economy

The Christian Science Monitor ran an interesting story earlier this week in which a number of criminologists were consulted about whether recent shootings, murders, and other violent crimes could be linked to the economic downturn in the United States. The paper cites a number of cases that have made the headlines in recent weeks:  “Four Oakland, Calif., police officers shot down. An Alabama man strolling a small town with a rifle, looking for victims. Seven elderly people shot dead at a North Carolina nursing home. And on Sunday, six people, including four kids, died in an apparent murder-suicide in an upscale neighborhood in Santa Clara, Calif.”

The details in all these cases are still emerging. In most, the exact motive has yet to be determined – or may never be fully understood. On a broader level, however, such incidents may be happening more often because an increasing number of Americans feel desperate pressure from job losses and other economic hardship, criminologists say.

“Most of these mass killings are precipitated by some catastrophic loss, and when the economy goes south, there are simply more of these losses,” says Jack Levin, a noted criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston.

Direct correlation between economic cycles and homicides is difficult to prove, cautions Shawn Bushway, a criminologist at the University at Albany in New York. But an economic downturn of this breadth and depth hasn’t been seen since data began to be collected after World War II, he also points out. “This is not the average situation,” Mr. Bushway says.

Still, criminologists do say that certain kinds of violent crimes have risen during specific economic downturns. The recession in the early 1990s “saw a dramatic increase in workplace violence committed by vengeful ex-workers who decided to come back and get even with their boss and their co-workers through the barrel of an AK-47,” Mr. Levin says.

Read more.

Forbes Magazine is running a story this week about peripheral effects of the economic meltdown, and for this they turn to the work of famous sociologist and criminologist Sudhir Venkatesh.

Elizabeth Eaves, for Forbes.com writes,

You may think the economic meltdown is hitting bankers and Realtors hard, but spare a thought for members of the underground economy–prostitutes, drug dealers and purveyors of stolen goods, to name just a few participants. That’s what sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh does, having spent much of the last 15 years studying, and sometimes living within, the underground economies of New York and Chicago.

“The recession is engendering more violence,” says Venkatesh, a professor at Columbia University. “There’s far greater competition for whatever meager resources there are. The folks down on Wall Street peddling drugs, they’re fighting. The sex workers are trying as hard as they can to retain their clients,” he says, sitting in a Mediterranean restaurant a short walk from the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, where he’s on jury duty. Considering his well-documented friendship with a gang leader–the subject of his bestseller, Gang Leader for a Day–one might have expected the court to disqualify Venkatesh, but no such luck.

About today’s economic situation…

Today Venkatesh is watching black market workers slip into despair along with the rest of the population affected by the economy. Lest legal workers consider this a distant problem, one conclusion of Venkatesh’s work is that the underground and mainstream economies are intimately entwined. “The boundaries are fluid, particularly in the global city where the black market has become instrumental–one might even say vital–to the overall economy,” he says. In New York City illegal workers serve sex, drugs and takeout to the wealthiest members of society–or at least they did until financial sector layoffs began in 2008.

The underground economy includes a vast array of people providing services that are off the books but otherwise legal. Venkatesh enumerates those having a harder time in the face of the recession: office cleaners, squeegee men, informal security guards, “canners” who scavenge for recyclables (there’s less consumption now, so less to recycle) and nannies whose employers have been laid off. And as business contracts, underground workers face certain problems unique to their status. They have no unemployment insurance or other benefits, and, with little protection from law enforcement, they tend to resolve disputes by physical means.

Venkatesh prefers to leave detailed prescriptions to policymakers but nevertheless ventures a few. Microcredit loans, as well as education on risk management and planning, could help shift some black market entrepreneurial zeal above ground. He heartily approves of the proposal by Barack Obama–a fellow pickup basketball player at the University of Chicago when Venkatesh studied there–to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit to give a bigger break to low-income parents. Sales taxes also hit the poor hard, he says; one way to help would be to let them use prepaid cards to buy goods tax free.

Venkatesh is struck by how much the black market resembles the wider society in which it is enmeshed. In the same Parisian banlieues that erupted in riots in 2005, he observed an “almost aristocratic,” highly centralized criminal operation. In the ghettos of Chicago, by contrast, he observed underground workers convene an ad hoc court to solve a dispute. His dismisses the “culture of poverty” theory, which suggests that poor blacks in America don’t work because they don’t value employment. “People in America want to work,” he says. They do so ever so industriously, even when they’re breaking the law.

