Find out how your income ranks in different parts of the U.S. with this interactive graphic from the New York Times. Needless to say, what earns 1% status in New York is not the same as in Flint, Mich. Data comes from demographic researchers at the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota.
A breakdown of the jobs of the 1%, featured over on Sociological Images, is part of the same Times package.
Just before the dawn of the New Year, Marketplace Money’s Eve Troeh hoped to find some silver lining, or at least an optimistic take, on one thing so many Americans now share: the job hunt. What she really seemed to find in her American Public Media report, though, was that unemployment remains as alienating an experience as it is a common one. And, as USC sociologist Karen Sternheimer explained, it’s a cruddy thing for anyone to go through, including the so-called highly-educated unemployed.
“One of the biggest measures of class is something called ‘occupational prestige’,” said Sternheimer. “Part of our status is based not just on how much money we have or make, but on kind of what other people think of what we do.” As Troeh went on, “When professionals lose jobs, then, [Sternheimer] says we’re more likely to blame them—even though we all know that layoffs in recent years happened across the board.”
Echoing Joe Soss’s comments in the Star Tribune, as covered in Citings & Sightings a couple of days ago, Sternheimer affirmed, “There’s still a lot of antipathy towards people who don’t have jobs. The myth of the American Dream says that you’ve either succeeded or failed based on your own merit.” More surprisingly, though, Sternheimer tells Marketplace Money that “her research on the Great Depression shows that in tough times, we cling more closely to that dream, that our own hard work determines our fate, rather than blame bigger economic forces.” This can result in a lot of blame for everyone’s “bad times” being placed on the unemployed themselves. And when you are the unemployed, the depression and alienation compound.
Etiquette, in fact, is where the radio story ended: “Etiquette expert Peter Post at the Emily Post Institute says relationships get ruined over a job loss. Even generous offers have to be made carefully.” This is to say, just as talking salary isn’t usually palatable for Americans, talking no salary is touchy, too. For more tips and/or commiseration, be sure to check out the full report, available online at American Public Media.
In some circles the social sciences are criticized for “discovering” what common sense supposedly already tells us. But sometimes, societal trends can cause even the experts to scratch their heads. During the recent recession, for example, unemployment rates in the United States rose sharply and many scholars and politicians expected crime rates to follow suit. According to recently released FBI crime statistics, though, they haven’t.
Violent crimes have fallen 6.4 percent in the last year while property crimes dropped 3.7 percent. Plus, last year’s crime decrease was just a continuation of a downward pattern since 2008; since 1991, the homicide rate has fallen 51 percent and property crimes dropped by 64 percent.
When this data went public, news sources like National Public Radio, the LA Times, and MSNBC.com looked to see how experts in criminology reacted to the findings. Richard Rosenfeld, professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and former president of the American Society of Criminology, was, “surprised by the overall decline in both violent and property crime during and since the recent recession.” He went on, “I’ve studied crime trends in relation to economic conditions for some time, and the 2008-09 recession is the first time since WWII that crime rates have not risen during a substantial downturn in the economy.” Many, including Rosenfeld, attribute some of the decline to smarter policing, but admit that can’t account for all of it, since in many places policing hasn’t changed much in the past ten years or during the recession.
Franklin Zimring, a criminologist and UC Berkeley law professor, was also a puzzled to see a decline in crime during the last three years when incarceration rates have stalled and the economy has soured. “By both the left- and right-wing leading indicators we should be in a lot of trouble—except [we’re] not,” Zimring maintains. “Everything we thought we knew are deeply challenged by events by the last three years.” In an email written to msnbc.com, Zimring does, though, suggest one possible factor affecting this decline: Inflation. “High rates of inflation are connected with high crime rates, so when inflation drops we should expect corresponding declines in crime, in the first instance property crime.”
Although bewilderment in the face of a crime decline is a relatively good problem to have, most scholars and public officials still agree on the importance of getting to the bottom of what’s causing it—particularly if it might be replicable.
