Check out my interview about American suburbs and McMansions with our campus radio station, WETN, which has started a new series of interview with Wheaton faculty and people on campus.
Category Archives: Sociology
Will Nate Silver ruin his brand with NCAA predictions?
Statistical guru Nate Silver, known for his 2012 election predictions, has been branching out into other areas recently on the New York Times site. Check out his 2013 NCAA predictions. Or look at his 2013 Oscar predictions.
While Silver has a background in sports statistics, I wonder if these forays into new areas with the imprimatur of the New York Times will eventually backfire. In many ways, these new areas have less data than presidential elections and thus, Silver has to step further out on a limb. For example, look at these predictions for the 2013 NCAA bracket:
The top pick for 2013, Louisville, only has a 22.7% chance of winning. If Silver goes with this pick of Louisville, and he does, then he by his own figures will be wrong 77.3% of the time. These are not good odds.
I’m not sure Silver can really win much by predicting the NCAA champion or the Oscars because the odds of making a wrong prediction are higher. What happens if he is wrong a number of times in a row? Will people still listen to him in the same way? What happens when the 2016 presidential election comes along? Of course, Silver could continue to develop better models and make more accurate picks but even this takes attention away from his political predictions.
How the megarich live in London: in the shadows
A profile of a newer housing development in London suggests the megarich live in secrecy:
The secrecy extends to the media, many of whose members, including myself and the London Sunday Times’s and Vanity Fair’s A. A. Gill, have tried but failed to gain entry to the building. “The vibe is junior Arab dictator,” says Peter York, co-author of The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, the riotous 1982 style guide documenting the shopping and mating rituals of a certain striving class of Brits, who claimed Knightsbridge’s high-end shopping area, which stretches from Harrods to Sloane Square, as their urban heartland…The really curious aspect of One Hyde Park can be appreciated only at night. Walk past the complex then and you notice nearly every window is dark. As John Arlidge wrote in The Sunday Times, “It’s dark. Not just a bit dark—darker, say, than the surrounding buildings—but black dark. Only the odd light is on. . . . Seems like nobody’s home.”
That’s not because the apartments haven’t sold. London land-registry records say that 76 had been by January 2013 for a total of $2.7 billion—but, of these, only 12 were registered in the names of warm-blooded humans, including Christian Candy, in a sixth-floor penthouse. The remaining 64 are held in the names of unfamiliar corporations: three based in London; one, called One Unique L.L.C., in California; and one, Smooth E Co., in Thailand. The other 59—with such names as Giant Bloom International Limited, Rose of Sharon 7 Limited, and Stag Holdings Limited—belong to corporations registered in well-known offshore tax havens, such as the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, Liechtenstein, and the Isle of Man.
From this we can conclude at least two things with certainty about the tenants of One Hyde Park: they are extremely wealthy, and most of them don’t want you to know who they are and how they got their money.
This reminds me of Veblen’s idea of conspicuous consumption where the rich spend or waste money to show that they can. In other words, the rich often want people to take notice of their wealth and status. But, this London development suggests the opposite: some of the megarich today want to stay hidden. Why is this? I wonder if it has to do with modern society where having lots of money is not always viewed positively, particularly when tied to particular industries or practices such as storing money in tax havens.
Scholars suggest switch from urban studies to urban science and the DNA of cities
Several scholars recently called for pursuing urban science:
William Solecki compares the current study of cities to natural history in the 19th century. Back then most natural scientists were content to explore and document the extent of biological and behavioral differences in the world. Only recently has science moved from cataloguing life to understanding the genetic code that forms its very basis.
It’s time for urban studies to evolve the same way, says Solecki, a geographer at Hunter College who’s also director of the C.U.N.Y. Institute for Sustainable Cities. Scholars from any number of disciplines — economics and history to ecology and psychology — have explored and documented various aspects of city life through their own unique lenses. What’s needed now, Solecki contends, is a new science of urbanization that looks beyond the surface of cities to the fundamental laws that form their very basis too…
In Environment, the researchers outline three basic research goals for their proposed science of urbanization:
- To define the basic components of urbanization across time, space, and place.
- To identify the universal laws of city-building, presenting urbanization as a natural system.
- To link this new system of urbanization with other fundamental processes that occur in the world.
The result, Solecki believes, will be a stronger understanding of the “DNA” of cities — and, by extension, an improved ability to address urban problems in a systemic manner. Right now, for instance, urban transport scholars respond to the problem of sprawl and congestion with ideas like bike lanes or bus-rapid transit lines. Those programs can be great for cities, but in a way they fix a symptom of a problem that still lingers. An improved science of urbanization would isolate the underlying processes that caused this unsustainable development in the first place.
