Category Archives: Sociology

Seeing Alzheimer’s as a social problem

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The cover story in the current issue of Time is about Alzheimer’s research. The main story is set up in a typical way: the condition affects a lot of people and yet research into a cure is underfunded. What is interesting is that Time employs two statistics that suggest the cover story should really be about how people could make Alzheimer’s a social problem worthy of more attention.

The first statistic is an actual dollar amount: one expert says $500 million a year is spent on researching Alzheimer’s while $1 billion is spent on heart disease, and $5.6 billion on cancer. The second measure concerns public perception: 48% of Americans think “a great deal or some progress has been made in curing” the disease while 81% say the same about heart disease and 74% say the same about cancer. With these two statistics, Time suggests Alzheimer’s has a certain public image: it doesn’t attract the same kind of research dollars as other diseases and the public is pretty pessimistic about progress.

While the rest of the story concerns itself with the medical and scientific advances, perhaps it should be about how the public could be convinced that the disease deserves more attention. Some ways the public image could be enhanced: it needs more fund-raisers, more celebrity supporters, more support for research from public officials, and more stories that demonstrate how many people are affected by Alzheimer’s. Look at the public image of other conditions: diseases like breast cancer (where are those “edgy” Facebook campaigns for Alzheimer’s?) have effectively been cast as critical social problems that everyone should care about.

Perhaps this cover story is itself intended to help raise the profile of Alzheimer’s. While real medical progress is the true goal and it is what will ultimately benefit people, Alzheimer’s as a social problem is another important issue to be considered.

A conundrum: Americans see entititlement programs as growing problem but don’t support available solutions

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Gallup reports that a majority of Americans see entitlement programs, such as Social Security and Medicare, creating large financial problems for the country in 25 years. Yet, a poll from several months ago showed that Americans did not support some of the main options for helping the finances of Social Security developed by the Congressional Budget Office.

I always find this to be an interesting situation: people agree something should be done but the available options do not appeal to a majority. Looking for and then applying patterns from situations where  solutions are developed would seem to be worthwhile. Are there sociological studies that address this?

Whoever can find a way through this will be deserving of lots of credit. Complicating the issue is the generation gap: issues like Social Security and Medicare tend to fire up older voters, who vote in larger proportions already.

Another creative way to raise suburban tax revenue: a “toilet tax”

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Nassau County, New York is considering a new tax that will bring in revenue from non-profit organizations:

Critics call the sewer fee — a “toilet tax” in Nassau County. Next year’s budget — for the first time — calls for previously tax-exempt public school districts, library districts and fire districts to increase their budgets, raise taxes, and, they fear, pass along the financial burden to taxpayers.

Democrats in the legislature are blasting the Republican county executive’s proposed “water usage fee”– that would charge one penny per gallon of water entering Nassau’s sewage system. They claim it would bankrupt hospitals, schools and more…

But the county executive said his sewer reforms would eventually lower rates for homeowners and businesses.

“I inherited a sewer district authority that’s $28 million out of balance. Nowhere else in New York state do not-for-profits get a free ride,” County Executive Ed Mangano said.

Even in the best of times, suburban communities may not enjoy the tax-exempt status of non-profit organizations. But with less favorable economic times, it is likely more communities will be looking for new revenue sources.

Although it sounds like this discussion may have just become another political issue (one party versus the other in Nassau County), these sorts of discussions will be taking place in many more suburbs across the country.

An academic conference to study elites

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“Elites” have been in the news lately and recently, Columbia University hosted a conference about elites. This is not as normal as one might think:

In the academic world, this was remarkable. As several of the scholars acknowledged, there has traditionally been some unease in talking about the elite, let alone researching them.

“When we study the poor, it’s relatively easy,” said Sudhir Venkatesh, a professor of sociology at Columbia and the author of “Gang Leader for a Day” (Penguin Press, 2008). “The poor don’t have the power to say no. Elites don’t grant us interviews. They don’t let us hang out at their country clubs.”

But Dorian Warren, an assistant professor of political science at Columbia, said the increasing concentration of wealth, moving from the top 10 percent of Americans to the top 1 percent, has made this the right time to look more closely at the group. “We have to understand what’s going on at the top,” Mr. Warren said.

This is an interesting topic: so why don’t academics study elites more? A few reasons (from what I know about sociology):

1. As noted above, elites can be hard to access.

2. Sociologists have often focused on deviants and the poor are often considered more outside society’s norms.

3. Could it be that many sociologists, with higher levels of education and decent incomes, might themselves be part of or are closer to the elite? If so, then there might be less interest in studying themselves or drawing attention to the class they participate in.