The University of Minnesota’s Joe Soss, recently interviewed for the Office Hours podcast about his new book Discliplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race, was featured in the Star Tribune thoughtfully explaining the lessons of his research for the Lori Sturdevant article “It’s Rarely a Luxury to Be in Need of Charity.” As Soss put it, “Our notions about who’s deserving of help and who isn’t are rooted in notions about individual effort and individual success or failure.” But, he told Sturdevant, “It’s become almost a Catch-22… You’re undeserving if you haven’t worked hard enough to lift yourself out of poverty. If you had worked hard, you wouldn’t be poor. So if you’re poor, you must be undeserving.”
And, the columnist relates, maybe, “In frontier Minnesota, hard work could rather reliably produce self-sufficiency. Suspicion of the poor as lazy or profligate arose easily when land was cheap or free, the population was exploding, and harvests of timber, grain and, eventually, iron ore were abundant beyond imagining.” Now that hard times are upon so many, it’s harder to write off the jobless or the poor as deserving of their fate. In this way, the Great Recession may also become something of a Great Equalizer, “opening eyes to to a new reality about work in America,” writes Sturdevant. As Joe Soss said, “Tougher times make people more likely to understand that poverty isn’t just about individual choices.”
In a recent article in the New York Times, economics professor Nancy Folbre helps us understand why men have not only experienced greater job loss during the current recession but have also continued to suffer during the economic recovery.
As Folbre explains, the higher job loss does not come without historical precedence.
The Great Recession has sometimes been dubbed the Mancession because it drove unemployment among men higher than unemployment among women. Because men tend to work in more cyclical industries than women, they have historically lost more jobs on the downturn and gained more on the upturn.
However, the current upturn, has not followed this trend due to the decline in the jobs that men usually fill.
For example, men constitute more than 71 percent of the work force in manufacturing but less than 25 percent of the workers in health and education services…These two employment categories were similar in size in 2000, but manufacturing employment has failed to rise, even in non-recession years. Employment in health and education, in contrast, has risen slowly, but steadily.
The question than becomes, why aren’t more men moving to jobs traditionally occupied by women? Holbre turns to Stanford sociologists Maria Charles and David B. Grusky’s book Occupational Ghettos who illustrate how “gender segregation is a remarkably persistent and complex phenomenon shaped by deep cultural beliefs.” Or to put it more simply, men don’t want the jobs that are thought of as being ‘for women’.
With nursing and home health being projected to grow the most rapidly between now and 2018 and manufacturing jobs continuing to be outsourced to overseas locations, it appears it might be time for men to trade in the work boots for some tasteful loafers.
The birth rate in the United States hasn’t been this low in 100 years, leading social scientists to speculate on the role the Great Recession might be playing in family planning. The Associated Press reports:
The birth rate dropped for the second year in a row since the recession began in 2007. Births fell 2.6 percent last year even as the population grew, numbers released Friday by the National Center for Health Statistics show.
“It’s a good-sized decline for one year. Every month is showing a decline from the year before,” said Stephanie Ventura, the demographer who oversaw the report.
The birth rate, which takes into account changes in the population, fell to 13.5 births for every 1,000 people last year. That’s down from 14.3 in 2007 and way down from 30 in 1909, when it was common for people to have big families.
A sociologist explains how the falling Dow might relate to declining birth rates:
“When the economy is bad and people are uncomfortable about their financial future, they tend to postpone having children. We saw that in the Great Depression the 1930s and we’re seeing that in the Great Recession today,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University.
“It could take a few years to turn this around,” he added.
The birth rate dipped below 20 per 1,000 people in 1932 and did not rise above that level until the early 1940s. Recent recessions, in 1981-82, 1990-91 and 2001, all were followed by small dips in the birth rate, according to CDC figures.
Despite this trend, there is no need to panic.
