Category Archives: Sociology

When big corporations keep approaching Illinois about tax breaks

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ADM and other large companies in Illinois keep pushing the state to offer more tax breaks:

The company has called Decatur home for more than four decades but said it needs to relocate to make international travel and employee recruitment easier. ADM hasn’t said where its new headquarters will be, but Chicago is the preferred location for an operation that would employ about 100 people, according to knowledgeable sources. The company has said it would also create a technology center at its headquarters site that would employ an additional 100…

The ADM tax package is one of several bills introduced Friday that would give breaks to specific companies or industries. The bills seem likely to reignite the debate over targeted breaks that swirled in 2011 when the General Assembly gave tax relief to CME Group Inc. and Sears Holdings Corp. Both companies had threatened to exit the state…

The proposal also would let the company retain state income tax withholdings that employees would have paid the state. Motorola Mobility, Navistar International Corp. and Ford Motor Co. have received the same tax break to retain jobs…

Separately, two other companies are in line to receive tax incentives. Swiss insurance company Zurich plans to build its new North American headquarters in Schaumburg, where it employs about 2,500 people who would shift to the new facility.

More on the story from yesterday’s paper:

ADM, which said last week it is searching for a new corporate headquarters, wants $1.2 million a year for the next 15 to 20 years, company representatives told a State House Revenue and Finance Committee at a hearing in Chicago on Tuesday…

If lawmakers approve the bill, ADM would join a select number of companies that can retain their employees’ income tax withholdings. That group includes Motorola Mobility, Sears Holdings Corp., Navistar International Corp. and Ford Motor Co.

To get there, companies have lobbied lawmakers to amended the language of the state’s Economic Development for a Growing Economy tax credit program, or EDGE.

The print version also noted that about two-thirds of Illinois companies don’t pay corporate income taxes.

Such requests put politicians in a difficult position – which I suspect is one reason businesses make such requests. The politicians quoted in the stories sound fairly negative about the tax breaks; they think the companies are simply asking to avoid taxes they could afford to pay. At the same time, politicians don’t want to be the ones who are viewed as anti-business (which is related to being anti-growth or anti-jobs) and the ones who let big name companies get away. If other states or localities are offering better tax breaks, they have to compete with tax breaks or highlight other advantages (an educated workforce, access to a global city – Chicago, clusters of other nearby corporations and services, etc.). It can then become a race to the bottom as governments undercut each other to attract corporations which are then less valuable.

Should every home improvement increase the value of your home?

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HGTV host Sabrina Soto discusses five home improvements that might actually lower the value of your home:

Converting bedrooms into other spaces: If potential homebuyers “see it’s a four-bedroom house, they want to go to the open house and see four bedrooms. You have to take the guesswork out,” says Soto. If you do convert a room, there’s one feature you should absolutely never mess with. Watch the video to find out what that is.

Hot tubs: Soto thinks inheriting someone else’s hot tub is a turn-off — and she’s not alone. “You’d be surprised how many potential buyers find them to be a little gross.” And once a hot tub is installed, it’s not an easy feature to remove from a deck or backyard.

Colored trim and textured walls: It seems like any potential homebuyer would see these features and know they can easily paint over them, but not so fast, says Soto. “I would much rather paint walls than trim any day — it’s a beast of a job,” she says. And textured walls are “a mess to sand down and remove. The fad is over anyway, so just let it go.” If you feel your trim is outdated, see the video for Soto’s tips on what to do.

Children’s theme bedrooms: Spending hundreds of dollars on a mural for your child’s wall is throwing money away. Not only will they outgrow it in a matter of years, but “you’re never going to get that money back when you sell, so just keep it neutral,” posits Soto.

Too much landscaping: Conventional wisdom says you want your yard to look as nice as possible, but heed Soto’s warning: you want to “keep up with the Joneses — but don’t exceed them.” To a potential buyer, gorgeous, overdone landscaping screams high-maintenance.

