Category Archives: Sociology

Why two media sources ranking the world’s wealthiest people is a good thing

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While Forbes had the corner on the market for years in compiling a ranking of the world’s richest people, there is now another option: this week Bloomberg released its Billionaires Index. One commentator thinks we don’t need both Forbes and Bloomberg examining this topic:

The Forbes list, available online today, is published every March. (Its companion, the “Forbes 400” list of richest Americans published in September.) It’s hard to not feel that Bloomberg’s outing takes some of the air out of Forbes usually-hyped cover story on who are the world’s richest people. This year’s edition proves unexciting not only because there were few shake-ups in the top spots from 2011’s list, but also because these rankings don’t appear all that different from Bloomberg’s.

Highlights from 2012’s version: With $69 billion, Mexico’s Carlos Slim Helu ranks No. 1 again for the third year in the row. (The magazine also profiled him.) Helu was followed by another 1,225 billionaires, starting with Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Bernard Arnault (of Louis Vuitton fame), who were also two through four last year. But beside no one being knocked off the top of this year’s Forbes list, it’s markedly similar to how rich Bloomberg News told us these folks were. Here’s a side-by-side comparison, with Forbes on the left and Bloomberg on the right.

So there are slight differences. Bloomberg has Arnault one spot lower and places fashion mogul Amancio Ortega down to seventh. Bloomberg puts the Koch brothers in the top 10, whereas Forbes had them both pegged at 12th. But isn’t this hair-splitting? If anything, the discrepancies show how hard it is to measure rich people’s riches.

What today’s Forbes list shows more than anything is that we don’t need two billionaires lists reminding us how wealthy the wealthy are. If we had to choose one, we’d go with Bloomberg’s, since it’s updated daily instead of once a year. But we doubt that will stop Forbes from producing its longstanding annual issue as long folks keep buying it.

I disagree. Here is why: I think that having two media sources looking at this topic will actually give readers better information. With two publications tackling the subject, I hope this improves their measurement of wealth for both publications. Perhaps we could average the rankings across the publications to get a more accurate assessment of what is going on. In the end, two sets of people looking at the data is better than one. Because Bloomberg is updating this list daily, perhaps this will push Forbes to update their lists more frequently and move away from a magazine era schedule to an Internet era schedule. The two lists do have some differences and this is not inconsequential. Lots of people are interested in this list and I’m sure some of the people at the top of the list have some interest in where they rank. Of course, these differences can indicate “how hard it is to measure rich people’s riches” but this doesn’t mean we should just throw up our hands and go with one list. Just because these people are really wealthy doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have more fine-grained analysis of their financial holdings. (This sometimes seems to happen quite a bit in sociology: we assume we know about the elites and so spend more time studying marginalized groups but we have fewer in-depth studies of the elites who do have a lot of influence in society.)

A second issue: Bloomberg obviously thinks there is a market for another list that is updated daily and so this is a market decision as well as a journalistic interest in updating this information more frequently. The Forbes list always gets a lot of attention and Bloomberg probably wants to draw away some of that market. I imagine there is enough room in the market for both lists to survive, particularly as the two could serve different markets. However, it will be interesting to see how the rest of the media responds to changes in the Bloomberg list: if someone moves up from #3 to #2 in the next few days, will there be news stories about it? Will journalists providing background information about the wealthy reference the Forbes or the Bloomberg list?

Preserving “authentic” spaces can lead to more “contrived and uniform places”

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While I haven’t read the book, I was intrigued by this one paragraph that describes sociologist Sharon Zukin’s argument in her recent book Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Spaces.

Sharon Zukin’s Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places signals its ambivalent relationship to Jacobs’s work in its subtitle, which both echoes Jacobs and argues with her legacy. Zukin’s argument is that Jacobs’s city is as much an artificial construct as any other, and that its imposition on living cities has tended to create mummified museums of urbanism rather than vibrant and authentic centres of human life: above all, it has unleashed the wave of middle-class-friendly gentrification that has made the special into the commonplace, the characterful into the bland, the human into the corporate. It seems that the more people insist on authenticity and individuality, the more contrived and uniform places become. Zukin uses New York to illustrate the problem: if you don’t know the city, you will definitely be at a disadvantage, as she wanders through streets and districts providing a sometimes illuminating, sometimes irritating commentary showing the ways in which the city has lost — or rather sold — its soul.

