development

Photo by Nicolas Raymond via flickr.com
Photo by Nicolas Raymond via flickr.com

Is economic development compatible with environmental sustainability? Are “green jobs” the way of the future? Those questions are at the center of sociologist Andrew Jorgenson‘s research on the economic activity and carbon emissions of 106 countries.

Analyzing data from 1970 to 2009, Jorgenson calculated a ratio of carbon emissions to life expectancy at birth, and then compared it with each country’s gross domestic product. The results are not encouraging. Jorgenson found that in all regions of the world except for Africa, development is linked with an increase in carbon emissions. Africa may be the exception that proves the rule. Jorgenson noted that, since 1995, African nations have experienced much more carbon-intensive development in exchange for increasing life expectancies of their populations.

Achieving the three-legged stool of economic growth, reduced harm to the environment, and improved human health will not be easy, and Jorgenson is skeptical that technological advancements alone are likely to accomplish the task. “We need to start seriously thinking differently about solutions to these sustainability challenges and recognizing that hoping for technology and engineering solutions … is probably not the way to go,” Jorgenson said.

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Istanbul 2010 - A Panasonic Lumix TripFor many Istanbul stands as a symbol of success. It’s growing status as a ‘global city’ and a European Capital of Culture has attracted tourists, foreign investments, and massive development projects. Luis Gallo’s recent article in the Hürriyet Daily News provides a reminder that with development and prosperity there are rarely winners without losers.

[I]n the shadow of those skyscrapers, there is another Istanbul, a little-seen realm where the urban poor are coming face-to-face with the bulldozers clearing ground for the sparkling new city. The neighborhood of Sulukule, perhaps the world’s oldest Roma community, is already flattened, with just a few holdouts living amid the rubble.

This raises difficult questions as development continues.

With massive amounts of money, and the city’s international reputation, at stake, fierce debate is raging over the government’s “urban transformation” programs: They may be beautifying and enriching the city, but at what social cost?

Critics are quick to point to the increasing inequality that ‘success’ is bringing. Ozan Karaman, an urban-geography scholar from the University of Minnesota, explains

“Lack of representation will result in further marginalization of the urban poor and perhaps the emergence of a new type of poverty, in which the poor have no hope whatsoever for upward mobility and are in a state of permanent destitution.”

Tansel Korkmaz and Eda Ünlü-Yücesoy, professors of architectural design at Istanbul Bilgi University, argue that the government ignoring the plight of the poor is not simply an unexpected result of development. Instead, they claim that the government’s goal is to to hide the urban poor in 21st-century Istanbul.

“The following statement by Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan about the neighborhoods of the urban poor summarizes the essence of the official approach: ‘cancerous district[s] embedded within the city.’ Planning operations in Tarlabaşı, Fener-Balat and Sulukule are [intended] to move the urban poor to the outskirts of the city and to make available their inner-city locations for big construction companies for their fancy projects,” Korkmaz said.

Recently, in the rapidly changing Tophane neighborhood in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district, dozens of people attacked a crowd attending an opening of art galleries. The  violence is a sign that frustration over being displaced in the name of gentrification has finally boiled over and is likely not a one time occurrence.

Experts say clashes between newcomers and longtime residents could become more frequent if people feel they have no say in the transformation of their neighborhoods and believe they must resort to violence in order to make their voices heard.

Even with the increasing tension, Ozan Karaman manages to hold onto hope while remaining critical of the current development approach.

“Urban redevelopment projects should be executed in collaboration with citizens and residents, not despite them. There is no need to re-invent the wheel; there are plenty of models of community-based development that have been successful since the 1970s.”

As the 5-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches, Salon‘s Matt Davis examined the New Orleans of today.  Unlike much of the nation, New Orleans has recently being going through an economic boom.   The number of economically disadvantaged people in the Orleans Parish has halved to 68,000 over the last five years, and the median household income has been rising.

Yet, these statistics are not as positive as they seem.  Instead, they are largely the result of poor residents leaving New Orleans after Katrina and not returning.

“By most measures, it’s quite clear that the 100,000 people who are missing are the poorest and darkest former residents of the city,” says Rachel Luft, professor of sociology at the University of New Orleans. “And they are being replaced by a slew of YURPs, or young urban redevelopment professionals, who tend to be whiter, wealthier and better educated than the traditional residents of New Orleans. I think they’re being held up as the great white hope for rebuilding the city.”

Many of these “YURPs” are participating in volunteer programs like Teach for America.  Others are participating in celebrity-run charities like Brad Pitt’s organization.

