Bill Clinton: “The American Dream has been under assault for 30 years”

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Former President Bill Clinton, speaking as part of the 10 year anniversary of his foundation, said “The American Dream has been under assault for 30 years.” He says this has happened for two (actually three?) reasons:

1. The challenges of globalization and the information age “which eliminated a lot of intermediate jobs.”

2. Corporations once had more equal responsibility among shareholders, communities, and workers (roughly 35-40 years ago and earlier) whereas today they act as individuals only beholden to shareholders.

3. A thirty year long anti-government rant that says “the government is the source of all our problems.”

Is this just a list of Democratic Party talking points?

More seriously, Clinton’s first point is well accepted: the world has changed. Globalization and information have changed the American and global economy and America is still struggling to catch up. The Rust Belt cities of the Northeast and Midwest are a great example: the departure of good-paying manufacturing jobs has shifted the landscape and cities and states are still scrambling to fill this void. The second issue regarding corporations is also notable: the quest for profits and meeting shareholder’s expectations has seemed to increase. The gap between CEO pay and that of the average worker has only widened. The median income for all Americans has dropped while some corporations earn record profits. The third point sounds more like a political argument though Clinton’s suggestion that there has been a relative lack of interest in public-private partnerships to address some of these issues may have some merit.

Clinton is in a long line of presidents who have promoted the American Dream which is typically thought to include homeownership, a good education, and middle-class standard of living. It would be interesting to hear what Clinton now considers to be the American Dream to be and how individuals and the country can achieve it. A measure of the American dream, homeownership, actually had increased in the last 30 years until the last few years of economic crisis. Is Clinton suggesting that fewer people now have access to the American Dream or something else?

Additionally, Clinton’s words have some sway since the public perception is that he was the president who presided over the last boom era in the United States.

The grid is better for us than winding streets and cul-de-sacs

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New Urbanists, advocates for more traditional grid street designs, would be happy to read this article that “Dubunk[s] the Cul-De-Sac.” This is a good summary of research that has been gaining attention for some years now and suggests that the now common suburban street is more harmful than the traditional grid.

While these knowledge is well-known amongst planners, I wonder how typical Americans would respond to this. How can one calculate the trade-offs in safety and alternative routes granted by the grid versus having a home on a quiet cul-de-sac where kids can play basketball, street hockey, ride bikes, and more right in front of the house?

Same data, different conclusions about poverty in “Rick Perry’s Texas”

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With the increased national exposure of Texas Governor Rick Perry comes more people picking apart his political career. While Perry has been quick to tout Texas’ economic progress during his tenure, the same data regarding the state’s poverty rate can be used to reach different conclusions.

A CNN article titled “Poverty grows in Rick Perry’s Texas” has this to say:

While it’s true that Texas is responsible for 40% of the jobs added in the U.S. over the past two years, its poverty rate also grew faster than the national average in 2010.

Texas ranks 6th in terms of people living in poverty. Some 18.4% of Texans were impoverished in 2010, up from 17.3% a year earlier, according to Census Bureau data released this week. The national average is 15.1%.

And being poor in Texas isn’t easy. The state has one of the lowest rates of spending on its citizens per capita and the highest share of those lacking health insurance. It doesn’t provide a lot of support services to those in need: Relatively few collect food stamps and qualifying for cash assistance is particularly tough.

“There are two tiers in Texas,” said Miguel Ferguson, associate professor of social work at University of Texas at Austin. “There are parts of Texas that are doing well. And there is a tremendous number of Texans, more than Perry has ever wanted to acknowledge, that are doing very, very poorly.”

This is the more negative interpretation of this data that highlights a growing underclass in Texas. Perry may talk about job growth but there is a growing segment of the population that isn’t participating in this growth.

On the other side of the spectrum, a “Democrat and urbanist” (Instapundit’s description) suggests “The Texas Story Is Real“:

Lastly, the poverty rate is higher in Texas than in the US as a whole – 17.2% vs. 14.3%, not a small difference. However, the gap actually narrowed between the two during the 2000s, as the chart below in the percentage point change in the poverty rate illustrates.

[The graph shows the “Change in % of Population For Whom Poverty Status Is Determined (2000-2009).” Texas is at roughly 1.8%, the United States as a whole at roughly 1.95%.]

While every statistic isn’t a winner for Texas, most of them are, notably on the jobs front. And if nothing else, it does not appear that Texas purchased job growth at the expense of job quality, at least not at the aggregate level.  There are certainly deeper places one might drill into and find areas of concern or underperformance, but that’s true of everywhere.  And these top line statistics are commonly used to compare cities and states. Unless Texas critics are ready to retire these measures from their own arsenal, it seems clear that Texas is a winner.  The Texas story is real.

