Tag Archives: economic crisis

A new term: the “accordion family”

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Sociologist Katherine Newman explains a new term she has coined to describe the experience of many families in recent decades where young adults return to live at home: the accordion family.

NEWMAN: …[B]asically, an accordion family is a multigenerational household in which you have adult children over the age of 21 living with their parents. And, actually, that has not been the norm in the middle class for some time. It would have been the norm before the Second World War, but it really hasn’t been for some time now…

[I]t’s actually a trend that’s been in play for some time now, so it’s not unique to the recession we’ve been mired in. But, really, ever since about the early 1980s, we’ve seen a pretty steady increase in the proportion of young people of this age group that have been either moving back with their parents or who don’t leave in the first place.And that’s mainly because the economy has been changing in ways that make it difficult for young people to find entry level employment that really pays enough for them to be independent. As well in the middle class, where we see ambitions for professional futures, it takes longer and longer and more and more money to achieve the kind of educational credentials needed to launch a middle class professional life.

So we see young people who complete college and move back in with their parents in order to shelter those costs of the master’s degree or experience with an internship where they’re not earning any money at all in the hopes of launching at a higher level when they get a bit older.

I don’t think Newman says in this interview why she uses this term but I’ll hazard a guess: an accordion implies that American families stretch to accommodate younger adults at home when economic times are bad and then contract when these same adults move out when jobs are plentiful and the economy has picked up. This is different than a norm of multi or intergenerational living – the economic climate affects who can and will move back home.

Opening day care facilities beyond 8 AM to 6 PM

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As the American economy changes and workers try to adapt, some day care centers are offering extended hours:

About 40 percent of the American labor force now works some form of nonstandard hours, including evenings, nights, weekends and early mornings, according to Harriet B. Presser, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland. That share is expected to grow with the projected expansion of jobs in industries like nursing, retail and food service, which tend to require after-hours work.

At the same time, working hours are less predictable than they once were. ”There’s a greater variability and irregularity of schedules,” said Lonnie Golden, a professor of economics and labor studies at Pennsylvania State University. “In surveys, more and more people are no longer able to specify a beginning or end of the workday.”

Yet for years it has been a frustrating reality for parents that child care services have failed to keep pace with the changing workday, with many centers still keeping a rigid 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. schedule. Experiments with nighttime care have come and gone over the years, but lingering ambivalence about the concept led most centers to deem it financially untenable…

While overnight care is still relatively rare, evening hours are no longer so unusual, providers say. Donna McClintock, chief operating officer for Children’s Choice Learning Centers Inc., which runs 46 employer-sponsored child care centers across the country, said that demand for nontraditional hours had grown and that centers providing care after-hours care made up a large part of the company’s recent growth. About a fifth of the company’s centers have added nontraditional hours in the past few years, she said.

This sounds like an unanticipated consequence of a poor economy: childcare providers have to offer more hours as people have to accept different kinds of jobs or work additional jobs. What are the potential consequences of changing childcare schedules?

Three years of poll data from during the Great Recession

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Here is a lot of interesting poll data collected during three years, April 2009 to early 2011, of the Great Recession. From a quick glance at the data, there is quite a bit of uncertainty and the country could go in a number of directions.

Poverty in Wheaton on PBS NewsHour

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In order to illustrate the rising number of people in poverty, PBS NewsHour went to Wheaton, Illinois.

PBS NewsHour: Suburb in Wealthy Illinois County Sees Unexpected Rise in Poverty

Some interesting material here including a look at local food banks, how middle-class people can end up in poverty, and how federal resources go more to urban areas than suburban areas. With the increase in the poor population in the suburbs and the knowledge that many suburbs are unprepared to handle this, this could change the image of and experience in the American suburbs for years to come.

While this is clearly a national issue, there hasn’t been much public discussion of this in Wheaton. Instead, I have heard more about high taxes, the government taking and wasting too much money, and the need to balance municipal budgets. I wonder how the City of Wheaton and others in the community would answer these questions:

1. Are there local resources to deal with this? Either way, should there be?

2. Is it a problem that suburban communities should help solve (with money, time, services, etc.) or is it someone else’s concern (the state, the federal government, private agencies, churches, etc.)?

3. Is this a problem for Wheaton’s image?

Virginia Postrel takes on typical arguments about worthless college majors

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Virginia Postrel counters arguments that many American college students are studying subjects that don’t matter and won’t help them find a job:

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, humanities majors account for about 12 percent of recent graduates, and art history majors are so rare they’re lost in the noise. They account for less than 0.2 percent of working adults with college degrees, a number that is probably about right for recent graduates, too. Yet somehow art history has become the go-to example for people bemoaning the state of higher education.