…Brad Pitt’s charity, the Make It Right foundation, has acquired the nickname the “Make It White” foundation, and has drawn quiet criticism for foisting $350,000 Frank Gehry-designed houses on poor black property owners in the Lower Ninth Ward, who may well, at some point, see an incentive to sell out and realize the nonprofit’s equity in their homes.

Today, New Orleans hosts 354,850 residents, which is almost 78% of its pre-Katrina population.  Yet, only 60% of these residents are black, compared to 67% before the storm.

The Des Moines Register recently discussed rural Iowans’ efforts to combat the problem of population loss as their young adults relocate to bigger cities, as well as the difficulties faced by those who stay close to home:

Iowans have made countless efforts to stop the state’s rural population drain. Former Gov. Tom Vilsack recruited former Iowans and welcomed immigrants. Groups worked to gussy up Main Street for a kind of nostalgic small-town tourism. Conference attendees listened to speakers who touted attracting a young, creative class of artists and entrepreneurs. Experts waited for the telecommuters who never came. Economic development officials hustled for small manufacturing plants that sometimes didn’t pay much.

The article includes sociological commentary on the fates of the “stayers”:

They are ignored, maybe even pitied when you see them in the grocery, and yet they are the very future of the town, say Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas, a husband-wife sociologist team who moved from Philadelphia to Iowa for several months to write “Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America.”

They identified a group of citizens they labeled “the stayers” who were not often encouraged by teachers or parents to attend college, worked through school to buy a pickup truck, and became invisible to the town’s more moneyed and educated classes.

“They are taken for granted, as in the story of the prodigal son,” said Kefalas, a St. Joseph’s University sociology professor who interviewed nearly 300 young people in a northeast Iowa town they chose to keep anonymous. “They don’t work as hard investing in them and just assume the old way of life will somehow work out for them.”

Part of the problem is that secondary education in America is focused on preparing kids to go to college:

“Those that have the ability go off. That makes a lot of sense as a community or a school. You don’t want to hold them back,” said high school counselor Diane Stegge. “But at the same time, you are taking them away from the community.”

Kefalas said schools should do more to prepare students who have a desire to stay or don’t have the money or abilities for college. Many are too busy catering to the high achievers.

“Teachers in Ellis (the pseudonym for the town in the book) were offended by our portrayal. But I’m a teacher, and it’s much more fun to teach those above grade level,” she said. “The challenge is how you make your school work for everyone.”

One rural Iowa school board member sums up the consequences for small towns of ignoring their average students:

“The ones with higher education, we know there is going to be nothing here for them,” he said. “We also try to focus on those with special needs. But the middle-of-the-road ones are going to become our community.”

The Boston Globe explores the economic effects of religion, and reports:

A pair of Harvard researchers recently examined 40 years of data from dozens of countries, trying to sort out the economic impact of religious beliefs or practices. They found that religion has a measurable effect on developing economies – and the most powerful influence relates to how strongly people believe in hell.

That hell could matter to economic growth might seem surprising, since you can’t prove it exists, let alone quantify it. It stands as one of the more intriguing findings in a growing body of recent research exploring how religion might influence the wealth and prosperity of societies. In recent years, Italian economists have presented findings that religion can boost GDP by increasing trust within a society; researchers in the United States showed that religion reduces corruption and increases respect for law in ways that boost overall economic growth. A number of researchers have documented how merchants used religious backgrounds to establish one another’s reliability.

The researchers, Robert Barro and Rachel McCleary, find intriguing relationships:

Their results show a strong correlation between economic growth and certain shifts in beliefs, though only in developing countries. Most strikingly, if belief in hell jumps up sharply while actual church attendance stays flat, it correlates with economic growth. Belief in heaven also has a similar effect, though less pronounced. Mere belief in God has no effect one way or the other. Meanwhile, if church attendance actually rises, it slows growth in developing economies.

Other social scientists’ findings have been consistent with Barro and McCleary’s results, reviving classic Weber-esque questions about how religion affects economies:

On one level, the connection seems intuitive: All the major religions extol virtues like self-discipline, sacrifice, and thrift. Some even preach that earthly success translates to good things in the afterlife, a kind of gold-plated stairway to heaven. Religion can, quite directly, affect what you earn – fundamentalists and evangelicals in the United States tend to have lower savings rates and incomes than members of other religions, in part because they have larger families and give away more of their money.

Some find religion prompts specific behaviors that spark economic growth:

Charles M. North, an economist at Baylor University, argues that private property protections developed by the Church to guard against grasping secular rulers gave Catholic – and eventually Protestant – nations stronger protections for individual rights than other nations, creating incentive for individual success. Similarly, literacy seems clearly connected with economic development, and mass literacy is a Protestant invention, says Robert D. Woodberry, a sociologist at University of Texas at Austin. He has mapped how missionaries spread literacy, technology, and civic institutions, and finds that those correlate strongly with economic growth. He argues in part that this helps explain why the once-poor but largely Protestant United States surpassed rich, Catholic Mexico after 1800.

