class

Martin Hart-Landsberg, at Reports from the Economic Front, offers a provocative hypothesis.  He observes that job loss in the U.S. has been tremendous. One in 20 jobs has disappeared.  Still, Congress drug its feet approving an extension of unemployment benefits.  The extension has been approved, but benefits are hardly generous (on average, $309 a month week).  Further, millions of unemployed people are not collecting unemployment because they’re not eligible under current policy.

Hart-Landsberg asks why there is a lack of “meaningful national efforts” to address the suffering of workers and their families?

His hypothesis:  Economic policy is not responsive to workers’ needs.  Instead, it is heavily driven by what is best for corporations.  And, it turns, out, corporations are doing swimmingly during the recession.  They took a beating at first, but their profits are up.  Downsizing appears to have benefited them.  Consider this chart from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI):

The EPI concurs with Hart-Landsberg.  Looking at this data, Lawrence Mishel concludes:

When employers are able to recover their profits many years before their employees can even hope to attain the income and employment levels they had  prior to recession’s devastation, economic policy is clearly skewed in favor of corporations and not workers.

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.

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.

(HT: Mark Kleiman)

Data from the Pew Research Center shows us the extent to which the recession has hurt the economic health of American households, especially the middle and working classes:

More than half of all Americans report some sort of work-related disruption:

Nearly half state that they are worse off than they were before the recession:

An additional four percent (since 2008) identify themselves as lower class:

Pew specifies:

Blacks, as a group, are an exception to this overall pattern. The share of blacks who now identify with the upper class has gone up during this recession, to 20% now from 15% two years ago.

Forty-eight percent have lost equity in their homes:

Sixty percent of Americans fear that they may have to delay retirement:

A larger percentage lack the confidence that they have enough income and assets for retirement, even compared to last year:

“Is America still a land of prosperity?”

The question in some historical perspective:

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.

Pew Research Center has released data suggesting an age gap in optimism for the future of American young adults.

When asked if their children will be better off or worse off than they are, less than half of U.S. parents say “better off” and a full 25 percent say “worse off.”  This is the most pessimistic we’ve seen parents in 16 years.

But their kids are more optimistic than anyone else, with 85% saying that they expect that their financial situation will improve next year:

Of course these data aren’t entirely compatible, but it’s an interesting comparison nonetheless.  The idealism of youth?  The pessimism that comes with bad backs and mortgage payments?  The possibility that 18-29-year-olds have nowhere to go but up?

Economix, via Karl Bakeman.

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.

We recently introduced the idea of “astroturfing.” Coined to contrast with the idea of a “grassroots” movement (led and supported by “regular” people), an astroturf movement is one that looks like it’s grassroots, but is actually driven and funded by a corporation. But is it always easy to distinguish between astroturf and grass? F.T. Garcia sent in this confounding example.

The Wall Street Journal reports that some labor unions are hiring non-union workers to “staff” picket lines, usually at or near minimum wage.  In this picture, for example, employees-for-the-day protest on behalf of union workers for a union they do not belong to:

It turns out, protesting is costly.  Workers have to take time off of work, travel to the location of the protest, pay for parking, make sure someone is taking care of their kids, etc.  Plus it’s often hot and involves a lot of yelling and stomping. Accordingly, some unions decide that it’s easier and cheaper to hire protesters than it is to mobilize their own workers.

So, you tell me, astroturf or grassroots?

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.

I may not have found the love of my life on OkCupid, but I did fall in love… with their data analysis!

Their latest super-fun post by Christan Rudder, sent along by Rob Walker, Sara P. and an Anonymous Reader, looks at the lies people tell in their profiles.  They do this not by catching any given individual in a lie, but by comparing data on their users to data on the general U.S. population.  (It’s unclear what percentage of OkCupid users are American and they don’t specify if they are only looking at U.S. users, so I can’t verify that this is a fair comparison but… if they do restrict the analysis to Americans then…)  Since they have 1.51 million active users, we should expect that any distributions should more or less overlap.

But they don’t…

1.  Men lie about their height, reporting, on average, that they are about two inches taller than they are.  In the figure below, the solid purple line represents the U.S. population, the dashed line represents the reported height of OkCupid users:

2. Women lie about their height too.  Here’s the same figure for women (but with a dark purple implied best fit line; you can just ignore it):

3. People exaggerate their income, on average inflating it by about 20 percent (for this data, they controlled for regional differences in income).  The figure below, however, shows that the amount of exaggeration is related to age.  Both men (blue) and women (red) increasingly inflate their income up until around age 40.  After that, they just keep inflating it at about the same rate.

Rudder quips:

A woman may earn 76 cents on the dollar for the same work as a man, but she can fabricate, like, 85 cents no problem.

Oh and, yeah, there’s a reason why the men are lying (no word from Rudder on the women). Income is highly correlated with how many messages a man gets (red = fewer messages; green = more):

4. It also turns out that not all of the “recent pics” are actually recent. This is especially true for pictures rated “hot.” Rudder says that “hot” photos are more than twice as likely as “average” photos to be over three years old (12% and 5% respectively).

And the older a person is, the more likely they are to upload an older photo:

Fun!

Also from OkCupid: the racial politics of dating, what women want, how attractiveness matters, age, gender, and the shape of the dating pool, and older women want more sex.

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.

Sociologist Geographer David Harvey’s analysis of the current economic crisis is engagingly illustrated in this 11-minute video.  Harvey evaluates individual, institutional, ideological, cultural, and policy explanations for the recession.  He then explains Marx’s insights into the “internal contradictions of capital accumulation”:  capitalists want to pay low wages, but if they’re paying low wages, then no one can buy their stuff.  If both high wages and low wages translate into no profits, where does that leave capitalism?

From Cognitive Media via BoingBoing and Karl Bakeman.

Buy Harvey’s book, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism.

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.

Bundle presents the following infographic detailing how much people in various U.S. cities spend restaurants and groceries (some highlights below): The average household in the U.S. spends 37% of its food and drink budget in restaurants. In Hialeah, Florida, 69% of food and drink spending is spent on groceries instead of dining out; the largest proportion of spending in eating in. Atlanta is on the other side of the spectrum, with 57% of the food budget spent at restaurants. Households in Austin spend the most on food ($12,447) with more than half of that spent dining out. In contrast, people in Detroit spend the least ($2,246), As the graphic notes, “five average Detroit households can eat on one Austinite’s food budget.” On average, in U.S. households 17% of spending goes towards food and drink. The largest proportion of spending allocated towards food and drink is found in Denver (22%), but my city, Los Angeles, is not far behind (21%). Hat tip to Flowing 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.