Tag Archives: patterns

What exactly one YouTube video tell us or does not tell us, car dealer inventory edition

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I recent read this summary of a YouTube video purportedly showing a car dealer stashing new cars in a parking garage so that their outdoor lots look emptier:

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Los Angeles-based car YouTuber effspot stumbled across something we’ve heard about but haven’t been able to dig up solid evidence of: dealerships are hiding a ton of new inventory in secret locations. Now you might think these dealers are putting their overstock vehicles in some secure location like a warehouse or locked lot, and some definitely are, but effspot found hundreds of Jeeps, Dodges, Rams, and Chryslers stashed in a public parking garage, all apparently put there by just one dealership.

This is a potentially interesting find. How common is this?

Dealerships have been running this scheme for months and months, but it’s starting to fall apart despite some media outlets trying to claim there may be no return to normal for the car market. Instead, both the new and used markets are going in only one direction: down. Just how quickly and by how much remains to be seen, but don’t believe car dealerships have hardly any vehicles and need to overcharge you big time for the privilege of new car ownership.

So we go from one parking garage is “dealerships have been running this scheme for months and months”? Roughly 51 seconds into the YouTube video, the maker says “these dealerships, or at least this particular dealership” has engaged in these practices. Later, at 5:52, he asks whether this is happening around the country.

This does not necessarily mean the larger argument is not true. But, the evidence presented here shows one parking garage and cars from one dealer. How broad is this practice? We do not know from this video and story.

This might just be the daily story of the Internet and social media. Interesting things are posted. Information is shared. People describe their experiences. But, it is difficult to know how this matches larger patterns or not. An individual reader might be able to make connections across stories. Or, people online could connect the dots for others. For example, others could make videos on YouTube detailing their finds of auto inventory in different locations. Sometimes these connections are made, often they are not. The next day comes and there is more information to process and relatively little that helps fit all the pieces together.

“Journalism is sociology on fast forward”

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Listening to 670 The Score at 12:14 PM today, I heard Leila Rehimi say this about journalism:

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Journalism is sociology on fast forward.

I can see the logic in this as journalists and sociologists are interested in finding out what is happening in society. They are interested in trends, institutions, patterns, people in different roles and with different levels of access to power and resources, and narratives.

There are also significant differences in the two fields. One is hinted at in the quote above: different timelines. A typical sociology project from idea to publication in some form could takes 4-6 (a rough average). Journalists usually work on shorter timelines and have stronger pressures to generate content more quickly.

Related to this timing issue is the difference in methods for understanding and analyzing data and evidence. Sociologists use a large number of quantitative and qualitative methods, follow the scientific method, and take longer periods of time to analyze and write up conclusions. Sociologists see themselves more as social scientists, not just describers of social realities.

I am sure there are plenty of sociologists and journalists with thoughts on this. It would be interesting to see where they see convergence and divergence between the two fields.

View housing – and America? – as “a country of 384 metro areas”

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Housing is all about location so why not view it as a metro by metro issue?

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When it comes to housing, it might be better to think about the U.S. as a country of 384 metro areas (plus 50 million Americans who don’t live in places big enough to qualify as a metro area) rather than one continuous country. In 2021, the U.S. population grew just 0.1% – the lowest annual expansion rate since our nation’s founding. But housing dynamics are best viewed through the different metro areas that are growing and shrinking. Of the 384 metro areas, 72 had declining populations in the decade leading to 2020, according to the Census.

The general argument makes some sense: supply and demand for housing depends on the metropolitan region. I have lived in one of these regions that has very limited demand for housing and experienced numerous foreclosures in the late 2000s. In places such as these, housing is cheap and plentiful – but there are relatively few people who want to move there and, if they do, there is limited desire to rehab older homes. On the other hand, the activity in particular housing markets – such as the coverage of housing and population in Manhattan and San Francisco during COVID-19 – draws all sorts of attention because of the prices and demand. All of this contributes to why housing is difficult to address at a national level.

More broadly, seeing the United States as a collection of metropolitan regions (or expanded city states?) may make some sense. For example, the 9+ million people in the Chicago region may see themselves as more of a collective than describing people from Illinois or people from the Midwest. These people share a particular housing and jobs market, common sources of information, entertainment options, a transportation network, and regional forces.

Of course, some regions may be more like other regions. Scholars have examined some of these broader collections, such as Rust Belt or Sunbelt regions or immigrant gateways, or used particular cities as models – particularly Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles – by which we can better understand all cities and regions. Yet, even these regions that share common characteristics have particular histories and current realities that would help set them apart from other.