While acknowledging that Texas has a higher poverty rate (and this doesn’t include 2010 data), this commentator suggests that Texas had a smaller increase in this population compared to the United States.

This is a classic example of how two sides that are looking at the same data can come to two very different conclusions. For one, the poverty data indicates that Rick Perry is allowing some of Texas’ population to fall behind while the other suggests the poverty data isn’t so bad since the poverty rate grew less than that of the United States as a whole. In this case, I suspect the data itself won’t win over either side since ideology trumps the data.

More broadly, will most Americans consider these fine-tuned arguments when considering Rick Perry as a candidate? Probably not. Quoting a sociologist in a post yesterday, “Questioning someone’s religious sincerity is totally a factor of whether you already like that person.” This may also apply to their supposed economic impact.

Patent trolls: 20 years, $500 billion in losses

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One of my BU law professors, Mike Meurer, just posted a working paper (pdf) he co-authored with James Bessen and Jennifer Ford titled “The Private and Social Costs of Patent Trolls.”  Quoting the abstract:

In the past, non-practicing entities (NPEs) — firms that license patents without producing goods — have facilitated technology markets and increased rents for small inventors. Is this also true for today’s NPEs? Or are they “patent trolls” who opportunistically litigate over software patents with unpredictable boundaries? Using stock market event studies around patent lawsuit filings, we find that NPE lawsuits are associated with half a trillion dollars of lost wealth to defendants from 1990 through 2010, mostly from technology companies. Moreover, very little of this loss represents a transfer to small inventors. Instead, it implies reduced innovation incentives.

This works out to around $25 billion in lost wealth per year.  For comparison, even in its pre-Napster days, the RIAA only sold $14.7 billion per year—more than $10 billion less.

H/T Groklaw.

Update:  More analysis by Ars Technica.

Tracing the McMansion Palladian window back to 16th-century Italy

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A common design feature of the American McMansion is the Palladian window, often over the front doorway and showing off the expansive, two-story foyer. One writer suggests Palladian design features can be found throughout the Pittsburgh region:

Want to see more? OK, let’s take a walk in any local area. Aspinwall or Avalon? Highland Park or Shadyside? You’ll wear yourself out counting Palladian features on houses and apartments, occasionally a grand facade in one place, sometimes just a simple Palladian window ornamenting the attic of a modest home in another.

And then, before you’re totally exhausted, take a drive through Upper St. Clair or Peters and take in all of the Palladian windows you will find on what seems like every fifth McMansion built in those towns in the past 30 years.

Continuing, the same writer gives us some insights into how Antonio Palladio’s designs became popular and part of the American architectural vocabulary:

Palladio designed about 45 villas and palazzos (country houses and town houses) for wealthy clients in and around his adopted home town of Vicenza and nearby Venice, which is about 40 miles away. He also designed significant public buildings in both towns, including major churches in Venice — the best known being the church of San Giorgio Maggiore — which is directly across the water from the Piazza San Marco and the subject of thousands of picture postcards over the years.

But, what really brought him fame is his published work “I Quattro Libri dell’ Architettura” or “The Four Books of Architecture.” These books, when translated into English at the beginning of the 18th century, captivated English architects, who eagerly copied his works and his style. Palladianism coursed like a river through the architectural styles of the Georgian Period — the approximately 120-year reign of the Kings George I through IV. As the prevailing styles in England at the time of the flowering of the American colonies, they were copied here in public buildings, churches and houses.

Thomas Jefferson, as a gentleman architect, was infatuated, and based his designs for Monticello on Palladian ideals. He even proposed a near-copy of a famous Palladian villa as his unsuccessful bid for the design of a presidential mansion in Washington. (Today’s White House is a somewhat more Anglicized version of Palladianism.)

What makes the Palladian features of McMansions problematic for critics (an example here) is that it is not seen as being “authentic.” For example, the Palladian window might sit beneath a French gable roof. Thomas Jefferson may have popularized the style but he did so in a more “true” structure that incorporates a number of a Palladian elements rather than simply picking one part out and slapping it up on the facade because it looks nice.

