economics

Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad recently reported on research forthcoming in the American Journal of Sociology that challenges the idea that increased education leads to decreased religiosity. According to the article,

Stijn Ruiter, senior researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement, and Frank van Tubergen, a professor of sociology in Utrecht, compared ‘religious participation’ in 60 countries. They found no effect of education, but instead came to the conclusion that social insecurity and the environment people grow up in have a significant impact.

The authors focus on church attendance rather than religious belief as their measure of religiosity, and this may help to explain their findings.  Van Tubergen says,

“Other research has shown that highly educated people are indeed less religious. But at the same time they tend to be more actively involved in political parties, associations and thus also in churches. Less educated people are more religious, but less active about it. There is a higher rate of churchgoers amongst educated believers than low-skilled believers.”

According to the authors, the level of economic security in a country is a stronger predictor of religious participation.

“The US has long been regarded as a special case: a developed country and scientific vanguard that is exceptionally religious. But past researchers did not take uncertainties resulting from the high socio-economic inequality into account. In the US you can quickly climb the social ladder, but you can fall off very hard,” Ruiter explains.

Van Tubergen: “Conversely, the link between religiosity and uncertainty explains why the churches in the Netherlands have emptied out. As a result of the welfare state great security can be found outside the walls of the church. It would be interesting to examine the impact of the current economic crisis on church attendance.”

On PBS’ NewsHour, business correspondent Paul Solman sat down with sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh to talk about how even though the economy is inching toward ‘recovery’ the perils of jobless and job-seeking Americans suggest a need for new metrics to evaluate economic recovery.

Solman reports:

According to Venkatesh, the days of a company giving someone a job for 10 years may be over; many American companies don’t know where they themselves will be in six months to a year. Instead, as companies hire more people for shorter periods of time, on a contract or freelance basis, we’ll need better ways to evaluate how this type of employment fits within our models of economic recovery.

Read more.

Watch the video.

The BCC World Service Business Desk ran a story several days ago featuring an interview with Johns Hopkins University sociologist Andrew Cherlin. The discussion centered on how ordinary people are changed by the current global economic recession. Cherlin’s work suggests that although one might think that hard economic times would take a more severe toll on marriages, leading to more divorce, this is not the case. Instead, Cherlin explains, divorce is on the decline in our current recession, a trend mirroring the last significant rise in unemployment.

LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW.

National Public Radio (NPR) ran an interesting story yesterday about the effects of the recession on young, low income families, drawing up the expertise of well-known sociologist Maria Kefalas.

The NPR blurb:

Financial and emotional stability can be an elusive fantasy for young, low-income families. Writer Laura Sessions Stepp, who wrote about “fragile families” in this week’s Washington Post Magazine , discusses how unemployment and financial troubles can shatter even the most loving young families. And sociology professor Maria Kefalas explains how family stability has become a class privilege in America.

Listen to the broadcast, here.

With the downturn in the economy, there has been significant debate about whether or not Americans’ spending habits have changed for good. An article in the Chicago Tribune explores the debate, with the benefit of some sociological commentary suggesting that the change might not be permanent.

The Tribune reports:

The past decade was one of splurging, as easy access to credit cards and home equity loans enabled Americans to live more lavishly than previous generations. But as the economy has come crashing down, some predict a permanent cultural shift in spending habits. Some anthropologists and economists say more consumers will be like [some Americans] and spend more practically. They’ll buy smaller houses, eat out less and save for big purchases.

Many consumers are being forced into these changes as they watch the value of their homes plummet or find themselves swimming in unmanageable debt. But for others it’s a moral shift as they realize that all that buying doesn’t add much to their lives. “People are at that higher level where they’re saying something is wrong with the way we’re spending and it has got to change,” said Robbie Blinkoff, co-founder and principal anthropologist at Context-Based Research Group. In conjunction with the Carton Donofrio Partners Inc. advertising and marketing firm, it recently surveyed people about the economy’s impact on their spending.

The survey found that a new “grounded” consumer is emerging. These consumers are realizing that life is not defined by what they buy and that credit isn’t a true measure of their financial worth. They’re moving to limit the amount of “stuff” in their lives, the survey found. And they’re learning to live within their means. “The consumer will go through this process of evaluating what stuff they bring into their life to make sure it brings meaning into their life,” Blinkoff said. “They’ll be less superfluous.”

The economist thinks the changes will be permanent…

“It’s going to have to be a new way of life,” he said. Christopher Carroll, a professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University, said more people are realizing that things they once saw as necessities are actually luxuries. Debt is forcing many of the changes.

“What we’ll end up with is an economy where there is more investment, less of a trade deficit and spending is more in line with income,” Carroll said.

But the sociologist thinks otherwise…

Sara Raley, an assistant professor of sociology at McDaniel College in Westminster, Md., with a specialty in consumerism, said shopping is too big a part of people’s lifestyles to be drastically changed. She recently asked her students to name things they couldn’t live without and many listed cell phones, high-speed Internet and multiple televisions.

