Category Archives: Sociology

Looking at the data behind the claim that more black men are in jail than college

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A scholar looks at his own usage of a statistic and where it came from:

About six years ago I wrote, “In 2000, the Justice Policy Institute (JPI) found evidence that more black men are in prison than in college,” in my first “Breaking Barriers” (pdf) report. At the time, I did not question the veracity of this statement. The statement fit well among other stats that I used to establish the need for more solution-focused research on black male achievement…

Today there are approximately 600,000 more black men in college than in jail, and the best research evidence suggests that the line was never true to begin with. In this two-part entry in Show Me the Numbers, the Journal of Negro Education’s monthly series for The Root, I examine the dubious origins, widespread use and harmful effects of what is arguably the most frequently quoted statistic about black men in the United States…

In September 2012, in response to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s screening of the film Hoodwinked, directed by Janks Morton, JPI issued a press release titled, “JPI Stands by Data in 2002 on Education and Incarceration.” However, if one examines the IPEDS data from 2001 to 2011, it is clear that many colleges and universities were not reporting JPI’s data 10 years ago.

In 2011, 4,503 colleges and universities across the United States reported having at least one black male student. In 2001, only 2,734 colleges and universities reported having at least one black male student, with more than 1,000 not reporting any data at all. When perusing the IPEDS list of colleges with significant black male populations today but none reported in 2001, I noticed several historically black colleges and universities, including Bowie State University, and my own alma mater, Temple University. Ironically, I was enrolled at Temple as a doctoral candidate in 2001.

When I first saw this, I first thought it might be an example of what sociologist Joel Best calls a “mutant statistic.” This is a statistic that might originally be based in fact but at some point undergoes a transformation and keeps getting repeated until it seems unchallengeable.

There might be some mutant statistic going here but it also appears to be an issue of methodology. As Toldson points out, it looks like this was a missing data issue: the 2001 survey did not include data from over 1,000 colleges. When more colleges were counted in 2011, the findings changed. If it is a methodological issue, then this issue should have been caught at the beginning.

As Best notes, it can take some time for bad statistics to be reversed. It will be interesting to see how long this particular “fact” continues to be repeated.

The rise of the “mega-Loop” in downtown Chicago

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Crain’s Chicago Business discusses the activity taking place in Chicago’s Loop and the surrounding area, an area it now calls the “mega-Loop”:

This is the new economic engine of the metropolitan area and, increasingly, the rest of Illinois. And it has reached a critical mass, data suggest, enabling its growth to be self-perpetuating, as more jobs downtown attract more residents to move nearby, which, in turn, becomes a magnet for more employers to join the inward migration.

The Chicago Loop long has been one of the world’s greatest job centers, of course. For much of its history, though, downtown emptied out after office hours. And as the city aged and its population declined, the suburbs rose to become the preferred home to generations of young families and the tollways became employment corridors of their own.

In recent years, those trends have reversed. After decades of watching the suburbs boom (often at the city’s expense), Chicago now is outperforming the surrounding area by almost any measure—jobs, income, retail sales and residential property values, to name a few—despite the loss of 200,000 people in the 2010 census.

The city is so hot that this expanded downtown is adding residents faster than any other urban core in America, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

“In the year 2020, no matter how many condos are built or sold, Chicago is likely to be a nest of center-city affluence unequaled in size—or even approached—by anyplace in America,” journalist Alan Ehrenhalt writes in “The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City.”…

There’s no question, however, that the mega-Loop is benefiting from a back-to-the-city movement that is reviving urban centers elsewhere in the U.S. In Chicago, the trend appears to be sustainable. “This is a pattern that has developed for the last 30 years, and it has only strengthened,” says Columbia University sociologist Saskia Sassen, author of “The Global City.”

These are some big claims and it will take some years to see how the longer trend plays out. As the article notes, there are a lot of factors at work including a global economy, a variety of serious social issues in Chicago, and growth patterns in the Chicago region where the outer collar counties are gaining population.

If the glitzy downtowns continue to grow as do the more exurban areas, perhaps it is the closer suburbs that are left out. These suburbs were likely founded between the mid 1850s and 1960s and are long past the era of rapid suburban growth. While researchers have noted troubling trends among inner-ring suburbs, communities adjacent to big cities, this might extend further out as growth is centered on the downtown and at the fringes.

