The Belgian Cancer Foundation is trying to increase awareness of skin cancer and the importance of wearing sunscreen to protect against it. Unfortunately, they’ve recently decided the best way to get this across is to fall back on a familiar message: ladies, if you don’t do what we say, you’ll be hideous and your guy won’t want you any more. In this video released as part of the campaign, ostensibly aimed at men (and sent in by YetAnotherGirl and Grace W.), guys fall asleep with their young female partners. After they fall asleep, the women sneak out of bed and their moms take their places, and we get to see the startled reactions when the men wake up, with the final warning that if men don’t make their girlfriends wear sunscreen, “she’ll start looking like her mom far too soon”:
Because you know, ladies, if you don’t wear sunscreen, you’ll age, and that makes you so gross and scary that men will fall out of bed trying to get away from you. And what could be more romantic than a boyfriend lovingly reminding his girlfriend to put on some sunscreen so she doesn’t someday totally freak him out?
Air pollution is what economists call an “externality.” It is not an intrinsic part of the economic bargaining between producers and consumers. The usual market forces — buyers and sellers pursuing their own individual interests — won’t help. The market may bring us more goods at lower prices, for example, but it can harm the air that everyone, in or out of that market, has to breathe. To create or protect a public good, the free market has to be a little less free. That’s where government steps in. Or not.
Case in point: My son and his girlfriend arrived in Beijing ten days ago. The got-here-safely e-mail ended with this:
…was blown away by the pollution! I know people talk about it all the time, but it really is crazy.
And it is. Here’s a photo I grabbed from the Internet:
At about the same time, I came upon a this link to photos of my home town Pittsburgh in 1940. Here are two of them:
Today in downtown Pittsburgh, the streetcars and overhead trolleys are gone. So are the fedoras. And so is the smoke.
The air became cleaner in the years following the end of the War. It didn’t become clean all by itself, and it didn’t become clean because of free-market forces. It got clean because of government — legislation and regulation, including an individual mandate.
The smoke was caused by the burning of coal, and while the steel mills accounted for some of the smoke, much of the it came from coal-burning furnaces in Pittsburghers’ houses. If the city was to have cleaner air, the government would have to force people change the way they heated their homes. And that is exactly what the law did. To create a public good — clean air — the law required individuals to purchase something — either non-polluting fuel (oil, gas, or smokeless coal) or smokeless equipment.*
Initially, not everyone favored smoke control, but as Pittsburgh became cleaner and lost its “Smoky City” label, approval of the regulations increased, and there was a fairly rapid transition to gas heating. By the 1950s, nobody longed for the unregulated air of 1940. Smoke control was a great success.** Of course, it may have helped that Pittsburgh did not have a major opposition party railing against this government takeover of home heating or claiming that smoke control was a jobs-killing assault on freedom.
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* Enforcement focused not on individuals but distributors. Truckers were forbidden from delivering the wrong kind of coal.
** For a fuller account of smoke control in Pittsburgh, see Joel A. Tarr and Bill C. Lamperes, Changing Fuel Use Behavior and Energy Transitions: The Pittsburgh Smoke Control Movement, 1940-1950: A Case Study in Historical Analogy. Journal of Social History , Vol. 14, No. 4, Special Issue on Applied History (Summer, 1981), pp. 561-588.
In the late 1940s and 1950s, sex researcher Alfred Kinsey estimated that about 10% of the population was something other than straight (and then, as now, a much larger number have same sex experiences or attraction). Today scholars believe that about 3.5% of the U.S. population identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual, a considerably lower number. Yet, a telling poll by Gallup shows that Americans wildly — wildly — overestimate the number of people who identify as non-heterosexual:
The table shows that more than a third of Americans believe that more than one out of every four people identifies as gay or lesbian. Only 4% of Americans answered “less than 5%,” the correct answer.
Estimates varied by demographics and political leaning. Liberals were more likely to overestimate, as were younger people, women, Southerners, and people with less education and income:
Interestingly, these numbers are higher than in 2008, when Gallup asked a similar questions. In that poll, only a quarter of the respondents choose “more than 25%” and more than twice as many said that they had “no opinion.”
Gallup concludes: “…it is clear that America’s gay population — no matter the size — is becoming a larger part of America’s mainstream consciousness.”
Remapping Debate has posted an interactive graph that lets you look at the decreasing relative value of the federal minimum wage. The graph shows the gap, at various points in time, between the annual income of a full-time worker earning minimum wage and the poverty line for a family of four (all expressed in 2011 dollars; you can see specific historical, unadjusted minimum wage rates here). In 1968, a single minimum-wage earner made about 94% of the federal poverty line for four people:
By 2011, the gap had widened significantly; one minimum-wage worker earns about 66% of the poverty threshold for a family of four:
Though the federal minimum wage has gone up over time, its relative value covers less and less of the costs of living in the U.S.
Identifying as Republican is strongly associated with religiosity in the U.S., so much so that people often use the term “Republican” and “Religious Right” interchangeably. Indeed, religious people are more likely to be politically conservative overall, but a Gallup poll shows that this relationship is moderated by race. The figure below cross-tabulates religiosity for four racial/ethnic groups with the likelihood of affiliating with the Democratic or Republican party or neither. You can see that the typical relationship — religion/Republican and no religion/Democrat — holds for all groups, except for African Americans.
At Gallup, Frank Newport writes:
Asian and Hispanic Americans, regardless of religiousness, are more likely to identify as Democrats than Republicans. But the Democratic advantage goes from 14 points among very religious Asians to 44 points among nonreligious Asians. The differences are less substantial among Hispanics; very religious Hispanics are more likely to identify themselves as a Democrats than Republicans by 20 points, while nonreligious Hispanics are more likely to identify themselves as Democrats by a larger 36-point margin.
Personal religiousness makes little difference among blacks, however, as the powerful partisan pull of Democratic identification among black Americans trumps any influence of religion.
The report is a great example of the importance of doing intersectional analyses. When you pull groups apart (by, say, adding race when looking at the relationship between religion and politics), you often find that a more generalized examination is hiding interesting details.
Apple’s profits more than quintupled in the last five years, but their tax burden has risen much more slowly. Last year, just 9.8% of their profits went to taxes. “By comparison,” writes economist Marty Hart-Landsberg, “Wal-Mart was downright patriotic — paying a tax rate of 24 percent.”
How does the company do it? Hart-Landsberg summarizes the New York Times: “The answer is tax loopholes and a number of subsidiaries in low tax places like Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the British Virgin Islands. ” More details at Reports from the Economic Front.
Last week Gwenyth Paltrow tweeteda photograph of Kanye West and Jay-Z performing in France along with the text: “Ni**as in paris for real.” The tweet started a conversation about her right to use the n-word, even with asterisks. Paltrow defended herself, claiming that it is the name of the song they were performing (which it is).
At Colorlines, Jay Smooth offers a characteristically entertaining and insightful analysis of the incident. What’s interesting, he observes, isn’t so much her use of the word, but her defensiveness about it. Here’s how he puts it:
No matter how justified you feel, as soon as you start arguing about your right to use the n–, that is a sign that you have become too attached to the n–.
He calls on her to apologize and move on with her life because…
The right to use that word is not a right worth fighting for.
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…
