Tag Archives: social problems

Chicago still leading the way for corruption

Posted on by

A new report finds Chicago is still at the top of American cities in corruption:

According to new research released today by University of Illinois at Chicago political science professor Dick Simpson, there were 45 convictions for public corruption in 2013 (the latest year available) in the U.S. court district that covers the Chicago area. That’s way, way above the 19 convictions in Los Angeles and 13 in the Southern District of New York (Manhattan). But Houston had far and away the most pols convicted on federal corruption charges in 2013, with 83.

Since the U.S. Department of Justice began to collect data in 1976, Chicago’s Northern District of Illinois, which includes Chicago, Cook County and 17 other counties, has had 1,642 convictions, according to Simpson. That compares with 1,316 in LA and 1,260 in the New York district, which includes Manhattan, the Bronx and six other counties…

If it makes you feel better, Simpson notes that on a per capita basis, Illinois is in seventh place. The District of Columbia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alaska, and North and South Dakota rank higher than Illinois.

In this case, I don’t know if the quantification helps at all. When scholars or activists produce such figures, they are often trying to draw attention to a particular cause by pointing out the large numbers. This is how social problems are made. On the other hand, Chicago has had a reputation for corruption for decades. Do these numbers mean anything if residents of the region already expect this? Perhaps the comparison of numbers with other cities and regions can help. Yet, it doesn’t look like knowing these figures changes very much.

And what is going with Houston – is the oil money flowing a little too freely?

When public anger can prompt the collection of better data

Posted on by

I’ve seen this argument several places, including this AP story: collecting national data about fatalities due to police would be helpful.

To many Americans, it feels like a national tidal wave. And yet, no firm statistics can say whether this spate of officer-involved deaths is a growing trend or simply a series of coincidences generating a deafening buzz in news reports and social media.

“We have a huge scandal in that we don’t have an accurate count of the number of people who die in police custody,” says Samuel Walker, emeritus professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and a leading scholar on policing and civil liberties. “That’s outrageous.”…

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, for instance, track justifiable police homicides – there were 1,688 between 2010 and 2013 – but the statistics rely on voluntary reporting by local law enforcement agencies and are incomplete. Circumstances of the deaths, and other information such as age and race, also aren’t required.

The Wall Street Journal, detailing its own examination of officer-involved deaths at 105 of the nation’s 110 largest police departments, reported last week that federal data failed to include or mislabeled hundreds of fatal police encounters…

Chettiar is hopeful that recent events will create the “political and public will” to begin gathering and analyzing the facts.

A few quick thoughts:

1. Just because this data hasn’t been collected doesn’t necessarily mean this was intentional. Government agencies collect lots of data but it takes some deliberate action and foresight regarding what should and shouldn’t be reported. Given that there are a least a few hundred such deaths each year, you would think someone would have flagged such information as interesting but apparently not. Now would be a good time to start reporting and collecting such data.

2. Statistics would be helpful in providing a broader perspective on the issue but, as the article notes, statistics have certain kinds of persuasive power as do individual events or broad narratives not necessarily backed by statistics. In our individualistic culture, specific stories can often go a long ways. At the same time, social problems are often defined by their scope which involves statistical measures of how many people are affected.

Organizations can’t keep up with the statistics of how many people ISIS have killed

Posted on by

Measuring many things rests on the ability to observe or collect the data. But, a number of organizations have found that they can’t keep up with the actions of ISIS:

He and his colleagues have (alone among wire services) built up a detailed spreadsheet total of civilian and combatant casualties, but faced with the near impossibility of verifying multiple daily reports of massacres in provinces rendered inaccessible since the early weeks of ISIS’s June offensive, they now largely restrict its use for internal purposes.Officials in UN’s Iraq mission (UNAMI) are similarly downbeat about the accuracy of their records.

“Since the armed conflict escalated, I would say that our figures are significantly under reported,” said Francesco Motta, Director of UNAMI’s human rights office.

“We are getting hundreds of reports in addition to those we verify that we are just simply not able to verify owing to our limited access to areas where incidents are taking place,” he added…

It’s the sheer magnitude of the slaughter that’s overstretching these groups’ resources, but ISIS’s murderous approach to the media has compounded the problem. On top of the much publicized recent beheadings of two American journalists, ISIS also has killed dozens of Syrian and Iraqi reporters. Body counts rely heavily on local news articles for coverage of incidents in towns and rural pockets far from Baghdad, and the jihadists’ seizure of up to a third of Iraq has complicated attempts to report within their areas of control.

