class

The US Census Bureau put together the map below.  It shows what percentage of households in any given county include a married couple.  In the counties colored with the darkest turquoise, between 59.6 and 79.6% of households consist of a married couple.  In the counties colored white, less than 51.6 do.

I think it’s interesting to speculate as to how the reasons why there are more or less married couple households might vary by place. For example, some places may have disproportionate numbers of gay and lesbian residents who cannot, legally, get married. Others may have higher rates of poverty, which has been shown to decrease relationship stability, leading to less marriage and more divorce.  Still others may have normative or religious pressures in favor of marriage (Utah strongly stands out as the most marriage-prone state).  The racial/ethnic make-up of counties may contribute to marriage rates; we know, for instance, that black women marry at a lesser rate than white women for a whole host of reasons.  Racial/ethnic homogeneity may play a factor too, since interracial marriage is still uncommon and asymmetrical when it does occur.  Some counties have more disproportionate ratios of males and females, which may also shape marriage rates. What do you think?  More hypotheses?  Arguments one way or 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.

Katrin sent us a great figure comparing the rate of socioeconomic mobility across several OECD nations.  Using educational attainment and income as measures, the value (between zero and one) indicates how strongly parental socioeconomic status predicts a child’s socioeconomic status (a 1 is a perfect correlation and a zero would be no correlation).

The figure shows that Great Britain, the U.S., and Italy have a near 50% correlation rate.  So, in these countries, parents status predicts about 50% of the variance in children’s outcomes.  In contrast, Denmark, Australia, Norway, Finland, and Canada have much lower correlations.  People born in the countries on the left of this distribution, then, have higher socioeconomic mobility than people born in the countries on the right.  Merit, presumably, plays a greater role in your educational and class attainment in these cases.

Source:  The New York Times.

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 2010 Olympics logo is an altered version of traditional Arctic Inuit sculptures. This quasi-indigenous logo has been displayed in a barrage of Olympics branding. You can see two examples of this marketing in photos — from the summer of 2009 – shown below.

With this Olympics logo, and other Olympics promotional messages, marketers have been portraying the 2010 Games as ‘indigenous’ Olympics. Indigenous references are foregrounded in mass produced Olympics marketing.  The online Olympics store even sells “Authentic Aboriginal Products” (such as t-shirts and silk ties).

Some people who encounter this Olympics branding are bound to come away with the impression that natives (that is, individuals with a significant enough amount of native ancestry or culture) are respected, empowered, and well-integrated here in Canada. In other words, some viewers will view this marketing as a sign of harmonious bonds between natives and mainstream Canadian society.

Chief Stewart Phillip, the president of Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, conveyed a much different view of Olympics marketing when he asserted that,

We’re deeply concerned about the concerted and aggressive marketing campaign advanced by Vanoc [the 2010 Olympics organization committee] which suggests the indigenous people of [British Columbia] and Canada enjoy a very comfortable and high standard of living. The Disneyesque promotional materials suggests a cosy relationship between aboriginal people of the province with all levels of government and it completely ignores the horrific levels of poverty our people endure on a daily basis.

In British Columbia, and elsewhere in present-day Canada, natives have communicated conflicting views about how the 2010 Olympics relate to their lives, lands, and traditions. Indigenous Environmental Network campaigners have been among the more vocal critics who have opposed the 2010 Games.

Some have found the cartoonish Olympic marketing imagery to be a mockery of native traditions.  For example, critics have argued that the 2010 Olympics committee has edited and re-packaged native culture — which also has been ripped out of its traditional contexts. The Committee is highlighting Arctic indigenous imagery — yet Vancouver, the centre of the Games, is a temperate city.  Arctic indigenous peoples did not live there — or on the nearby Whistler and Cypress mountains, where some Olympic events will be held. Other indigenous populations who did live in that area of British Columbia also are not represented in the marketing iconography.

The Olympics branding denies noteworthy differences among native groups spread across these areas. Passing theatrical gestures to native peoples during the open ceremonies could be considered to be more respectful, but Olympics marketers otherwise have been mixing up North American native traditions into a soup-like caricature. Natives have been consistently oppressed, but the various peoples who are considered to be native (in some way, or to some degree) certainly are not ‘all the same.’ Tacking Arctic imagery on to Vancouver-area Games implies that there is only one native essence (in North America, if not beyond this continent).