The most common words found in American real estate listings

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A new analysis looks at the 100 most common words found in American real estate listings with “beautiful” sitting at #1:

Point2Homes, which provides marketing services to real estate agents, ran the numbers on 300,000 active listings in the United States in the first half of 2012 to see which household features and characteristics were thought by their listing agents to attract buyer interest. Though such chestnuts as “must see” and “spacious” pervade the listing verbiage, it was interesting to note which other specifics appear to merit singling out, according to Roxana Baiceanu, a spokesman for the company…

But she said the analysts were a bit surprised to see the emphasis on such specifics as hardwood floors and stainless steel, which placed second and third, respectively, on the overall frequency list.

In all, the top 100 terms aren’t particularly surprising — nearly every listing in the history of American real estate would have you believe that there’s no such thing as an unappealing home. That list includes such predictables as “stunning,” “sunny,” “finest,” “perfect,” “super” and “spectacular,” along with more concrete features such as “home office,” “soaking tub” and “dishwasher.” But when Point2 started breaking the findings into geographic regions and price segments, it was a little more revealing…

Geographically, homes for sale in the Midwest and along the East Coast seem stuck in that “beautiful” rut, where that word held the No. 1 spot. But on the West Coast and in the South, “stainless steel appliances” went to the top of the heap, she said. Midwesterners also liked “fireplaces,” which showed up with two variations in the top 10; Eastern states placed a premium on “move-in condition;” the South was the only region to put the legendarily coveted “granite countertops” in its top tier of listing terms.

It is interesting to see stainless steel and hardwood floors up there. While these might be desirable features, they are relatively quick fixes to homes while other features, such as “open concept,” are harder to change.

This list suggests several things to me:

1. Selling a home involves a lot of marketing. This is obvious but seeing this list full of vague and positive words is an extra reminder.

2. This list is like a set of code words. If you aren’t familiar with real estate listings, these may strike you in one way but if you commonly see such words, you can read between the lines.

3. I wonder what happens to homes whose listings don’t feature these common words. Is there a penalty? Would this help the home stand out to a particular kind of buyer?

A lack of automatic penalties for a New York City driver hopping the curb and killing a pedestrian

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Sarah Goodyear highlights an interesting legal area: New York City drivers whose cars kill pedestrians on the sidewalk do not automatically receive penalties.

In New York, unless the driver flees the scene (as happened in the Queens case mentioned above) or is intoxicated, crashes that kill pedestrians rarely result in criminal charges. “No criminality was suspected” is the mantra of the NYPD when it comes to pedestrian and cyclist deaths in general. The tepid police response to traffic deaths is even more jarring when applied to cases in which the vehicle actually leaves the roadway and enters what should be inviolate pedestrian space…

I talked to Steve Vaccaro, a lawyer who frequently represents victims of traffic crashes and is an outspoken advocate for pedestrian and bicyclist rights in New York City, and asked him to explain how running your vehicle up onto a sidewalk crowded with pedestrians can be seen as anything other than reckless. He explained to me that recklessness is in the eye of the beholder.“The standard for criminal charges is that the risk you take has to be a gross deviation from the risk a reasonable person would accept,” he says. “It’s about the community norm.”

And the community norm is to accept the explanations proffered by drivers such as the one who killed Martha Atwater – who, according to an unnamed police source quoted in the news, said he had suffered a diabetic blackout. Other drivers are let off the hook after simply “losing control” or hitting the gas instead of the brake. The ease with which pedestrian deaths are accepted by police as just unfortunate “accidents” has led to a deep cynicism among many observers of street safety in New York.

Shouldn’t the community norm instead be an understanding that if you drive your car in such a way that you end up on the sidewalk in the middle of one of the world’s most pedestrian-rich environments, you have somehow failed in your responsibility as a driver? Obviously, there are extreme circumstances, such as mechanical failure, in which a driver is not in any way at fault. But why are we so quick to dismiss the mayhem caused by motor vehicles as inevitable?

Seems odd to me. Frankly, pedestrians are not that protected on sidewalks. The speed and size of cars means the short jump up to the sidewalk isn’t much of an obstruction. But, perhaps this shouldn’t be too surprising considering how much Americans love cars and how much cities have been redesigned to accommodate cars.

This reminds that New Urbanists often make this argument about their neo-traditional designs for narrower streets that allow street parking and both sides and trees in the parkways. These conditions both slow down drivers, which could give pedestrians more time to react, and also provide barriers between drivers and pedestrians. Better that drivers who lose control hit inanimate objects than also harm other people in the process.

