The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities ran the CBO data on income and published a report showing the huge increase in inequality since 1979, especially in recent years (the data go up to 2007 – full report here). It’s the people at the top – the default swappers and hedge funders – who’ve been making out like bandits, while the rest of us limped slowly along.
The graph shows percent changes. How much is that in American money?
We all knew this. But I’m still surprised that supposedly intelligent people can still attribute it all to individual factors. Yes, individual differences in ability account for individual differences. But they don’t make for huge changes in the overall distribution.
But here we have Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit, one of the most widely read bloggers in the known universe (especially the conservative universe), reprinting the comment of a reader at a tax blog that posted the data.
A reason for the “wealth or income gap”: Smart people keep on doing things that are smart and make them money while stupid people keep on doing things that are stupid and keep them from achieving.
People who get an education, stay off of drugs, apply themselves, and save and wisely invest their earnings do a lot better than people who drop out of school, become substance abusers, and buy fancy cars and houses that they can’t afford, only to lose them.
We don’t have an income gap. We have a stupid gap.
Glenn calls it “the comment of the day.”
In 1993, the average household in the top 1% was making 36 times the income of a household in the lowest fifth. In the next 14 years, those top guys worked really hard while the poor apparently sold their diplomas to buy crack and Escalades, so by 2007 the gap had doubled. The richest now made 72 times the income of the poor.
The funny thing is that for a few years (1984- 1983 1993) the rich-poor gap was decreasing. It must have been all the cocaine those bond traders were doing.
The commenter is right – there may be a stupid gap. But it’s the gap that Durkheim suggested long ago. Some people look at “social facts” – large differences between one time or place and another – and try to explain them in terms of individual facts. Other people seek an explanation in social facts – facts about the society, facts which individuals have little power to change.
Understandably, parents are eager to memorialize pregnancy and the birth of their child (well, the nicer parts of them, anyway). Some of this is done informally by parents or relatives themselves. Earlier this summer I took my 4-year-old niece for her first ever haircut because my sister loves long hair and couldn’t bring herself to get it cut, but I’m a big meanie with no soul and it didn’t bother me to cut a little girl’s butt-length hair into what seemed to me a much lower-maintenance, reasonable length. But I digress. The point is, my sister’s one requirement was that I save her hair and bring it back in a ziploc bag. Not one or two curls; all of it. So I handed over to her a freezer-size bag full of a lot of hair. Many of us have baby books from when we were young where our parents saved our first lost tooth, hair from our first haircut, or other things deemed to have sentimental value.*
But an industry has also arisen to help parents turn every step of the pregnancy, childbirth, and infancy process into a precious memory, whether it’s paying to get a video of the childbirth or the enormous number of scrapbooking supplies that provide an array of materials and pre-printed statements to help you express your joy.
RudolfoRabulous sent in a coupon for a product that takes this process of turning every single event in a pregnancy and child’s life to a new level. If you buy an e.p.t. pregnancy test, you can send in a coupon for a FREE promotional “keepsake gift”…a pouch to save the used pregnancy test in, to “remember the moment you knew”:
I am sure there are people who treasure their used pregnancy test, perhaps because they were trying to get pregnant for a long time or wanted a baby more than anything in the world. I’m not trying to deny the importance that finding out you’re pregnant has for people who are actually happy about it. But…e.p.t. has created purple pouches you’re supposed to send in for so you can keep a peed-on stick in it (notice the coupon says, in bold, “Please do not send in your stick”).
This strikes me as part of the trend to treat increasing amounts of our lives as unique, precious moments that require formal remembrance through some type of physical creation/artifact, rather than something to remember fondly as a non-material memory. Technologies such as film and video cameras, and consumer products such as physical and digital scrapbooking materials and the wide array of “keepsake” items you can buy, both allow and encourage this process. It’s not that the desire to have physical reminders of important moments in our lives is new, we just have a much greater variety of ways to do that now, and many have become quite cheap (digital photos, for instance, have no cost, really, once you’ve bought the camera, unless you want to print them out). Those two factors mean we now have the ability to turn many more life events from intangible memories into an end product, either on our own or with the aid of the items provided by a helpful memory industry.