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The New York Times blog ‘Room for Debate: A Running Commentary on the News’ ran an exchange devoted to ‘What to Do When You Lose Your Job,’ particularly appropriate given the latest news from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that “the national unemployment rate surged to 8.1 percent in February, its highest in 25 years, with 651,000 jobs lost last month.”

Luckily, the Times solicited comments from a sociologist, Princeton University’s Katherine S. Newman, to be precise…

Newman writes:

In today’s economic landscape, the skills and experience the newly unemployed bring to the table still matter, but will not command the wages needed to preserve the standard of living they know. Stability at a lower plane is weathered most successfully by families that pull together rather than pull apart, especially husbands and wives who avoid corrosive conflict and learn to adjust with as much grace as they can muster, to new roles as earners and house husbands.

Teenage kids who learn how to pitch in to the family coffers and help with the care of their younger siblings make a difference. Neighbors, fellow parishioners and P.T.A. contacts who are still working should remember that anything they can do to help their unemployed friends get back into the game is a blessing. Most of all, the newly jobless need to remember this maelstrom was not of their making and whatever they have to do to survive will be honorable.

Read Newman’s full commentary.

Read more from the exchange. 

Late last week, the Financial Times (UK) ran a story about how men are more ‘prone to credit crunch blues’ than women in the same situation. The story is focused on men who think they might lose their jobs, who become more depressed and anxious than women. This assessment comes out of a study from Cambridge University sociologist Brendan Burchell. 

The Financial Times reports, 

This anxiety reflected males’ “macho” belief about “men being the breadwinner”, said Brendan Burchell, the Cambridge sociologist who carried out the research. “Men, unlike women, have few positive ways of defining themselves outside of the workplace between when they leave school and when they retire,” he said.

More from Burchell:

The stress and anxiety of people who had become unemployed “bottomed out” after about six months as they adapted to their new circumstances. By contrast, people who had not lost their jobs but thought they might be fired showed steadily worsening mental health for one to two years.

Mr Burchell said: “Given that most economic forecasts predict that the recession will be long with a slow recovery, the results mean that many people – and men in particular – could be entering into a period of prolonged and growing misery.”

Commenting on possible solutions, Mr Burchell stressed the need “to restabilise the City” – adding a mental health angle to the well-rehearsed economic arguments for shoring up the banking system.

Read on…

NYU sociologist Dalton Conley was featured on ‘Marketplace’ this past Tuesday. Host Kai Ryssdal talks with Conley about the blurring line between work and family now that more Americans are taking fewer vacations and clocking in more hours at the office.

An excerpt from the interview:

RYSSDAL: This [Conley’s book, Elsewhere, USA]  is fundamentally, I guess, a book about work-life balance, but really what you do is you tell us how we’re not getting any of it right.

CONLEY: Yeah, it’s really about work-life imbalance and the underlying forces — some of them very visible but some of them more invisible — that have created this new social and economic landscape that we work in.

RYSSDAL: And the visible ones we know about, right? I mean everybody’s got their Blackberry, they’re on the computer all the time, the kids have 14 different things to do after school. What are the ones though that maybe we’re not entirely aware of?

CONLEY: Well, a couple of big socio-demographic changes have occurred since the 60s. First is rising economic inequality. Every year since 1969 economic inequality has risen in the United States and has particularly been concentrated in the top half. In fact, the higher up you go, the more inequality has risen and the gaps get bigger. And I think this causes what I call an economic redshift, no matter where you are on the top half, it looks like everybody is rushing away from you.

RYSSDAL: That’s insane. I mean, on the face of it, that’s nuts, right?

CONLEY: It’s a brave new world. For the first time, it was people with incomes over $200,000, in a New York Times poll, that said that they feel poorer when they’re around rich people as compared to people who are actually poor. That’s stunning to me. And for the first time in labor history, the further up the income ladder you go, the more hours you work.

Listen to the show.

US News & World Report presents the findings from a new study suggesting that when the economy is in a significant downturn, members of minority groups are more likely to be the victims of crime than others. The study, from sociologist Karen Heimer and criminologist Janet Lauritsen makes use of longitudinal data to establish the trend beyond our current recession…

National crime statistics from 1973 to 2005 show an increase in violent, non-lethal crime against blacks and Latinos during and after periods of recession, according to research that was scheduled for presentation Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Chicago.