Can a $10 million home really be a McMansion?

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I’ve worked on defining a McMansion before but after seeing a recent story about a new house listing few times, I stumbled into a new definitional issue: is there a price point where a home can no longer be considered a McMansion?

Location: Los Angeles, Calif.
Price: $10,000,000
The Skinny: Just weeks after closing on a 9,000-square-foot McMansion in Bel Air and reported plans for a gut renovation, hip-hop star Kanye West and reality TV regular Kim Kardashian have decided to cohabitate elsewhere. According to recent reports, the duo have flipped the property for around a million more than they paid. Redfin lists the previous sale price at $9M, so it seems Kim and Kanye have unloaded the place for somewhere around $10M. The mansion, completed in 2010 on less than an acre in the Holmby Hills neighborhood, features five bedrooms and seven bathrooms, but that wasn’t enough for the celeb couple, who were planning to gut the place and expand to 14,000 square feet.

Several features of this home would seem to put it in McMansion territory: it is 9,000 square feet (though this is getting close to regular “mansion” status), it is on a fairly small lot for a house its size, and it may be located in a neighborhood with a number of similar homes.

Yet, the price for this home may be way beyond the typical McMansion at $10 million. This is not just a mass produced home for the American masses; it is a home that from the beginning was only available to the wealthiest in global society. In this case, two of the biggest entertainment stars were able to flip the house. Because of this, I argue this home isn’t really a McMansion at all even though it might exhibit some McMansion traits. It should fall more in the mansion category because its price makes it quite inaccessible.

Sad: creator of Diplomacy board game dies

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I was not aware that the founder of the Diplomacy board game was a Chicago area resident but after his death last Monday, both Chicago newspapers ran interesting bits. Here is a little from the Chicago Tribune obituary about how the game came to be:

The final inspiration came when Mr. Calhamer was at Harvard and, in a class on 19th century Europe, taught by Sidney Bradshaw Fay, he read his professor’s book, “The Origins of the World War.”

“That brought everything together,” Mr. Calhamer told Chicago magazine in 2009. “I thought, ‘What a board game that would make!'”

After being rejected by several game companies, Mr. Calhamer in 1959 published on his own 500 copies of Diplomacy, and the game came to develop a relatively small but extremely devoted following…

Mr. Calhamer dropped out of law school after a year and a half, then took the foreign-service exam and spent three months on a temporary assignment in Africa. When he returned, he continued to work on perfecting the game and joined Sylvania’s Applied Research Laboratory in Waltham, Mass., where he did operations research, a scientific approach to military problem-solving.

“He was hired because of the game,” Richard Turyn, a mathematician who worked at Sylvania, told the Washington Post in a 2004 feature on Diplomacy.

And here is more from the Chicago Sun-Times:

With its shifting alliances, deception and backstabbing, Diplomacy resembled a Fortran-era version of TV’s “Survivor” — set in pre-World War I Europe. Reportedly, it was popular with President Kennedy, broadcaster Walter Cronkite, and Nixon-era Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. It’s in the Hall of Fame of both Games Magazine, and boardgamegeek.com, where fans worldwide are mourning his passing…

“In many ways, the hobby game industry as we know it owes its existence to Allan Calhamer,” Webb said. Diplomacy “moved away from pure strategy games like chess and from straightforward die rolls for conflict resolution, and introduced bluffing, lying and manipulation. . . . Diplomacy opened up entirely new dimensions to gaming, truly bringing a new level of social interaction into gaming, a legacy that can be seen today in hundreds of hobby games.”

“It sort of started a new genre of games, because you’re playing up to seven players, and making secret deals, and then coming back to the board and making your moves,” said Wayne Schmittberger, a game designer and editor in chief of Games Magazine, who used to stay up all night to play it at Yale University…

One fan, Jim Burgess, wrote about how he reconciled his religion and the game’s treachery in an article on diplomacy-archive.com: “Why I am a Christian” and a Diplomacy player.

My own thoughts:

1. Diplomacy is a fantastic game and superior to Risk because it relies on conversation and negotiation. Its biggest drawback is that it takes forever to play. There is something about the interaction that is unique; impression management means a lot.

2. I played a number of times in person during college and then multiple games by email (though not for some years now). Of course, the outcome was often not what I wanted. Inevitably, the game hinges on backstabbing moments where one player is able to gain an upper hand over another. This often requires just getting one center more than another player.