My question after reading this list: what if you simply want these features for yourself and not because it might add to your resale value? Granted, if you are looking to sell your house, you might not want to pursue these options. But, if you are looking to live in your house for a while, you might decide that one or more of these features is what you want.

The bigger issue is this: doesn’t a list like this perpetuate the idea that a home is primarily an investment? That is one way to view things but there are other reasons for owning a home.

The wealthy continuing to give to wealthy universities and colleges

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Gregg Easterbrook, ESPN’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback, continues to highlight a pattern: wealthy donors giving to already wealthy universities and colleges:

Don’t Give to Harvard! A running TMQ cause is that rich people give money to schools such as Harvard, Yale and Stanford, places already possessing gargantuan endowments, rather than to schools where money is needed. The rich underwrite elite schools for ego reasons — at cocktail parties they can say, “I just donated $10 million to Harvard, now a shower stall will be named after me.” At colleges and universities that serve average people, donations can change lives. If you’ve got money, donate to noble Berea College, which accepts only poor students and charges no tuition, or to gallant Bethune-Cookman, a historically black school that mainly serves the underprivileged. Alumnus Charles Johnson just gave $250 million to Yale — which is already sitting on a $19 billion endowment. At a place like Berea College, $250 million would have been a transformative event in the lives of the deserving. At Yale, it’s a rounding error in the lives of the privileged.

Reader Jon Miller of Beaumont, Texas, notes that despite having a world’s-best endowment of $32 billion — nearly double the GDP of Honduras — Harvard just kicked off a capital campaign, asking for another $6.5 billion. Rich people, show a little class: Don’t give to Harvard. Or Yale, Princeton or Stanford. Make your donation count.

This gets back to an old question: do elite universities perpetuate social inequalities? If giving patterns changed as Easterbrook suggests, perhaps there might be a shift…

Can a pleasant suburb like Naperville have medical marijuana facilities?

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Naperville officials are looking into how to regulate future medical marijuana facilities in their community:

Naperville will begin considering zoning regulations for medical marijuana businesses Tuesday night as councilmen review staff recommendations to limit such facilities to industrial parks, set a distance requirement from residential areas and require all medical marijuana operations to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis instead of allowed outright.

The proposed zoning code updates, which also would prohibit medical marijuana cultivation centers or dispensing organizations from opening in downtown and general commercial areas, are set to be considered during a council meeting at 7 p.m. in the municipal center, 400 S. Eagle St…

Naperville’s possible zoning changes are in addition to state restrictions that say cultivation centers cannot be within 2,500 feet of the property line of a school, day care center or residential area, and only one can open in each of the 22 state police districts statewide…

He said keeping dispensaries out of downtown and allowing only one in each strip mall or collection of buildings under the same ownership will help prevent the new businesses from being too widespread…

“The dispensaries are more like a pharmacy and should be allowed in retail areas,” Chirico said. “Legal, prescribed medication shouldn’t be restricted to an industrial park.”

It will be interesting to watch how wealthier suburbs treat medical marijuana facilities which are legal but probably not very desirable in these communities. Are the dispensaries better or worse than tattoo parlors? (If I had to vote, I’d go with better.) The interest in putting a dispensary only in industrial areas certainly would help keep it out view and away from impressionable people.

But, I could imagine a scenario where a resident of such a community is able to effectively tell how they need the marijuana to relieve pain from a life threatening illness and they don’t want to be made to feel like a ne’er-do-well in their own suburb. Telling that story in the right setting might make the community leaders and residents look uncaring and callous.

Durkheim, modern American hyper-individualism, and moral consensus today

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One commentator links Durkheim’s ideas about suicide, anomie, and society to individualism in America today:

Here in the West, we take individualism and freedom to be foundational to the good life. But Durkheim’s research revealed a more complicated picture. He concluded that people kill themselves more when they are alienated from their communities and community institutions. “Men don’t thrive as rugged individualists making their mark on the frontier,” the University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox pointed out recently: “In fact, men seem to be much more likely to end up killing themselves if they don’t have traditional support systems.” Places where individualism is the supreme value; places where people are excessively self-sufficient; places that look a lot like twenty-first century America—individuals don’t flourish in these environments, but suicide does.