* Am I the only one who wasn’t really sure what to do with this stuff when my mom decided it was time to hand it all over to me? What am I going to do with my old teeth? Why on EARTH would I want my umbilical cord? I kept the baby book itself but all the bottles and baggies of accompanying biological materials went in the trash.
And what would you do if your mom gave you her used pregnancy test? Would you be excited or touched? Or creeped out? Or just confused/indifferent?
The phrase “nature/nurture debate” refers to an old competition between those who think that human behavior and psychology is determined by biology (that is, genetics, both evolutionary and individual, hormones, neurology, etc) and those who believe that it is determined by environment (that is, socialization, cultural context, experiences in childhood, etc). While the nature/nurture debate rages in the mass media, most scholars reject it altogether. Instead, social scientists and biologists alike recognize that our behavior and psychology is the result of an interaction between nature and nurture (yep, even sociologists like myself).
A recent story on NPR illustrates this beautifully. James Fallon, a neuroscientist specializing in sociopaths, had been scanning the brains of murderers for 20 years. His research had demonstrated that sociopath brains have a distinct appearance: dark patches in the orbital cortex, the part of the brain responsible for moral thinking and controlling impulses.
You can see the dark patches in the brain on the right, the brain on the left is a “normal” brain:
At a family gathering one day, Fallon’s mom mentions that there were some pretty violent types in Fallon’s own family history (it apparently didn’t come up anytime in the previous 20 years !!!) and, so, he investigates. It turns out that there were eight proven and alleged murders in his ancestral line, including Lizzy Borden, one of the most famous murderers in history. Because Fallon knows that the atypical neurology associated with sociopaths runs in families, he decided to scan the brains of all his family members. No one had the dark patches.
Except him. Fallon had the dark patches. In fact, that brain on the right: that’s him.
Not only did he have the neurology of a typical sociopath, he also carried a genetic determinant known to be associated with extreme violence.
Fallon doesn’t have the answer to why he’s not a sociopath, but scientists think that a person needs to have some sort of experiential trigger, like abuse as a child, in addition to a biological predisposition.
Significantly, [Fallon] says this journey through his brain has changed the way he thinks about nature and nurture. He once believed that genes and brain function could determine everything about us. But now he thinks his childhood [and his awesome mom] may have made all the difference.
Majd A.-S. sent in a link to a review at The Brainy Gamer of the Wii videogame Heavy Fire: Special Operations, which was released last week. Michael Abbott, the reviewer, starts by saying that he doesn’t find First-Person Shooter (FPS) games inherently problematic, but that after playing the game he found this one disturbing. He suggests it should be renamed “Arab Shooting Gallery.” Here’s an extended trailer:
Notice that the game specifically points out that it has a “destructible environment”; not only can you kill enemies, you can make sure you leave the surrounding city as demolished as possible. Woo hoo! Fun!
Abbott mentioned the article “Digital Arabs: Representation in Video Games,” by Vit Sisler, so I checked it out. Sisler conducted a content analysis of 90 European and American video games and 15 Arab-language ones, all set in the Middle East (or fictional settings clearly derived from the Middle East):
The methodology used for content analysis involves playing the whole game while taking notes and screenshots of relevant visual signifiers, recording the narrative and analysing the structure of gameplay… Correspondingly, other paratextual materials related to the game were analysed (booklets, manuals and websites).