Authenticity: something that many people want but it is hard to find in places and perhaps even harder to maintain.

This reminds me of some ideas I’ve run into in recent years. One ASA presentation I saw a few years ago addressed this very issue by looking at a neighborhood that was just on the edge of gentrification in Chicago. This means the neighborhood hadn’t quite yet been overrun by wealthier, white residents but it had enough artists and wealthier residents to be clearly on the rise. The argument was that soon this place was going to tip into gentrification, meaning the true grittiness of the neighborhood would be scrubbed away as people moved in looking for “authentic” urban living.

Additionally, you could argue that wanting to preserve authenticity is behind many NIMBY efforts. Once having moved into a place, residents want to preserve what they liked in the first place, sometimes going so far that it seems like they wish they could have frozen that place in time. In these cases, residents are often fighting against outsiders and trying to promote their own vision of an authentic neighborhoods. In the end, few, if any, places can really be frozen in time except maybe corporatized spaces like Main Street U.S.A. at DisneyWorld. Places change and might go through cycles when they are authentic and then become inauthentic.

So how exactly do you get authentic places? This particular reviewer doesn’t like Zukin’s suggestion that government should help guide this process. I might chime in that government in the past has been known to promote its own interests or the interests of wealthy businesspeople over residents. At the same time, if we leave everything up to an unfettered market, authentic spaces tend to get commodified, taken over by wealthy residents, and influenced by corporations. I would guess that Zukin prefers to have places where residents have a say in what happens in the neighborhood, that everything isn’t decided by outside forces and that government can act as a referee to look out for the interests of current residents.

A reminder: there are plenty of people who have a stake in whether a place is authentic or not and this complicates everything.

Not much of a price premium for net-zero-energy homes

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As more homebuyers seek out green homes and want to reduce energy bills, they can purchase a net-zero-energy home for a price that may not be as high as you think:

The Spencer’s new home is part of a niche, though growing, segment of the U.S. housing market — net-zero-energy homes, many of which use solar energy to achieve net-zero-energy use vs. consumption. In the sun-sparse days of winter, energy consumption often exceeds generation, but in the sunny days of summer, energy generation often far exceeds consumption.

As of February 2012, 37 homes have been rated net-zero-energy or better on the industry-standard Home Energy Rating System e-scale of the U.S.-standard auditor. This number could grow 1,000 percent or more in 2012 if projects continue as planned.

“Interest has been off the charts,” said Todd Louis, vice-president of Tommy Williams Homes, the Florida-based building company that built the Spencers’ home. So far, the company has built and sold four, and has plans to build 35 to 40 more in 2012. The price of their net-zero-energy homes are still $30,000 to $40,000 higher than those that are not net-zero-energy, said Williams, but that margin is dropping with a decline in photovoltaic costs. The Spencers paid $250,000 for their home…

Shea Homes has long featured extremely energy-efficient designs, though the upgrade to solar panels could be costly — around $30,000, said Asay. He and his wife were considering the upgrade, but when the announcement was made that the new net-zero homes, with solar, were only $7,000 more than the previous base model, they jumped: “Sign us up.”

This approach is different than another housing approach that has generated buzz: passive houses are homes that are so insulated that they use a ventilator to move air from inside to outside (and vice versa – see some diagrams here). The energy costs in these homes are very low. In contrast, net-zero-energy homes have higher energy costs than passive homes but then offset the energy usage. In this article, the homes have solar panels (I wonder if this could be done in other ways – wind turbines on the roof?) which also means that the homes have to be in climates and locations with more sunlight. If the costs for doing this are reasonable and introduced completely at the beginning (meaning it can be spread out across the life of a mortgage), I could see how this is attractive for homebuyers.

I expect that we will see more homes like this in the future: beyond wanting to reduce energy bills, more homeowners appear to be interested in green homes. The housing industry is starting to warm to this idea and there are a number of ways that new homes can adapt: more sustainable materials, being a passive house or a net-zero-energy house, downsizing or right-sizing, and being in denser neighborhoods where homeowners can drive less and use less land.