Durkheim’s work emphasizes the importance of community life. Without the constraints, traditions, and shared values of the community, society enters into a state of what Durkheim called anomie, or normlessness. This freedom, far from leading to happiness, often leads to depression and social decay (as the “twerking” Miley Cyrus perfectly exemplified recently at the Video Music Awards). Durkheim thought that the constraints—if not excessive—imposed on individuals by the community ultimately helped people lead good lives.

But we live in a culture where communitarian ideals, like duty and tradition, are withering away. Even conservatives, who should be the natural allies of these virtues, have in large part become the champions of an individualism that seems to value freedom, the market, and material prosperity above all else, leaving little room for the more traditional values that well known thinkers like Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver cherished. “Man is constantly being assured today that he has more power than ever before in history,” wrote Weaver in Ideas Have Consequences (1948), “but his daily experience is one of powerlessness. . . . If he is with a business organization, the odds are great that he has sacrificed every other kind of independence in return for that dubious one known as financial.”…

Let’s return to the Google Books Ngram Viewer to illustrate the point. When Twenge, Campbell, and their colleague Brittany Gentile analyzed books published between 1960 and 2008, they found that the use of words and phrases like “unique,” “personalize,” “self,” “all about me,” “I am special,” and “I’m the best” significantly increased over time. Of course, it is not just in our books where this narcissism appears. It is also throughout the popular culture, not least in pop music. When a group of researchers, including Campbell and Twenge, looked at the lyrics of the most popular songs from 1980 to 2007, they found that the songs became much more narcissistic and self-centered over time. In the past three decades, the researchers write, the “use of words related to self-focus and antisocial behavior increased, whereas words related to other-focus, social interactions, and positive emotion decreased.”

Durkheim was very much about social cohesion, moral consensus, and the interdependence of individuals in modern society. Individuals may think that they are self-sufficient or able to do a lot on their own but much of their lives are built on the efforts of others.

Another aspect of this might be the declining participation of Americans in civic groups as outlined by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone. This doesn’t mean Americans are completely withdrawn but it does suggest they might be more wary of collectives or only choose to participate when it suits them. This is how you can view online social networks like Facebook and Twitter: they enable social interaction but it is at the demand of individual users as they get to decide when and how they interact.

You could flip this this around and ask a different question: what are Americans all committed to? Where do we still have moral consensus? Perhaps in declining trust in institutions. Perhaps in celebrating Super Bowl Sunday. Perhaps the idea that homeownership is a key part of the American Dream. Perhaps in religiosity (even with the rise of the “religious nones,” some of whom still believe in God). Here are a few other things 90% of Americans can agree on:

Yet there are some opinions that 90% of the public, or close to it, shares — including a belief that citizens have a duty to vote, an admiration for those who get rich through hard work, a strong sense of patriotism and a belief that society should give everyone an equal opportunity to succeed. Pew Research’s political values surveys have shown that these attitudes have remained remarkably consistent over time.

The proportion saying they are very patriotic has varied by just four percentage points (between 87% to 91%) across 13 surveys conducted over 22 years. Similarly, in May 1987, 90% agreed with the statement: “Our society should do what is necessary to make sure everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed.” This percentage has remained at about 90% ever since (87% in the most recent political values survey).

It is not that we don’t have zero social cohesion these days. The argument here could be two-fold: (1) social cohesion has declined from the past; (2) social cohesion today has changed – it might be more “alone together” than everything else where we can be around others at times and share some common values but we generally want to follow our own paths, as long as they aren’t impeded too much by the paths of others.

