Tag Archives: social class

Uptick in recent years in American children born to unwed parents

Posted on by

As more Americans are living alone or delaying or rejecting marriage, “more children [are] born to unmarried parents.”

The percentage of first births to women living with a male partner jumped from 12% in 2002 to 22% in 2006-10 — an 83% increase. The percentage of cohabiting new fathers rose from 18% to 25%. The analysis, by the National Center for Health Statistics, is based on data collected from 2006 to 2010.

“We were a little surprised in such a short time period to see these increases,” says demographer Gladys Martinez, lead author of the report, based on face-to-face interviews with 12,279 women and 10,403 men ages 15-44.

The percentage of first births to cohabiting women tripled from 9% in 1985 to 27% for births from 2003 to 2010.

Karen Benjamin Guzzo, a sociologist at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, who studies cohabitation and fertility, says she thinks the big jump since 2002 is likely because of the recession, which was at its height from late 2007 to 2009, right in the middle of the federal data collection.

“I think it’s economic shock,” she says. “Marriage is an achievement that you enter into when you’re ready. But in the meantime, life happens. You form relationships. You have sex. You get pregnant. In a perfect world, they would prefer to be married, but where the economy is now, they’re not going to be able to get married, and they don’t want to wait to have kids.”…

Sociologist Kelly Musick of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., who studies cohabiting couples with children, says she’s noticed women with more education starting to have children outside of marriage. She says cohabiting used to be more common among women who didn’t graduate from high school but it’s becoming more common for those with a high school degree or some college…

If sociologist Benjamin Guzzo is correct, does that mean that a good economy down the road (whenever that might be) would reverse this trend? I also wonder how this fits with sociologist Kelly Musick’s suggestion that cohabitation is spreading across class lines. How does this line up with recent arguments that marriage may be becoming a middle- or upper-class luxury?

Guzzo’s argument that marriage happens when two people are “ready” is also interesting. This fits with an argument that expectations for marriage partners are very high. So people don’t want to marry because they aren’t ready, economically or perhaps psychologically, but they do feel ready to have children in these situations and having a child is less tethered to being married.

Some of this seems to be happening quite rapidly and we just starting to to track it think about what it means.

Differences in who blogs by race and education

Posted on by

A new sociological study shows that who blogs is affected by both race and education:

While African Americans as a whole are less likely to afford laptops and personal computers, Internet-savvy blacks, on average, blog one and a half times to nearly twice as much as whites, while Hispanics blog at the same rate as whites, according to a study published in the March online issue of the journal, Information, Communication & Society.

“Blacks consume less online content, but once online, are more likely to produce it,” said the study’s author, Jen Schradie, a doctoral candidate in sociology at UC Berkeley and a researcher at the campus’s Berkeley Center for New Media.

Schradie analyzed data from more than 40,000 Americans surveyed between 2002 and 2008 for the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which tracks Internet use and social media trends. Her latest findings follow up on a 2011 study in which Schradie found a “digital divide” among online content producers based on education and socio-economic status…

But, she said, “While blacks are more likely to blog than whites, it doesn’t mean the digital divide is over. People with more income and education are still more likely to blog than those with just a high school education and Internet access.”

There is not a whole lot of public discussion about this “digital divide” but it is interesting to see how this plays out with blogs. Of course, blogs are just one part of the content of the Internet and are a form that generally lends itself to longer pieces of writing (say compared to Twitter, Facebook, comment sections, discussion boards). In general, how involved are minorities in other forms of web content?

I wonder if the link between blogging and education is tied to the idea that more educated Internet users feel like they have something to say and contribute. Or perhaps education leads people to think that they should have a voice. For example, if you think about Annette Lareau’s theories about two types of parenting, “concerted cultivation” leads to adults who are assertive and comfortable in conversing with others.

Lost in the Trayvon Martin story: the mindset behind gated communities

Posted on by

Lost in the Trayvon Martin story is the location where this all occurred: a gated community. While these are common in some places, particularly in Florida, one author explains the unique mindset in gated communities and how this might have contributed to the situation:

From 2007 to 2009, I traveled 27,000 miles, living in predominantly white gated communities across this country to research a book. I threw myself into these communities with gusto — no Howard Johnson or Motel 6 for me. I borrowed or rented residents’ homes. From the red-rock canyons of southern Utah to the Waffle-House-pocked exurbs of north Georgia, I lived in gated communities as a black man, with a youthful style and face, to interview and observe residents.

