economics

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…

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.

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.

Newswise has highlighted a new study by Stephen Sweet and Peter Meiksins titled the ‘Changing Contours of Work.’ In the study, the authors present a picture of the ‘new economy’ characterized by a lack of job security or upward mobility experienced by the majority of workers. Sweet and Meiksins call for a ‘new deal’ to address these issues, including a new worker’s bill of rights. Sweet notes, ““If you look back to the Fair Labor Standards Act —that said if you want to employ a worker more than 40 hours a week you have to pay them overtime at time-and-a-half. This is a wonderful way of reorganizing and creating a disincentive for employing workers for long hours; it could also benefit potential workers who are not in the labor force. The Act did exactly what it was intended to do. Now, it is not working as well, so we have to rethink how we are going to provide health care, how we are going to keep workers from being overworked and how we are going to provide levels of security that currently don’t exist. In short, we need to rethink what we need to expect from employers, what we need to expect from our government, unions and from each other in the workplace.”

About the study…

“Make no mistake, there is a new economy,” says Stephen Sweet, lead-author of “Changing Contours of Work” and an assistant professor of sociology at Ithaca College. He explains how the new economy has opened up prospects for working in new ways and created opportunities for new groups of workers. “But one problematic feature of the new economy is the way it segregates opportunity into ‘good jobs’ (that are increasingly fragile) and ‘bad jobs’ that lack benefits, livable wages and prospects for mobility,” says Sweet. Thus, he explains that the new economy creates chasms that separate many workers from reasonable working conditions, reasonable chances of upward mobility, reasonable chances of job security and reasonable chances to earn a living wage.

But what should we do about it? (According to the authors…)

“As we consider social policy, a key question concerns how to make the new economy work for everyone. This includes dismantling gender and racial chasms, but also addressing the needs of workers laboring in jobs that provide few resources.”

Read on.

Time Magazine recently reviewed Dalton Conley’s new book entitled, ‘Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, Blackberry Moms, and Economic Anxiety.’ As for the book’s content? As Time reports, “It’s pretty much all there in the subtitle.”

Conley, a New York University sociologist, asks why middle- to upper-class professionals who were once able to put in a full day’s work at the office, enjoy their leisure time, save up for a house and retire well now find themselves working more for seemingly less. There’s a new class of Americans in town, says Conley. “Changes in three areas — the economy, the family and technology — have combined to alter the social world and give birth to this new type of American professional. This new breed — the intravidual — has multiple selves competing for attention within his/her own mind, just as, externally, she or he is bombarded by multiple stimuli simultaneously.”

Although Time ultimately rated the book a ‘Read,’ they offered some critique of Conley’s work…

Conley’s a sociologist, and at times he writes as if he’s submitting a paper for review rather than penning a book for mass-market consumption. Still, Conley’s concept of intravidualism — “an ethic of managing the myriad data streams, impulses, and even consciousnesses that we experience in our heads as we navigate multiple worlds” — is fascinating. So is another useful but slightly silly neologism: “weisure,” Conley’s term for our increasing tendency to work during leisure time, thanks to advances in portable personal technology. As Conley writes, there are fewer and fewer boundaries in the world of the middle- to upper-class professional. “Investment v. consumption; private sphere v. public space; price v. value; home v. office; leisure v. work; boss v. employee” — the walls between them all are increasingly blurring or falling altogether. We seem to work all the time because technology now makes it possible to do so. Constant motion — between jobs, between relationships, between multiple selves, even — is Conley’s all-too-familiar “Elsewhere Society.”

Read the full review.

The LA Times ran a story yesterday, attempting to present some ‘straight talk’ about the economic crisis. The article focused largely on the comments of economist Paul Krugman, but Barry Glassner weighed in on the fray.

Barry Glassner, the USC sociologist, wrote “The Culture of Fear” to expose what he said was the media’s tendency to exaggerate the danger of various phenomena, such as road rage and workplace violence. He called TV news “by far the most breathless” in pumping up worries about the economy, but urged print journalists to be cognizant of their power.

“If we do a little thought experiment and imagine that the media suddenly told us everything is about to turn around,” Glassner said, “wouldn’t it seem a lot more likely we would call a broker and buy on the stock market, or make an offer on that house we have been waiting to move on, and so forth?”

Read more.

The New York Times reports on the apparent downturn in major cosmetic surgeries as the US economy seems to be faltering. The article, ‘Putting Vanity (and Botox?) on Hold,’ explores how even with the advent of Botox in 2002 – making wrinkle reduction a more affordable luxury – people may still be cutting back on their body alterations. The Times asks, “But now, as the country plunges into recession, will financial hardship demote the pursuit of physical perfection?”

Time to call in the sociologists…

In uncertain times, people tend to re-evaluate their priorities, dismissing aspirational purchases as frivolous, said Victoria Pitts-Taylor, a professor of sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

“Cosmetic surgery is going to become the new S.U.V., something that you can do without, that is less justifiable for you and your family,” said Dr. Pitts-Taylor. She is the author of “Surgery Junkies: Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture.”

A second opinion…

Deborah A. Sullivan, a sociology professor at the School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University, said that people who feel forced to forgo cosmetic medicine might experience a loss of control in their lives.

“I think it will intensify the sense of downward mobility: ‘I can’t even get my wrinkles treated,’ ” Dr. Sullivan said. She is the author of “Cosmetic Surgery: The Cutting Edge of Commercial Medicine in America.”

Against a tide of people eschewing cosmetic medicine in the new economy, she also predicted a counter current of consumers having procedures to feel proactive.

“People who would not have considered it, when they get laid off at 45, 50, 55 and are back on the job market, might consider it as they try to enhance their human capital,” she said.

Read the full story.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports this morning on recent speculation that financial woes from the deepening recession may mean that families will be having fewer children. The AJC reports on how parents are increasingly filled with doubts about their ability to provide for additional children as job prospects shrink, retirement savings plummet, and home values continue to fall.

Many economists fear that the recession will become one of the worst since the Great Depression. When that hit in the 1930s, the birthrate dropped precipitously, and the effects of having fewer people in the work force rippled through the economy two decades later. “If you can’t pay your mortgage, the last thing on your mind is to have another child,” said Dr. Khalil Tabsh, chief of obstetrics at the University of California, Los Angeles, who expects to start seeing a drop in pregnancies.

Bring in the sociologists…

Starting or growing a family often becomes more of a financial decision than an emotional one as parents calculate the sometimes overwhelming costs of health care, child care, education and other necessities, said Kathleen Gerson, a sociologist at New York University.

Though birthrates usually decline in a recession, there is a countervailing theory popular with some economists: Births may swell. Some women who lose their jobs may decide it’s an opportune time to raise a child, said Gary Becker, a University of Chicago economist and sociologist.

Read more.