The bottom line:

The work is preliminary, but offers the hope of useful findings. Knowing exactly how and when God influences mammon could lead to smarter forms of economic development in emerging nations, and could add to our understanding of how culture shapes wealth and poverty. And it stands as part of a larger movement in economics, in which the field is looking beyond purely material explanations to a broader engagement with human culture, psychology, and even our angels and demons.

madreslesbianas88.jpgA recent New York Times article reported on some of the data that is known about gay and lesbian parenthood and how children of same-sex parents turn out. 

The Williams Institute at UCLA finds that approximately 115,772 American same-sex couples have children.  

Summarizing the state of the field:

Until relatively recently, we didn’t know much about the children of same-sex couples. The earliest studies, dating to the 1970s, were based on small samples and could include only families who stepped forward to be counted. But about 20 years ago, the Census Bureau added a category for unwed partners, which included many gay partners, providing more demographic data. Not every gay couple that is married, or aspiring to marry, has children, but an increasing number do: approximately 1 in 5 male same-sex couples and 1 in 3 female same-sex couples are raising children, up from 1 in 20 male couples and 1 in 5 female couples in 1990.

Concerning child outcomes:

“These children do just fine,” says Abbie E. Goldberg, an assistant professor in the department of psychology at Clark University, who concedes there are some who will continue to believe that gay parents are a danger to their children, in spite of a growing web of psychological and sociological evidence to the contrary.

In most ways, the accumulated research shows, children of same-sex parents are not markedly different from those of heterosexual parents. They show no increased incidence of psychiatric disorders, are just as popular at school and have just as many friends. While girls raised by lesbian mothers seem slightly more likely to have more sexual partners, and boys slightly more likely to have fewer, than those raised by heterosexual mothers, neither sex is more likely to suffer from gender confusion nor to identify themselves as gay.

Gender plays a key role in the differences that are known between children of heterosexual and sexual minority parents:

More enlightening than the similarities, however, are the differences, the most striking of which is that these children tend to be less conventional and more flexible when it comes to gender roles and assumptions than those raised in more traditional families.

There are data that show, for instance, that daughters of lesbian mothers are more likely to aspire to professions that are traditionally considered male, like doctors or lawyers — 52 percent in one study said that was their goal, compared with 21 percent of daughters of heterosexual mothers, who are still more likely to say they want to be nurses or teachers when they grow up. (The same study found that 95 percent of boys from both types of families choose the more masculine jobs.) Girls raised by lesbians are also more likely to engage in “roughhousing” and to play with “male-gendered-type toys” than girls raised by straight mothers. And adult children of gay parents appear more likely than the average adult to work in the fields of social justice and to have more gay friends in their social mix.

Same-sex couples, it seems, are less likely to impose certain gender-based expectations on their children, says M. V. Lee Badgett, director of the Center for Public Policy and Administration at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and author of “When Gay People Get Married: What Happens When Societies Legalize Same-Sex Marriage.” Studies of lesbian parents have found that they “are more feminist parents,” she says, “more open to girls playing with trucks and boys playing with dolls,” with fewer worries about conforming to perceived norms.

They are also, by definition, less likely to impose gender-based expectations on themselves. “Same-sex parents tend to be more equal in parenting,” Goldberg says, while noting that no generalization can apply to all parents of any sexual orientation. On the whole, though, lesbian mothers (there’s little data here on gay dads) tend not to divide chores and responsibilities according to gender-based roles, Goldberg says, “because you have taken gender out the equation. There’s much more fluidity than in many heterosexual relationships.”

United Press International issued a release this morning about new findings on the spread of AIDS across sub-Saharan Africa, out of Penn State University.

A U.S. sociologist says increased schooling across sub-Saharan Africa might be lowering the number of new HIV infections among younger adults.

If that is true, Penn State University Professor David Baker says it would suggest a shift in a decades-long trend in which a formal education was considered an AIDS risk factor.

“Before the 1990s, in the impoverished regions of sub-Saharan Africa, even modest amounts of education afforded males higher income, more leisure time and, for some males, greater access to commercial sex workers,” said Baker. “HIV-infected higher-status males then spread the infection to both educated and uneducated women, which moved the disease into the general population.”

Baker and graduate students John Collins and Juan Leon report their research findings in the U.N. journal Prospects.

Read more.