Three quick thoughts:
1. I think this assumes we have the kind of data and methodology that could get at the “DNA of cities.” Presumably, this is big data collected in innovative ways. To use the natural science metaphor, it is one thing to know about the existence of DNA and it is another thing to collect and analyze it. With this new kind of data, cities can then be viewed as complex systems with lots of moving pieces.
2. Are there necessarily universal laws underlying cities? We are currently in an academic world where there are a variety of theories about urban growth but they tend to be idiosyncratic to particular cities, apply to particular time periods, and emphasize different aspects of social, economic, and political life. Is this because no one has really put it all together yet or because it is really hard to find universal laws?
3.
“Being White in Philly”
Philadelphia magazine recently published a piece titled “Being White in Philly.” Here is the argument of the article:
I’ve shared my view of North Broad Street with people—white friends and colleagues—who see something else there: New buildings. Progress. Gentrification. They’re sunny about the area around Temple. I think they’re blind, that they’ve stopped looking. Indeed, I’ve begun to think that most white people stopped looking around at large segments of our city, at our poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods, a long time ago. One of the reasons, plainly put, is queasiness over race. Many of those neighborhoods are predominantly African-American. And if you’re white, you don’t merely avoid them—you do your best to erase them from your thoughts.
At the same time, white Philadelphians think a great deal about race. Begin to talk to people, and it’s clear it’s a dominant motif in and around our city. Everyone seems to have a story, often an uncomfortable story, about how white and black people relate…
Fifty years after the height of the civil rights movement, more than 25 years after electing its first African-American mayor, Philadelphia remains a largely segregated city, with uneasy boundaries in culture and understanding. And also in well-being. There is a black middle class, certainly, and blacks are well-represented in our power structure, but there remains a vast and seemingly permanent black underclass. Thirty-one percent of Philadelphia’s more than 600,000 black residents live below the poverty line. Blacks are more likely than whites to be victims of a crime or commit one, to drop out of school and to be unemployed.
What gets examined publicly about race is generally one-dimensional, looked at almost exclusively from the perspective of people of color. Of course, it is black people who have faced generations of discrimination and who deal with it still. But our public discourse ignores the fact that race—particularly in a place like Philadelphia—is also an issue for white people. Though white people never talk about it.
Everyone might have a race story, but few whites risk the third-rail danger of speaking publicly about race, given the long, troubled history of race relations in this country and even more so in this city. Race is only talked about in a sanitized form, when it’s talked about at all, with actual thoughts and feelings buried, which only ups the ante. Race remains the elephant in the room, even on the absurd level of who holds the door to enter a convenience store.
My first thought after quickly reading through the article was that the writer ignores the privileged positions of whites vis a vis minorities in Philadelphia and the United States. Part of what makes it difficult for whites to talk about race is they then have to acknowledge that currently and historically whites have been advantaged and don’t face the same kind of discrimination that blacks and others have faced. Without being willing to tackle these power dynamics and the larger structural inequalities at hand, it is difficult to have a conversation.
Bad logic: stories of successful college dropouts obscure advantages of going to college
Names like Jobs, Gates, Dell, and others lend star power to the myth of the wildly successful college dropout. One recent New York Times homage to the phenomenon compared dropping out to “lighting out for the territories to strike gold,” with one young executive describing it as “almost a badge of honor” among startup entrepreneurs. Like any myth, this story has a kernel of truth: There are exceptional individuals whose hard work, determination, and intelligence make up for the lack of a college degree. If they could do it, one might think, why can’t everybody?
Such a question ignores the outlier status of these exceptional drop-out entrepreneurs and innovators.
Those who are able to achieve such success often rely on a set of skills already developed before they get to college. They know how to educate themselves, get a bank loan, and manage their time and their money. They may benefit from a network of family, friends and acquaintances who open doors and provide a safety net.
But what happens to young people without access to these important resources? For them, skipping college to pursue business success is like investing their savings in lottery tickets in the hopes they will be a multimillion-dollar winner, or failing to pursue an education because they expect to be an NBA superstar. The reality is that the next college dropout will not be LeBron James, James Cameron, or Mark Zuckerberg. He will likely belong to the millions of college drop-outs you don’t hear the press singing about. These are the 34 million Americans over 25 with some college credits but no diploma. Nearly as large as the state of California, this group is 71 percent more likely to be unemployed and four times more likely to default on student loans. Far from being millionaires, they earn 32 percent less than college graduates, on average.
I’ve seen this logic used in arguments about not having to spend lots of money on college or from those who see college as liberal indoctrination. As Zimmer argues, using outliers to build a theory is just not a good idea. These famous cases are held up partly because they are so rare, not because this is necessarily a good path to pursue. This is similar to the logic used in holding up rages to riches stories; while it is true that social mobility, upward and downward, occurs in the United States, a phenomenal change in position over one lifetime is more rare.