What else is going on here? What does this superficially ‘indigenous’ rhetoric and imagery have to do with the rest of the 2010 Olympics? In other words, are indigenous populations benefiting from the 2010 Olympics in a way that might explain or justify the appropriation of Arctic imagery?

I pose these questions:

– What proportion of the profits from Olympics sales and tourism will natives groups receive?

– To what extent have native groups actively participated in Olympics organizing?

– How many of the athletes representing Canada at the Games have strong ties to native traditions and ancestors?

– Aside from the branding rhetoric and imagery discussed here, how much indigenous culture will be included in Olympic sports events and Olympics broadcasting?

– And how should we interpret the use of traditional imagery for product marketing purposes? What is the relationship between native peoples and chewing gum wrappers, sugary soda pop drink bottles, and other products which display Olympics brand logos?  Are indigenous peoples profitting from these product sales?  Are natives involved in the boardrooms of the corporations behind these sales?  And are there any other noteworthy connections between these products and any natives in present-day Canada?

Answers to those preceding questions are tied to the conditions that native peoples live under in present-day Canada. As I will explain, there are deep problems with the ‘indigenous’ Olympics rhetoric and imagery, which is very much at odds with Canadian realities.

Native issues can be complex — and yet brutally straightforward, at the same time. Here are some figures that convey the highly disproportionate impoverishment, vulnerabilities, marginalization, and disempowerment of natives in present-day Canada. (Here are additional child poverty statistics.) The worst racism in Canada is reserved for indigenous peoples who are trapped between assimilation and ghettoization. Native groups ultimately are disappearing — in a nation that was established on native lands.

No marketing imagery ever could erase these ongoing legacies of a history of colonial genocide in Canada (and elsewhere).

Frankly, the ‘indigenous’ Olympics rhetoric and imagery strikes me as yet another form of liberal tokenism, given how fundamental problems are glossed over with paltry gestures (rather than a more radical redistribution of resources — or other constructive societal change).

In fact, while the Olympics imagery implies some sort of harmony between natives and non-natives in Canada, there actually are various ongoing native land claim conflicts in this country. In Ontario, indigenous activists helped to wage a defensive campaign which was a relatively high-profile land claim conflict here in Ontario, during the summer of 2009.

Native land claims are at the forefront of the issues raised by anti-Olympic protestors in Canada (who occasionally have supported tactics that I do not agree with). The phrase “No Olympics on Stolen Land” has been a common protest slogan, and indigenous imagery has been foregrounded in messages from no2010 campaigners, and other anti-Olympic activists. Although these opponents of the Olympics have not carefully distinguished between imagery from different indigenous cultures, their campaign messages surely could not be considered a tokenist form of whitewashing or conservatism — since these anti-Olympic activists have been siding with native land claims.

Protesters also have been raising concerns about how the Olympics are tied to indigenous land conflicts around the tar sands in Alberta. A recent day of action call-out from the Indigenous Environmental Network is the best example of connections drawn between the tar sands and the 2010 Games. As in some other activist campaign messages, this day of action announcement highlights financial and energy-system ties between the Olympics and tar sands pollution in Alberta — beside native lands. These tar sands operations also are the world’s worst climate threat; and the Arctic indigenous peoples alluded to in Olympics marketing actually are on the front lines of global warming impacts, which are aggravated by Olympic environmental devastation (including deforestation, which releases carbon into the world-wide atmosphere). As in other areas of the world, the most disempowered and resource-poor Canadians tend to be much more vulnerable to climate impacts.

Given all of the aforementioned gaps between pro-indigenous rhetoric and actual indigenous realities, why have so many people tolerated the native branding around the 2010 Games? After all, the Olympic brand logo was selected in 2005, and the Olympics marketing blitz was well-underway by the summer of 2009, in Canada.