3. I still prefer playing as Russia, one of the seven powers at the start of the game, which to me still has the most risk and reward.

4. My favorite website for the game is diplomacy-archive.com.

5. This game has a sort of cult status. It is difficult to find in stores and is not a well-known board game. I think more people should learn how to play.

Quick Review: The Queen of Versailles

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I recently watched the 2012 documentary The Queen of Versailles which details the quest of David and Jacqueline Siegel to built the largest house in the United States. My thoughts on the film:

1. I’ll be honest: I’m disappointed more of the movie isn’t about the house. And, I hope the house is completed just to see what an 85,000 square foot house looks like.

2. The film ends up being a lot more about what happens when a wealthy person/family suddenly sees that money disappears. This is an interesting story in itself. How do they adjust? How much of their behavior really changes? Even if they say they can readjust to a lower income, which is closer to what they grew up with, it appears this is is a really hard process. This reminds me of recent research suggesting people feel losses more strongly compared to equal gains.

3. Jackie is a somewhat sympathetic character but David Siegel is the one to watch here. His mood gets darker and darker as his financial prospects dim. I felt sorry for him; he freely admits at several points that he can’t separate his family and work and it shows in how he lives. Is this what trying to hold on to money looks like? If so, it doesn’t look attractive at all.

4. The film does address at various points who is responsible for the situation the Siegels are in: banks who made money easily available or people who got addicted to this easy money? But, the film doesn’t go far enough in trying to resolve this. It would be interesting to see banks or financial institutions interviewed on this particular case, or even more broadly, to get their side. We see the personal fallout of the problem as the Siegel family tries to recover but the film only hints at the bigger picture.

While this is an interesting story, I wonder: if the outlandishly large house was not involved, how different is this from a number of reality shows or films about wealthy people? In the end, I do think the family is pretty honest about the changes they are experiencing and perhaps it is this authenticity that sets this documentary apart.

(Note: critics like the film. On RottenTomatoes, 98 out of 103 reviews were fresh.)

New findings show Holocaust much more vast than notorious concentration camps

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New findings show the Holocaust was a widespread phenomenon including more than 42,000 sites in Europe:

The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitler’s reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945.

The figure is so staggering that even fellow Holocaust scholars had to make sure they had heard it correctly when the lead researchers previewed their findings at an academic forum in late January at the German Historical Institute in Washington…

The lead editors on the project, Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean, estimate that 15 million to 20 million people died or were imprisoned in the sites that they have identified as part of a multivolume encyclopedia. (The Holocaust museum has published the first two, with five more planned by 2025.)

The existence of many individual camps and ghettos was previously known only on a fragmented, region-by-region basis. But the researchers, using data from some 400 contributors, have been documenting the entire scale for the first time, studying where they were located, how they were run, and what their purpose was.

Two thoughts related to these new findings:

1. My Social Research class recently read a more detailed account of the Milgram Experiment of the early 1960s. (Milgram’s own book Obedience to Authority gives even more details.) College students are well aware of the Holocaust but often don’t know the lengths Milgram went to in order to verify his findings about how “normal” people might respond when given orders by authorities to hurt others. We also watched a 2009 replication from the BBC – watch here – that had similar results to Milgram. This tends to help make the 50+ year old experiment more real for students.

2. In my Culture, Media, and Society class, I use a chapter from Jeffrey Alexander’s The Meanings of Social Life that discusses how the Holocaust came to be a universal human trauma rather than one just limited to a trauma for Jews. Alexander argues that the United States approached the Holocaust as a moral superior since the act was committed by Germans and the U.S. helped liberate Europe and then emerged as the leader of the free world. But, a series of events, including the Milgram experiment, changed people’s minds about exclusivity of the Holocaust as even countries like the United States came to be seen as perpetrators of great violence. In other words, we are all capable of acting like Nazis under certain conditions.

Why Public Policy Polling (PPP) should not conduct “goofy polls”

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Here is an explanation why the polling firm Public Policy Polling (PPP) conducts “goofy polls”:

But over the past year, PPP has been regularly releasing goofy, sometimes pointless polls about every other month. In early January, one such survey showed that Congress was less popular than traffic jams, France and used-car salesmen. According to their food-centric surveys released this week, Americans clearly prefer Ronald McDonald over Burger King for President; Democrats are more likely to get their chicken at KFC than Chick-fil-A, and Republicans are more apt to order pancakes than waffles. “We’re obviously doing a lot of polling on the key 2014 races,” says Jensen. “That kind of polling is important. We also like to do some fun polls.”

