class

The phrase “service economy” — commonly used to describe the U.S. economic profile these days — refers to a decrease in manufacturing (where we make things for people) and an increase in the service sector (where we do stuff for people).

Planet Money put together stacked bar graphs to illustrate the increasing importance of service in our economy (1972 on the left, 2012 on the right).  Manufacturing (making things) is in yellow, so you can clearly see its decline in prominence.  Service sectors include “professional and business services,” “leisure and hospitality,” and “education and health services.”

So, when people talk about the move to a service economy, these are the changes they’re talking about.  We also see the “servitization of products” (don’t you love academics?), or a tendency for products to come with more and more service.  A restaurant, for example, offers a product (made by the chef), but also a degree of service (offered by the wait staff).  Both the quality of the food and the service vary as you move from fast food restaurants to high end eateries. When we see a servitization of products, we see a ratcheting up of the level of expected service that attends any given product.

The U.S. economy, by the way, is more heavily characterized by service than most of the world.  The map below is colored to indicate the relative balance between service (blue), manufacturing (red), and agricultural (green) industries in each state.  You can see that the U.S. is among the bluest country on the map:

One of the concerns with the move to a service economy is that service jobs on the low end of the occupational hierarchy tend to be “bad” jobs, while manufacturing jobs, even when they’re on the low end, tend to be “good.”  Service jobs are “bad” in the sense that they tend to have low wages, underemployment, little chance for advancement, and poor or no benefits.  We’re talking, here, about jobs in sales, cashiering, food preparation, and the like.  Because of this tendency, the move to a service economy is taking some of the blame for the shrinking of the middle class.

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.

This spring the Chronicle of Higher Education offered an in-depth look at the number of highly educated people receiving federal aid.  Though, on average, they are still doing better than people without college degrees, these populations have not been immune to the recession.

While I sensed an undercurrent of classism in the article (e.g., “how could someone like me be on aid”), it offered an interesting profile of the post-graduate degree job outlook, especially for people with a PhD.  Notably, it reminds us just how risky pursuing graduate work can be; 70% of all faculty are now off the tenure-track.  That often means that they teach part-time, have no benefits, and face semester-to-semester job insecurity.

These faculty could probably do something else, but many of them are trying to realize a dream that they’ve spent 10 to 15 years of their lives working towards.  So, they continue to teach part-time for relatively low pay and participate in a job market that, for the most part, opens up only once a year.

For more on the economics and politics of academic labor, read Keith Hoeller’s The Future of the Contingent Faculty Movement.

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.

Unless we’re one of them, many of us learn the habit of looking away from the down-and-out when we’re going about our daily lives.  Truly seeing the homeless, the mentally ill, the drug-addicted, and others in crisis (not overlapping populations, but intersecting ones) potentially forces us to think about our role in a society that has largely abandoned them.

Meanwhile, art photography of these populations tends to force us to look, to see just how much pain and suffering there is to see on the streets.

In light of this — not looking vs. looking to see the pain — I found the photography of Chris Arnade to be a breath of fresh air.  Featured at Mother Jones, his portraits of “drug abuse, sex work, and homelessness in the Bronx” are humanizing. Many of them show smiling faces, dignity, pride, and peace. I recommend going to see the Flickr set.

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.

In capitalism, owners of the “means of production” (things like land, factories, technologies, and natural resources, or the money to buy these things) employ labor to do the work of actually producing things.  If the system is working correctly, the value of the labor that goes into making something is worth less than the value of the thing.  This way the capitalist can sell the thing, pay the worker, and skim some profit off the top.

But how much profit?  In a less exploitative system, the worker is paid close to what his work is worth (after accounting for the expenses of maintaining the means of production). In a more exploitative system, the capitalist takes a larger chunk of the enhanced value for himself and gives less to the worker.

What kind of system do we have in the U.S.?  Let’s take a look at some data.

Over at Reports from the Economic Front, Martin Hart-Landsberg posted this graph. It shows that  workers have become increasingly productive since 1948 (i.e., they have created more and more surplus value).  Employers largely shared the increase in profitability with their workers… until the mid-1970s.  Since then, wages have remained stagnant even as worker productivity has continued to rise.  “In other words,” Hart-Landsberg writes, “the owners of the means of production have basically stopped sharing gains in output with their workers.”

You wonder why the middle class is shrinking?  This is one reason.

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.

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.”

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.

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

The politics of motherhood reared its head again last month when Hilary Rosen, who the news identified as a “Democratic strategist,” said that Ann Romney (Mrs. Mitt) had “never worked a day in her life.” (A NY Times article is here.)

“Worked” was a bad choice of words.  Raising kids and taking care of a home are work, maybe even if you can hire the kind of help that Mrs. Romney could afford.  Rosen’s comment implied that family work is not as worthwhile as work in the paid labor force.  That’s not such an unreasonable conclusion if you assume that we put our money where our values are and reward work in proportion to what we think it’s worth.  Mitt’s supporters use this value-to-society assumption to justify the huge payoffs Romney derived from those leveraged buyouts at Bain Capital.*

Even Mrs. Romney apparently felt that there must be some truth to the enviability of a career.   Why else would she refer to stay-at-home motherhood as a career?  “My career choice was to be a mother.”

Still, regardless of the truth of Rosen’s remark, it was insulting.**  Stay-at-home motherhood is work – a job.

But is it a good job?

A recent Gallup poll provides some more evidence as to why stay-at-home moms might be both envious or resentful of their employed counterparts.  Gallup asked women about the emotions, positive and negative, that they had felt “a lot” in the previous day.  Gallup then compared the stay-at-home moms, employed moms, and employed women who had no children at home.