Cherlin said the U.S. birth rate “is still higher than the birth rate in many wealthy countries and we also have many immigrants entering the country. So we do not need to be worried yet about a birth dearth” that would crimp the nation’s ability to take care of its growing elderly population.
NPR explores why the familiar “Made in China” print may be less common in the future:
Factory workers demanding better wages and working conditions are hastening the eventual end of an era of cheap costs that helped make southern coastal China the world’s factory floor.
A series of strikes over the past two months have been a rude wakeup call for the many foreign companies that depend on China’s low costs to compete overseas, from makers of Christmas trees to manufacturers of gadgets like the iPad.
Where once low-tech factories and scant wages were welcomed in a China eager to escape isolation and poverty, workers are now demanding a bigger share of the profits. The government, meanwhile, is pushing foreign companies to make investments in areas it believes will create greater wealth for China, like high technology.
Or, perhaps, manufacturers will shift their operations to other areas of the country:
Given the intricate supply chains and logistics systems that have helped make southern China an export manufacturing powerhouse, such changes won’t be easy.
But for manufacturers looking to boost sales inside fast-growing China, shifting production to the inland areas where many migrant workers come from, and costs are lower, offers the most realistic alternative…
Massive investments in roads, railways and other infrastructure are reducing the isolation of the inland cities, part of a decade-old “Develop the West” strategy aimed at shrinking the huge, politically volatile gap in wealth between city dwellers and the country’s 600 million farmers.
Gambling that the unrest will not spill over from foreign-owned factories, China’s leaders are using the chance to push investment in regions that have lagged the country’s industrial boom.
One sociologist sees this as potentially a large-scale shift:
Many of today’s factory workers have higher ambitions than their parents, who generally saved their earnings from assembling toys and television sets for retirement in their rural hometowns. They are also choosier about wages and working conditions. “The conflicts are challenging the current set-up of low-wage, low-tech manufacturing, and may catalyze the transformation of China’s industrial sector,” said Yu Hai, a sociology professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University.
Lest you think that sociologists are not discovering things relevant to your day-to-day life, rest assured. Sociologist Dan Myers of Notre Dame, along with his son, claims to have discovered the shortest possible Monopoly game. As reported on NPR:
The shortest possible game of Monopoly requires only four turns, nine rolls of the dice, and twenty-one seconds, Daniel J. Myers, a professor of sociology at Notre Dame University, told NPR’s Robert Siegel…
In short, here’s what has to happen:
“One player moves around the board very quickly, to buy Boardwalk and Park Place, and places houses on them,” Myers explained. “And the other one ends up drawing a Chance card that sends them to Boardwalk, and they don’t have enough money to pay the rent with three houses, and the game is over.”
So, what is the statistical probability of that particular game happening?
The odds are very, very, very slim.
Statistically speaking, it would happen “once every 253,899,891,671,040 games,” Josh Whitford, an assistant professor of sociology at Columbia University, says.
Not only is this discovery fun, it’s also not without its sociological parallels. From Myers’ interview with NPR’s Robert Siegel:
SIEGEL: Monopoly, famously, was popular in the Great Depression, when people were going broke. And now, you’ve come back during the Great Recession of the 21st century, with this theory.
Mr. MYERS: Yeah, well, there have been some comments out on the blogosphere about how it’s representative of what’s going on in our economy, that people could go bankrupt so quickly. We didn’t intend to parallel but certainly, it’s been drawn by a number of people out there.
Myers’ next project will be the shortest possible game of Risk.
SIEGEL: Well, what will fill the void, now, that’s occupied you for the past few weeks?
Mr. MYERS: Well, we’ve been getting suggestions from those out in the blog world. So the next one is to try to play the shortest possible game of Risk.
SIEGEL: Which you think might be more complicated or…
Mr. MYERS: I think it will because making someone go bankrupt isn’t quite as complicated as world domination.
