Growing American political divide between urban and rural areas

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The urban/rural political divide has grown in the last few decades:

As Democrats have come to dominate U.S. cities, it is Republican strength in rural areas that allows the party to hold control of the House and remain competitive in presidential elections…

The U.S. divide wasn’t always this stark. For decades, rural America was part of the Democratic base, and as recently as 1993, just over half of rural Americans were represented by a House Democrat, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. Conservative Democrats often represented rural districts, including Ms. Hartzler’s predecessor, Ike Skelton, who held the seat for 34 years before she ousted him in 2010.

That parity eventually gave way to GOP dominance. In 2013, 77% of rural Americans were represented by a House Republican. But in urban areas—which by the government’s definition includes both cities and suburbs—slightly less than half of residents were represented by congressional Republicans, despite the GOP’s 30-seat majority in the House…

In 1992, Bill Clinton won 60% of the Whole Foods counties and 40% of the Cracker Barrel counties, a 20-point difference. That gap that has widened every year since, and in 2012, Mr. Obama won 77% of Whole Foods counties and 29% of Cracker Barrel Counties, a 48-point difference.

And with this divide between cities and rural areas, the suburbs, particularly ones in the middle between exurbs and inner-ring suburbs, are where politicians fight for votes.

The profiles of a suburban county outside Kansas City and a rural county in Missouri suggests that most people make conscious choices about where they want to live. In other words, everyone in America can live wherever they want and they make these choices based on culture and politics. A common illustration for this is the plight of high school and college age adults and fears of  a rural “brain drain“: they can leave their small town for the big city where they see there is more excitement. To some degree, this is true: Americans are a mobile people yet it is a more complicated process than simply selecting a cultural milieu and parking there for the rest of their lives. On one hand, people can make much more finer-grained decisions than on a county by county basis (particularly in denser areas where there are plenty of communities to choose from) and on the other hand people are pushed and pulled by particular places through race and ethnicity, social networks, economic opportunities, and life changes. The article mentions cultural factors quite a bit but says little about race and ethnicity, a long-standing factor in where people live and evidenced today by continued residential segregation.

Just a note: the second author of this piece is Dante Chinni, also the co-author of Our Patchwork Nation. His analysis could be contrasted with sociologist Robert Wuthnow’s recentl book on small-town America.

When a financially troubled suburb buys fake Twitter followers

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Fake Twitter followers are not just for celebrities and politicians: a company may have purchased fake Twitter followers for the Chicago suburb of Harvey as part of a social media campaign.

As of last month, the Twitter feed had just 25 followers seeking updates to its posts. After the Tribune asked Harvey about Lola Grand, that number jumped to nearly 1,200. Social media experts said the new followers had telltale signs of being fake accounts bought from online brokers, who sell bulk sets of “followers” to wannabe celebrities, politicians or entrepreneurs trying to appear popular.

For example, one of Harvey’s new Twitter followers was Lieni Alves, who hasn’t posted a Tweet in 19 months, and then it was in Portuguese. The account follows more than 1,700 people besides Harvey, including porn actresses, a Christian music company, Brazil’s president and a host of people who tweet in Arabic and Turkish.

StatusPeople, a London-based firm, created an oft-cited algorithm to count suspect accounts. That algorithm last week estimated that 88 percent of Harvey’s Twitter followers were fakes, a figure called “very unusual” by StatusPeople’s founder, Rob Waller…

Lola Grand declined to say how it boosted Twitter followers. It said it designed a website but is waiting for Harvey to review it before launching that and the blogs. It said its other social media efforts have directed “hundreds” of residents’ requests to Harvey officials. The firm and the mayor’s office touted additional behind-the-scenes work, such as “brand development” and “24/7 monitoring of social media channels.”

This looks bad for a community that is already struggling for cash. But, if everyone is doing it…

It also highlights a new form of civic boosterism. There is a long history of American communities talking up their advantages and trying to sell themselves to potential investors, businesses, and residents. Think the novel Babbitt. In the past, it may have been more about gregarious men working their good old boy networks but today this can include politicians sniping at other states (see these examples of Indiana, Wisconsin, and Texas seeking Illinois jobs), television and radio ads (lots of radio ads in the Chicago area for the city of Bedford Park for all of their available water and industrial space), and online spaces. This can include running Google ads, YouTube videos, and using Facebook and Twitter.