She also said television, movies and other entertainment media promote luxury living too much.

“I don’t think we’ll see permanent change unless we see some large structural change in the way we idolize consuming,” Raley said. Jean Johnson, an event planner who lives in Suitland, Md., is being a little more cautious with spending but doesn’t plan to abandon her shopping habits anytime soon–especially her shoe habit. The 46-year-old, who shops about once a week, said it’s something she enjoys.

“There are still going to be plenty of people out there who shop,” she said.

Read more.

Business Week ran a story over the weekend about how the economic meltdown is hitting male-dominated jobs, such as those in car manufacturing and finance, much harder than the service sector, where jobs are more often held by women. 

Good thing they call upon a sociologist to sort this out for their readers…

“In a society where services are becoming increasingly important, women quite simply have the better jobs,” says Hans Bertram, a sociologist at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

Bertram is not at all surprised by the fact that it is men who are worst affected by the crisis. “That was historically always the case, for example when you look at the collapse of the steel and coal industries in the Ruhr industrial region,” he says. Unemployment has always been a part of life in an industrialized country, and belongs to the rhythm of industrial society. “As long as someone is young and strong, he can make good money as a construction worker. But once you are 35 and your body won’t cooperate any more, there are fewer prospects,” Bertram explains.

He thinks it unlikely that, for example, former Opel workers will simply retrain to work in the service sector. “You can’t turn a steel worker into a call center agent,” he says. The service industry usually requires higher qualifications and these are not easily acquired later on in life, he explains.

“The change will only come with the generations,” Bertram says. “Perhaps young men will now more often decide against becoming a mechanic or a construction worker and instead opt to train as a nurse.”

Read more. 

The Houston Chronicle ran a book review with a rigorous critique of Dalton Conley’s Elsewhere, USA this weekend, highlighting some of the aspects of the book that were confusing to Chronicle reviewer Steven Alford, but raises some interesting concerns about how applicable Conley’s arguments are to a lay-reader, or any middle-class American. 

Alford writes: 

Conley claims, “changes in three areas of our lives—the economy, the family, and technology—have combined to alter the social world and give birth to a new type of American professional … the intravidual [who] has multiple selves competing for attention within his/her own mind, just as, externally, she or he is bombarded by multiple stimuli simultaneously.” (Isn’t he describing a mother of twins?)

This raises the question of exactly what and whom he is describing in the Elsewhere society—the wealthy or a much broader group. If the latter—and it seems he’s going for a larger reader demographic—then the terms of the argument he sets up at the beginning just don’t work, shuttling as it does between descriptions of the hard-working, high-flying Elsewhere class and “us,” constantly conflating the author/reader “us” with Mr. and Mrs. Elsewhere.

This intravidual is a member of the Elsewhere class, the top third of earners, “lawyers with young kids at home, and investment bankers, and public relations consultants, and advertising executives, and yes, overpaid CEOs.” Apparently, the more these people earn, the more they work, upsetting the traditional idea of leisure-class elites. Also, they “change partners more than they change locations.”

They live in the Elsewhere society, “where not only have physical boundaries become less important, where not only do many of us function with split-screen attentions (becoming, in essence, a collection of intraviduals), but where social boundaries dissolve, leaving us in a new cultural landscape without a map or guidebook.”

Do you live here? Do I? I have no idea (lacking, I guess, the relevant map/guidebook). The reason I’m confused is that there is a fundamental problem with Elsewhere’s argument. After identifying the Elsewhere class in the introduction, in the first chapter he switches to “we,” “us,” and “Mr. and Mrs.” [!] Elsewhere, suggesting that he’s speaking to a broad swath of readers, not just those he earlier identified as earning more than $200K a year.

But has Conley’s written an ‘Encyclopedia of Sociology’ in this volume? 

To call the book’s prose “breezy” would be akin to calling a hurricane windy. On any given page, it seems that an Encyclopedia of Sociology has exploded and we are sifting through the remains. All the usual suspects appear — C. Wright Mills, Weber, Milgram, Goffman, Shills — but they are presented adrift from their important historical and social context, applied at will to the present moment, picked up and put down like so many discarded Legos.

For example, Conley explains Marx’s four types of alienation — no doubt helpful to many readers — and claims that intraviduals are alienated. But then it’s on to the next topic. Wait: If a postmodern person is alienated, how does that compare to the modernist figure who was the object of Marx’s analysis? And apparently one of the marks of an intravidual is his/her internationalism: Identity is no longer a function of place and space. But what of Marx’s proletariat, which was international by definition? What’s the difference in the two types of internationalism? Apparently “nowhere men” are “the necessary, dialectic complement to the Elsewhere class,” an observation not made until page 131, and dropped again without elaboration. The author then talks about rational taxation schemes, the monetization of the Internet and other bubbly topics only peripherally, if at all, related to his subject.

Read more.

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.

Read more.

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.