I’ve used this very example with my Introduction to Sociology class when talking about why people go to college. I ask them if they are aware of wealthy college dropouts like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. They say yes. I then ask if they dropped out of college, would their parents accept these stories as good rationale? They answer no. I then tell them a little of the Bill Gates story as relayed by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers. Gates attended a pretty good high school that through one student’s parent who worked for a computer company was able to purchase a used mainframe computer. Gates then had a rare opportunity at the time for a high school student to spend hours with the mainframe and learn about it. He was then able to build on this background and later founded Microsoft with Paul Allen. Gladwell uses this as an example of the Matthew effect where those who come from more advantaged backgrounds (or who happened to be the oldest hockey players) tend to get more opportunities later in life.
The antidote to McMansions: tiny houses
If you are suffering from McMansion disease, here is a cure: the tiny house.
Say what you will about tiny homes, the reasons behind their increasing popularity are pretty solid: Small houses are inexpensive and easy to maintain, and they also offer more privacy than your average apartment.
Micro-spaces are especially popular with eco-conscious homeowners invested in consuming less—a stark contrast from their McMansion-buying counterparts of years past. A tiny home pretty much guarantees less electricity and water will be wasted, which is always a good thing.
These mini-houses are from all over the U.S. and they’re selling for a fraction of what a regular home would cost. Even if you’re not up for the challenge of moving into one, they’ll at least inspire you to imagine a reality that’s less focused on accumulating stuff and more focused on living.
While I have read much criticism of McMansions in recent years, I’ve never before seen it compared to a disease or sickness. Are McMansions a sickness the United States needs to be rid of? I’ve tended to see such homes more as symptoms of some larger issues in the United States such as an emphasis on homeownership and sprawl. Talking about McMansions as a disease could contribute to a view that McMansions are a social problem that has been socially constructed. There may not be anything inherently wrong with such homes until they are compared to other homes that are seen as being more moral or decent.
New study finds CHA’s efforts to relocate public housing residents has found some success
A new report released Monday by the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, paints a largely positive picture of the Chicago Housing Authority efforts. The study comes while the CHA is retooling its Plan for Transformation, an ambitious multi-year effort begun in 1999 that broke up concentrated high-rise developments…
Several years ago the Urban Institute told CHA that moving families wasn’t simply a construction issue; to succeed, residents needed services. Popkin said that steep learning curve for CHA has paid off after the housing agency implemented a strong resident service program in 2007.
Researchers say that vulnerable residents need intensive wraparound services to address mental health, low literacy and lack of job skills. The report suggests that residents who’ve received intensive case management have fared better. The services cost about $2,900 annually per household but can increase family stability and reduce depression. CHA families have grappled with the trauma of poverty: physical health problems, anxiety, high mortality rates.
But Popkin said it’s not all a pretty picture. Emphasis on adults has meant that improvements have not always trickled down to children. Relocation has been especially hard on them and causes disruption in school and socially.
“I worry a lot about the kids,” Popkin said. “The services that helped the adults do better don’t seem to have helped the kids. It’s an urgent issue. These are kids who have grown up in families who’ve lived in chronic disadvantage for generations and it’s going to take more than just moving to slightly safer places to help get them on a better trajectory.”
Some young people have struggled academically and have had a tough time adapting to new neighborhoods where they are perceived as outsiders. And they continue to live amid violence. The Urban Institute is currently working on CHA incorporating a dual generation approach at Altgeld Gardens, a public housing development on the southern edge of the city.
You can read the reports for yourself on The Urban Institute website here. It looks like the full story of relocated public housing residents is more complicated than this news story suggests. While there has been good movement on several factors, including more psychological factors like feelings of safety and fighting depression (which is what Popkin and several other authors also report in the very interesting 2010 book Moving to Opportunity: The Story of an American Experiment to Fight Ghetto Poverty), we don’t yet know the long-term effects of relocation. For example, the abstract for Brief 2 suggests:
Those who got intensive case management and supportive services through the Chicago Family Case Management Demonstration have significantly lower rates of depression, better physical health, and higher rates of employment. However, even with these gains, many adults struggle with extremely high rates of debilitating chronic illnesses that prevent them from finding full-time employment and many children still grapple with the fallout from growing up with chronic violence.
Relocation is not a quick fix when there are deeper issues involved including residential segregation, discrimination, poverty, and acquiring social and human capital. As Brief 1 notes, relocated residents would benefit from ongoing services…but this requires ongoing funding.