The perverse, pervasive real-estate speak I heard in these communities champions a bunker mentality. Residents often expressed a fear of crime that was exaggerated beyond the actual criminal threat, as documented by their police department’s statistics. Since you can say “gated community” only so many times, developers hatched an array of Orwellian euphemisms to appease residents’ anxieties: “master-planned community,” “landscaped resort community,” “secluded intimate neighborhood.”

No matter the label, the product is the same: self-contained, conservative and overzealous in its demands for “safety.” Gated communities churn a vicious cycle by attracting like-minded residents who seek shelter from outsiders and whose physical seclusion then worsens paranoid groupthink against outsiders. These bunker communities remind me of those Matryoshka wooden dolls.  A similar-object-within-a-similar-object serves as shelter; from community to subdivision to house, each unit relies on staggered forms of security and comfort, including town authorities, zoning practices, private security systems and personal firearms.

Residents’ palpable satisfaction with their communities’ virtue and their evident readiness to trumpet alarm at any given “threat” create a peculiar atmosphere — an unholy alliance of smugness and insecurity. In this us-versus-them mental landscape, them refers to new immigrants, blacks, young people, renters, non-property-owners and people perceived to be poor.

This account lines up with academic research on the topic: gated communities are intended to be safe places. They are generally in the suburbs and residents move there to feel more secure. While not stated explicitly, these communities are meant to help keep issues like poverty, race, social class, and crime outside the walls and fences.

Here are the three best works I know on the subject:

1. McKenzie, Evan. 1994. Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.  

2. Blakely, Edward and Mary Gail Snyder. 1999. Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution.

3. Low, Setha M. 2003. Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America. New York: Routledge.

One of the ironies revealed in these works is that these gated communities are rarely completely sealed off from the outside world. The ones that are tend to be the province of the wealthy and have very controlled entry points. For many gated communities, while there might be fences or walls, not all communities have manned gates and there are often multiple entrances into a neighborhood. So the gated nature of the community is more about a feeling of security than an actual sense that no unwanted outsider can get in.

In the end, gated communities do not necessarily lead to more violent action against outsiders. At the same time, the mindset in these communities is explicitly about safety and protection from the outside world.

Argument: class concerns behind zoning laws

Posted on by

One commentator suggests that activities commonly banned by zoning laws are banned because they don’t meet middle-class or upper-class standards:

1. Clotheslines instead of dryers. Reason: Looks poor. Might suggest you can’t afford a dryer. Plus, you might see underwear that isn’t your own. This is a major cause of sin.

2. No livestock, but large pets are acceptable. Reason: Ostensible reasons are health based, a few even broadly grounded in fact, They ignore, however, that carnivore manures are almost certainly more dangerous than any other livestock manure, and health issues are at least as prevalent from pets. The same is true of considerations of size, noise, etc… – barking dogs the size of ponies are permitted while three quiet hens are not. The real reason is that pets are broadly a sign of affluence, since they cost us money, while livestock are a sign of poverty, because they provide economic benefits.

3. No front yard gardens. Reason: The lawn is a sign of affluence – you have money, leisure and water enough to have a chunk of land, however tiny, that doesn’t produce anything.. It creates in many neighborhoods a seemingly contiguous but basically sterile, often chemically toxic and seeming “public” greenspace that is actually privatized and not very green. Gardens, on the other hand, have dirty wildlife and bugs in them, and might grow food, which is bad because it implies you can’t afford it – even if you can’t.

4. No rainwater collection. Reason: This is mostly in dry places in the Southwest, for fear that the tiny amount of available rainwater might not reach people who can’t afford to pay for it, or strangely believe that water that lands on their roof might belong to them, and who would like to have gardens anyway. A few other municipalities do it for fear of west nile disease because they seem never to have heard of screens or mosquito dunks. Oh, and barrels look like you can’t afford to water your lawn with sprinklers, even when it is raining. While western riparian water rights are an issue, research has shown over and over again that rainbarrels increase net water access and that lost water in storm surge that could have been collected in rainbarrels is a net gain. Fortunately, many cities are finally getting over this one.