It may be a macabre task but an important one. As the article goes on to note, this matters for political ends (different sides will spin the available or estimated numbers in different ways) and for public perceptions. In fact, social problems are often defined by the number of people they affect. Higher numbers of deaths would tend to prompt more reaction from the public but overestimates that are later shown to be false could decrease attention.

McMansions as “weapons of mass construction”

Posted on by

One writer resents having to put up with McMansions, labeled in the headline “weapons of mass construction,” for the sake of the economy:

I hate being all in this thing together. Or let’s just say, I hate being all in this thing together with the home-construction industry. Right now, a McMansion the size of the Louvre is going up directly across the street from my house. Nine other monstrosities are also being deployed in what was once a beautiful, empty meadow. The field has been filled with backhoes and earth movers and building materials on and off for at least two years.

The projects, once begun, take forever to finish. The crew starts work on a house, then gets dispatched to finish another project in a different town, and then comes back. So it takes months to get the micro-chateaux built. It’s like watching someone set fire to your neighborhood, then douse it, then come back and start the fire again six weeks later. You’d rather they just ruined things once and for all and got it over with. If you’re going to sack Rome, sack it. Drilling, digging, dust and leveled trees have been our reality since 2011. It makes it very, very hard to root for the home builders.

I am constantly reading that young people are not buying houses at the pace needed to get the economy percolating. Well, maybe someone should tell the developers to stop building lurid, vile houses that no one can afford. Or to stop building lurid, vile, prefab, ticky-tacky houses even if people can afford them.

When the economy cratered in 2008 and my 401(k) got massacred, I wasn’t as upset as I should have been because it meant that the McMansions scheduled to be erected across the street wouldn’t get built until the recession was over. Four happy years ensued, without bogus cathedral windows and four-car garages and faux-Belgian cobblestones and Philistines for neighbors. This situation put me in the uncomfortable position of having to root against my own country. As long as the housing industry was flat on its back, life was good.

I really wish that the economy were not so dependent upon the health of home builders. I would love to root for these guys. I really would. But they build trash. They tear down adorable bungalows and build McMansions in Princeton, N.J. In Chicago, in Boston, in Los Angeles and even in little old Easton, Pa., they are bulldozing whatever stands in their way and throwing up their eyesores. Throwing up being the operative term.

What does he really think? I wonder if this is closely tied to what he suggests is a personal experience with nearby houses. It is one thing to dislike McMansions on the whole and argue they are bad for society – like Thomas Frank suggested a few months ago – but then not live by them. In fact, a lot of social problems are like this: we know there are bad things happening in our county, state, country, and around the world but it is different when they are removed and abstract. There is some of that argument here: such homes are ugly, he doesn’t want to have to rely on the housing industry so much, etc.

It is another thing if a new McMansion under construction greets you every morning when you walk out your front door. Or if construction projects take a really long time. Are these concerns the result of teardowns where a historic neighborhood is threatened?

Presenting big data about Chicago

Posted on by

The Chicago Architecture Foundation has a new exhibit highlighting the use of big data in Chicago:

Architects, planners, engineers and citizens, it contends, are increasingly using massive amounts of data to analyze urban issues and shape innovative designs…

But data, the show argues, is useful as well as ubiquitous. We see some classically gritty Chicago stuff to back this up, though it’s not quite powerful or precise enough to be fully persuasive…

More convincing are the show’s examples of “digital visualization,” which is geekspeak for using digital technology to present and analyze urban planning data.

Take a monumental, crowd-pleasing map of Chicago, 15 feet high and 30 feet wide, which presents the footprints of thousands of buildings, even individual houses, and color-codes them by the era in which they were built. We see the impact of the city’s three great building booms, from Chicago’s earliest days to 1899, from 1900 to 1945, and from 1946 to 1979. The recent surges that filled downtown with new skyscrapers look puny by comparison.

Also worth seeing: Video monitors which display data for Divvy, the city’s bike-sharing program. They offer neat tidbits: Divvy’s most popular station, for example, is at Millennium Park.

Sounds interesting. Big cities are complex social entities who could benefit from large-scale and real-time data collection and analysis. Of course, as Kamin notes at the end, there still is a human side to cities that cannot be ignored but getting a handle through data on what is happening could go a long way.

Another dimension to this is how to best present big data. While the online presentation of maps has grown popular, how can this be done best in person? I look forward to seeing this exhibit in person as I already like what the Chicago Architecture Foundation has done with this space. Here is part of the gallery a few years ago:

CAFChicagoAug11This is a great free place to learn more about Chicago and then choose among the cool offerings in the gift shop or sign up for one of the architecture tours that cover all different aspects of Chicago.

