economy

Earlier this week the New York Times ran a story about joblessness in the current recession. The article, entitled “The Price of U.S. Recession is Paid in Jobs,” includes commentary from sociologist Thomas Cottle.

The Times reports:

The pain of joblessness extends well beyond the workers themselves, hitting their families and entire communities as home foreclosures mount, neighborhoods decay and crime rises.

“I see long-term unemployment as a real, treacherous disease. And it kills. It kills,” said Boston University sociologist Thomas Cottle, ticking off side effects from stress and hypertension to depression, alcoholism and drug addiction.

Even the rate of dental cavities goes up as the unemployed tend to put off routine medical care, said Cottle, author of “Hardest Times: The Trauma of Long Term Unemployment.”

He worries that the recession is slowly eroding belief in the American ideal that if you work hard enough, you will get ahead. The longer unemployment endures, the more people will feel abandoned and betrayed, he said.

Read more.

green arrowThe 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.

For SaleNational 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.

5445 Slyder Farm and the Round Tops, GettysburgThe Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story today about the proposed elimination of the rural and community sociology program at Washington State University.

The justification for the cuts are as follows:

As colleges and universities struggle through the nation’s economic downturn, most are trying to preserve both academic programs and tenured faculty jobs. When it comes to saving money, universities are laying off staff members, freezing future faculty hiring, imposing furloughs, and trimming operating expenses. Some are merging academic departments, but few are eliminating them outright.

Besides theater and dance, Washington State also wants to get rid of the German major and the department of community and rural sociology. It figures the cuts will save $3.6-million over the next two years. In documents justifying the cuts, officials said professors in theater have too little time for research and that those in community and rural sociology bring in little money for research. Rural sociology has no undergraduate majors, and German awarded only four degrees in 2008. The theater program, administrators said, lacks “visibility and impact.”

But…

The university may have underestimated the outpouring of support for some of the programs it wants to scrap. Scholars have staged a national letter-writing campaign on behalf of the rural-sociology department, and in May students in theater and dance conducted a silent march across the campus to the president’s office.

The Chronicle featured commentary from some Washington State University sociologists:

Annabel R. Kirschner, a full professor in community and rural sociology, is just three years away from her planned retirement. Closing academic programs and laying off tenured faculty, she says, are dramatic steps for a university to take. “I’m concerned it will reflect on the prestige of the university for many years to come,” she says. Besides, Ms. Kirschner believes the action just wasn’t necessary. “If they had done a 10-percent cut across the board,” she says, “there wouldn’t be a need to terminate tenured faculty.” Mr. Bayly [the University Provost], however, says the university already tried that approach, making across-the-board reductions totaling between 2 percent and 5 percent in about 10 of the last 15 years. It wasn’t enough, he says.

José L. García-Pabón has taught in the community and rural sociology department at Washington State for only two years. His position is unique: He is the university’s first Latino community-development specialist. He works with Latino farmers on agriculture and health issues, and on literacy issues with the Latino population in general. Latinos are the fastest-growing minority group in the state. “If I’m gone,” he adds, “I don’t think anyone’s going to continue to do these kinds of things.”

Read more.

s p l i f f # o n e h u n d r e d f o r t y n i n eIn light of increasing media coverage about the drug trade in Mexico, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a story yesterday about how the U.S. appetite for illegal drugs appears to be insatiable, fueling drug trafficking from Mexico to the United States.

The Chronicle reports:

The Mexican drug cartels battling viciously to expand and survive have a powerful financial incentive: Across the border to the north is a market for illegal drugs unsurpassed for its wealth, diversity and voraciousness.

Homeless heroin addicts in big cities, “meth heads” in Midwest trailer parks, pop culture and sports stars, teens smoking marijuana with their Baby Boomer parents in Vermont – in all, 46 percent of Americans 12 and older have indulged in the often destructive national pastime of illicit drug use.

This array of consumers is providing a vast, recession-proof, apparently unending market for the Mexican gangs locked in a drug war that has killed more than 10,780 people since December 2006. No matter how much law enforcement or financial help the U.S. government provides Mexico, the basics of supply and demand prevent it from doing much good.

The sociological commentary…

The Mexican cartels are eager to feed this ravenous appetite. Once used mostly to transship drugs from South America, Mexico is now a major producer and distributor; its gangs control cocaine networks in many U.S. cities and covertly grow marijuana on U.S. public lands.