Aside from the sheer monetary force behind the Olympics, there also are important cultural factors at work here. The harmonious vision conveyed through ‘indigenous’ packaging around the Olympics is an extension of mainstream Canadian visions of an outright “multicultural” “mosaic” in this country — where some claim that there is a complete lack of systemic racism, as well as equally proportioned room for all ethnic groups. In spite of arguments and evidence from critics (including scholars who are affiliated with John Porter’s The Vertical Mosaic), rhetoric about ethnic equality in Canada persists in marketing, in policy documents, and in other mainstream rhetoric. ‘Native’ Olympics marketing celebrates the Canadian status quo, in the same way.

At the same time, the ‘indigenous’ Olympics imagery provides some ethnic spice to the 2010 Games — as well as associated merchandising, and mass media spectacle. In Canada, remnants of native cultures likewise are re-packaged as decorations and tourist industry products. In much the same way, Olympics marketers have sought to increase profits with shreds of de-contextualized indigenous culture which they have appropriated.

But how are indigenous traditions linked to capitalist consumption, mass advertising, mainstream media systems, or tourism? These systems are entrenched on former native lands, but are there any other noteworthy connections between native traditions and such mainstream systems?

(I don’t mean to imply that people with native ancestors will be or should be forever trapped in a receding past. Vibrant, living traditions are flexible. Yet, I do not see how native heritage could be considered to be largely optional in any conception of indigenous-ness.)

Outside of Canada, it probably is not so apparent that the disputes over the Olympics have been national-scale tensions. Anti-Olympic protests (hyper-marginalized though they may be) actually have been organized in various other areas of Canada — well beyond British Columbia. (Here is one example of anti-Olympic campaigning in a city in Ontario.) I also find it telling that, in the face of an anti-Olympic protest in the city that I live in here in southern Ontario, some people conveyed their support for the Olympics by chanting “Canada… Canada… Canada.”

In sum, mainstream Canada claims and re-packages imagery from natives to sell a vision of a present-day Canada that is a tolerant country, with a rich and interesting history; such visions have been produced for the 2010 Games – as well as other tourism and merchandising, and wider nationalism. Then, ironically, when pro-indigenous groups challenge the use of this appropriated iconography to represent ‘Canada,’ majority groups dismiss their protests by claiming a more authentic Canadian-ness. Of course, the refusal to take indigenous protests seriously is just another manifestation of disinterest in the welfare of living indigenous peoples. Even as gestures are made toward native culture, actual natives generally are ignored.

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Toban Black is a Sociology PhD student specializing in environmental sociology, theory, inequality, and media.  He is also an activist, a blogger, and an amateur photographer.  He considers this guest post to be a blend of each of those four forms of communication.  Black is a frequent contributor to Sociological Images and the many posts inspired by his material can be viewed here.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

Katrin sent along one ad from a campaign by Louis Vuitton.  The campaign centers around the fantasy that young, beautiful women with porcelain (white) skin are hand-crafting their products.  A two-page spread:Text:

The Young Woman and the Tiny Folds.

In everything from Louis Vuitton, there are elements that cannot be fully explained.  What secret little gestures do our craftsmen discreetly pass on?  How do we blend innate skill and inherent prowess?  Or how can five tiny folds lengthen the life of a wallet?  Let’s allow these mysteries to hang in the air.  Time will provide the answers.

Another example is titled “The Seamstress With Linen Thread and Beeswax.”

But, of course, “Hardly any Vuitton bags or wallets are handmade.”  Or so says Carol Matlack at Business Week.  She continues:

While reporting an article on Vuitton in 2004, I visited one of its factories in the village of Ducey near Mont St. Michel. There I saw rows of workers seated at sewing machines, stitching together machine-cut pieces of canvas and leather. The partially finished bags were rolled from one workstation to the next on metal carts.

It was no sweatshop. The building was modern and airy, with windows overlooking the Normandy countryside. But the work being done there didn’t resemble in any way the painstaking handiwork shown in Vuitton’s ads. Indeed, the factory managers – who had been recruited from companies making such things as mobile phones and yogurt containers — talked proudly about the strides they had made in automating every step of the process. Just about the only Vuitton products still made by hand, they told me, were custom-made items produced at its historic atelier in the Paris suburb of Asnières.