Lots of sociological themes in Time’s “10 ideas that are changing your life”

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I enjoy reading magazines and other media sources that are willing to consider the world of ideas and what new thinking we all need to know about. Thus, Time’s “10 ideas that are changing your life” are not only interesting – there is a lot of sociological material in these ten ideas. Here are a few sociological musings about four of these ideas:

1. “Living Alone is the New Norm.” I’ve highlighted some of the recent reviews of the new research from sociologist Eric Klinenberg (see here and here) that shows that Americans living alone “make up 28% of all U.S. households, which means they are now tied with childless couples as the most prominent residential type, more common than the nuclear family, the multigenerational family and roommate or group home.” Another interesting line: “Living alone helps us pursue sacred modern values – individual freedom, personal control and self-realization.” That is an interesting trio of values to mull over.

3. “The Rise of the Nones.” Sixteen percent of Americans claim to be non-religious but this group is particularly interesting because 4% claim to be agnostic or atheist. Thus, many of the “nones” are spiritual or religious but dissatisfied with organized religion. This group can be examined as part of a larger debate about whether American religion is declining or not. This also presents a challenge for organized religion: how do you get these religious or spiritual “nones” to buy into established houses of worship?

7. “High-Status Stress.” New findings suggest that people in charge or in the higher classes experience more stress: “In fact, research indicates that as you near the top, life stress increases so dramatically that its toxic effects essentially cancel out many positive aspects of succeeding.” It may not be easy to be at the top even if you have the power and ability to do more of what you want. I’m not sure how this would affect the class struggles between the upper and lower classes but it is interesting information nonetheless.

9. “Nature is Over.” Humans have altered the earth in many ways, doing so much so that our conception of nature might need to change: “The reality is that in the Anthropocene, there may simply be no room for nature, at least not nature as we’ve known and celebrated it – something separate from human beings – something pristine. There’s no getting back to the Garden [of Eden], assuming it ever existed.” This reminds me of the romanticism of nature in the mid 1800s that influenced how early American suburbs were created (designing winding streets to preserve pastoral views) and how Central Park was created (meant to preserve a piece of nature in the midst of the big city). More realistically, neither city parks or most suburbs really present much of nature – based on an idea in James Howard Kunstler’s TED talk about suburbs, these are more elaborate “nature band-aids.”

Several of the other ideas have sociological implications as well.

Reading through this list, it reminds me of how much I enjoy reading and talking about new ideas and where society might be going. If I could get all of my students to share this enthusiasm and develop a capacity to seek out and interact with ideas on their own (using the critical thinking skills and other tools they have picked up in college), it would make me happy.

Characters on GCB have taste because they don’t live in McMansions

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I was amused to run across this description of the homes for the new ABC series GCB. While the women may be gossipers, at least they have good taste and don’t live in McMansions:

The production team spent four days scouting historic and modern houses in Texas, soaking up local color in the tony Dallas enclaves of Highland Park, Preston Hollow and University Park. “We visited homes, churches, country clubs, offices, stores, etc., and immersed ourselves in everything Dallas,” says Dugally, an Emmy nominee in 2004 for Arrested Development. The pilot was shot on location, though Los Angeles doubles for Dallas in the series. “It was not an easy task as Dallas is known for its large expanses of property, many without high fences or security and lots of brick architecture,” she adds. “Los Angeles is full of palm trees that don’t do well in Dallas. We were able to find several wonderful houses and a great church in the L.A. basin that serve as the exteriors for our show.”

Although Dallas certainly earns its bigger-is-better notoriety — Aspen’s housewife character has a French Country-style kitchen with a countertop deep fryer and three double ovens — Dugally notes that the houses they saw there weren’t McMansions. “Dallas is the most cosmopolitan city in Texas. Most of the money is old money,” says the designer. “I said, ‘Let’s give our characters taste.’ We made a very conscious decision that the look be over-the-top but still elegant.”

For the home of Amanda’s colorful mother Gigi (Potts), production designer Dugally wanted the interiors “to remain very upscale but traditional.” Front and center is the ornate, winding staircase with a landing topped by a gold leafed dome. Asian accents, custom-designed wallpapers by Astek in Los Angeles and white wainscoting are just a few of the design elements used for the warm gold- and cream-toned decor.