All of this gets at an ongoing issue in sociology and other disciplines: at what point is it worthwhile to group phenomena together because of common traits or is it better to leave them as distinct entities because of their differences? There are both common traits in and a lot of variation among the 384 metro areas (plus all the other people living outside metro areas). At least for housing, it is tempting to treat each market as unique even as there are common patterns.

Learning to see sociological patterns in Intro to Sociology

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An Introduction to Sociology course could be renamed “Introduction to Seeing Structural Patterns in Society.” For those not used to looking at the world with this particular lens, such a class can be an education. I recall being in this position as an undergraduate and feeling the challenge; how can you see and understand the world from a structural perspective?

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After concluding another semester teaching Intro to Soc, I realize I approach structural patterns in this class in at least three ways:

  1. Read and discuss sociological research deploying this perspective. The readings we do in this class range from early work to recent monographs that examine particular social forces. The readings tackle big issues in society that are far beyond the influence or experience of a single individual. The methods the sociologists employ, including surveys, interviews, ethnographic observations, and historical analysis, examine broader patterns and not just individual cases or single case studies. From DuBois highlighting “the veil” and “double consciousness” in his own life and in American society to Rendón discussing the difficulty of young Mexican men in Los Angeles obtaining the American Dream,
  2. Continually contrast structural perspective to a more individualistic view. As we discuss different topics, I often compare the ways we might individually experience life and particular social phenomena and the collective experience. Additionally, a common American individualistic approach – my decisions explain my circumstances – provides a foil to a sociological perspective. Even as we enact our own agency, we do so within conditions not entirely of our own making (as Marx suggested).
  3. Provide multiple opportunities for students to practice deploying structural perspectives. Some of the assignments I have throughout the semester ask students to connect their own experiences to sociological analysis. To do this, they need to step outside of themselves to see the bigger picture. Is their experience typical, different, and how might a sociological theory or concept explain it? As Mills suggested, history and biography come together in “the sociological imagination.”

By the end of all of this, I hope students will be able to use this sociological lens in different situations. Even as many will not be sociology majors, their work in different disciplines and a variety of careers could be enhanced by thinking sociologically with an emphasis on large-scale patterns and forces.

Pursuing repetition in a world of novelty and spectacle

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When I assign full books for my classes to read, one complaint I hear consistently from students is this: the book is too repetitive – the author keeps making the same point over and over. I admit to having similar thoughts at times where I wonder if a book could have been ten pages long and effectively made the same argument.

Yet, one of the jobs of an author is to remind their reader of their argument. Readers should not easily get lost. I distinctly remember my eighth grade Language Arts teacher telling us that we need to keep restating our argument. Granted, the author should do this in new ways each time.

Is the problem then that the book authors are indeed too repetitive or are we today less interested in repetition? A Foreward of a recent book I read included these lines:

But the best books aren’t the ones that have all brand new information. We don’t have context for that. Instead, we need new voices telling us old things…

Many of the questions that vex humans are not new ones, even if their form might change. The quote above is from a book about living in the suburbs. Even though suburbs in the current American form have been around about 100 years (thinking about suburbs based around driving and featuring mass-produced housing), the questions are similar: how does one find fulfillment? What leads to lasting success? What is the good life?

But, how do you answer such questions if modern life is about new experiences and novelty? Perhaps this is supposed to be an answer to those questions: the good life involves new adventures and change.

Or, perhaps repetition helps answer these big questions. Patterns. Habits. Consistent behaviors. Rituals. In a religious setting, liturgies. Novelty can be good but what is it anchored in? Can humans truly go from topic to topic or experience to experience without anchoring beliefs?

Repetition can be hard to get excited about yet it is a regular feature of our lives. Washing the dishes. Regular interactions with people. Doing the laundry. Making food. The activities may not be exciting and novel but they do help form us.

Going back to the book example, repetition is good. Having read many books and written pieces, I am not sure exactly when an author crosses a line between good repetition and annoying repetition. However, maybe we all need a little more repetition of good arguments, experiences, and patterns.

The Internet and social media can help us see more small things but the bigger picture is still fuzzy

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On one hand, the Internet and what comes along with it allows us unprecedented access to what is going on in the world. Information galore. Bypassing the traditional gatekeepers of the media. Access to millions of stories we might not have otherwise seen or heard.