5. No commerce that isn’t white collar. Reason – Class. Telecommuters who can make money out of their homes all they want, or upscale white collar professionals with home offices are generally permitted in residential zoning.. This means people who want to sell food, do hair, fix things, cannot hang a discrete sign selling their biscuits or offering their services. This is deemed ugly and bad – and it is a visible reminder that people might not have enough money to keep warm burning it, and might need to earn some.

This seems to get at one of the basic principles of suburban life in recent decades, particularly in places with homeowners associations: legislate against certain behaviors in order to protect your own property values. Voluntarily give up some of your property rights in order to protect yourself from neighbors who don’t care about their property as much as you do. Theoretically, everyone then wins because the neighborhood is protected.

This reminds me of accounts of some early suburbs in the United States where people built their own homes and frequently kept animals. Building your house yourself these days would likely run into all sorts of code concerns (unless you were a proficient plumber, electrician, etc.). Additionally, I imagine the home might look less “perfect” than mass produced housing and these accounts told about how people frequently were adding on to their homes or leaving certain parts in various states of repair.

Many suburbs and communities have faced the question in recent years about residents keeping animals. Some have allowed it, some have not. I assume this is not as much of a concern in wealthier suburbs but it would be interesting to see if there are patterns in which communities allowed animals and which did not.

Overall, zoning is often black and white in its approach and residential zones are meant to be only for residences.

Residents still benefit in paying taxes for schools even with no children

Posted on by

These days, you can find plenty of people who make this argument: I don’t have any children in school so why should I have to pay high property taxes? A sociologist counters this common argument:

In their study, Neal and co-author Jennifer Watling Neal, assistant professor of psychology, analyzed the data from a Gallup survey of more than 20,000 people from 26 U.S. communities from Michigan to Florida to California. As part of the survey, participants were asked how satisfied they were with their communities and to rate the overall quality of their public schools.The researchers found a strong relationship between those who were satisfied with their communities and quality schools. This finding was not affected by gender, age, race, employment status or whether the participant owned or rented a home or had children in school…

Neal said this is likely due to two major reasons:

  • Public schools offer amenities to the entire community such as adult education courses, after-hours computer labs, workout facilities, auditorium space for churches and other groups, and more.
  • Public schools have the more indirect benefit of promoting relationships among neighborhood residents. These relationships lead to issues getting solved – such as broken streetlights, unplowed streets or crime problems – that benefit everyone.

Additionally, good schools are often seen as markers of a good community. I think this is often tied to ideas about class and race: if the schools are good, people think this is due to being in an upscale, quality community.

I would be interested to see if these researchers controlled for the socioeconomic status of the community. Are communities that are wealthier more or less likely to reject additional funding for schools? Are residents who are more able to pay for increased education funding the ones who are most resistant to it?

If all residents do benefit from better schools, what is the best way to pitch educational funding increases? Perhaps you could throw a study like this at them but I don’t think that would be enough…

Was there really cultural consensus in America in 1963?

Posted on by

Virginia Postrel takes issue with one recent claim from Charles Murray that 1963 America was some sort of golden era of cultural consensus. Postrel raises two counterpoints:

There are two big problems with this fable [of cultural consensus]. The first is that the old consensus was an illusion. Editing out anomalies was essential to the whole concept of a single culture as defined not merely by basic values but by taste and experience. Some of those anomalies were huge.

Take religion, a topic that looms large in Murray’s analysis. In 1976, Gallup for the first time asked people whether they had had a “born again” experience in which they committed themselves to Jesus Christ. It was a concept largely unknown to the popular media before the emergence of Jimmy Carter…

That’s the second problem with Murray’s fable: The cultural consensus was not just an illusion. It was an unhealthy one. Instead of promoting understanding, it fed contempt.

One piece of evidence is right on page 2 of the book: “The Beverly Hillbillies,” the highest-rated TV show the week Kennedy was killed. As Murray points out, nearly a third of American households watched it on CBS every week — astounding numbers by today’s standards. “The Beverly Hillbillies” was not just popular. It was, by most measures, the biggest hit in sitcom history. By its fourth week on the air, it had knocked Lucille Ball out of her top spot, and it only fell from the top 10 in its ninth and final season. It even saved “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” a flop in its original slot, by providing a big lead-in audience in an era when it was hard to change the channel. In a true consensus culture, everyone would have loved it…

Critics damned “The Beverly Hillbillies” as utter trash. The New York Times called it “steeped in enough twanging-guitar, polkadot gingham, deliberative drawl, prolific cousins and rural no-think to make each half hour seem as if it contained 60 minutes.” Variety declared it “painful to sit through.” Newsweek said it was “the most shamelessly corny show in years.”