PPP, which has a left-leaning reputation, releases fun polls in part because they’re entertaining but mostly in an attempt to set themselves apart as an approachable polling company. Questions for polls are sometimes crowd-sourced via Twitter. The outfit does informal on-site surveys about what state they should survey next. And when the results of offbeat polls come out, the tidbits have potential to go viral. “We’re not trying to be the next Gallup or trying to be the next Pew,” Jensen says. “We’re really following a completely different model where we’re known for being willing to poll on stuff other people aren’t willing to poll on.” Like whether Republicans are willing to eat sushi (a solid 64% are certainly not).

Which means polls about “Mexican food favorability” are a publicity stunt on some level. Jensen says PPP, which has about 150 clients, gets more business from silly surveys and the ethos it implies than they do cold-calling. One such client was outspoken liberal Bill Maher, who hired PPP to poll for numbers he could use on his HBO show Real Time. That survey, released during the 2012 Republican primaries, found that Republicans were more likely to vote for a gay candidate than an atheist candidate—and that conservative virgins preferred Mitt Romney, while Republicans with 20 or more sexual partners strongly favored Ron Paul.

Jensen argues that the offbeat polls do provide some useful information. One query from the food survey, for instance, asks respondents whether they consider themselves obese: about 20% of men and women said yes, well under the actual American obesity rate of 35.7%.  Information like that could give health crusaders some fodder for, say, crafting public education PSAs. Still, the vast majority of people are only going to use these polls to procrastinate at work: goodness knows it’s hard to resist a “scientific” analysis of partisans’ favorite pizza toppings (Republicans like olives twice as much!).

Here is my problem with this strategy: it is short-sighted and privileges PPP. While polling firms do need to market themselves as there are a number of organizations that conduct national polls, this strategy can harm the whole field. When the average American sees the results of “goofy polls,” is it likely to improve their view of the polling in general? I argue there is already enough suspicion in America about polls and their validity without throwing in polls that don’t tell us as much. This suspicion contributes to lower response rates across the board, a problem for all survey researchers.

In the end, the scientific nature of polling takes a hit when any firm is willing to reduce polling to marketing.

Michigan to appoint emergency manager for Detroit

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The city of Detroit will soon lose self-governance as Michigan Governor Rick Snyder says an emergency manager will take control:

“I believe it’s important to declare the city of Detroit in financial emergency,” Snyder announced at a midday press conference on Friday, in front of the banner, “Detroit Can’t Wait.” The EM will assume the suspended powers of the mayor and city council, and will take unilateral control of municipal finances, union contracts, pension systems, and more.

The consolidation of power will likely lead to cuts and asset sales that the mayor and city council had sought to avoid, which could include the privatization of most of the city’s water supply or the sale of Belle Isle Park. The EM also has the power to declare the city bankrupt, though that option seems unlikely.

The process has racial and political overtones. Detroit is over 80 percent black and its city government is controlled by Democrats; the Michigan statehouse is largely white and firmly in Republican control. If an EM is appointed in nearby Inkster (pop. 25,000, currently under a “consent agreement” with the state), as Chris Savage has pointed out, more than half of Michigan’s 1.4 million African Americans will be governed by unelected officials.

Snyder’s decision follows last week’s devastating report from a state review team that Detroit is unable to address its long-term financial problems. The Motor City, the investigation found, has $14.9 billion in long-term debt and pension obligations, and its general fund has not shown a surplus since 2004. The review team unanimously recommended state intervention…

Five other cities in Michigan are also under state control. Detroit will be the largest city in the country to lose the ability to govern itself.

It will be interesting to see what goals the emergency manager has. To fix the budget and turn a surplus? To contract the city to a viable size? To try to attract growth? To stem the population loss? To privatize unprofitable utilities? Related to the goals, I’m also curious to know how the state will determine whether the emergency manager is “successful.” What happens if the emergency manager doesn’t work out?

In the long run, the ability to self-govern seems to be a bedrock principle in American life. I wonder how much Governor Snyder really wants to do this versus feeling like it has to be done to turn Detroit around. The political fall-out from such a move may not be pretty and states don’t want to be in long-term positions like these.