For now, the Mexican government is fighting the cartels and working with U.S. authorities who have promised to stop the southbound flow of weapons and cash – but all parties are aware of the role played by the U.S. market.

“When the U.S. government turns up the pressure a lot, then is when you see a return to the old formula of saying (to Americans), ‘You also have corruption, you consume the drugs, you’re the biggest drug consumer in the world,’ ” said Jose Luis Pineyro, a sociologist at Mexico’s Autonomous Metropolitan University.

Another sociologist weighs in…

Studies of youth drug use in Western Europe show a few countries with serious problems, but overall a far lower portion of young people there are abusing drugs than in America. Elsewhere around the world, drug use also is widespread, though data is generally not as thorough as in the United States.

“There’s no escaping the fact that we have the highest drug rates in the world,” said Craig Reinarman, a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Read more.

Downtown Orlando at sunsetThe Orlando Sentinel ran a story over the weekend about a sociologist at the University of Central Florida who undertook a study of the homeless population in Orlando, Florida. Estimates put this population around 10,000 people this year, although this study actually documented less than half that number.

“The economy is just spitting out homeless people in droves,” said lead researcher James Wright, a sociology professor at the University of Central Florida who has studied the poor and homeless for years. “A lot of these families were living right on the economic edge — and now that economic edge has retreated.”

The methods:

The analysis of the homeless population in Orange, Osceola and Seminole counties is largely based on a single-day count, conducted in January, of emergency shelters, transitional housing, soup kitchens, homeless camps, food pantries, drop-in centers and day-labor pools.

The single-day tally — 3,970 — may actually underrepresent the problem by excluding, for instance, individuals and families who stay in pay-by-the-week motels, those doubling up with relatives in violation of a lease or housing code, or those who “sofa surf” by taking turns sleeping at the homes of family and friends.

The study documents a dramatic increase in the homeless population there.

At the Coalition for the Homeless shelter in downtown Orlando, for example, officials report that the number of homeless women and children is up 10 percent to 20 percent from the same time a year ago.

Of the three local counties covered in the report, Orange had 63 percent of the region’s homeless population, while Osceola had 19 percent and Seminole 18 percent. But all have witnessed a striking increase in homeless students — from 2,700 at the end of last school year to more than 4,200 so far this year, according to school-district figures.

“Being homeless has a lasting impact for those children,” said Cathy Jackson, the Homeless Services Network’s executive director. “You are going to see a 1 1/2 – to two-year drop in academic performance. You’re going to see an increase in developmental delays. You’re going to see an increase in psychological and physical-health problems because medical care isn’t available and their environment is disrupted.”

Read more. 

88/365 - take two aspirin and call me when you can see againBoth ABC news and the New York Times ran stories over the weekend about the relationship between job loss and health. New research by sociologist Kate Strully, a sociologist at the State University of New York-Albany, examines unemployment data from 1991, 2001, and 2003 and finds that job loss is “linked to a higher risk for high blood pressure, heart disease, heart attack, diabetes or depression, even when the person finds a new job. Losing a job through no fault of one’s own, if a company shut down, for example, led to a 54 percent increase in that person reporting poor health.” 

She told ABC News:

“Jobs are so fundamental to who you are and where you fall into society,” said Kate Strully, an assistant professor in sociology at the State University of New York at Albany and the author of a new study. “In looking at what happens to people after they lose such a big component of their class position and social identity … [the study asked] did they lose their job because they were sick or did they get sick because they lost their job?”…

Still, Strully’s data is based on situations from the 1990s and early 2000s, when the economic climate was not as universally challenging as it is now. People who lost their jobs may have been in a better position to find alternate employment or receive financial help via credit, mortgages or family and friends.

“We were looking at a situation where the economy was better than now and there were still sizable health hazards associated with job loss,” Strully said. “Common sense suggests that the situation today for displaced workers is probably worse.”

The New York Times reported:

Workers who lost a job through no fault of their own, she found, were twice as likely to report developing a new ailment like high blood pressure, diabetes or heart disease over the next year and a half, compared with people who were continuously employed. Interestingly, the risk was just as high for those who found new jobs quickly as it was for those who remained unemployed.

Though it has long been known that poor health and unemployment often go together, questions have lingered about whether unemployment leads to illness, or whether people in ill health are more likely to leave a job, be fired or be laid off. In an effort to sort out this chicken-or-egg problem, the new study looked specifically at people who lost their jobs through no fault of their own — for example, because of a plant or business closing. The author, Kate W. Strully, said she looked at situations in which people lost jobs for reasons that “shouldn’t have had anything to do with their health.”