Americans walk less than other countries

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The Infrastructurist sums up some recent research that shows Americans walk less than residents of other countries. Explaining why this is the case is interesting:

The report’s lead author, David R. Bassett of the University of Tennessee, blames America’s poor performance on its auto obsession and lack of public transportation…

The researchers found no association between daily steps and living environment (e.g. urban, suburban, or rural)…

For the year 2009 alone, the top five walking commuter cities were Boston (14.1 percent commuted by foot), Washington (11.1), San Francisco (10.3), New York (10.3), and Philadelphia (8.7). The city with the lowest commuter walking share for the year was Fort Worth, at 1.2 percent. Freemark comments:

“As the chart shows, automobiles have a majority share in all cities except New York, Boston, Washington, and San Francisco. Unsurprisingly, these are dense cities and the places in the United States with the most complete transit systems.

These arguments make sense at face value: driving and setting would seem to play a large role. However, the first research study’s finding about driving may indicate that driving just trumps other factors for most Americans: whether Americans live in cities or suburbs or rural areas, driving is the preferred mode of transit.

Additionally, perhaps the number of people living in large cities with established and effective mass transit (the five top walking cities cited above) is simply not enough to counter all the drivers in other places.

Fighting “immappancy” by looking at the true size of Africa

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Many people have skewed perceptions of the world due to maps. Americans are used to seeing the United States (and North America) as the focal point of their maps; woe to those who put eastern Asia as the main point or even the Southern Hemisphere as the right way up! (What is interesting in these cases is that it reduces the United States to more of an afterthought. This doesn’t fit American cultural perceptions of our ) Another issue is one of size: because of the typically used projections, Greenland can vary from the largest mass in the world to a small mass. Relative sizes can be difficult to judge.

To combat “immappancy” (which apparently is a mash-up of illiteracy and innumeracy), here is a graphic that shows the size of Africa. Notice how large it is: the contiguous United States, China, all of Europe, and India all fit inside it. Yet how many people would know the true size of Africa?

Tunnels as infrastructure and symbols of pride

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Boring machines broke through today at the opposite end of a 35.4 mile tunnel in the Alps, creating the world’s longest tunnel in Switzerland and taking the title away from Japan. While this is a feat of engineering (allowing high speed trains to carry cargo under the mountains rather than have it be shipped on trucks over the Alps), it is also interesting to read about the emotional responses people are having:

Trumpets sounded, cheers reverberated and even burly workers wiped away tears as foreman Eduard Baer lifted a statue of Saint Barbara — the patron saint of miners — through a small hole in the enormous drilling machine thousands of feet (meters) underground in central Switzerland.

At that moment, a 35.4-mile (57-kilometer) tunnel was born, and the Alpine nation reclaimed the record from Japan’s Seikan Tunnel. Television stations across Europe showed the event live…

Peter Fueglistaler, director of the Swiss Federal Office of Transport, called Friday “a day of joy for Switzerland.”

“We are not a very emotional people but if we have the longest tunnel in the world, this also for us is very, very emotional” he told The Associated Press.

This project is not just a boon for business and the environment; it is seen as a testament to the will and determination of the Swiss. As a project that has been in the works for decades (with the referendum votes for funding taking place nearly two decades ago), to see the proverbial “light at the end of the tunnel” is a big accomplishment. This is cultural moment that will likely become part of the Swiss collective memory.

How might the response in the United States to such an engineering feat differ?

Planning for Los Angeles’ future

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This video from CNN takes a look at some thinking about what the Los Angeles of the future will look like. If sprawl has indeed “hit the wall,” there will be opportunities to create something different.

Tweeting every emergency call the police receive

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A British police chief/chief constable is trying a new tactic to draw attention to what his department does: tweeting each of the emergency calls that the department receives.

While this may seem like a political stunt considering large budget cuts that are being considered, the chief says he wants to draw attention to the things police do beyond chasing criminals:

”A lot of what we do is dealing with social problems such as missing children, people with mental health problems and domestic abuse. Often these incidents can be incredibly complex and need a lot of time, resource and expertise.

”I am not saying that we shouldn’t deal with these types of incidents, far from it, but what I am saying is that this work is not recognised in league tables and measurements – yet is a huge part of what we do.”

An interesting argument. How much do police do outside what many might consider “traditional police work” of solving crimes and chasing criminals? At the same time, he seems to argue that activities like dealing with missing children and domestic abuse are outside typical boundaries – aren’t these cases often criminal complaints or issues?

Of course, if we were to draw conclusions about the police just from television and movies, we might conclude that they only work on grisly crimes…

American life can’t be too bad if people can spend lots of time tracking down a fast food sandwich

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Times are dire, bad, fraught with difficulty. This is now what we have heard, and many have experienced, for months.

But it struck me today that American life is not that terrible if there are some people who are very devoted to tracking down McDonald’s McRib sandwich. It is this sort of quotidian hobby or interest that is only possible in societies where people have extra time and money on their hands.

So what exactly is going on here? Couple this story with the fervor that Chick-fil-A has inspired in the Chicago region with the opening of new stores and it is clear that many Americans love their fast food.