“Minorities experience substantially higher rates of violent victimization than non-Latino whites in the United States,” researcher Karen Heimer, a University of Iowa sociology professor, said in a news release issued by her school. “Our study shows that the higher rates of poverty, urban residence and differential age distributions of non-Latino blacks and Latinos help to explain these groups’ higher victimization rates.”

By knowing this trend, law enforcement officials, criminal justice policy-makers and those who offer help and services to victims can better prepare against fluctuations in crime during the current recession, said Heimer, who worked on the study with Janet Lauritsen, a professor in the criminology and criminal justice department of the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Read more.

Yesterday the Columbus Dispatch ran a story exploring whether thefts and break-ins rise in hard times – the answer is yes, but it may not be clearly linked to the state of the economy. Reporter Elizabeth Gibson calls on sociologist Richard Rosenfeld for a more in-depth interpretation of this trend.

The paper reports:

More people struggling with the economy means more people turning to crime just to put bread on the table. Right? It’s poetic, but police, economists and criminologists say it’s neither that simple nor that dramatic.

“Everybody thinks it’s just a law of nature, but that’s just not true. There are a lot of things more powerful than the economy, operating all the time,” said David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention at the John Jay College of Criminal Studies in New York.

The buzz on the street is that car break-ins and petty thefts are on the rise, prompting some residents to beef up their block-watch programs. But crime actually has been going down or staying stable in many central Ohio communities.

But sociologist Richard Rosenfeld presents a more nuanced argument as to why this trend might occur…

Richard Rosenfeld, a sociologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said a subtle increase in crime will deepen with the economy. It’s not that desperate people turn to a life of crime, he said; it’s that existing criminals can make more money in a down economy as demand for cheap stolen goods rises.

“It’s anecdotal so far,” he said. “But when the numbers come out, I do expect an increase in crime over the next few years.”

The Columbus Dispatch emphasizes that among academics, the verdict is still out on this link…

Read more.

Live Science reports on work by sociologist Sampson Blair suggesting that the recession may fuel more family murders and suicides. They write:

The dramatic murder-suicides last month involving a family in Ohio and another in California might be the tip of a deadly domestic-violence iceberg, a sociologist says. The topic, of course, is highly complex. In a nutshell, however, several studies have found that suicides as well as domestic violence spike for the unemployed. While family murder-suicides are relatively uncommon, such events can be tied to poor economic situations such as the current recession, said Sampson Blair, a sociologist at University of Buffalo.

“I expect an increase in such incidents over the next few years because economic strain on families provokes depression and desperation,” Blair said. Blair is not alone in anticipating a rise in suicide and deadly domestic violence.

But there does appear to be some disagreement between sociologists about the link between economic trouble and suicide…

While several studies have linked unemployment to suicides, it’s not clear that overall terrible economic times cause spikes in the suicide rate.

In fact one researcher, Loren Coleman, an expert on suicides and author of “The Copycat Effect” (Pocket, 2004), argues that suicides actually decrease during times of social and economic stress: “Historical studies conducted by sociologist Steven Stack and others have discovered a noticeable dip in suicides and related violent events when there is society-wide anguish, for example, in times of massive immediate grieving in periods of wars and economic depressions.”

Suicide is more common than most people think, though. Each day about 85 U.S. residents die by suicide, or roughly 30,000 a year. Hundreds of thousands more try it every year, according to researchers at Temple University in Philadelphia. Suicide is the ninth leading cause of death in the United States, higher on the list than homicide. Men are more prone to suicide than women. (Women are three times more likely to report attempting suicide than men, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Men apparently succeed more often, as they are four times more likely to actually die from suicide.)

The reasons are myriad and certainly go beyond mere economic misfortune.

A recent study led by Temple University sociology professor Matt Wray found Las Vegas residents are much more likely to commit suicide than people living elsewhere in the country. Among the reasons speculated by Wray and his colleagues in the November online version of the journal Social Science and Medicine: gambler’s despair, of course. But short-term economic woe is probably not the only mechanism at work in Sin City.

“Las Vegas is also one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the U.S., a pattern of growth that may amplify social isolation, fragmentation and low social cohesion, all of which have long been identified as correlates of suicide,” Wray said.

Read on…

The New York Times business section blog Economix, ran a story yesterday including commentary from sociologist Viviana Zelizer about the history of holiday bonuses – an especially interesting topic given the recent outrage surrounding bonuses for failing companies’ executives.