Dunphy’s home from Modern Family isn’t exactly a middle-class home

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The home used as the Phil and Claire Dunphy household on Modern Family is up for sale:

[G]et ready for a blast of memories from “Modern Family,” the Golden Globe & Emmy-winning ABC prime-time comedy that was filmed at 10336 Dunleer Dr., Los Angeles, CA 90064.

The price is $2.35 million, but listing agent Mitch Hagerman of Coldwell Banker Previews International said there’s decent income potential given the fact that TV producers have forked over generous fees for the right to film exterior shots of the property. He said it would be up to the new owners to negotiate with ABC Studios…

The home is a traditional, two-story style and has been impeccably remodeled, complete with crown molding, wood floors and upgraded appliances. It sits on a prime street in the coveted Cheviot Hills neighborhood. Hagerman says the home should sell pretty easily on its own merits.

“It’s a charming, gorgeous, cozy, family-oriented and classic-style home in a fantastic neighborhood where there’s very little inventory,” he said.

The home offers 4 bedrooms with en suite bathrooms, plus a powder room. The home last sold for $1.97 million in 2006.

A nice and expensive home. This is interesting because the Dunphy family is portrayed as being fairly middle-class. Phil is a realtor who is not the most successful or smart (these are running points throughout the shows). Claire recently returned to work, working for her father’s closet business, after not working. Where do they get all of their money? How do they afford such a nice house?

Sociologist Juliet Schor argued in The Overspent American that one problem of post-World War II television is that it showed an increasingly lavish middle-class lifestyle. The evolving image of the middle-class on television showed families with more money and possessions and not much discussion about how they could afford it all. The Dunphys are supposed to look like normal Americans yet their lifestyle is pretty wealthy with little concern about money and pretty nice possessions. Schor suggests portrayals like this pushed more Americans to consume more.

In other words, the show plays off the idea the extended family depicted is a “typical” American family yet its class status is far from what many American families experience.

Big differences in life expectancy across American counties due to income differences

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Here is an update on the “longevity gap,” the differences in life expectancy, by county in the United States:

Fairfax County, Va., and McDowell County, W.Va., are separated by 350 miles, about a half-day’s drive. Traveling west from Fairfax County, the gated communities and bland architecture of military contractors give way to exurbs, then to farmland and eventually to McDowell’s coal mines and the forested slopes of the Appalachians. Perhaps the greatest distance between the two counties is this: Fairfax is a place of the haves, and McDowell of the have-nots. Just outside of Washington, fat government contracts and a growing technology sector buoy the median household income in Fairfax County up to $107,000, one of the highest in the nation. McDowell, with the decline of coal, has little in the way of industry. Unemployment is high. Drug abuse is rampant. Median household income is about one-fifth that of Fairfax.

One of the starkest consequences of that divide is seen in the life expectancies of the people there. Residents of Fairfax County are among the longest-lived in the country: Men have an average life expectancy of 82 years and women, 85, about the same as in Sweden. In McDowell, the averages are 64 and 73, about the same as in Iraq…

Since the 1980s, “socioeconomic status has become an even more important indicator of life expectancy.” That was the finding of a 2008 report by the Congressional Budget Office. But dollars in a bank account have never added a day to anyone’s life, researchers stress. Instead, those dollars are at work in a thousand daily-life decisions — about jobs, medical care, housing, food and exercise — with a cumulative effect on longevity.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/03/15/business/higher-income-longer-lives.html

This is part of a growing body of research that links demographics and social forces, including social spaces, to different health outcomes. Wealthier counties can offer a wide range of health and social services as well as have more higher class residents while poorer counties have different social structures.

While the county level data is interesting, I would assume there would also be some wide differences in life expectancy within counties. Fairfax County, Virginia is one of the wealthiest U.S. counties but income levels there are not uniform. Cook County, Illinois could include some of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago as well as Kenilworth, Illinois, one of the wealthiest suburbs with a median household income of over $247,000. Check out these maps from VCU’s Center on Society and Health on life expectancy in metro areas. Here is what they found in Chicago:

So the contrast between a county in Virginia versus one in West Virginia might be notable but one doesn’t have to travel that far to find big differences in life expectancy.

Get better ideas by interacting with others with different ideas

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One secret to innovation is to interact with people who differ from you and are outside your closer network:

The tendency of people to seek out insights from people in different fields, different organizations or of different mindsets is called “brokerage” and has been carefully studied by academics.

It can lead to better ideas, better promotions, and better salaries — whether you work in product design, contracting or finance…

But if you’re charged with innovation, you need to branch out and build brokerage, said Ronald Burt, the Hobart W. Williams Professor of Sociology and Strategy at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

“It’s essential,” Burt said. “The new ideas we come up with come from the places where we vary. A person who only knows about the variation in what they do will get better at what they’re doing, but will always come to the same place.”

