Dimitriy T.M. sent in another interesting link, this time to an interactive map that presents IRS data on inter-county moves — that is, how many people moved from one county to another in 2008, and where they moved to. The map doesn’t capture all moves, since the IRS only presents data if at least 10 people from a county moved to a particular destination county (so a county could have a lot of out-migration, but if people really spread out when they moved, it wouldn’t show up). Despite that limitation, it does highlight some interesting general trends.
For instance, people from counties with big cities move to a variety of places, often far away from where they started (note that the width of the line indicates the number of immigrants, red = out-migration and black = in-migration, and the destination counties show up in blue):
On the other hand, if you look at most counties in the U.S. that don’t have large metropolitan areas, you see that most movement is to relatively nearby counties. Here’s an example from North Dakota:
I suspect that the number of migrants in rural areas is going to be under-represented, since their smaller overall populations may make it more likely that less than 10 people would move to any particular place, so that’s important to keep in mind.
Also not surprisingly, counties with universities see a lot of migration, both in and out, and to a wide variety of destinations. Here is Dane County, the site of the University of Wisconsin-Madison:
When I was looking around, I randomly clicked on Sweetwater County, Wyoming. I was surprised to see quite a bit of in-migration from distant counties:
I don’t know what’s going on there. There isn’t a university in the county. Does anyone know enough about Wyoming to have a guess?
UPDATE: Reader Caitlin says it’s related to oil production. Thanks for the info, Caitlin!
Anyway, it’s a sort of fun map to mess around with.
Mindy J. and Andrea F. sent in a really interesting project by artist Nathan Vincent. Vincent recreates masculine items and ideas with feminine crafts in order to upset the gender binary. He explains:
My work explores gender permissions and the challenges that arise from straying from the prescribed norms. It questions the qualities of gender by considering what constitutes masculine and feminine. It critiques stereotypical gender mediums by creating “masculine objects” using “feminine processes” such as crochet, sewing, and applique.
Katrin discovered a particularly ironic bit of photoshopping. The first picture is of Rosie Huntington-Whiteley on a photo shoot, the second is her ad for the Victoria’s Secret “I Love My Body” ad campaign. Notice that the body she is supposedly loving has significantly more cleavage than the body we see in the first photo. Apparently even models’ bodies are unlovable without re-touching (or surgery?).
Dimitriy T.M. sent in a link to an article at CBS news about changing attitudes toward gays and lesbians. The poll found that the proportion of people who say they know someone who is gay or lesbian has increased dramatically since 1992:
This differs quite a lot by age, however:
It seems likely that the difference is a reflection of increased visibility of gays and lesbians in our culture, such that younger people know more people who openly describe themselves as gay. In general, knowing someone who is gay is correlated with more positive attitudes toward gays and lesbians.
Over time people have also become more accepting of gays and lesbians, though the number saying homosexual relations are wrong has increased slightly between 2009 and 2010 (from 41 to 43 percent).
Over half of Americans believe there should be legal protections to prevent discrimination against gays and lesbians.
The wording of questions seems to affect people’s reported attitudes, with people being slightly less tolerant when relationships are described as “homosexual” than when the term “same-sex” is used:
If younger people are more accepting of gays and lesbians than older generations, it seems that we can expect more increasingly positive attitudes over time, unless it turns out that people become less tolerant of gays and lesbians as they get older. Overall, the responses here seem to justify some optimism about increasing gay rights and decreasing discrimination.
A reader who asked to remain anonymous sent in a video about a recent interview by Star Jones with the lawyer for Kelsey Peterson, a teacher accused in 2007 of fleeing to Mexico in order to live with a 13-year-old student of hers (he was 12 at the time they began having sex together). In the interview, the lawyer for Peterson says he “resents” the boy being referred to as a child because he is a “Latino machismo teenager” (a phrase that doesn’t even make sense) and “manly”:
Notice that the lawyer also argues, at about 1:25, that teen boys have a high sex drive, which somehow excuses an adult woman having sex with a 12-year-old. In addition, at 3:30 in Jones mentions that some individuals have implied the kid couldn’t be a victim because he was physically larger than other kids his age (5′ 6″ in 8th grade, which doesn’t sound super unusual to me); it sounds like Peterson’s defenders have questioned his age because of his size.
Jones calls him out on his implication that Latino teens are hyper-sexual and therefore this boy shouldn’t be seen as a victim. At about 5:45 one of her guests discusses the adultification of non-White children — that is, the way they are often treated as adults, regardless of their age. Ann Arnett Ferguson discusses this process at length in her book, Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity. This adultification includes assumptions that they are sexual at earlier ages than White children.