Nobel Prize winning economist Gary Becker on the difficulty of sociology

Posted on by

The authors of Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics are primarily interested in economics but they do make occasional mention of sociology. Here is one example involving the Nobel Prize winning economist Gary Becker describing his own life (page 15 of the deluxe edition):

“I began to lost interest in economics during my senior (third) year because it did not seem to deal with important social problems. I contemplated transferring to sociology but found that subject too difficult Fortunately, I decided to go to the University of Chicago for graduate work in economics. My first encounter in 1951 with Milton Friedman’s course on microeconomics renewed my excitement.”

Two things stand out:

1. Sociology is about social problems. This is a long-standing part of the discipline and the reason many introductory level college classes in sociology are about social problems. At the same time, this tends to portray sociology as more as an activist discipline – which it may be, depending on who you talk to – and less of a scientific enterprise.

2. Though he doesn’t say why, Becker suggests sociology was “too difficult.” From a smart guy, this is a nice hint that sociology isn’t just common sense. Society, groups, interactions, and individuals influencing each other leads to a complex set of theories and methods.

Traffic deaths predicted to be 5th leading cause of death in the developing world

Posted on by

Even as the conversation about safer autonomous cars picks up in the United States, traffic deaths are an increasing problem in the developing world:

It has a global death toll of 1.24 million per year and is on course to triple to 3.6 million per year by 2030.

In the developing world, it will become the fifth leading cause of death, leapfrogging past HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and other familiar killers, according to the most recent Global Burden of Disease study.

The victims tend to be poor, young and male.

In one country — Indonesia — the toll is now nearly 120 dead per day; in Nigeria, it is claiming 140 lives each day…

In 2010, the U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution calling for a “Decade of Action for Road Safety.” The goal is to stabilize and eventually reverse the upward trend in road fatalities, saving an estimated 5 million lives during the period. The World Bank and other regional development banks have made road safety a priority, but according to Irigoyen, donor funding lags “very far below” the $24 billion that has been pledged to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

It sounds like while diseases are well known and relatively well-funded, not many people have caught on to the problems of traffic deaths. This is all about social construction: where are the Bill Gates of the world to come in and tackle traffic problems in poorer nations?

Perhaps this gets less attention it is because cars are viewed as things that may help developing countries improve: owning them means citizens have more economic power and have more independence to get around as well as help their own economic chances (can carry things around, etc.). Particularly from an American point of view, cars are generally good things. But, of course, cars bring other problems in addition to safety concerns: pollution (a huge problem in many large cities), clogged streets, and an infrastructure that may not be able to handle lots of new cars on the roads (maintaining roads, having enough police, driver training, cities that have to redevelop areas to accommodate wider roads).

It will be interesting to see if this gets more attention in the coming years. It is one thing to discuss longer-term consequences of cars like increasing pollution but it is another to ignore large numbers of deaths each day.

Homelessness went down in last decade but not much coverage of this policy success

Posted on by

Here is a story you may not have heard: homelessness in the United States has gone down in the last decade.

The National Alliance to End Homelessness, a leader in homelessness service and research, estimates a 17% decrease in total homelessness from 2005 to 2012. As a refresher: this covers a period when unemployment doubled (2007-2010) and foreclosure proceedings quadrupled (2005-2009)…And what about the presidents responsible for this feat? General anti-poverty measures – for example, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit — have helped to raise post-tax income for the poorest families. But our last two presidents have made targeted efforts, as well. President George W. Bush’s “housing first” program helped reduce chronic homelessness by around 30% from 2005 to 2007. The “housing first” approach put emphasis on permanent housing for individuals before treatment for disability and addiction.

The Great Recession threatened to undo this progress, but the stimulus package of 2009 created a new $1.5 billion dollar program, the Homeless Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program. This furthered what the National Alliance called “ground-breaking work at the federal level…to improve the homelessness system by adopting evidence-based, cost effective interventions.” The program is thought to have aided 700,000 at-risk or homeless people in its first year alone, “preventing a significant increase in homelessness.”

Since then, the Obama administration also quietly announced in 2010 a 10-year federal plan to end homelessness. This is all to say that the control of homelessness, in spite of countervailing forces, can be traced directly to Washington—a fact openly admitted by independent organizations like the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

The article goes on to suggest why there hasn’t been much coverage of this success: homelessness is not much of a social problem in Washington or the national media. The social construction of homelessness as a social problem that should receive a lot of public attention either hasn’t been very successful, was never really attempted, or other social problems (like various wars on crime, poverty, terrorism, etc.) have captured more attention.