Even though I have heard about Palladian features many times, I was unaware about its roots in 16th century Italy. Is there anywhere in the general American education (grade school through college) where more modern architectural features comes up? I know students learn about Greek columns and temples but what about more modern buildings, like the steel skeletons of skyscrapers, the balloon-framed house, roof styles, and more. Is this a deficit in general knowledge that encourages architectural pastiche like McMansions? Is this generally left to history and art classes? What if all college graduates had the knowledge of a basic architectural field guide that they then could mentally carry around for the rest of their lives?

Tracking President Obama’s “God talk”

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Decades after the sociologist Robert Bellah introduced the term “civil religion,” academics are continuing to track how politicians talk about religion in the public sphere. Here is an overview of how President Obama is increasing his use of religious language in recent days:

President Obama is “ramping up his ‘God talk’ for the re-election campaign,” says political scientist John Green, senior fellow at the Pew Forum for Religion & Public Life.

But Green and two other experts who track religious rhetoric in presidential politics speculate this strategy to connect with evangelical voters may not work for Obama…

These kinds of God mentions won’t move the dial for conservative evangelicals but, Green says, they could be just right for ambivalent voters who “don’t want a hard-edged faith shaping national politics.”…

Questioning someone’s religious sincerity is totally a factor of whether you already like that person. Baylor University sociologist Paul Froese says,

If Obama held a prayer rally, it would never work. People who don’t like him won’t believe him.

I wonder how the average American would react to this article. On one hand, the argument here is that appealing to audiences with the “right” religious language matters for votes. On the other hand, is this simply ammunition to make some people more cynical about the use of religious language in election seasons? Politicians have to walk a fine line of appearing sincere but not too exclusive so as to alienate potential voters.

More seriously, this will continue to matter in the months ahead as Americans get longer looks at Republican challengers (and the article contrasts Rick Perry’s approach to religious language). I hope we will continue to get updates on this from these same academics.

Does sex also sell sociological research?

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A common assumption is that “sex sells.” Could this also apply to sociological research? I have watched as two stories about sociological research have made their way through the media.

1. Do a Google search for “erotic capital” and you will find reference to sociologist Catherine Hakim’s term. Read a quick overview of the term here.

2. A New York Times article from the weekend titled “Another Reason to Avoid His Friends” briefly discusses a study in the July 2011 issue American Journal of Sociology titled “Network Position and Sexual Dysfunction: Implications of Partner Betweenness for Men.”

If these two pieces of research could be distributed to a broad representative sample of American sociologists, here are a few things that I would want to ask:

1. Do you think research that covers a topic like sex (or celebrity or political scandals, etc.) is more likely to get a positive reception and more coverage from the media and the American public?

2. Does publicity about a sociological research finding make the research more or less important within the field of sociology?

3. Do you think it is good for sociologists to promote any research that would appeal to the public rather than research that might be more consequential? In other words, is all publicity good publicity?

For the record, I have not looked closely into either pieces of research and therefore could not assess the quality myself. A sociologist from the London School of Economics and a piece published in AJS might get attention anyway since they have already come from respected institutions. But I think these pieces could lead to interesting discussions about how research within the discipline matches what might be popular among the American public and whether these two interests should match up and whether this helps the academic discipline of sociology.

The norms of college protests in court

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Arguments in a California courtroom revolve around this question: what are the norms governing college protests?

Sociologist Steven Clayman took the stand on Thursday, the final day of testimony. He is an expert in “speaker-audience interaction,” and has written a scholarly article titled, “Booing: The Anatomy of a Disaffiliative Response,” which examines environments such as presidential debates, TV talk shows and British Parliament. He believes audience participation cannot be prevented because members of the crowd are “free agents,” able to express approval or disapproval of what a speaker is saying.

Having watched a video of the Irvine 11 incident, Clayman affirmed that the audience response seemed to be a “normal and unavoidable” part of Ambassador Michael Oren’sspeech.

Lead prosecutor Dan Wagner then fired, “It’s unavoidable that 10 people would stand up with planned statements that have nothing to do with what the speaker is saying? . . . Are you saying that the only way to prevent [protests] is to put a straitjacket and muzzle on them?” The questions were stricken by the judge.
Ten UC Irvine and UC Riverside students have been charged with misdemeanor conspiracy to commit a crime and misdemeanor disruption of a meeting. To be convicted of the latter, one must commit an act that violates the “implicit customs” or “explicit rules” for the event. The defense team claims the defendants did neither, arguing that they were merely following the norms and customs of protests on college campuses.

So what exactly is “normal” college protest behavior? A number of colleges have faced these questions in recent years as protests have moved from just being outside the event to occurring during the event. Think the “Don’t Tase Me Bro” incident of 2007. Or witness the various pie-throwing attempts involving politicians. I wonder if this trial is then less about whether such actions are harmful but rather how these norms have changed over the decades and whether there is widely understood agreement about these changes.