From what Jones and one of her guests say, it also appears that the fact that he was an undocumented immigrant has also been used as a way to undermine his ability to claim victim status. At about 7:55 a guest discusses the way that referring to people as “aliens” dehumanizes them, making it easier to deny them equal legal protection. (Side note: Jones mentions the history of immigration in the U.S. and in doing so says everyone in the U.S. is descended from immigrants, something Native Americans might find surprising, though I suppose if you go back a few thousand years to the migration from Asia to North America, technically yes, they are immigrants.)
When I searched for news stories about the case, I came across one at ABC news in which the boy is described as “a sexually-active sixth-grade student with a crush on her,” which seems to me to be reminiscent of the way female rape victims are often asked about their sexual history, as though they cannot be true victims if they have been sexually active.
The ABC story contains this quote from Peterson’s lawyer:
From the beginning, he was trying to entice her. There’s no question about that…He would try to kiss her, he would grab her, he would do these things. She didn’t initiate this relationship. That young man did.
Again the blame is placed not on the adult woman but on a 12-year-old boy. Peterson says she was shocked the first time he kissed her, which was in her kitchen — a place that maybe a thinking person wouldn’t have a 12-year-old student in. She also says his parents knew about and were fine with their sexual interactions; they dispute this.
Perhaps drawing on the stereotype of macho Latino men, her lawyer said,
He used to tell her what she could wear. And whether she could wear makeup and the length of her skirts in terms of where they were gonna go and what they were gonna do…He had a very, very strong influence over her in terms of controlling her behavior.
The comments to the ABC story are pretty fascinating too.
This is a disturbing example of the way that boys, and particularly non-White boys, are generally denied victim status when it comes to sex because our cultural beliefs include the idea that boys want sex and attempt to get it at an early age, and thus can’t really be vulnerable to sexual assault or coercion. For another example, see this post about how Jimmy Kimmel reacts when Lil’ Wayne confirms that he lost his virginity at age 11.
To me this New York Times graphic showing the relationship between gas prices and the average number of miles driven powerfully suggests that gas prices actually have little to do with how much driving Americans do. The vertical axis is gas prices and the horizontal axis is the number of miles driven. The line inside the figure is time.
Basically the illustration shows that the number of miles per year Americans drive has been climbing since 1956. Despite short-term gas price fluctuations, something is driving us to drive more and more every year.
When gas prices do shoot up — such as during the oil embargo, the energy crisis, and the most recent peak — Americans show a modest drop in driving, but it’s not a very large one and we recover rather quickly. During the oil embargo, Americans shaved 210 miles a year off of their driving. During the energy crisis, only 156. The recent reduction in the number of miles driven per year is attributed by the New York Times writer to the fact that so many people are unemployed and, therefore, no longer need to drive to work.
Driving, then, shows only a modest response to high prices. Perhaps the jumps in prices during these peaks — 43 and 106 cents per gallon respectively — weren’t really worth slowing down for? Or perhaps driving is so culturally meaningful that Americans are willing to pay to stay in their cars regardless? Or maybe driving, and driving farther, has become increasingly important over time such that people can’t reasonably reduce the amount of driving they do?
It seems to me that the problem is at least partly infrastructural. I wonder how average miles driven responds, or would respond, to enhancing and investing in public transportation? If we started building denser neighborhoods and got rid of suburbs?
In “Sports, Jobs, and Taxes: Are New Stadiums Worth the Cost?”, Roger Noll and Andrew Zimbalist question whether athletic stadiums are a useful or effective means of economic development for communities.* When new stadiums are built, they are often heavily subsidized by taxpayers, particularly by issuing state or city bonds.
Cities do this in the hopes of improving the economy. They argue that new arenas directly create construction jobs and indirectly create more employment opportunities by bringing in fans who patronize local businesses. They also often hope that the prestige of having a new stadium will make the city more attractive to companies looking to relocate, as well as tourists.
Noll and Zimbalist looked at the effects of stadium construction in a number of cities, as have others. They conclude,
In every case, the conclusions are the same. A new sports facility has an extremely small (perhaps even negative) effect on overall economic activity and employment. No recent facility appears to have earned anything approaching a reasonable return on investment. (p. 249)
However, cities continue to subsidize stadiums, despite the evidence that they aren’t economically practical, as well as frequent public opposition. Among other things, they often face a form of economic blackmail: teams threaten to move to another city that will build them an updated facility, with fancier concessions, luxury seats, club boxes, and the like, if their host city won’t. While the benefit to cities is doubtful, the additional revenue brought in by these luxuries definitely benefits the teams.
I thought of their findings when I saw a video over at Jay Smooth’s blog about the new stadiums built for the Yankees and the Mets. It’s 18 minutes long, but it’s pretty funny and also highlights some of the issues Noll and Zimbalist bring up (particularly why teams want updated stadiums, effects on the local economy, fans’ differing reactions to new facilities, and teams’ threats to move if they didn’t get what they wanted). You might want to skip the intro, which is about 40 seconds long.
* Source: Sport in Contemporary Society, 6th edition, edited by D. Stanley Eitzen. 2001. P. 248-255.
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