On the other hand, it is a glut of stories and information. The social media feeds just keep going. The 24 hour news cycle of cable TV news is now an up to the second compendium of events big and small. There is a lot to take in. Some of the research I’ve done with the social media use of emerging adults suggests some have a hard time keeping up with it all. What should we pay attention to?

Going forward, I fear the extra information we now have – an unprecedented amount in human history – isn’t helping as much as it might. This is the case for at least four reasons. First, even though we have more information, we still don’t have all the information. As Max Weber once said, social life is so complex that it is difficult to imagine even social scientists understanding all aspects of social phenomena. Second, we’re not necessarily good as humans or trained well in how to process all the information. Certain things catch our eye – for example, such as information that agrees with what we already think (confirmation bias) – while we see others but they don’t register at all. Third, there is simply too much. Perhaps humans were not made to think at this scale; for much of human history, we lived in relatively small settings and had close relationships with people who were pretty similar to us. See Dunbar’s Number as an example of how the limits of humans comes up against friends and followers on social media.

Fourth, and this is where my sociological perspective particularly comes in, it is difficult work to connect individual level data – what we might call microsociology – with larger societal trends – macrosociology. Take this example: we see a post of involving a person with particular traits leaving no tip for a waitperson which they have posted on social media. Unfortunately, such negative interactions happen frequently. But, are we to take this single example as just an attempt to point out a wrong done by a single customer or does this one event reflect on an entire people group? Or, is a serious weather event on the other side of the world (one we would have had little knowledge about even a few decades ago) evidence for climate change or for deniers? When we are immersed in so many small events and their immediate interpretations, how are we to form big picture understandings of patterns? It requires us to step back and try to make sense of it all rather than simply slotting each small event into our existing heuristics.

Our capacities to deal with all of this information may improve in coming years as it becomes the new normal. Or, some may go another direction – though it is hard to imagine – where they retreat from this information overload. Either way, we’ll need to figure out ways to help everyone see the broader patterns so we all don’t lose the forest for the tees.

Richard Florida: we lack systematic data to compare cities

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As he considers Jane Jacobs’ impact, Richard Florida suggests we need more data about cities:

MCP: Some of the research around the built environment is pretty skimpy and not very scientific, in a lot of cases.

RF: Right. And it’s done by architects who are terrific, but are basically looking at it from the building level. We need a whole research agenda. A century or so ago John Hopkins University invented the teaching hospital, modern medicine. They said, medicine could be advanced by underpinning the way doctors treat people and develop clinical methodologies, with a solid, scientific research base. Think of it as a system that runs from laboratory to bed-side. We don’t have that for cities and urbanism.  But at the same time we know that the city is the key economic and social unit of our time. Billions of people across the world are pouring into cities and we are spending trillions upon trillions of dollars building new cities and rebuilding, expanding and upgrading existing ones. We’re doing it with little in the way of systematic research. We lack even the most basic data we need to compare and assess cities around the world. There’s no comparable grand challenge that we have so terribly under funded as cities and urbanism. We need to develop everything from the underlying science to better understand cities and their evolution, the systematic data to assess them and the educational and clinical protocols for building better, more prosperous and inclusive cities. Right now, mayors are out there winging it. Economic developers are out there winging it. There’s no clinical training program. There are some, actually, but they’re scattered about and they’re not having much impact. It’s going to take a big commitment. But we need to build the equivalent of the medical research infrastructure, with the equivalent of “teaching hospitals” for our cities.  When you think of it cities are our greatest laboratories for advancing our understanding the intersection of natural, physical, social and human environments—they’re our most complex organisms. This is going to be my next big research project: I’m calling it the Urban Genome Project. It’s what I hope to devote the rest of my career doing.

The cities as laboratories language echoes that of the Chicago School. But, much of the sociological literature suggests a basic tension in this area: how much are cities alike compared to how much are they different? Are there common processes across most or all cities that we can highlight and work with or does their unique contexts limit how much generalizing can be done? Hence, we have a range of studies with everything from examining large sets of cities at once or processes across all cities (like Florida would argue in The Rise of the Creative Class) versus studies of particular neighborhoods and cities to discover their idiosyncratic patterns.

Of course, we could just look at cities like a physicist might and argue there are power laws underlying cities…

Social science assumes “human living is not random”

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Noted sociologist of religion Grace Davie gives a brief description of her work:

My work, like that of all social scientists, rests on the assumption that human living is not random. Why is it, for example, that Christian churches in the West are disproportionately attended by women? That requires an explanation.