A new study finds that it now costs approximately $60,000 a year for a family of four to survive in Philadelphia without government assistance, reports The Philadelphia Inquirer. This actual cost of living is almost three times as much as the federal poverty level:
A family of four is considered poor if it makes $22,050 a year – the federal poverty level.
That measure, which has been used for nearly 50 years, has long been criticized as failing to take a full measure of what it costs to live in America.
The level, based on how Americans lived in the 1960s, does not take into account costs of child care, health care, transportation, and housing. Also, the level is the same throughout the continental United States, failing to consider variations in cost based on geography. For example, it costs more to live in San Francisco than in Williamsport, Pa., but the federal poverty level is the same in both places.
There is a gap between the cost of living in Philadelphia and what most people actually make:
Nearly 62 percent of Philadelphia households take in less than $50,000 a year, according to census data analyzed by Dave Elesh, a sociologist at Temple University.
The $60,000 figure reveals that there are many more people who are having trouble making it, said Carol Goertzel, president and chief executive of PathWays PA, a Delaware County advocacy group for which the standard was prepared.
Advocates say the Pennsylvania study demonstrates that years of stagnating wages and growing income inequality have taken a toll, making it harder for working people to survive.
“Everybody is feeling hard times right now because of the recession,” said Carey Morgan, executive director of the Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger. “We like to blame and judge certain people and say they’re poor” because of inner failings, Morgan said. “But in the past couple of years, we see it can happen to anybody. This study is a wake-up call.”
Unable to stretch their wages to cover basic necessities, families lack adequate income to meet the costs of food, housing, transportation, and health and child care, wrote sociologist Diana Pearce, who prepared the study. These families are “nevertheless not deemed poor by the official federal poverty measure,” she added.
Since 2008, costs for child care and food in Philadelphia have gone up 8 percent each, while health care has shot up 22 percent and housing has risen 23 percent, according to Goertzel.
Recent data released by the Census Bureau have sociologists and demographers abuzz about mobility in the U.S. The Christian Science Monitor reports:
Americans are moving again, following a recession-induced plunge in mobility. But the mobility rate is still at historic lows as housing costs and few job opportunities keep many Americans hunkered down.
Some 37.1 million Americans, or 12.5 percent of the population, moved in 2009, according to the Census Bureau. That’s up – barely – from 11.9 percent the previous year, the lowest the US mobility rate has been since the Bureau began tracking it in 1948.
A normal rate during good economic times, such as in the 1990s, is between 15 and 17 percent.
A sociologist comments:
“What the [recession] has done is frozen people in place,” says Kenneth Johnson, a senior demographer at the Carsey Institute and a professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. “I’ve never seen changes of this magnitude in so short a period: It’s stunning for demographers.”
Another expert weighs in on the economic effects of lower mobility:
But the fact that the mobility rate is still very low is bad news for the economy, says Richard Florida, professor of US urban theory at the University of Toronto.
“Mobility is the cornerstone of the American economic backbone,” says Professor Florida, author of the new book “The Great Reset.” “Our economy has been premised on flexibility and mobility. Our workforce has always better able to move to where jobs and opportunities are.”
One demographer explains why local vs. long-distance moves might be problematic:
“It’s not good news,” says William Frey, chief demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “It only ticked up for local moves, not long-distance moves. I think the latter is a more significant story than the former – more college-educated people, more young people trying to move up in their careers. They are the lifeblood of migration and growth.”
Another concerning although consistent trend: People with incomes below the poverty line were more likely to move locally – and less likely to make long-distance moves – than others.
But experts see at least some positives of lower mobility:
Moving tends to take a toll on people. Staying put, by contrast, reaps social benefits like stronger family and community connections. Communities with lower levels of mobility tend to enjoy higher levels of trust and well-being, Mr. Frey says.
“People have their kids around them longer. There’s a stronger sense of community, but you’d like to think that would happen more for voluntary reasons,” he says.
