class

Sociologists have shown that rates of “obesity” correlate with economic class. That is, the poorer you are the more likely it is that you will be overweight.  This is, in part, because healthy, low-calorie food tends to be more expensive that calorie rich, nutrient poor food; and also because poor neighborhoods have fewer grocery stores, forcing the poor, especially if they don’t have cars, to shop for groceries at corner stores, gas stations, and fast food restaurants.  When there are so many other things to worry about, like not going hungry, food quality is not prioritized.  Level of fitness, then, correlates with social class (and the time and money it affords you) and the things that correlate with social class, like level of education.

The American College of Sports Medicine has released data showing these correlations, if measured at the level of U.S. metro areas, as reported at The Atlantic and sent along by Tracie Hitter, a doctoral student at New Mexico State University.  First, fitness level is correlated with average income in these areas:

Second, fitness level correlates with average level of education (here called “human capital”):

And fitness level correlates with overall well-being, a measure related to both fitness and socioeconomic class:

Here are some selected metro areas plotted in relation to one another:

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.

Adrienne H. sent along two print advertisements for Hospitality Staffing Solutions, a company that is hired by hotels and restaurants to provide service-level hospitality workers: janitors, maids, cooks, servers, and others.  The ads position this type of worker as inherently problematic.  The first suggests that there is a pressing need to ensure that they don’t have criminal backgrounds.  The second, with the byline “you shouldn’t have to sacrifice quality for price,” suggests that low-wage employees are typically of poor-quality — interchangeable, metaphorically junk, like junk food — but that a company should have the right to pay the bare minimum and still retain excellent workers.

Hospitality Staffing Solutions clearly believes that employers have a very low opinion of the workers to whom they pay the lowest wages.  I imagine it must be unpleasant to be a working class person employed by someone so inclined to think the worst about you, all while paying you as little as possible and monitoring you for the slightest infractions.  Many middle- and upper-class people are privileged to escape this kind of scrutiny — a scrutiny under which many of them would look quite imperfect; they are generally considered worthy of respect and their skills deserving of a living wage.  These ads suggest that working class people are not given such privileges.

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 recent years, as states around the country have been faced with the worst budget deficits on record, funding for many social service programs has been slashed or cut entirely. A new report from the NAACP demonstrates that during these budget clashes, funding for prisons has won out over spending for education. The report argues that these “misplaced priorities” are ultimately destructive.  Expanding prisons at this point does little to reduce crime and by spending these limited budget dollars on prisons rather than education, we are condemning the next generation of kids in poor neighborhoods to this same cycle of poor education, high crime rates, and mass incarceration.

However, the NAACP report only describes the first half of the problem—the failures of schools and the expansive role of the criminal justice system. The other half of the story is the legacy of these failures—strikingly low levels of education among those who wind up in our nation’s prisons—and the fact that corrections departments today are doing a worse job than ever in providing education inside of prisons as a way out of the revolving door of corrections.

This is important because we know that over 90 percent of inmates are at some point released and roughly half of them will return to prison within the next 3 years. Slashing prison education funding may provide a very small benefit to the current budget, but it also helps to fuel the growth in prisons that has suffocated education funding in the first place.

It is simple to document the dire educational needs of prisoners.  According to the 2004 Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities, over 60 percent of state inmates never made it past 11^th grade in school.  Among young inmates under 25 years of age, only 20 percent have completed high school.  If G.E.D.’s are included in this measure, only 66 percent of inmates 25 years or older have completed their basic education, compared to 85 percent of adults in the non-institutionalized population.

Sadly, the programs that serve these inmates’ needs have been on the chopping block for years.  In work recently published in Law & Society Review, I show that the ratio of inmates to teachers for academic and vocational education in prisons nationwide has more than doubled since the 1970s, growing from 53 inmates per teacher in 1974 to 112 inmates per teacher in 2005. Much of this change occurred in the most recent decade: in 1990, the ratio was only 67 inmates per teacher.

These declines in staffing investments are clearly translating into declining participation in prison education programs. Between 1991 and 2004, the percent of inmates reporting past or current participation in academic classes dropped precipitously from 43 percent to 27 percent.  If the rate of high school attendance had dropped by almost 50% in the span of a decade and a half, pundits would be railing against state legislators.  But since this happened behind prison walls, there has been very little awareness (let alone outrage) about these changes.

This strategy is a flawed attempt to cut costs since we know that education is one of the more successful ways to reduce recidivism.  In study after study, inmates who participate in educational programming are less likely to commit new crimes after release and to be re-incarcerated. This is in part because basic academic education and vocational training makes it more possible for ex-felons to find the kind of employment opportunities that forestall re-incarceration.

In recent years, this disinvestment in prison education has been even more brutal. In California, state lawmakers have taken $250 million away from rehabilitation programs in the last two years and are planning to cut another $150 million in the coming year. These losses in funding translate into a third of the adult programming budget. These cuts are an ironic move after Governor Schwarzenegger’s 2004 decision to change the name of the state agency from the “Department of Corrections” to the “Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation”.