Read more from ABC.

Read more from the New York Times. 

photo from the empire state building, 1The New York Times City Room ran a story about whether or not street vending could help alleviate New York City’s soaring unemployment rate. The article suggests that some members of the City Council as well as advocacy groups think that raising the cap on permits for street vendors might ease joblessness…

Michael Wells, co-director of the Street Vendor Project, said that the city needs to raise the number of permits to handle the surge of people who are looking to make a living. “People call because they have lost their jobs; people call because their husbands have lost their jobs; people call in anticipation of being laid off,” he said at a rally Tuesday morning on the steps of City Hall.

But he said he almost always told them that the chances of securing a legal vending permit was almost next to none. The number of New York street vending licenses for food and merchandise has been capped at fewer than 4,000 for decades — 853 general vending permits and 3,000 food permits citywide — though the Bloomberg administration introduced 1,000 new permits for fruit and vegetable vendors last year.

One sociologist weighs in…

The current set of caps was more or less put into place during the administration of Mayor Edward I. Koch, as part of an effort to clean up the streets, according to Prof. John Garber, a sociologist who has studied New York City street vending.

“They cut the number of vendors permits in half,” said Professor Garber, a who will soon be teaching at the University of Arkansas. “The number of vendors never decreased. The number of illegal vendors increased. It just forced the business of street vending to be illegal.”

“There is an erroneous theory that if you increase the number of street vendors’ permits you increase the number of vendors on the street,” Professor Garber said. “Street vending is bare-bones economics, supply and demand.” He added, “If there is no profit incentive, it doesn’t matter if they have a license or not, they are not going into street peddling.”

His research also found that vendors are often looking for other jobs while they are doing their selling on the street.

Sociologist Mitch Dunier comments on the opposition to street vending…

Opposition to broadening street vending permits comes from a number of directions, said Prof. Mitchell Duneier, a sociologist at Princeton who has also studied street vendors. Many people argue that street vending causes congestion on sidewalks and streets. In fact, the arrival of trucks as a means for delivery prompted a movement against street peddlers and their pushcarts because they “cluttered” the streets. “How much pedestrian congestion is a reasonable amount is frequently a cultural phenomenon of different neighborhoods,” he said. (Chinatown, for example, has a higher tolerance.)

Prof. Duneier added: “There has historically always been a give and take between the business community that is part of the formal economy and the informal economy. Businesspeople who pay rent and taxes are very, very skeptical.”

Garber suggests that this opposition is overstated…

Prof. Garber added that competition is overstated and that in fact, he saw many instances in which street vendor and store were more synergistic. Street vendors generally sell smaller-ticket items, while stores, because of their high-fixed costs for rent, generally try to sell higher-priced items.

“It’s fairly rare for street vendors to compete with store owners,” Professor Garber said. “The direct competition between the two is not really there realistically.” In fact, he noted that street vendors can be good for the city because they provide a sense of safety with vendors and create a urban feel and draw more foot traffic.

Read more.

88/365 - take two aspirin and call me when you can see againYesterday USA Today reported on how executives who carry out layoffs are suffering too. They now report numerous symptoms including stress, poor sleep, and other problems with their physical health. The paper reports, “About 3 million Americans have been laid off since the recession began 16 months ago, the government says. In every instance, someone decided the worker had to go, and someone delivered the bad news.”

Of course these people can’t expect much sympathy from the laid off employees, but at least we can call upon a sociologist to explain the trend…

Managers involved with layoffs at one large company were more prone than other executives to have sleep problems, ulcers, headaches and even heart trouble up to three years after the layoffs, says Leon Grunberg, a sociologist at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash. They also had more job stress and depression. Grunberg led the only long-term study of how such bosses fare, following 410 managers over 10 years, until 2006.

In interviews, managers called the layoffs “gut-wrenching” and “devastating,” Grunberg says.

Something changes

In his study, the managers had mostly regained emotional health up to six years after the layoffs. But they still were more likely than other bosses to have stress-related health problems, such as ulcers and heart trouble, he says. “It seemed to change their image of the company dramatically. One said, ‘It’s almost a falling-out-of-love feeling.’ “

Read more.

A Vibrant FlagThe 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.