There are a number of video games set in the Middle East broadly defined (Sisler lists Delta Force, Prince of Persia, Conflict: Desert Storm, Full Spectrum Warrior, and others). In most, the shooter is a member of the U.S. military or the coalition forces associated with it. Sisler says,
While the US or coalition soldiers usually are humanized and individualized by their nicknames or specific visual characteristics, the enemy is collectivized and linguistically functionalized as ‘various terrorist groups’, ‘militants’ and ‘insurgents’ (Machin and Suleiman, 2006). At the same time, the moral mission, professionalism and courage of the forces controlled by the player are emphasized by the in-game narrative and scripts. However, the enemies are presented in a way that suggests they are not ‘real’ soldiers, thereby removing the legitimacy of their actions (Machin and Suleiman, 2006). This could be manifested even on the level of the artificial intelligence controlling the enemy soldiers via scripts including undisciplined poses, shouting and yelling (Full Spectrum Warrior), or raising weapons above their heads, laughing mockingly after they kill (Delta Force).
Some Arab groups have responded to this by creating video games of their own that present a more sympathetic view of Arabs and/or Muslims. For instance, Hezbollah released a game called Special Force (Al-Quwwat al-Khasa):
The game presents members of Hezbollah as heroes or martyrs while the Israeli Defense Force is the enemy. As Sisler points out, this doesn’t change the basic narrative of the games mentioned above, it just switches the roles of “us” vs. “the enemy.”
On the other hand, the game Under Ash (Tahta al-Ramad), based on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (from the Palestinians’ point of view), humanized Palestinians by giving them significant backstories that explained how they came to be involved in the Palestinian resistance. It presented Israeli soldiers as the enemy but specifically prohibited players from harming either Palestinian or Israeli civilians (in a sequel to Under Ash, titled Under Siege, Tahta al-Hisar, killing a civilian automatically leads to a “game over” message). It doesn’t allow any type of peaceful interaction with Israelis, but it is one of the few games based on the Middle East that presents cities as full of inhabitants whose lives are valuable, regardless of which side of a conflict they’re on.
Sisler argues that the depictions of players and their enemies have implications beyond all of these video games themselves. Particularly when games are set in locations with current real-world conflicts, the narratives presented in cultural products such as video games help shape understandings of the conflict, including its morality, hero-izing some groups while dehumanizing others, and normalizing particular forms of warfare. In the U.S., these types of images, as well as those included in movies like The Siege and TV shows such as 24, also reinforce the perception of Arabs and Muslims as racialized Others, bloodthirsty terrorists whose acts of aggression are inherently illegitimate, while any by the Coalition forces are, by definition, moral and justifiable in the face of such an enemy.
Michael Kimmel forwarded me a blog post at Gallup updating their data on acceptance of homosexuality in the U.S. In 2009, “morally acceptable” eeked out a win over “morally wrong” and, in 2010, it took a resounding lead:
Gallup offers some really interesting answers to that question.
First, men are driving it. Women are only marginally more supportive of homosexuality today compared to 2006. But men, especially young men, but older men too, are significantly more supportive. A full 14% of men have changed their mind in the last four years! Women started out more supportive than men, but men have caught up.
Second, while members of all political parties and religions reported show increases in their level of acceptance of gays and lesbians, it is the politically moderate that are really pushing the percentages up. Eleven percent of independents and 14% of moderates changed their mind about homosexuality between 2006 and 2010. They are now as likely as democrats to endorse homosexuality (but still fall behind self-described liberals). One in 20 Republicans and conservatives also changed their mind, though in overall acceptance rate they still fall far behind everyone else.
Finally, among religiously-affiliated Americans, Catholics were the most likely to change their mind to favor homosexuality. They are as likely as political Democrats to support gays and lesbians. Religious non-Christians and the non-religious, however, kick everybody’s asses with 84% and 85% of them saying that gay and lesbian relations are “morally acceptable.”
This month Gwen and I wanted to take a moment to thank all of you who have submitted ideas for posts. Our inbox is alive with ideas and it makes our job exceedingly fun! We absolutely could not do it without all of your eyes. So thank you for your submissions! Also, if you’ve submitted an idea and it was never posted, please don’t be discouraged. We get far more ideas than we could possibly use. And, even if yours was a submission that we decided against using, be assured that we read it, thought about it, and sometimes talked about it together before setting it aside. We appreciate all of your help, even if it doesn’t make the front page.
