chung. Hao Tiechuan, a Beijing official stationed in Hong Kong, called in local reporters to denounce Professor Chung’s work as “unscientific” and “illogical.”

Beijing, always wary of Hong Kong’s loyalty because of its colonial heritage, ratchets up the rhetoric even higher during “election” season. In March, 1200 mostly pro-Beijing loyalists will choose the next chief executive, and in September, Hong Kong citizens will go to the polls to choose 35 of 70 seats in the partially-democratic legislature. Last fall, pro-Beijing candidates won local district-level polls overwhelmingly, although an investigation has been opened into possible vote-rigging. Beijing’s attacks on Professor Chung– as well as on a so-called “Gang of Four” of prominent democracy advocates — may be calculated to keep the minions who choose the chief executive in line and dampen turnout by the solid majority of Hong Kong voters who favor progress toward full democracy.

Does this make complaints about academic freedom in the United States seem rather tame?

The attacks by the communist press are intriguing. First, “political fraudster” implies that the work is unscientific. Second, the charge of being  “a slave of dirty political money” suggests that the work is politically motivated and skewed. In both critiques, the attack is against the scientific credibility of the sociologist. The argument is that Chung has done poor research and the results shouldn’t be trusted. Furthermore, it suggests that Chung himself is not capable of good conducting good research.

These are serious charges for a sociologist. It is one thing to disagree with findings or about their interpretation or suggest that they should have used another method. It is another thing to claim that the researcher intentionally found certain results or can’t do good research. Yes, methodological errors are made occasionally (and sometimes fraudulently) but this cuts to the heart of sociology and the claim that we are searching for replicable and valid results. I hope Chang is able to show his proper use of sociological methods and is supported by others.

Why the Washington Metro doesn’t yet reach Tysons Corner

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As part of an argument that seems to really be about the difficulties of large-scale bureaucracies in responding to change, Michael Barone explore why the Washington Metro has had difficulty in reaching suburban destinations like Tysons Corner, the prototypical edge city.

Continue reading →

What happens when Tim Pawlenty comes to your sociology class

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Courtesy of modern technology, you could have been following a live Twitter stream chronicling what happens when former Minnesota governor and former Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty visits a sociology class at the University of Kansas:

“23 minutes later and I have no idea what he’s talking about,” tweeted Ray. “Freedom, drugs, a kickass pool, meatpacking, MLK.”

It sounded interesting, so I called Ray for an after-action report. The room, he said, was somewhat full and somewhat interested.

“A few hundred students are enrolled in class,” he said, “but maybe a hundred show up. I figure that a lot of the people in the class are freshmen who are just taking it to take it. They probably know Romney, they know Santorum, but Pawlenty dropped out so early that they might not know him.”

But what did the great man say? “Somebody asked him what he thought about Santorum’s victories yesterday,” remembered Gray. “He congratulated him, but he brought up the fact that John McCain lost 19 states and still won the nomination.” Gray paused. “It sounded like a backhanded compliment. And he referred to Minnesota as one of the smaller states, in terms of political power.”

A few quick thoughts:

1. Should we trust a single student’s report in a large 100-level lecture class where roughly half the students don’t attend? I always find it interesting to hear what students remember or find noteworthy.

2. Politicians are now tracked at almost every turn.

3. What exactly does Tim Pawlenty know about sociology? The class is titled “American Identity”…was Pawlenty talking about what he thinks this identity is? I would be really curious to hear (1) what Pawlenty thinks sociology is and (2) whether he thinks sociology has any value.

4. It sounds like Pawlenty was on campus to talk about how the still-to-be determined candidate for President will run a campaign and govern.

Conservatives fight against perceived UN efforts to herd people into urban areas

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A number of conservatives are fighting hard against green efforts that they claim are part of a larger UN plan:

Across the country, activists with ties to the Tea Party are railing against all sorts of local and state efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy. They brand government action for things like expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space as part of a United Nations-led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities.

They are showing up at planning meetings to denounce bike lanes on public streets and smart meters on home appliances — efforts they equate to a big-government blueprint against individual rights…

The protests date to 1992 when the United Nations passed a sweeping, but nonbinding, 100-plus-page resolution called Agenda 21 that was designed to encourage nations to use fewer resources and conserve open land by steering development to already dense areas. They have gained momentum in the past two years because of the emergence of the Tea Party movement, harnessing its suspicion about government power and belief that man-made global warming is a hoax…

The Republican National Committee resolution, passed without fanfare on Jan. 13, declared, “The United Nations Agenda 21 plan of radical so-called ‘sustainable development’ views the American way of life of private property ownership, single family homes, private car ownership and individual travel choices, and privately owned farms; all as destructive to the environment.”