Denver Broncos scoring at 3.13 standard deviations above the NFL average

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Bill Barnwell puts the scoring of the 2013 Denver Broncos in statistical perspective:

That brings us to z-score (or standard score), the measure that analyzes a figure’s distance from the rest of the data set using the mean and standard deviation from the set. By comparing each team’s points scored to the league average (and calculating the standard deviation) for the points scored of each team from that given season, we can get a measure of how much better or worse it was than the average team from that season. Fortuitously, that measure also allows us to compare teams across different years and eras. It’s not perfect, since it can’t account for things like strength of schedule or whether a team let up late in games or not, but it’s a much better measure than raw points scored.

As it turns out, even after we make these adjustments, the 2013 Denver Broncos have still scored points at a higher rate through four games than anybody else since the merger. The Broncos are scoring points on a per-game basis at a rate of 3.13 standard deviations over the mean, which is unmatched over that 43-year run. No team has ever scored more frequently, relative to its peers, than the Broncos have done relative to the rest of the league in 2013.

Because these are standardized figures, it’s possible to translate each team’s scoring rate in 2013 figures and see how close it is to Denver. In this case, after we account for the different populations, a bunch of teams move closer to Denver’s throne. Chief among them is the 1991 Super Bowl–winning team from Washington, which scored 146 points through four games in a league whose teams averaged a mere 72 points through their first four tilts. Washington’s figure placed it 2.85 standard deviations above the mean and translates to 170.9 points scored in 2013, just 8.1 points behind the Broncos. Other famous teams follow: the 2000 Rams, 1992 Bills, 1996 Packers, 1981 Chargers, 2005 Giants …

And you thought standard deviations were good only for statisticians. If you know your normal distribution, that’s way above the league average. I can only imagine how Sportscenter anchors might try to present this information…

Actually, this is quite useful for two reasons: (1) it allows us to look at the Broncos compared to the rest of the league without having to rely on the actual points scored; (2) it allows us to standardize points scored over the years so you can compare figures over a 43 year stretch. Both advantages are part of the wave of new statistical analysis taking over sports: don’t just look at the absolute value of statistics but put them in comparison to others teams or players and also provide statistics that allow for comparisons across time periods.

Wording matters: more Americans oppose and support Obamacare than support and oppose the Affordable Care Act

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This is a good example of how wording questions differently can lead to different results: support of Obamacare versus the Affordable Care Act.

More Americans oppose the health care law when you call it Obamacare—46% of Americans oppose the health care law when it carries Obama’s name, while just 37% oppose the Affordable Care Act.

When dubbed Obamacare, however, the law has more supporters: 29% of those polled in a new CNBC poll said they supported Obamacare; just 22% of those polled said they supported the Affordable Care Act.

CNBC asked half of its poll respondents about the Affordable Care Act and half of them about Obamacare.

There are a couple of possible explanations here: some people react more negatively or positive to Obama while others might be unclear what exactly the Affordable Care Act is.

Given these results, it makes President Obama’s decision to fully own the Obamacare title as opposed to using a more neutral title. While he might feel the legislation is a signature part of his presidency, its attachment to him rather than having a more bland bureaucratic name might be hurting its cause.

Teardowns McMansions responsible for the big American homes of today?

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A story about a family who has downsized links teardown McMansions to the big American homes of today:

At a time when smaller, older homes are routinely torn down to build sprawling new “McMansions” — the median American home size has soared 250 percent from 1,000 square feet in 1950 to 2,500 in 2008 — Lindsay and Sue took the opposite approach when they remodeled their 1920 Arts and Crafts style bungalow in 2011. They actually lost square footage, about 40 square feet.

Just how indicative are teardowns of bigger American homes? They can be viewed as a symptom of longer and larger trends, particularly when looking back to 1950. Over the course of 60 years, the average new American home expanded by a factor of 2.5. This is significant as it led Americans to have the largest average new homes in the world. And all of this has happened as the average American household shrunk – perhaps suggesting Americans like even more space and more stuff in that space. Across the board, Americans now consume more than their counterparts in the 1950s – and this includes houses.