Over at The Huffington Post, the Princeton sociologist Viviana A. Zelizer recounts some interesting milestones in the history of the bonus, and traces its evolution from gift to entitlement:

At the turn of the 20th century, U.S. employers began substituting the traditional 19th century Christmas offerings to employees — turkeys, watches, candy or gold coins — with a cash bonus. As early as 1902, J. P. Morgan & Company had apparently broken the record by giving each of their employees a full-year’s salary as a Christmas present. Gifts of cash were increasingly standardized, calculated as a percentage of the wage. By 1911, 10 percent was considered “liberal.” Some banks went as far as substituting the Christmas present for a first of the year merit increase in salary.

Most employers, however, continued to want to treat the bonus as a discretionary gift; after all, this custom of “remembering the workers” served them well to oversee and regulate workers’ productivity as well as assuring their loyalty. Indeed, it is reported that Woolworth’s first Christmas cash bonus to employees in 1899 ($5 for each year of service, with a limit of $25) was meant to match competitors’ higher wages and avoid a salesgirls’ strike. It was probably also a cheaper way to pay overtime. Around 1910, a 25-year-old saleswoman working in a New York department store told a National Consumers’ League investigator that in the week before Christmas “she worked standing over fourteen hours every day… so painful to the feet becomes the act of standing for these long periods that some of the girls forgo eating at noon in order to give themselves ..a foot-bath.” For this overtime the store gave her $20 “presented to her, not as payment, but as a Christmas gift.”

Significantly, while some companies offered a bonus to every employee, others made the Christmas present contingent on length of service or a worker’s efficiency record. Or on a worker’s proper disposition of the bonus; in Christmas 1914, a large Minneapolis flour-milling company reportedly gave each of their employees a $25 check to be deposited at a savings bank, the gift-check being valueless otherwise.

But the similarity to other forms of compensation invited recipients to treat the bonus as an entitlement, pressing for a definition of the additional income as a right. The personalization of a business gift from employer to employee was hard to sustain when the bestowal was standardized and expected. By the 1950s, the Christmas bonus officially lost its status as a gift: when a firm announced a reduction in its annual Christmas bonus as a way to make up for the expense of introducing a costly new retirement plan, the union tried to negotiate the employees’ holiday bonus. After the company refused any bargaining, the union appealed to the National Labor Relations Board. The Board ruled that the Christmas bonus could no longer be considered an employer’s discretionary gift but an expected and negotiable component of a worker’s wage. While a dissenting board member protested that a “genuine Christmas gift has no place at the bargaining table” (Niles-Bement-Pond Company and Amalgamated Local No. 405, International Union, United Automobile, Aircract & Agricultural Implement Workers of America, C.I.O., 1952), it was generally agreed that the bonus was no longer a present but a separate category of payment from the regular paycheck. The benefactor-beneficiary component of the employer-employee relationship, it follows, was vanishing…

Read more.

Newsday has also reviewed Dalton Conley’s latest book, ‘Elsewhere USA,’ and presented some strong feelings about the substantive focus of the book.

“Only in these times of economic meltdown could the common reader be persuaded to feel sympathy for the rich; in the past few months, multimillion-dollar portfolios evaporated and the noblesse oblige were bilked out of dollars destined for philanthropic causes. Into this unsteady new reality comes Dalton Conley’s “Elsewhere, U.S.A.,” in which the author argues that for the first time in our history, America’s rich are working harder and feeling more stressed out than our poor.

Is that the sound of a million tiny gold violins screeching? (Or should I say billion, since everything seems to have inflated to 10 figures these days?) Conley, author of six previous books, including the memoir “Honky,” is a member of the upper-income professional class that he writes about. But he also is chairman of the sociology department at New York University, and “Elsewhere” is a measured mix of social science, first-person reporting and historical research that is sometimes awkward but ultimately compelling.

Throughout, Conley traces the origins of “Elsewhere,” the nebulous location of the book’s title. As the disparate spheres of work and home collide and interpenetrate, it creates a sense of “elsewhere” at all times, presumably because one is never fully here nor there but in some murky in-between world.

In drawing a line from the past to the present, Conley sets his first pin squarely midcentury, highlighting “the growth of women’s work in the formal economy; the rise of information technology that allows many professionals to blend work and leisure on a 24/7 basis; and increasing inequality at the top of the ladder, as disparity grows between the upper-middle and upper classes.”

Conley makes clear that the confluence of these forces – not just working mothers or Blackberries alone – inspired a crippling mixture of guilt and anxiety in our upper class.”

Read on.