Although some states have begun looking into ways to reduce correctional populations as a more sustainable way to manage costs, in the next few years, we can expect to see even more slashes to prison education funding.  Ultimately, this strategy is likely only to cut a small percentage of states’ immediate costs and will increase the need for incarceration spending in the near future.

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Michelle Phelps is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology and Social Policy at Princeton University.  Her work focuses on the punitive turn in the criminal justice system, examining how the daily operations of prisons changed (and remained the same) during the massive recent shift in the rhetoric and politics of punishment.  Her dissertation project is on the rise of probation supervision and you can find her new blog on the strange media surrounding probation at Probation Research.

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Philip Cohen posted some interesting data at his blog, Family Inequality, that I think will look at first blush, counterintuitive to many.  The figure below shows the percent of men’s income that women bring home, organized by age bracket and level of education.  The top bar, for example, tell us that, among 45-50 year olds with advanced degrees, women make 68% of what men do.

Two observations:

First, notice that women with more education (the lighter bars in each age bracket) do worse compared to men than women with less education.  That is, the gender inequity is worse in the upper classes than it is in the lower classes.   Why?  Well, people tend to marry other with similar class and education backgrounds.  Accordingly, women with more education may be married to men with higher earning potential than women with less education. Those women are more able to make work-related choices that don’t foreground economics, since their income is less central to the financial health of the couple.  They are also more likely to take substantial amounts of time out of the workforce when they have kids (working class women can’t afford to do so as easily), and we know that doing so makes a real dent in career advancement.  So, perhaps ironically, women who are “richer” educationally may marry economically richer men who then allow them to deprioritize their careers.

Second, notice that the most equal incomes (where women make 85% of men’s salaries) occurs among the youngest and least educated group: 25-34 year old high school drop outs.  Why would younger women do better relative to men than older women?  Some of this may be due to a decrease in gender-based discrimination.  But it also likely has something to do with the devaluation and disappearance of traditionally working-class men’s work.  Most of the narrowing of the gender wage gap, in fact, has to do with the lowering of men’s earning power to meet women’s, not vice versa.  As the industrial base in the U.S. has been collapsing, the number of historically-male blue collar jobs have been shrinking.  Meanwhile, our industrial economy has been replaced by one split between (well compensated) information/technology and (poorly compensated) service jobs.  Those service jobs are going disproportionately to women.  So, while men still dominate (especially the most well-regarded and well-compensated) upper class professions, their dominance in the lower rungs of the economic ladder is waning.

Thanks again to Philip Cohen for the data!

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.

Dmitriy T.M. sent in a link to the website If It Were My Home. The site allows you to select two nations and then explains how your life would compare if you lived in each one in terms of rates of HIV/AIDS, employment, energy consumption, infant mortality, class inequality, and other factors (based on CIA data). As an example, Dmitriy chose to compare the U.S. and Ukraine, “the 2 greatest countries in the world, as determined by the poll conducted in my head”:

You can then choose one of the items for more details; I selected life expectancy:

The site is set up with the U.S. as one of the default comparisons, but at the top there’s a button that lets you select a non-U.S. comparison. (Note: Reader Parodie says it appears to detect whatever country you’re accessing the site from and set that as one of the default comparisons.) It’s a fun site that you can spend quite a bit of time playing around with.

UPDATE: Just a caution–a couple of readers seem to have found situations where the math doesn’t add up in the comparisons of some countries. And other readers noted that this does an enormous amount of averaging, which definitely hides the differences in quality of life in various countries, which are so extreme in some nations that “averages” might be nearly meaningless.

In this 16-minute video Professor of Political Science Wendy Brown does a clear and concise job of outlining eight frightening changes that privatization will bring to higher education. The talk is part of a six-part “Save the University” teach-in at UC Berkeley.

Via John McMahon at Facile Gestures.

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.

Dmitriy T.M. sent in a link to an article by David Leonhardt in the New York Times about differences in income between various religious groups in the U.S. This graph shows the percent of households earning more than $75,000 a year (the numbers along the side; and note that, somewhat counterintuitively, the shade of each color gets lighter as the percentage gets higher), as well as the percent of each group with a college degree (along the top). In order from least to most educated, we have Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentecostals, the unaffiliated, Baptists, Muslims, Catholics, Mormons, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, those who identify as secular, Orthodox Christians, Buddhists, Unitarians, Episcopalians, Conservative Jews, Reform Jews, and Hindus. Not surprisingly, income is pretty strongly correlated with education:

The data come from a 2007 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey (which we’ve posted on before), though the NYT reports that they did smaller surveys in 2010 and 2011 and found similar patterns.

Also see our posts on the demographics of the non-religious and religion, income, and 2008 Presidential voting behavior.

If you are privileged enough to be graduating from college this season, know that your degree translates into a higher degree of privilege now than at any time in the past.  In fact, graduates today will out earn non-graduates by nearly 100%, a number that has doubled in the last 50 years or so.

Chart borrowed from Made in America.

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.