Burt goes on to discuss how people need two sets of connections: close ones (which helps provide closure) and a few regular connections with distant people (weak ties) who will provide you with different perspectives outside your close group. This all emphasizes the power of social networks: information (as well as other things like motions) can be passed through a network through the social connections.

Court says director of “The Queen of Versailles” did not defame film’s subject

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The director of an interesting film about the largest single-family home in the United States was cleared of defamation charges in court:

Lauren Greenfield received a best director nod at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival for her documentary, “The Queen of Versailles.” Now, two years later, she has another victory to her credit, which may ultimately prove more important to her career.

An arbitrator at the Independent Film and Television Alliance ruled that her movie about David and Jackie Siegel was not defamatory. This seems to end Siegel’s effort to punish Greenfield for her film, which centered in large measure on the family’s profligate ways — building a 90,000 square-foot mansion (to replace the 26,000 square-foot home they lived in); spending $1 million a year on clothing, and having a household staff of 19…

Siegel charged the film defamed him and his company. His claims were dismissed by a federal court judge, which is how the case ended up in arbitration.

“Having viewed the supposedly egregious portions of the Motion Picture numerous times, [the Arbitrator] simply does not find that any of the content of the Motion Picture was false,” the arbitrator, Roy Rifkin, ruled.

An unflattering but true story can still be told. But, if the story was not going to be positive, why participate in the first place or go through the whole process after things had turned sour? As I note in my quick review of the film, the story is less about the big house and more about what happens when someone loses lots of money and disconnects from his family. Also see a September 2013 update on the fate of the home.

Crimean crisis for cartographers: is it part of Ukraine or Russia?

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Maps today are updated often so Russia’s actions in Crimea have left cartographers with a decision to make:

Online mapping tools from Google and Bing, as well as Mapquest, all list Crimea as a part of Ukraine. Wikipedia’s community is embroiled in a fierce debate over whether or not to recognize Russia’s annexation of the region.

National Geographic still has not yet reached a decision on the matter, and is waiting for annexation to be formally approved. They said in a statement:

Most political boundaries depicted in our maps and atlases are stable and uncontested. Those that are disputed receive special treatment and are shaded gray as “Areas of Special Status,” with accompanying explanatory text.

In the case of Crimea, if it is formally annexed by Russia, it would be shaded gray and its administrative center, Simferopol’, would be designated by a special symbol. When a region is contested, it is our policy to reflect that status in our maps. This does not suggest recognition of the legitimacy of the situation.

Rand McNally, on the other hand, takes its mapping data from the State Department, and so will leave its data as it currently stands. It could be a long time before the U.S. formally recognizes Russia’s takeover.

It sounds like this comes down to: (1) which authority each cartographer relies on plus (2) the perceived legitimacy of Russia’s actions. While maps may simply reflect these political realities, they also have the potential to shape current and future perceptions of the area.

If only we could go back to the good old days (20 years ago?) where it took some time for maps to be updated. As a kid, I loved maps and I remember the shift in the early 1990s to a fragmented Yugoslavia (the National Geographic Geography Bee seemed to like focusing on this rapidly changing region as well) as well as emerging post-Soviet states. It takes some time for all these maps to be updated, from online sources to printed atlases to school textbooks and maps that hang on classroom walls. Cartographers in the past might have had more time to wait out a situation like this to see what happens while today people want the newest information now.

Kids today: “emotionally priceless and economically worthless”

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Sociologist Dalton Conley talks about how the role of children has changed in recent centuries:

A child born in 2012 will cost his parents $241,080 in 2012 dollars, on average, over his lifetime. And children of higher-earning families drain the bank account more: Families earning more than $105,000 annually can expect to spend $399,780 per child.

The “price tag” is astounding, considering that until not long ago, kids were expected to contribute to the household and were not generally a financial drain on it. “From a young age, for much of human history, they would do household labor, whether gather berries or get water and bring it back. From ages 5 and up, kids had an economic role to play in the household,” says Dalton Conley, sociologist, NYU professor and author of “Parentology: Everything You Wanted to Know About the Science of Raising Children But Were Too Exhausted to Ask.”