This is one of those stories that simply made me say, “Huh?” when I first read it. But the article suggests this is now mainstream in conservative circles as Newt Gingrich has mentioned it in a debate and the Republican National Committee has addressed it.

I would be interested in hearing more about whether this is really about sprawl (conservatives want the right to live in the suburbs/more rural areas) or about related issues like international law, the power of the UN, the environmental movement, and liberty. It also suggests that sprawl is not simply about where one can live but symbolizes a whole way of life that is associated with freedom.

I didn’t realize this was tied to a larger movement but this helps provide some background for why some Naperville residents have been so vehemently opposed to smart meters (read some of their arguments here). This group has gathered over 4,000 signatures on their petitions and they make a sort of slippery slope argument: it may be smart meters today but soon the government wants to get all of your information and influence your decisions in the future.

A last question: what is so threatening to freedom about bike lanes?

Sociologist: downgrade threat of terrorism in US to a “tiny” threat

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Remember when terrorism was the number one concern in the United States? A new report features a sociologist arguing that terrorism is a “tiny” threat in the United States. Here is some of the evidence:

Kurzman’s report, “Muslim-American Terrorism in the Decade Since 9/11,” said that compared to the 14,000 murders in the U.S. last year, the potential for Muslim Americans to take up terrorism is “tiny.”

In the 10 years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, 193 Muslim Americans have been indicted in terrorist plots, or fewer than 20 per year, Kurzman said.

Just one of those indicted last year was actually charged with carrying out an attack — Yonathan Melaku, who fired shots at military buildings in northern Virginia — compared to six Muslim Americans who carried out attacks in 2010, including Faizal Shahzad, the failed Times Square bomber.

“This number is not negligible — small numbers of Muslim Americans continue to radicalize each year and plot violence,” Kurzman wrote. “However, the rate of radicalization is far less than many feared in the aftermath of 9/11.”

This reminds me of the idea that the “war on terror” is more of a social construction than actual threat. Granted, the money and resources spent on fighting terrorism may just have contributed to the low number of terrorists but the large application of resources plus the political rhetoric (remember the days of terror alerts?) plus media accounts may have just blown this up into a bigger issue than it actually was.

It would be interesting to hear what Kurzman thinks should be done in response to this data. On one hand, perhaps we should spend less time and effort fighting terrorism, particularly in an era of a lot of other issues and fiscal shortfalls. On the other hand, who wants to be the politician or expert that says things are okay and some major incident occurs? Is just one incident of terrorism just too many to handle? This sounds like a very similar tradeoff to what the options are in dealing with (falling rates of) crime.

A quick overview of the liberal world of academia from a sociological study

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As a writer looks at the political leanings of academia, much of the factual basis of the story is derived from a sociological study:

That faculties are liberal is beyond dispute. In a rigorous survey, University of British Columbia sociology Prof. Neil Gross concluded, “professors currently compose the most liberal major occupational group in American society.”

Gross got interested in this issue in 2005, when he was at Harvard, where president Lawrence Summers suggested that the underrepresentation of women at the highest levels of math and science might be due to “different availability of aptitude at the high end.”…

So Gross and Solon Simmons of George Mason University surveyed more than 1,400 full-time professors at more than 900 American institutions. Only 19.7 percent of professors identified themselves as “any shade of conservative” (compared with 31.9 percent of the general population), while 62.2 percent identified themselves as some flavor of liberal (compared with 23.3 percent of Americans overall).

Gross found variation between disciplines. Social sciences and humanities contained the highest concentration of liberals. Conservatives were as numerous as liberals in business, health sciences, computer science and engineering.

I’ve noted before where sociological studies plus social psychologist Stephen Haidt, who is cited in this article, have discussed this topic. I still think it is a bit odd that Newt Gingrich has so much popularity with Republicans even though he is a former academic (see previous posts here and here).

Of course, the question regarding the politics of academia is “so what?” – how does it matter in the long run? The author of the piece cited above offers this conclusion:

Unfortunately, the estrangement will serve only to reinforce the lopsidedness of university politics, undermine the confidence of a large share of the public in expert opinion, and jeopardize the role of the university in public life whenever conservatives are in power.

These are not small matters, particularly as college costs continue to rise and students are told they must go to college in order to succeed in a changed world. In a world where we are told that everything is or could be considered political, this affects how researchers go about finding about and reporting on the truths they are discovering about the social and natural world. And this also must have an effect on how students view the learning process and the purposes of a college education. Does it simply reduce everything, from the perspective of all sides, to a naked struggle for power?