The stay-at-home moms came in first on every negative emotion.  Some of the differences are small, but the Gallup sample was more than 60,000 so these differences are statistically significant.   The smallest difference was for Stress – no surprise there, since paid work can be stressful.  Worry and Anger too can be part of the workplace.  The largest differences were for Sadness and Depression.  Stay-home moms were 60% more likely to have been sad or depressed.

Gallup also asked about positive feelings (Thriving, Smiling or Laughing, Learning, Happiness, Enjoyment), and while the differences were smaller, they went the same way, with stay-at-home moms on the shorter end.  Still it’s encouraging that 86% of them had Experienced Happiness 86%; so had 91% of the employed moms.

Money matters.  As Rosen said,

This isn’t about whether Ann Romney or I or other women of some means can afford to make a choice to stay home and raise kids. Most women in America, let’s face it, don’t have that choice.

Gallup found a small interaction effect.  The stay-at-home mom-employed difference was greater for low-income women.

The Gallup poll does not offer much speculation about why stay-at-home moms have more sadness and less happiness. One in four experienced “a lot” of depression yesterday.  That number should be cause for concern.

Maybe women feel more uncertain and less able to control their lives when they depend on a man, especially one whose income is inadequate.  Maybe stay-at-home moms find themselves more isolated from other adults. Maybe they are at home not by choice but because they cannot find a decent-paying job. Or maybe money talks, and what it says to unpaid stay-at-home moms is society does not value your work.  Nor, in comparison with other wealthy countries, does US society or government provide much non-financial support to make motherhood easier.

The late Donna Summer sang,

She works hard for the money
So you better treat her right

But how right are we treating women who work hard for no money?

——————————-

* For example, Edward Conrad is a former partner of Romney.  In a recent article in the Times Magazine, Adam Davidson writes, “If a Wall Street trader or a corporate chief executive is filthy rich, Conrad says that the merciless process of economic selection has assured that they have somehow benefitted society.”

** Hillary Clinton committed a similar gaffe twenty years ago in response to a reporter’s question about work and family “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life”

A while back, in a post of test prep for kindergarten entrance exams, I criticized the idea that we should be giving our children every advantage.  Have every advantage over who?  Somehow, I wrote, “the fact that advantaging your child disadvantages other people’s children gets lost.  If it advantages your child, it must be advantaging him over someone else; otherwise it’s not an advantage, you see?”

This notion applies, also, to our adult lives, as manifest in a post about the “luxury” of drinking tea that was especially time-consuming to prepare.  We’re supposed to find appealing the idea that someone else has had to work really hard for our pleasure and comfort.  Really?

I thought of both of these examples when I saw this Citigold ad, submitted by vmlojw.  The copy reads, “You may not consider yourself privileged.  Then again, you haven’t experienced our premium service yet.”

What is interesting to me about this is the assumption that we should all seek to have MORE than other people.  The ad doesn’t suggest that we should seek to be comfortable or have enough to get by, but instead appeals to the idea that we must all want a “premium” life, one that is characterized by having more than other people.

And this isn’t interpreted to mean that you’re greedy or arrogant.  It doesn’t reflect on your character negatively.  Instead, being on the top of a hierarchy is something to aspire to.   The fact that that your being on top requires other people to be on the bottom is of no concern.  The pleasures and comforts of being on the top are things that we should enjoy without qualms.

Meanwhile, the existence of hierarchy itself — the idea that we must live in a world where some people have so much and others have so little — is never questioned.  I think there’s a nearly-invisible American value here that I would like us to talk more about.

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.

Abortion is highly politicized in the U.S. (more so than in many other countries) and the fight between those who are in favor of and against available abortion occurs on two fronts.  One is familiar to just about everyone: the effort to overturn Roe v. Wade, the legislation Supreme Court decision that established the legality of abortion in 1973.

The second front, though, is less familiar.  It involves reducing the ease of access to legal abortion. Efforts to increase barriers to accessing legal abortion include passing laws that require minors to notify their parents of an abortion or get their consent, requiring mandatory counseling for abortion-seekers, instituting waiting periods, and discouraging medical schools from teaching abortion procedures.  Some of the issues of diminishing access are non-movement related; others are the direct result of pro-life activism.

I bring this up in order to focus on an additional barrier to access: a reduction in the number of clinics and hospitals that provide abortions.  The map below, based on data from the Guttmacher Institute and compiled by ANSIRH, shows how availability varies by state.  In the darkest states, up to 20% of women live in a county with no abortion provider; in the lightest states, between 81 and 100% percent do.

Living far from the nearest abortion provider is a problem especially for low-income women.  Such women are less likely to have an employer who will give her a day off to travel to the clinic, less likely to get a paid sick day, and less likely to be able to afford to lose even a single day’s wages.  She is also less likely to have a car, making it more difficult to get to a distant location, and less likely to have reliable day care for any existing children.  If the state requires in-person counseling and has a waiting period, it means that the woman must take two days off, travel to and from the clinic twice, and arrange for child care on multiple days.

Reduction in the availability of abortion does not necessarily reduce the number of abortions.  We recently posted global data showing that less liberal abortion laws actually correlate with higher rates of abortion.  The data below, also from Guttmacher, show that were abortion laws are less liberal (largely in developing countries), the rate of abortion is 34/1,000 women oer year, compared to 39/1,000 in developed countries (the difference may look significant here, but imagine how trivial it would look if the horizontal axis went all the way to it’s true maximum of 1,000):

Guttmacher explains that the relevant variable isn’t availability of abortion, but the unintended pregnancy rate (which is surprisingly high in the U.S.).

Barriers to accessing abortion, then, don’t lower the abortion rate.  They do, however, increase the likelihood that an abortion procedure will occur later in pregnancy and guarantee a greater logistic burden on the pregnant woman.

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.