But, there might be some merit to linking teardowns to a larger average house size. Teardowns are still relatively rare. They occur most frequently in wealthier or gentrifying neighborhoods where there is money to spend on buying a home, destroying it, and constructing a whole new home. Yet, the average new house size might continue to be pulled up by the luxury housing market that may not have been hit as hard during the economic crisis. Look at the distributions of new homes by square feet from 1999 to 2012: 34% of new American homes in 1999 were over 2,400 square feet (17% over 3,000) compared to 45% over 2,400 square feet in 2012 (26% over 3,000).

On one hand, McMansions are often the whipping boys of the early 21st century American consumer culture. On the other hand, their presence may have helped keep the average new house size high even as the lower end of the housing market has had more difficulty recovering.

Focus groups examine home designs in a warehouse

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Pulte recently put together some new home designs in a Chicago area warehouses to see how consumers would respond:

Basically, it was the latest incarnation of the company’s ongoing experiment: walking focus groups of consumers through full-size prototypes of floor plans of homes that Pulte intends to build, and asking for reactions before the first shovelful of earth has been dug. The consumers’ input enables the builder to tout the homes as “Life Tested.”

So on this September day, in an 88,000-square-foot warehouse in suburban Franklin Park, nine Chicago-area homeowners were life-testing “houses” framed in lumber and covered with sheets of Tyvek house wrap to simulate walls.

Pulte brought in a team of carpenters to do the framing for 11 houses and the fixtures within, such as kitchen islands and bathroom sinks, which were covered in corrugated paper and marked — in case you weren’t sure what you were looking at — “island,” “sink,” etc…

Total silence ensued — they weren’t supposed to speak to one another, so as not to influence opinions — as they wandered from room to room. Then they moved “upstairs” (that is, next door) to do the same thing.

This sounds like a helpful approach to getting feedback about particular interior features, even if the features aren’t fully constructed. However, I wonder how valuable this feedback is without situating a home within a particular neighborhood. I assume Pulte would say the neighborhood is another important factor and that they build attractive neighborhoods that only enhance the individual homes.

It is also interesting to see that Pulte’s designs are then said to be “life tested.” Pulte has built enough homes over the decades to legitimately claim this for established featuresbut can they really say this for new designs?

“Normal accidents” and black swans in the complex systems of today

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A sociological idea about the problems that can arise in complex systems is related to Taleb’s ideas of black swans:

This near brush with nuclear catastrophe, brought on by a single foraging bear, is an example of what sociologist Charles Perrow calls a “normal accident.” These frightening incidents are “normal” not because they happen often, but because they are almost certain to occur in any tightly connected complex system.

Today, our highly wired global financial markets are just such as system. And in recent years, aggressive traders have repeatedly played the role of the hungry bear, setting off potential disaster after potential disaster through a combination of human blunders and network failures…

In his book Normal Accidents, Perrow stresses the role that human error and mismanagement play in these scenarios. The important lesson: failures in complex systems are caused not only by the hardware and software problems but by people and their motivations.

See an earlier post dealing with the same sociological ideas. Nassim Taleb discusses this quite a bit and suggests knowing about this complexity should lead us to different kinds of actions where we try to minimize the disastrous risks and find opportunities for extraordinary success (if there are inevitable yet unknown opportunities for crisis, there could also be moments where low risk investments can pay off spectacularly).

If these are inherent traits of complex systems, does this mean more people will argue against such systems in the future? I could imagine some claiming this means we should have smaller systems and more local control. However, we may be at the point where even much smaller groups can’t escape a highly interdependent world. And, as sociologist Max Weber noted, bureaucratic structures (a classic example of complex organizations or systems) may have lots of downsides but they are relatively efficient at dealing with complex concerns. Take the recent arguments about health care: people might not like the government handling more of it but even without government control, there are still plenty of bureaucracies involved, it is a complex system, and there is plenty of potential for things to go wrong.