The Paris School of Economics has posted a database, compiled by Facundo Alvaredo, Tony Atkinson, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez, of the distribution of top incomes in a number of nations, with more on the way. Using income tax records, they provide a quick glance at concentration of income among the wealthy over decades (and in some cases, data extends back over a century). As the authors point out, there are limitations to using tax info to measure inequality, so it’s important to be aware of the limitations of this data series. Most obviously, individuals may take steps to hide their income to evade taxes, and the very wealthy may be particularly able to do so through the use of tax havens, etc. Also, tax policies change, so what counts as “income” at one point might not at another. The authors also had to contend with differences in the taxation unit (households vs. individuals) in different countries to provide some level of comparability.

The database allows you to select a country, a time period, and a variable (top 5% income share, etc.), and get a table showing the results for all years in which data were available. Here, for instance, is part of the table for the share of income earned by the top 1% in Singapore:

Of course, this includes only data on income. In many countries, including the U.S., wealth (value of all assets) is significantly more concentrated than income.

Looking at the dataset, you can see patterns over time. For instance, here’s part of the data from the U.S. (notice there are time gaps between the end of each column and the beginning of the next–I was just grabbing some illustrative screencaps), showing how the percent of income earned by the top 0.1% decreased significantly starting in the 1940s, but began creeping up again by the late 1980s and has grown since then:

The site also allows you to create graphs. They provide a comparison of the share of income earned by the top 1% in 2005 in the U.S., Japan, Australia, and France, but you can look at data for individual nations:

It’s worth playing around a bit, but keeping in mind the caveats about what these data do and don’t tell us. Thanks to Shamus Khan for the tip!

A recent post on Boing Boing discussed the newly discovered “rules for jazz performers during the Nazi occupation.”  Jewish and Black people — two groups targeted by the Nazis — were also the primary innovators of jazz music. But even as the German state denigrated jazz, jazz musicians, and swing dancers, Nazi soldiers loved jazz!  How to handle such a contradiction? Rules for playing jazz music: no “Jewishy gloomy lyrics,”  no “Negroid excesses in tempo,” and no “hysterical rhythmic reverses characteristic of the barbarian races.”  

It’s well worth a look, as is this post from 2010 explaining how many groups vilified by Nazis survived the Holocaust by playing jazz for Nazi soldiers…

————————–

I have a favorite historical musician: Django Reinhardt.

Reinhardt was a Roma jazz musician. During World War II both Roma and jazz musicians were targeted by the Nazi regime. Over a million Roma were exterminated for presumed racial inferiority and jazz was believed to combine the worst of Blacks and Jews (i.e., “musical race defilement”). Just listening to a jazz record could get you sent to a concentration camp.

Reinhardt, however, enjoyed the most lucrative period of his career during the war, while living and playing openly among Nazi soldiers.

How?

Reinhardt biographer Michael Dregni, recently interviewed by NPR, explained:

The Germans used Paris basically as their rest-and-relaxation center, and when the soldiers came, they wanted wine and women and song. And to many of them, jazz was the popular music, and Django was the most famous jazz musician in Paris… And it was really a golden age of swing in Paris, with these [Romas] living kind of this grand irony.

Reinhardt, then, survived because the Nazis loved jazz music, even as Hitler censored the music and, on his orders, people who dared to listen to, dance to, or play it were encamped and members of the groups who invented it were murdered.  Irony indeed.

For more on Reinhardt, jazz, and World War II, here is a clip from a documentary on Reinhardt’s remarkable talent, career, and luck:

—————————

UPDATE: A commenter, Bernardo Soares, offered an interesting critique/clarification in the thread.  Here’s part of what he had to say:

…I think it is grossly misleading to write that Reinhardt “enjoyed the most lucrative period of his career during the war”. He enjoyed the protection of some individuals in the German occupation force. This is not so unusual — the composer Richard Strauss who headed the Reichsmusikkammer used his influence to protect some Jewish composers. But as many other examples show, this was extremely precarious. As long as these individuals had the power to protect him, he was probably relatively safe, but he could still be shot by any soldier at a whim or be accidentally included in a deportation action. Also, these individuals could lose their power, or some higher-ranking officer could order him to be deported. Reinhardt tried several times to escape occupied France.

[Also] …the whole issue of music and art politics in the Third Reich is much more complex than stated in the video. The Reichsmusikkammer (Reich Music Chamber) was not the only institution regulating music politics. As with many other bureaucratic institutions in the Third Reich, several agencies struggled for influence and power. This means that music politics was often contradictory, and the absence of a clear regulation as stated in the video opened the door for arbitrary measures – again emphasizing the precarious situation of musicians. The competition and struggle for power between different agencies led to a radicalisation of racial and cultural politics, and this was even taken further in the occupied countries.

I do love this topic.  I also have a post on racial borrowing and lindy hop, the dance that made me love Django.  A paper I wrote about gender and lindy hop can be found in the journal Ethnography. And I have a talk based on the paper that I love to give in theory classes.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Behold, I present to you a video parody of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance,” rewritten as “Bad Romance: Women’s Suffrage,” an account of the fight to get voting rights for women in the U.S.:

I just wanted you to know that this exists.

Lyrics and info available here. Thanks to Kristina Killgrove for the tip!

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

In a wonderful example of the social construction of time, there was no Friday, December 30th, 2011 in Samoa (NPR).

The country decided to move from one side of the International Dateline to the other.  The move, accomplished by skipping forward 24 hours, will allow it to align its week with its largest trading partners: Australia, New Zealand, China and Tonga.  Many business leaders were thrilled at the switch.