Studies suggest texting in class is related to lower grades, GPA
Several studies in recent years have examined the link between students texting and using Facebook in in class and their grades. The Chicago Tribune summarizes the studies:
In the past five years researchers have published the results of five surveys and experiments that link texting and Facebooking with lower academic performance. In 2011, researchers at California State University reported that students who received or sent a high number of text messages during a video recorded lecture scored worse on a quiz than those who received or sent few or no text messages.
In a 2012 study, a researcher at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania surveyed 1,800 students about how often they Facebook, instant message, email, text, search online and talk on the phone in class. Among the results: 69 percent of students reported they had texted in class, and students who texted or used Facebook more frequently in class had lower overall semester GPAs. The author of that study, Reynol Junco, also co-wrote a study that linked texting and Facebooking during study time with lower GPAs…
“That I can be definitive about: That’s not working. If you’re going to search (online) during class, I don’t have any data telling you to stop. If you’re going to email during class, I don’t have any data to tell you to stop. But do not text or Facebook during class. Do not text or Facebook while you’re studying for your classes, because that’s another area where this is definitely a negative.”…
Junco’s evidence against texting and Facebooking is correlational, meaning that his studies show that students who Facebook or text more in class or while studying do worse academically, but not that the texting or Facebooking itself is causing the problem. It’s possible that, say, an easily distractible student is texting a lot and doing poorly in class, with the underlying cause of poor performance being the distractibility, not the texting. But Junco points to two other college studies in which researchers, not students, largely determined which students would do the most media multitasking in class.
In both the studies — the California State study and one published in 2012 in the journal Computers and Education — a form of media multitasking (texting or Facebooking) was linked to lower student performance.
It would be interesting to pair data like this with student’s perceptions of whether they are doing better or worse in a class because they are texting, browsing, or not. It would be one thing if students knew that texting was distracting and did it anyway and yet another thing if they were so used to texting that they were unaware of its possible effects.
Let’s say future studies more clearly establish a causal link. Would colleges then move to banning cell phone use or Facebooking in class? Or is this one of those areas that would generate a lot of negative feedback from students who would want the freedom to do more of what they want in class?
How boundary work helps explains false equivalence in the media
Read here for an explanation of how the sociological concept of boundary work is applied to the issue of false equivalence in media coverage:
Boundary work is a kind of rhetorical work that is performed in public argument: something is asserted to be science by stressing what it is not (pseudo-science, or faith, or religion, or what have you). Even Tim Geithner did it in his exit interview when he painted his own work as just a kind of technocratic problem-solving rather than politics, see this analysis.It seems to me that our political discourse also contains a similar kind of boundary work — between “politics” and “policy.” Our politicians will always say: what I’m doing is just plain old common sense or the right thing or just good policy, or just the solution to a problem; whereas what my opponent is doing is playing politics. And if one sees politics as actually a way of managing relations between conflicting groups of people, one can see why they do that.
For instance, reforming the American health care system is almost certainly a matter of redistribution: taking money from older people and giving it to others (the uninsured, younger people, etc.). But one can’t say that if one is a politician, and so there is a delicate balancing act: one’s own work is constructed as problem-solving and policy-making, the opponent is portrayed as playing politics (where politics is understood to be trading off between different social groups).
I think this kind of boundary work exists in journalism too (and more on why it exists later); it’s what you call false equivalence (and Yglesias calls bipartisan think). Here the newspaper is seen as above politics, which is what grubby politicians do. And therefore the contrast between the policy that the newspaper is advocating (which is not politics but merely good moral sensible stuff), and that what the politicians are doing. It is imperative, I think, in this model that both parties be painted in the same brush. Because if you don’t, then you agree with one of the parties, which therefore makes you political.
Why should the newspapers practice this kind of boundary work? My sense (which comes straight from Paul Starr’s history of the media) is that it’s a holdover from the times when the newspaper industry changed. As we all know now (from arguing about partisanship), newspapers in the 19th century were unabashedly partisan. They also catered to niches, and made money from subscriptions. And that changed sometime in the 20th century when newspapers started to make money from advertisements — and therefore they had to be less partisan and attract more people. Hence the objective tone of the reported stories (he says, she says) — and also I think the false equivalence of the editorials.
The concept of symbolic boundaries is an important one in the sociology of culture. Groups or organizations engage in drawing boundaries between what they are (by their own definition) and what they say others are. Policing these boundaries is a consistent and tricky task; the changes the other groups make might force a group to redraw its own boundaries. Or, outside social forces and circumstances might push all groups to redraw or double down on their boundaries. A good application of this concept to defining social class in the United States and France is Michele Lamont’s book Money, Morals, and Manners.