Gun-toting Gigi gets her own rifle-display room. “It’s completely taken from memory from a house I saw in Dallas,” says Dugally. Among the animal trophies is a mounted javelina. In high school, Bibb’s Amanda character had branded ugly-duckling Carlene as one of the creatures, a relative of the pig that’s native to the Southwest. Says Dugally, “Our executive producer Robert Harling wanted a javelina wherever we could get one, and he was so thrilled we found it. It’s so ugly.”

Read on for descriptions of some of the other houses.

Perhaps the characters on the show have some reason to have more taste – perhaps they are educated and/or have money. The inspiration for the fictional Hillside Park is supposedly Highland Park, a well-known Dallas suburb that is quite monied (a median household income of about $150k). If you have enough money, you don’t need a “traditional McMansion” to impress people because you don’t want to look like the nouveau riche and would prefer to show your wealth through refined and expensive accoutrements.

But the decision to have them avoid McMansions is still intriguing, particularly if they wanted the houses to be over-the-top. Even diva or “sassy” characters on TV can’t have McMansions because this would reflect badly on them.

The stories of Chicago synagogues that became black churches

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An article in the Chicago Tribune takes a look at black churches in Chicago that once were synagogues. Here is how this happened:

[Historian Irving] Cutler observed that ethnic groups often follow each other through Chicago’s neighborhoods. The patterns are regular: Mexicans trailed Czechs and Slovaks from Pilsen to Little Village and Cicero, for example, Cutler said. Blacks have followed Jews — westward from Maxwell Street to Lawndale and Austin; southward from the Near South Side to Bronzeville and South Shore.

Like other immigrants, Jews came to this country hoping their children would have opportunities denied them in the Old Country. For a while, they couldn’t realize part of the American dream: a nice home on a tree-lined street in a bucolic community. Some suburbs were restricted, others unfriendly to Jews.

“Then came World War II and the GI Bill which enabled veterans to become homeowners,” Cutler said. “There weren’t many single-family homes with nice yards in Lawndale. It was a neighborhood of two-flats and apartment buildings. So they went to the suburbs.”

Synagogues were sold to black congregations, whose members still couldn’t follow their previous owners to many suburbs in a region still often defined by racial and ethnic lines.

Interesting sociological history here. I was recently telling a class about the rapid shifts in Chicago neighborhoods in the mid twentieth century, how a neighborhood might go from being 90% white to 90% black in a ten year stretch. I don’t think they were able to comprehend this very well; we generally aren’t used to seeing such rapid social change and we tend to think that places will keep following the same course unless some large social force intervenes such as the closing of a major job provider. (Perhaps this helps explain NIMBY behavior – if they can, people will fight against any social force altering their neighborhood.) But in Chicago and many other American cities, this kind of rapid racial and demographic change once occurred regularly and altered many neighborhoods and communities.

It would be interesting to hear more about the sale of these synagogues. As Jews moved to the suburbs, did they sell their houses of worship at a fair market value or did they sell them for cheaper? Were there any hard or bitter feelings about having one’s house of worship turned over to another faith?

Driving today is much safer than in the past

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An article (“Safer Passage”) in the latest issue of Time has shows that the fatality rate from driving has dropped a lot over the years. Here is a description of the issue:

America’s roadways are safer than ever. The latest data show that traffic fatalities are at their lowest level since 1949 and that the death rate based on miles traveled is the lowest in history. But technologies such as active safety systems and advanced air bags are being offset by auto safety’s newest enemy: distracted drivers using electronic devices behind the wheel.

“We lost over 3,000 in 2010 to distraction-related crashes,” National Highway Traffic Safety Administration chief David Strickland says. “It’s a heightened risk to the public, and it’s growing exponentially.”

Some of the statistics cited in the story:

1. In 1950, there were 7.2 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. In 2010, the rate is 1.1. While Americans might be driving more on average today than in 1950 (I couldn’t find figures on this), the fatalities while driving has dropped nearly sevenfold.

2. Here is what causes traffic fatalities: 32% killed by drunk driving, 31% by speeding, 16% by distraction, and 11% by bad weather. It is interesting that much of the current debate about making driving safer deals with cell phones and distractions (see a recent article from the Chicago Tribune about new efforts in Illinois) while it is the third biggest threat. Perhaps policymakers could argue that getting rid of distractions if the cheapest or easier route compared to dealing with the first two issues.