A longtime acquaintance perfectly captured the dominant Internet memes in an e-mail he sent me after my last column, which was on rising tuitions. “Many people that go to college lack the smarts and/or the tenacity to benefit in any real sense,” he wrote. “Many of these people would be much better off becoming plumbers — including financially. (No shame in that, who’re you gonna call when your pipes freeze in the middle of the night? An M.A. in Italian art?)”…

The higher-education system does have real problems, including rising tuition prices that may not pay off in higher earnings. But those problems won’t be solved by assuming that if American students would just stop studying stupid subjects like philosophy and art history and buckle down and major in petroleum engineering (the highest-paid major), the economy would flourish and everyone would have lucrative careers…

The critics miss the enormous diversity of both sides of the labor market. They tend to be grim materialists, who equate economic value with functional practicality. In reality, however, a tremendous amount of economic value arises from pleasure and meaning — the stuff of art, literature, psychology and anthropology. These qualities, built into goods and services, increasingly provide the work for all those computer programmers. And there are many categories of jobs, from public relations to interaction design to retailing, where insights and skills from these supposedly frivolous fields can be quite valuable. The critics seem to have never heard of marketing or video games, Starbucks or Nike, or that company in Cupertino, California, the rest of us are always going on about. Technical skills are valuable in part because of the “soft” professions that complement them.

The American economy is large and difficult to describe. It is a complex system where there are lots of educated and uneducated workers trying to fill a lot of different job slots. Simple answers on either side are not the solution in helping people to understand what is really going on. If there are lots of jobs in certain fields that need to be filled, like technical trades or nursing, it doesn’t necessarily mean that every student should suddenly go in that direction. I wonder if this is all tied to the Sportscenter-ization of discussion.

I wonder if someone has tracked whether these sorts of discussions happen in good economic times. In other words, when the economy is good and unemployment is low, do many people worry about what majors college students are pursuing or does it not really matter?

Quick Review: Boomerang

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Michael Lewis’s latest book, Boomerang, gives the current economic crisis some international context. In an entertaining and somewhat breezy manner, Lewis investigates why countries as disparate as Iceland, Greece, Germany, and the United States all fell into the economic mess. Here are a few thoughts about his take:

1. My overwhelming thought about Lewis’s explanations is that he wants to delve into different cultural approaches to the world of finance. Lewis’s argument goes like this: even though these countries have very different histories and cultural mindsets, somehow they all got involved with bad debt in the 2000s. This same topic could spark a fascinating economic sociology or cultural sociology manuscript.

2. Unfortunately, Lewis either doesn’t have much time to spend with each country (he admits the book began as he was working on understanding the US system, which became The Big Short or he doesn’t want to delve deeply into his thin arguments. For example, in Germany he tries to tie their fondness for following rules (which means Germans were the last people to be being disastrous American CDOs) to their fondness for scatalogical humor (which Lewis bases on one anthropological study). While there is a lot of potential here for showing how different cultures can be tied together by a global finance market, Lewis needs a lot more evidence to construct a convincing argument.

3. I found the last chapter to be both exhilarating and depressing. Lewis comes back to the United States in the final chapter and describes how this could all play out. Here is what Lewis suggests: while the centralized governments of Europe struggle, the problem in the US is pushed down the road because the federal government can push off more and more obligations on state and local governments. If this plays out as Lewis suggests (though there is debate over whether it will be as bad as Meredith Whitney suggested), local governments will continue to feel the pain of the economic crisis for years to come and the results may not be pretty.

Summary: I think Lewis is on to something here but I would like to see the topic covered with more depth and include more research.

Sociologist Richard Sennett: Wall Street offices lack cooperation

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After talking with a number of workers involved in the Wall Street troubles of 2008, sociologist Richard Sennett argues that Wall Street offices lack cooperation:

The financial industry is a high-stress business that requires people to work extremely long hours, sacrificing time for children, spouses and social pleasures. But after 2008, many of my subjects were no longer willing to make those sacrifices. Looking back, they realized how little respect they had for the executives who’d worked above them, how superficial was the trust they had for fellow workers and, most of all, how weak cooperation proved in the wake of financial disaster.

The fragility of this social triangle is disturbing. When informal channels of communication wither, people keep to themselves ideas about how the organization is really doing, or guard their own territory. Weak social ties erode loyalty, which businesses need in good times as well as bad. Many of the employees I’ve been talking with have come to feel embittered by the thin, superficial quality of social ties in places where they spend most of their waking hours…

Even for those workers who have recovered quickly, the crash isn’t something they are likely to forget. The front office may want to get back as quickly as possible to the old regime, to business as usual, but lower down the institutional ladder, people seem to feel that during the long boom something was missing in their lives: the connections and bonds forged at work.

This is an example of how sociology can help inform economics and/or social policy. In order for offices or any social group to work well, there has to be trust, solidarity, and cooperation. These traits cannot simply be dictated or ordered. Rather, relationships and social ties need to be started, developed, and maintained over time. These relationships may seem silly or unnecessary to some but it will be difficult to accomplish great things without them.

I expect an analysis like this is just the beginning of a flood of academic work and commentary about the recent economy crisis. And I would guess that a lot of research will show that people were not acting “rationally” but rather were working off of different emotions that led to “irrational exuberance.” Cultural and social factors played a role but it will up to scholars to determine how much.