Finally, please do remember that you can follow us on Twitter or friend us on Facebook. Soon we’ll be launching a MySpace page as well.
NEW PUBLICATIONS:
(If you don’t have the subscriptions required to access either paper, we’re happy to send you a copy, Just send us a note at socimages@thesocietypages.org.)
Gwen and my most recent essay in the print-magazine Contexts, Flesh-Toned, is now online. It draws on the long conversation we’ve been having here about the way that the use of the terms “flesh,” “nude,” and “skin” to refer to light beige colors makes darker-skinned people invisible.
Also, a paper I wrote with Caroline Heldman is now available at Sexuality Research and Social Policy. How and why hook-up culture came to characterize U.S. colleges remains a mystery. In our paper, Hook-Up Culture: Setting a New Research Agenda, we argue that the emergence of hook-up culture on college campuses is an excellent opportunity to learn more about how sexual cultures change. We review the literature, offer some hypotheses to explore, and discuss methodological requirements.
NEWLY ENRICHED POSTS (Look for what’s NEW! July ’10):
This month we added new material to some older gender- and race-related posts. Thanks almost exclusively to Gwen for doing the hard work of updating! And thanks to those of who sent the images along!
Givenchy has some rather light “nude”-colored dresses, but Esquire responded to complaints about ignoring Black men by following up a story with a segment that acknowledged that African Americans might require or prefer different hair maintenance techniques and styles than other groups.
Sully R. drew our attention to a set of images of wedding-related dresses at brides.com. She searched through the thumbnails of brides in the entire gallery; out of 684, there were about 43 African American women, a few identified as Hispanic, and none, as far as she could tell, of Asian women. She also points out, “Of all the models that could be considered full-figured or curvy, most…were black.”
There’s something else going on here, the type of thing that just makes you wonder, given how much businesses spend on marketing and design and such, how it still made it through. Here is an image of the front page of the gallery, showing the only two thumbnails with Black women in them:
Did you catch it? The only two pictures that have Black women in them…are in the category “Maids in Heaven.” I’m sure this was referring to being a “maiden” or something of that sort (I first thought of “bridesmaid,” but then it’s a bride in one picture, so that doesn’t really make sense).
I can’t really fathom how no one noticed and thought, “maybe we should change that title, just to be safe.” It shows, at the very least, a remarkable insensitivity to part of the presumed audience — not thinking about how the language of the categories might have different meanings depending on who it referred to and that for some groups, the use of “maid,” however innocuously meant, would have unpleasant connotations.
Interestingly, the one area where Sully noticed interracial groups, including Asians, was in pictures of flower girls:
She said there were actually quite a few Asian girls in these photos. Presumably this is a safe place to show interracial mixing; it implies a childhood innocence where everybody gets along and is less likely to alienate adults who might be more uncomfortable with images of an interracial couple getting married.
NPR recently featured a story on Kevin Michael Connolly. Connolly is an athlete, adventurer, author, and photographer who was born without legs.
In his memoir, Double Take, he talks about travel. People around the world, he explains, tend to stare. And, with his camera, he stared back.
Curiosity, it appears, is very human. But people in different places tend to speculate differently as to the source of his lost legs and that, he discovered, is quite culturally specific.
In Sarajevo, people tended to think that he’d lost his legs in mines during the Balkan conflicts. In New Zealand he overheard a child asking his mother if he’d been attacked by a shark. In Montana, he was asked if he still wore his dog tags from Iraq.
I broke my leg five weeks ago and, for what it’s worth (not much really), my experience, also, is that people speculate based on their own experiences and their relationship to you. An avid lindy hopper (12 years now… well, not now exactly, but again real soon), many of my dance friends immediately inquire as to whether I broke my leg dancing. My raunchy friend, Fancy, asked if I broke it “doin’ it.” The second most common guess is that I broke it stepping off a curb. It turns out lots of people do that. Who knew!
Sociological Images encourages people to exercise and develop their sociological imaginations with discussions of compelling visuals that span the breadth of sociological inquiry. Read more…