So while Murray wants to tell a story of a dividing America, Postrel is suggesting there has always been an America divided between the elites and the masses. It seems to me that there would be ways to collect data to answer this question about whether the divide today is more pronounced than in the past and whether it is more problematic today than in the past.

This reminds me of all the suburban critiques that quickly emerged after World War II. While there are indeed viable issues to raise about suburban life (whether it is a good use of land and resources, whether it could be planned better, whether concessions could be made so that it is accessible by more than just cars, whether it could offer opportunities for the elderly and teenagers, that it should be welcoming to all people, etc.), there is also some scorn in this analysis. There was a lot of concern about “mass culture,” how the average American was being tempted by low-brow culture. Marxist commentators labeled this as the trade-off of “lawns for pawns.” These viewpoints tended to come from upper-class, urban commentators who couldn’t understand why so many Americans wanted the suburban lifestyle that these commentators argued was simply a glittering facade with no depth. One sociologist who jumped into this fray was Herbert Gans. Writing about the suburban experience (after living in Levittown, unlike many of the negative commentators) or popular culture, Gans debunked some of the myths. Using sociological data and theory, Gans poked holes in some of this commentary, suggesting that perhaps society wasn’t rapidly unraveling and that we were all doomed to live in the land of Idiocracy.

This is a reminder of a few things:

1. Analyzing American culture all at once is a tough task that requires good data and nuance.

2. Closing this gap between high and low culture may be a worthy task but it is not an easy one.

3. America will have to move forward while balancing these multiple perspectives of high and low culture. Either side demonstrating contempt for the other (think about attacks on “academic elites” or “mass culture”) isn’t helpful.

The rise of granite countertops

Posted on by

I’ve written about this before but more people are also interested in this topic: what is behind the rise in popularity of granite countertops?

“What’s interesting is how granite has quickly become the one and only material, across the country and across all price points,” says Ron Cathell, a real estate agent in Northern Virginia. It used to be a high-end thing, back in the 1990s when these countertops began making appearances. It was aspirational. “Then, 12 years ago, the first sort of moderately priced homes started using it. Now, every home has to have granite if you want to sell it. Not just sell it, but rent it. It’s become such a thing. It’s almost — ” he searches for the right metaphor. “It’s almost like trying to sell a house without a toilet.”

As the price has gone down, the popularity has gone up; just look at the graph provided by StoneUpdate.com, a Web site dedicated to the natural stone industry. In 2000, 895,000 metric tons of granite slabs were imported to the United States. In 2011, that number was 1.43 million — and that’s down from a high of 2.64 million a few years ago. The recession slowed granite sales — even cheap granite, which can be bought for as low as about $30 a square foot. Less cheap can go for $80, or however much you’re willing to spend, really. The backsplash is the limit.

“Let’s get deep, let’s get psychological,” says Anthony Carino. Carino is the co-host of “Kitchen Cousins,” a renovation show on HGTV, the network that taught the world about recessed lighting and radiant heating, that democratized the stainless steel appliance so it could be enjoyed by New Yorkers and North Dakotans alike. HGTV is the land that viewers visit when they are trying to cultivate a personal design aesthetic by spying on what everyone else is doing. “People wanting granite countertops is people wanting to sound like they know what they’re talking about,” Carino says. “It’s like listening to two guys talk about hot-rod cars.”

I would argue that this is not psychological – it is sociological. Granite countertops are in for three big reasons:

1. It signals something about its owners. Perhaps it is that they have the money (a marker of social class). Perhaps it is because they have the right taste (though whether it is about aesthetics or being functional would be interesting to look at). Perhaps it is because they are smart enough to get behind the latest trend (#2 on this list).

2. It is what is popular now, thanks to HGTV and other outlets. People want what is popular, partly because they don’t want to be left behind (like having Harvest Gold appliances) and partly because of #3.