“Muck mansions” and “bungalow bliss” in Ireland

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The United States is not the only country with housing issues. Here is a description of some of the issues in Ireland, complete with references to “muck mansions” and “bungalow bliss”:

A major study of the impact of the Celtic Tiger property boom on the Irish landscape has slammed the damage done to the countryside, to rural towns, and to people who have to endure long commutes…

It says that the damage done by the ‘McMansions’ or ‘Muck Mansions’ of the past decade is worse than the effect of the ‘bungalow bliss’ era in the 1970s…

“The mark left on the landscape by the Celtic Tiger society has been profound. A sense of lifestyle entitlement is reflected in the one-off ‘McMansion’ housing in rural areas, with SUVs on cobble-lock driveways, satellite dishes and decking that is seldom used but always seen.”

The McMansions are on a bigger scale, the book says, referring to “a conspicuous two-storey house faced in either red brick or stone, with protruding conservatory and a detached garage. Frequently sited in commanding locations, they dominate the landscape, reflecting their role as status symbol as well as home.”

The description of a McMansion is intriguing. On one hand, there are similar traits compared to American McMansions: ties to SUVs, “entitlement” culture, conspicuous design, sprawl and long commutes, and status symbols. On the other hand, there are some differences: Irish McMansions are said to be in rural areas (though I’m not sure they really have suburbs like the US does so maybe this is similar), the garage is separate, and they are placed in “commanding locations” where everyone else can see them. The general connotation that these are undesirable places and that such homes are either symbols or causes of economic troubles is very similar.

There is something to this alliteration: “muck mansions” and “bungalow bliss.” Any good ideas about similar terms that could apply to the US housing market?

The rise of dollar stores and the questions that should follow

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In recent years dollar stores have had a lot of growth:

Surveys have shown that today’s shoppers are more likely to make purchases in dollar stores lately, and chains such as Dollar Tree, Dollar General, and Family Dollar have experienced outstanding sales growth as a result…

Now, according to a study by retail research firm Colliers International, dollar store locations outnumber drugstore locations in the U.S. Specifically, Colliers added up the number of locations for four national dollar store chains (Dollar General, Dollar Tree, Family Dollar, 99 Cents Only), and compared that figure to the total number of locations for the country’s three biggest drugstore chains (CVS, Rite Aid, Walgreens).

The tally, as of mid-2001, stood at 21,500 dollar stores vs. 19,700 drugstores…

Also, the dollar store chains have all experienced remarkably strong sales in recent years, and have been expanding like crazy as a result. Dollar General, for example, has nearly doubled its location total over the past decade, 5,000 to more than 9,500 stores today. And counting.

I’ve wondered recently why Walmart gets a lot of attention while drug stores, particularly Walgreens in this area, and dollar stores have been expanding. Whenever I walk into a Walgreens, I can’t help but think they are mini-Walmarts. Walgreens sells everything from prescriptions to ice cream to photos to cosmetics and so on. Dollar stores are similar but cheaper, selling everything from food to detergent to household supplies.

After noting the growth in dollar stores, we could ask some questions about the effects these stores have. Clearly, they offer cheap goods. But: Are dollar stores good for the local economy? Do they provide good jobs? Do they tend to be found in areas of sprawl or strip malls and are dependent on automobile traffic? Are the goods primarily made in the US or overseas? Is the food for sale healthy? Perhaps these questions aren’t asked since it is assume dollar stores will recede in popularity when the economy improves. But since this likely won’t be for a while, shouldn’t we think about what it means to have a lot of dollar stores?

Occupy Wall Street to move into foreclosures?

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As Occupy Wall Street moves forward, here is one of the next steps is to move into foreclosures:

Occupy Wall Street has left the street and gone legit. They’ve rented office space in the Financial District and meet daily at a public atrium inside Deutche Bank.

“We’ve managed to, in basically two months, propel the issues of inequality and social justice to the top of our national discussion,” said one Occupier.

In various cities today there were marches on a variety of issues, but the movement plans new tactics. On Tuesday around the nation, it plans to occupy foreclosed homes. In mid-January, a call to pitch tents outside of Congress.

Foreclosures have generally taken a back seat recently to issues like jobs, stock markets, and Republican presidential nominees. Can OWS turn attention back to housing? It will be very interesting to see where they occupy homes (the worst areas like Merced, California or Las Vegas?), how they sustain their collective energy if they are more indeed spread out, and how neighbors respond.

Some recent polls on the most important issues in the minds of Americans:

–PwC Health Research Institute in mid-November: job creation is most important and healthcare and the deficit are tied at number two.

–Gallup in early November: the economy leads the way but there is no mention of housing or foreclosures.

–Rasmussen Reports in mid-October: economy leads by wide margin with 84% saying it is “very important.” No separate category for housing so hard to parse out jobs, stock market, housing.

Perhaps there aren’t many people tracking dissatisfaction with housing in recent months?

If these polls are correct, should the OWS focus on job creation and the economy rather than branch out into foreclosures/the housing market?