“Today, as sociologist Viviana Zelizer says, kids are emotionally priceless and economically worthless. They’re just a big sinkhole of our time, attention and money, and yet at the same time, we think of them as our most important life project,” says Conley. This idea that parents must invest in their kids for years is now even codified into law. For instance, while traditional markers of adulthood were set at 18 or 21, the Affordable Care Act has now extended the age limit for children to be on their parents’ health insurance to 26.

Why the shift? It boils down to the fact the economy now requires more technical knowledge, so children need more education than before.

The rest of the article then goes on to describe how Dalton uses data to tackle 10 important parenting issues. But, this early part highlights the changing nature of childhood, from an age where children could contribute economically to the family (and many children did not survive because of poor health) to an era where wealthier families have fewer children and parents pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into each child.

“Who had richer parents, doctors or artists?”

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NPR looks at how the jobs and incomes of parents influence the same outcomes among their children:

After some poking around, we figured out how to settle the argument. It allowed us to look at the same group of people in 1979 and 2010 — from a time when most were teenagers to the time when they were middle-aged and, for the most part, gainfully employed…

Who's doing better than their parents?

Based on this chart, it looks like the jobs of parents that are linked to better outcomes for their children require more education and are higher-skilled. This would seem to line up with findings from the Pew Economic Mobility Project about what traits are linked to upward social mobility:

This research reveals:

  • College graduates were over 5 times more likely to leave the bottom rung than non-college graduates.
  • Dual-earner families were over 3 times more likely to leave the bottom rung than single-earner families.
  • Whites were 2 times more likely to leave the bottom rung than blacks.

Additionally, Pew’s analysis examined the intersection between income and wealth, and found that the health of family balance sheets—including accumulated savings and wealth—are related to income mobility prospects. Households with financial capital, such as liquid savings or other readily available assets such as stocks, were more likely to leave the bottom of the economic ladder. In other words, movement up the income and wealth ladders was connected, and economically secure families were also the most likely to be upwardly mobile.

So in addition to parental education and the type of job one’s parent has, going to college, having two-income families, race, and wealth matter quite a bit. Overcoming these factors is not necessarily easy: “In fact, 43 percent of Americans raised at the bottom of the income ladder remain stuck there as adults, and 70 percent never even make it to the middle.”

Microsoft hoping to sell lots of political ads on XBox Live, video games

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Ads in video games are not new but Microsoft is looking to use more recent technology and information to sell political ads in its online spaces:

Microsoft is trying to persuade politicians to take out targeted ads on Xbox Live, Skype, MSN and other company platforms as midterm elections begin heating up around the country. To plug the idea, Microsoft officials handed out promotional materials Thursday at CPAC, the annual conference for conservatives.

It’s the latest move by tech companies to seize a piece of the lucrative political ad market. The ads, which would appear on the Xbox Live dashboard and other Microsoft products, combine Microsoft user IDs and other public data to build a profile of Xbox users. Campaigns can then blast ads to selected demographic categories, or to specific congressional districts. And if the campaign brings its own list of voter e-mail addresses, Microsoft can match the additional data with individual customer accounts for even more accurate voter targeting.

The image of white male teens as the stereotypical average gamer is something of a myth; Microsoft says that of its 25 million Xbox Live subscribers in the United States, 38 percent are women. Forty percent are married, and more than half have children. Those numbers are important, because they represent key demographics that are among the most contested in political races. Microsoft is particularly aggressive in selling its ability to reach women, Latinos and millennials; across the company’s other platforms, such as MSN, Microsoft has developed consumer categories like “Ciudad Strivers” and “Nuevo Horizons” that attempt to describe a set of characteristics including age, type of residence and income level. At a time when virtually all politicians are resorting to microtargeting, this technology could help Microsoft become a major player in the advertising space…

Microsoft has made successful pitches to political campaigns before. In 2012, President Obama agreed to advertise on Xbox Live for his reelection campaign. The effort sparked some complaints among Xbox users who disliked the ad appearing on their dashboards. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, meanwhile, opted not to participate. Obama has also advertised within games themselves. With the release last year of the Xbox One, it’s safe to expect Xbox Live to become another important platform in the political ad wars.

It will be interesting to see how users respond and then how effective such ads are. This shouldn’t be much of a surprise to users: we shouldn’t be surprised if we volunteer data online and then it is used for targeted ads. Plus, given the time people spend playing video games (particularly for demographics that might not be accessing more traditional media as much), this seems like a relatively untapped market compared to television. Yet, it is harder to argue this has many benefits for users. While some might argue targeted ads for consumer goods show people what they might want, what average XBox Live user wants to be presented with political content while trying to play a game?