This is a good starting point for describing the social sciences. There are patterns to human social life and we can’t rely on anecdotes or interpretations of whether there are patterns or how to understand them. We want to apply a scientific perspective to these patterns and explain why those patterns, and not others, exist. Then, we might delve deeper into level of analysis, theoretical assumptions, and techniques of data collection and analysis – three areas where the various social science disciplines differ.

Perceptions of extreme weather affected by social context

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A new study in Environmental Sociology finds that people view extreme weather differently depending on their context:

“Odds were higher among younger, female, more educated, and Democratic respondents to perceive effects from extreme weather than older, male, less educated, and Republican respondents,” said the study’s author, Matthew Cutler of the University of New Hampshire.

There were other correlations, too. For example, people with lower incomes had higher perceptions of extreme weather than people who earned more. Those who live in more vulnerable areas, as might be expected, interpret the effects of weather differently when the costs to their homes and communities are highest.

Causes of extreme weather and the frequency of extreme weather events is an under-explored area from a sociological perspective. Better understanding is important to building more resilient and adaptive communities. After all, why prepare or take safety precautions if you believe the weather isn’t going to be all that bad or occur all that often?…

“The patterns found in this research provide evidence that individuals experience extreme weather in the context of their social circumstances and thus perceive the impacts of extreme weather through the lens of cultural and social influences. In other words, it is not simply a matter of seeing to believe, but rather an emergent process of both seeing and believing — individuals experiencing extreme weather and interpreting the impacts against the backdrop of social and economic circumstances central to and surrounding their lives,” Cutler concludes.

Context matters! (Many sociology studies could be summed up this way.) Weather may have some objective features – it can be measured, quantified, examined, and predicted (to a small degree). Yet we all experience slightly differently based on what shapes us. While it sounds like this study focuses more on demographic factors, I wonder if there would also be big differences based on general attitudes about nature: is it something that is bigger than humans/has a life of its own vs. it is something that humans can control or not be affected by because of our increasing knowledge? Plus, humans are often not the best at detecting patterns; we perceive things to be related when they are not or vice versa.

Perhaps this helps explain why so many people can make small talk about the weather. It isn’t just that it affects us; rather, we all view it in slightly different ways. One person’s big storm that requires changing their behavior might be just an inconvenience to someone else.

Fun with statistics: people flock to stores that sold winning lottery tickets in the past

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Ahead of the recent large Powerball jackpot, stores that sold winning tickets in the past experienced an increase in business:

When word got out that a southeast Pennsylvania 7-Eleven sold a $1 million Powerball ticket on Saturday, customers hoping to experience some luck of their own flocked to the store…

At a Casey’s General Store in Bondurant, Iowa, everyone knows it’s the place where a $202.1 million Powerball jackpot ticket was sold to a local woman in September. Asked what types of questions the store gets when the jackpots get huge, assistant manager Debra Fetters said: “Does lightning strike twice here?”…

“When you get those stores where they’ve actually seen someone win, they’re very enthusiastic about it. They know about the game, they have regular customers. A lot of it really does come down to great retailers that support the lottery, understand that there are winners on both sides.”

Linda Hamlin, also of the New Mexico Lottery, noted the story of “Millionaire Mary” Torres of Albuquerque. After she sold a $1 million winning Powerball ticket to an Albuquerque man in May 2011, she became known as a good luck charm. Her customers followed her to another store a few miles away.

And the article ends with this quote:

“Humans tend to be superstitious about things,” said Strutt of the Multi-State Lottery Association. “We all have our ways to ensure our best luck. But every ticket has the exact same chance of winning.”

What would happen if this argument, that their odds of winning do not increase, was presented to these purchasers who go back to the place of past winners? Would they say the numbers aren’t right or say it doesn’t matter? Perhaps this is a sort of Pascal’s Wager for Powerball: it doesn’t increase my odds of winning to shop at this particular location, but it can’t hurt!

This could be chalked up to superstition but it is also the result of humans looking for patterns where there aren’t any. Two things make where the winning person bought the ticket stand out: (1) there are few big winners and (2) the big prizes are noteworthy. Put these two together and all of the sudden people start seeing trends even though there is little data to work with. But, then you have news coverage a few years ago about a woman in Texas who won the lottery four times – four data points make a much better pattern than a one-time winner!