Of course, this particular trial in California involves a number of contentious political and social issues.

I wonder if this case, and other similar ones, will lead to more schools creating more explicit rules about what is allowed and not allowed in on-campus protests and to make this information widely known.

Comprehending the office and retail space in an edge city

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After explaining the concept of an edge city to my American Suburbanization class, a discussion arose about how much space these places really have. When defining the edge city, Joel Garreau had these as two criteria (out of five total): “has five million square feet or more of leasable office space” and “has 600,000 square feet or more of leasable retail space.” This is a lot of space, as much as a smaller big city, but can still be hard to understand.

For example, there is much more commercial and retail space in the exemplar of the edge city: Tysons Corner, Virginia.

Around 2007 Tysons Corner had 25,599,065 square feet (2,378,231.0 m2) of office space, 1,072,874 square feet (99,673.3 m2) of industrial/flex space, 4,054,096 square feet (376,637.8 m2) of retail space, and 2,551,579 square feet (237,049.4 m2) of hotel space. Therefore Tysons Corner has a grand total of 33,278,014 square feet (3,091,628.7 m2) of commercial space.

How do we put this in more manageable terms?

1. Garreau compares this suburban space to the office and retail space in existing cities. The 5 million square feet of office space “is more than downtown Memphis.” While we may have traditionally associated this much office and retail space only with the downtowns of big cities, now concentrations of this space can be found right in the middle of the suburbs. This is unusual because suburbs are often portrayed as bedroom suburbs, places like people live and sleep but have to work elsewhere.

2. Compare this space to large buildings. The Willis (Sears) Tower in Chicago has 4.56 million square feet of space, 3.81 million rentable. So an edge city would have at least slightly more space this notable office building though perhaps it is difficult to visualize this space since it is a skyscraper and each floor seems smaller. An ever bigger building, The Pentagon, has 6.5 million square feet, more than the lower threshold for an edge city. Therefore, Tysons Corner has nearly 4 Pentagons of office space. Comparing this edge city space to shopping malls, Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, Illinois (an edge city itself) has 2.7 million square feet while the Mall of America has a total of 4.2 million square feet.

3. We could measure edge cities in terms of square miles or acres and then compare to bigger cities. Square miles make some sense: Tysons Corner is 4.9 square miles while Memphis, a city Garreau says has downtown space similar to that of an edge city, is 302.3 square miles (on land). Acres are a little harder to interpret: a common suburban house lot is an eighth of an acre, a square mile has 640 acres (hence the dividing of the American frontier into 160 and 640 acre plots), and an acre has roughly 43,500 square feet. Then, an edge city with 5 million square feet of office space has about 115 acres of office space. Perhaps acres are best left to farmers.

In the end, I think Garreau made the right comparison to demonstrate the office and retail space within an edge city: we have some ideas about the size of downtowns of smaller big cities and the image of this amount of space existing in the suburbs is jarring.

Sociologist uses Twitter for class but are the students learning more?

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Stories like this are not uncommon: professors utilizing technology to engage their students (and here is another one about clicker use).

Wendy Welch is incorporating the use of the social networking site Twitter into her cultural geography class this semester. The adjunct instructor said she decided to use the social networking site in her class after having problems with students using their phones in class for less-than-appropriate purposes.“If you can’t beat them, get ahead of them,” Welch said. “That’s the way the world works now.”…

Each student was assigned a country in Africa and asked to tweet facts about their country, such as languages and population, using designated hash tags, or categories. That way, each student only has to research one country but has access to all the information they may need from other students.

Welch also plans to have students use their mobile devices or laptops to research information during class sessions, she said…

She said she hopes to “get students to understand and participate in their own education.”

Perhaps this does increase the engagement level of the students. All professors want their students to be engaged and we don’t want to be seen as being behind the times. But, I think there is often something missing from discussions about student engagement and the use of technology in the classroom: does this actually lead to higher levels of student learning or student outcomes?

I suspect professors will always try to keep up with technology as it changes and each of these changes will be accompanied by hand-wringing. However, we need to be able to distinguish between engaging students with technology versus helping them learn. Take this Twitter example from class: do students do better on tests? Do they retain the knowledge better? Can they apply their knowledge from this particular class to other settings, particularly if the technology is not present? Does technology itself help students think more deeply about the big questions of our world?

If technology alone becomes the answer in the classroom, we will be in trouble.