But, if all the numbers cited above are correct, it seems a shame that a positive effect of public policies regarding a difficult problem is going relatively unnoticed…

The antidote to McMansions: tiny houses

Posted on by

If you are suffering from McMansion disease, here is a cure: the tiny house.

Say what you will about tiny homes, the reasons behind their increasing popularity are pretty solid: Small houses are inexpensive and easy to maintain, and they also offer more privacy than your average apartment.

Micro-spaces are especially popular with eco-conscious homeowners invested in consuming less—a stark contrast from their McMansion-buying counterparts of years past. A tiny home pretty much guarantees less electricity and water will be wasted, which is always a good thing.

These mini-houses are from all over the U.S. and they’re selling for a fraction of what a regular home would cost. Even if you’re not up for the challenge of moving into one, they’ll at least inspire you to imagine a reality that’s less focused on accumulating stuff and more focused on living.

While I have read much criticism of McMansions in recent years, I’ve never before seen it compared to a disease or sickness. Are McMansions a sickness the United States needs to be rid of? I’ve tended to see such homes more as symptoms of some larger issues in the United States such as an emphasis on homeownership and sprawl. Talking about McMansions as a disease could contribute to a view that McMansions are a social problem that has been socially constructed. There may not be anything inherently wrong with such homes until they are compared to other homes that are seen as being more moral or decent.

Bill Gates: we can make progress with goals, data, and a feedback loop

Posted on by

Bill Gates argues in the Wall Street Journal that significant progress can be made around the world if organizations and residents participate in a particular process:

In the past year, I have been struck by how important measurement is to improving the human condition. You can achieve incredible progress if you set a clear goal and find a measure that will drive progress toward that goal—in a feedback loop similar to the one Mr. Rosen describes.

This may seem basic, but it is amazing how often it is not done and how hard it is to get right. Historically, foreign aid has been measured in terms of the total amount of money invested—and during the Cold War, by whether a country stayed on our side—but not by how well it performed in actually helping people. Closer to home, despite innovation in measuring teacher performance world-wide, more than 90% of educators in the U.S. still get zero feedback on how to improve.

An innovation—whether it’s a new vaccine or an improved seed—can’t have an impact unless it reaches the people who will benefit from it. We need innovations in measurement to find new, effective ways to deliver those tools and services to the clinics, family farms and classrooms that need them.

I’ve found many examples of how measurement is making a difference over the past year—from a school in Colorado to a health post in rural Ethiopia. Our foundation is supporting these efforts. But we and others need to do more. As budgets tighten for governments and foundations world-wide, we all need to take the lesson of the steam engine to heart and adapt it to solving the world’s biggest problems.

Gates doesn’t use this term but this sounds like a practical application of the scientific method. Instead of responding to a social problem by going out and trying to “do something,” the process should be more rigorous, involve setting goals, collecting good data, interpreting the data, and then adjusting the process from the beginning. This is related to other points about this process:

1. It is one thing to be able to collect data (and this is often its own complicated process) but it is another to know what to do with it once you have it. Compared to the past, data is relatively easy to obtain today but using it well is another matter.

2. Another broad issue in this kind of feedback loop is developing the measurements and what counts as “success.” Some of this is fairly easy; when Gates praises the UN Millennium Goals, reducing occurrences of disease or boosting incomes has face validity for getting at what matters. But, measuring teacher’s performances or what makes a quality college are a little trickier to define in the first place. Gates calls this developing goals but this could be a lengthy process in itself.

It is interesting that Gates mentions the need for such loops in colleges so that students “could know where they would get the most for their tuition money.” The Gates Foundation has put money into studying public schools and just a few weeks ago released some of their findings:

After a three-year, $45 million research project, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation believes it has some answers.

The most reliable way to evaluate teachers is to use a three-pronged approach built on student test scores, classroom observations by multiple reviewers and teacher evaluations from students themselves, the foundation found…

The findings released Tuesday involved an analysis of about 3,000 teachers and their students in Charlotte; Dallas; Denver; Memphis; New York; Pittsburgh; and Hillsborough County, Fla., which includes Tampa. Researchers were drawn from the Educational Testing Service and several universities, including Harvard, Stanford and the University of Virginia…

Researchers videotaped 3,000 participating teachers and experts analyzed their classroom performance. They also ranked the teachers using a statistical model known as value-added modeling, which calculates how much an educator has helped students learn based on their academic performance over time. And finally, the researchers surveyed the students, who turned out to be reliable judges of their teacher’s abilities, Kane said.

All this takes quite a few resources and time. For those interested in quick action, this is not the process to follow. Hopefully, however, the resources and time pay off with better solutions.