Thanks to sociologist Dan Hirschman for the tip!  Also in the social construction of time: Social Construction, Deviance, and Daylight Savings.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Earlier this year we uncritically posted a spoken word poetry performance about prejudice against short men.  Geoffrey Arnold, who uses his blog, The Social Complex, to highlight heightism, had this to say about our tacit approval…

—————————

I’ve gotten some e-mails and criticism lately for an entry on this blog which was recently featured on the Sociological Images website.  In this entry, I posted a video of a Def Poetry Slam entitled “Death From Below” and asked the rhetorical question whether the video depicted “Short guys making fools of themselves?  Or poetry with a message, delivered through humor?”  I should have elaborated further, but I neglected to at the time.

…

The problem with Dan Sully & Tim Staffor’s poetry slam about being short is that it does not clearly convey the message that heightism is wrong.  In fact, as one commenter put it, the pair seem only to perpetuate numerous false stereotypes about short men.  Quite simply, the commentary which may underline their performance is too subtle for a general audience.  Instead of standing up for those who are the targets of height bigotry, it seems to me that these two are basically playing the role of the short male buffoon.  They are humiliating themselves and their bodies for the entertainment of others.  Any point which they are trying to make (and I’m not so sure that there is a point here) is lost in their performance.  Additionally, beyond their performance itself, some of their comments actually have the effect of supporting heightism instead of undermining it (“little man complex” as motivation for being healthy and “can’t date girls in heels people”).

Just the fact that they attempted to deliver their message through comedy is troubling when one considers that other groups rarely engage in this sort of behavior.  There is already a stigma against short men as people who are not to be taken seriously and so it doesn’t help when a short man publicly presents his body as a target for ridicule.

—————————

Geoffrey Arnold is an associate with a mid-sized corporate law firm’s Business Litigation Practice Group.  When Geoffrey isn’t chasing Billable Hours in the defense of white-collar criminals, he is most likely writing about social justice with a special emphasis on height discrimination at his blog: The Social Complex.  See also Geoffrey’s guest post introducing the concept of heightism as a gendered prejudice.

Dominant groups have the power to control representations of less-powerful groups.  They exert an out-of-proportion influence on their cultural portrayals.

We’ve previously featured objections to simplistic portrayals of the enormous continent of Africa, especially as a place that is primitive and hopelessly burdened by death, disease, poverty, corruption, and other problems.  Chimamanda Adichie, for example, objects to the “single story of Africa” and Binyavanga Wainaina tell us how not to write about Africa.  Elsewhere, we’ve illustrated how the bustling city of Nairobi is portrayed as a savanna with giraffes and elephants.

An organization called Mama Hope, sent in by Jennifer C., seeks to challenge this perception.  They want the world to think of Africa as a place of hope and possibility.  To this end, Mama Hope is producing videos that “…feature the shared traits that make us all human— the dancing, the singing, the laughter…”  They look like this:

The effort reminds me of the “Smiling Indians” and “More Than That” videos, sent in by Katrin and Anna W.  The first addressed the stereotype of the “stoic Indian,” while the second is designed to counterbalance the common portrayal of reservations as miserable places full of one-dimensional hopeless people (something we are certainly sometimes guilty of).

Smiling Indians:

More Than That…:

These videos are examples of the way that the democratizing power of new technologies (both the internet in general and the relatively easy ability to take video and edit) are offering marginalized peoples an opportunity to contest representations by dominant groups.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Trudi Abel, who directs the Digital Durham Project at Duke University, sent in a map she thought we might like to post. Created by the Department of Public works in Durham, NC, in 1937, the map illustrates the legal and taken-for-granted racial segregation of the time. The map indicates which parks and residential areas were for Whites and which for African Americans:

The map:

Obviously you can’t see much, other than a general idea of which parts of town each race lived in. Go to the Digital Durham website and click on the map for a version that lets you zoom in to read all the details.

You might also want to check out our posts on a 1934 redlining map of Philadelphia and 2010 Census data on segregation.

Cross-posted at Compassionate Societies.

This week the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released a series of new gender indicators, covering the presence of women in top corporate jobs and parliaments, the gender wage gap, and entrepreneurship.

Despite efforts in many countries to promote their participation on boards, women are still under-represented in top corporate jobs.  On average, women make up 10% of board members. The United States is only 2% higher at 12%. Quite a few countries do better. The highest is highest is Norway, at close to 40%, due to a mandatory quota introduced in 2006. In Sweden, France, Slovak Republic and Finland the proportion of women on boards is between 15% and 20%, while in Germany, Japan and the Netherlands, it is less than 5%.

The percent of women in the U.S. congress and senate is 17%, which is about 10% lower than the average of OCED countries parliaments.  In the past ten years, the average proportions have increased slightly, but significantly.

The overall wage gap in the U.S. has been declining, but at 19%, it is three times greater than it is in Hungary. And it is about twice as large as most European countries.  Overall, the gap has been declining:

Entrepreneurship is still highly gendered.  The percent of women has been rising, but this is largely due to an overall decline in male entrepreneurs during the past 11 years.

If one considers lack of participation in power positions of business as well as government to be indicators of injustice due to social processes like glass ceilings that prohibit advancement, then the U.S., as well as the rest of the OECD countries analyzed here, have a long way to go to reach gender justice, both informal and formal.

————————

Ron Anderson, PhD, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, has written many books and hundreds of articles, mostly on technology. In his retirement, he is doing research and writing on compassion and suffering and maintains the website CompassionateSocieties.org.