3. It helps a home sell. Add stainless steel appliances and decent cabinets and you have a kitchen that is ready to help sell the house.

People internalize these important factors and then make a decision whether to purchase granite countertops or not.

A few other things intrigue me:

1. Are granite countertops “green” or “sustainable”? Does it matter?

2. I’ve seen a few references here and there to a backlash against people who buy this. One referred to purchasers as the “granite and stainless set.” Will this grow into a bigger movement and/or how long will the granite countertop popularity last?

3. Is part of the appeal the natural nature of granite? Although one could argue that it is strange to bring a big slab of rock into your gleaming kitchen…it makes for an odd mix of modern machines and prehistoric rock.

4. How do people sell other countertop surfaces these days if granite is so popular? Besides price, what is the sales pitch for something else?

Also, Megan McArdle recent wondered why people purchase stainless steel appliances.

h/t Instapundit

Argument: environmentalism something the wealthy can pursue “to the exclusion of everything else”

Posted on by

Here is an interesting argument (to be clear, in a conservative outlet): environmentalism is something the upper class pursues because it no longer needs industrial progress.

In turning down Keystone, however, the President has uncovered an ugly little secret that has always lurked beneath the surface of environmentalism. Its basic appeal is to the affluent. Despite all the professions of being “liberal” and “against big business,” environmentalism’s main appeal is that it promises to slow the progress of industrial progress. People who are already comfortable with the present state of affairs — who are established in the environment, so to speak — are happy to go along with this. It is not that they have any greater insight into the mysteries and workings of nature. They are happier with the way things are. In fact, environmentalism works to their advantage. The main danger to the affluent is not that they will be denied from improving their estate but that too many other people will achieve what they already have. As the Forest Service used to say, the person who built his mountain cabin last year is an environmentalist. The person who wants to build one this year is a developer…

What finally focused my attention on the aristocratic roots of environmentalism, however, was a chapter in Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. Although the book is justly famous for coining “conspicuous consumption” and “conspicuous waste,” there is a lesser-known chapter entitled “Industrial Exemption” that perfectly describes the environmental zeitgeist. Veblen posed the question, why is it that people who are the greatest beneficiaries of industrial society are often the most passionate in condemning it? He provided a simple answer. People in the leisure class have become so accustomed affluence as the natural state of things that they no longer feel compelled to embrace any further industrial progress…

But that was not the point. It is not that the average person is not concerned about the environment. Everyone weighs the balance of economic gain against a respect for nature. It is only the truly affluent, however, who can be concerned about the environment to the exclusion of everything else. Most people see the benefits of pipelines and power plants and admit they have to be built somewhere. Only in the highest echelons do we hear people say, “We don’t need to build any pipelines. We’ve already got enough energy. We can all sit around awaiting the day we live off wind and sunshine.”

Environmentalists have spent decades trying to disguise these aristocratic roots, even from themselves. They work desperately to form alliances with labor unions and cast themselves as purveyors of “green jobs.” But the Keystone Pipeline has brought all this into focus. As Joel Kotkin writes in Forbes, Keystone is the dividing line of the “two Americas,” the knowledge-based elites of the East and West Coasts in their media, non-profit and academic homelands (where Obama learned his environmentalism) and the blue-collar workers of the Great In- Between laboring in agriculture, mining, manufacturing, power production and the exigencies of material life.

So the argument here is the wealthy of all political stripes are generally opposed to industrial progress, not just liberals or conservatives?

I wonder how much this explanation differs from explaining resistance to certain projects in terms of NIMBYism. When NIMBY is invoked in response to unwanted projects, existing residents can throw out a lot of reasons to oppose the project. Two reasons are commonly thrown out: safety and environmentalism. In a typical suburban situation, a new subdivision is going to be built on open land adjacent to another recently built subdivision. The current residents then complain about the open space that they is going to disappear, losing sight of the fact that their own neighborhood was just recently built on open land as well. If the above argument is completely true, then those existing residents would say, “we don’t need any more new houses. There are plenty of older homes for people to live in.” Is this exactly what happens or are they willing to let houses be built somewhere but just nowhere near them?

Also, if this argument is correct, then those who aren’t as wealthy will end up throwing environmental concerns under the bus when push comes to shove?

h/t Instapundit