3. According to this CDC report, there were 36,216 deaths in 2009 in motor vehicle accidents for a death rate of 11.8 per 100,000 Americans.

Americans seem willing to accept some risk in driving and generally welcome efforts to make cars safer. And the numbers have gone down quite a bit since 1950: driving is safer. At the same time, the fight over cell phones in cars is just heating up and we need more data to know whether cell phones are more distracting than other features found during driving (passengers, fiddling with the radio/GPS devices, talking to passengers, tiredness). In the end, this may be an odd costs-benefits tradeoff: restricting cell phone use may limit deaths but some will argue that too much is being given up (assuming that only others get in accidents while using cell phones?). Of course, one solution is to simply go to driverless cars but there are other hurdles to overcome there.

Photos of Greenbelt Communities

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The New York Times’ Lens Blog has photos and a write-up of “New Deal Utopias”:

Known as Greenbelt Communities, these three federally built developments combined the suburb’s closeness to nature with the social and economic advantages of cities. Built originally for displaced farmers and poor or working families, they encouraged cooperation and community spirit. They also provoked accusations of socialism, and any further developments were stopped after a court ruling declared the federal government’s role in building these developments unconstitutional.

It’s always interesting to see a major media treatment of one’s backyard (many of the Greenbelt, MD photos were taken within a half mile or so of the residence my wife and I just moved into at the end of December).  I don’t feel like I’ve lived here long enough to have any major insights to add to the article, but it does strike me that Greenbelt, MD is a very tight-knit and walkable community.

“The mothering you see today in America is culturally and historically unprecedented”

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A sociologist suggests mothering is done very differently in America:

“American parenting is child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, financially expensive and is expected to be done by mothers alone. And it is impossible to do alone,” said Sharon Hays, a sociologist at the University of Southern California. “The mothering you see today in America is culturally and historically unprecedented. We expect selfless devotion to what we interpret as the child’s needs, wants and interests at every moment of the day. And with the vast majority of mothers working, that puts them in an impossible paradox.”

While the intensity is at its most acute in the middle and upper-middle class, she said, her studies have found that low-income parents feel the same parenting pressures, compounded by the guilt of having neither the resources nor the time to meet them.

The rest of the article talks about why this is: we have structured society in such a way so that the brunt of child care is borne by individuals, not society, and with our cultural gender norms, women are left with much of the burden.

Pedestrians in a world of driverless cars

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Many bloggers are starting to tease out the social and infrastructure implications of driverless cars, including David Alpert over at the Atlantic:

[Driverless cars] will bring many changes, but when it comes to the car’s role in the city, they may just intensify current tensions.

David suggests that new technology will simply exacerbate current trends by “trigger[ing] a whole new round of pressure to further redesign intersections for the throughput of vehicles above all else”:

If autonomous cars travel much faster than today’s cars and operate closer to other vehicles and obstacles, as we see in the [University of] Texas team’s simulation , then they may well kill more pedestrians. Or, perhaps the computers controlling them will respond so quickly that they can avoid hitting any pedestrian, even one who steps out in front of a car.

In that case, we might see a small number of people taking advantage of that to cross through traffic, knowing the cars can’t kill him. That will slow the cars down, and their drivers will start lobbying for even greater restrictions on pedestrians, like fences preventing midblock crossings.

Our metropolitan areas could then look, more and more, like zoos for humans interlaced with pathways for the dominant species, the robot car.

Personally, I think one of these scenarios (i.e., “travel much faster…[and] kill more pedestrians”) is unlikely.  Initially, driverless cars will almost certainly be much more expensive than equivalent conventional vehicles.  A car that is both (1) more expensive and (2) more dangerous seems unlikely to sell well, to say nothing of the likelihood that such lawsuit-magnets would be sued utterly out of existence.  To catch on with a mass market, driverless cars will at least need to uphold safety’s current status quo.

As far as David’s second fear (“metropolitan areas [that] look, more and more, like zoos for humans”), I’m unclear how much that differs from current development patterns.  While there are plenty of examples of “walkable” cities, much of contemporary American infrastructure is extremely unfriendly to pedestrians, cyclists, and other non-car users.  To the extent that cars dominate today’s roads, a move to driverless cars seems only to continue, rather than augment, that trend.