UPDATE (May ’10)! Katrin and Anjan G. messaged us to let us know that the U.K. Advertising Standards Agency has decided that these ads violate truth in advertising.  They’ve been disallowed.

For other examples of marketing that mythologizes its manufacturing processes, see these posts on Goldfish crackers (mommies and daddies make them!) and Ecko Jeans (sweatshops are full of hot women in bikinis!).

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.

Katrin sent along links to visual portrayals of how much money goes, or could go, to various causes.  While sometimes it’s hard to comprehend what a billion, or 300 billion, dollars amounts to, these images give us perspective on just where our priorities lie.  The segments below are clipped from the visuals for the U.K. and the U.S. at Information is Beautiful.

The British example nicely illustrates how little social services like education, police, and welfare cost in the big scheme of things.

It also reveals how easy it would be to wave all of the African countries’ debt to Western countries. Just £128 spread out over the West.  Shoot, that’s the money for just a couple of corporate bailouts.

The U.S. example reveals how costly (just) the Iraq war has been.  All of our spending pales in comparison to that expenditure., with the exception of what we have spent bailing out the U.S. economy.

It also reveals that the U.S.’s regular defense budget is almot enough to feed and educate every child on earth for five years, and/or about the same as the revenues of Walmart and Nintendo combined.

If we diverted the money spent on porn, we could save the Amazon… almost five times over.  For that matter, if we gave our yoga money to the Amazon, that would just about do it.

Bill Gates could have paid for the Beijing Olympics and had money left over.

Dmitriy T.M. sent in an interactive breakdown of the US Budget for 2011.  In the figures below, the sizes of the squares represent the proportion of the budget, but the colors refer to changes from 2010 (dark and light pink = less funding, dark and light green = more).  These figures will give you an idea, but the graphic is interactive and there’s lots more to learn at the site.

See also our posts on how many starving children could be fed by celebrity’s engagement rings and where U.S. tax dollars go.

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 week the Supreme Court overturned a ban that “prevented corporations [and unions] from using their profits to buy political campaign ads” (source).  The ruling enhances the ability of these organizations to throw money behind candidates, potentially increasing their ability to influence political decision-making by shaping who ends up in, and out of, office.  The majority argued that the decision honored the First Amendment right to free speech.  And, since corporations, according to U.S. law, are persons, they have the same right to free speech as any of us.

They also, of course, happen to have a lot more money.

So much money, Senator Charles Schumer (D – New York) said, that “…the winners of next November’s election. It won’t be the Republican or the Democrats and it won’t be the American people; it will be corporate America” (source).

Matthew Yglesias puts this in perspective (source):

Bank of America, for example, dedicates $2.3 billion to marketing in 2008 so it’s clear that they’ve got the budget to mount a $100 million series of scathing attacks on a Senator who pisses them off and basically laugh that off (and note that in 2004 total spending on Senate campaigns was just $400 million). And if you can have it be the case that just one Senator goes down to defeat for having pissed off BofA then everyone else will learn the lesson and avoid pissing them off in the future. You don’t need to actually sustain that volume of campaign spending.

Others argue that the ruling doesn’t so much change the political landscape as make it more honest, since corporations have always found ways around the rules anyway (source):

“Whether there’s a vast increase in the amount of resources spent, it’s hard to say,” said Joseph Sandler, a former lawyer for the Democratic National Committee. “There’s already so much they can do.”

…

Republican consultants, in particular, argued that the decision would simply shift spending by political action committees and issue-based “front groups” to the corporations themselves.

“I don’t believe that the ruling will fundamentally change the outcome of the elections given the obscene amounts of money that was spent independently in the last two years by everyone,” said Jim Innocenzi, a GOP strategist in Alexandria, Va. “You could argue that since everyone has figured out a way to get around the rules, we’d be better off with full disclosures of who is really paying for this stuff and let everyone just promote whatever cause they want.”

The decision left unaddressed the question of whether this meant that multinational corporations, with non-U.S. roots and branches, were allowed to throw money to candidates (source).  Right now, the answer appears to be “yes.”  This, then, allows for an unprecedented “foreign” influence on U.S. elections.

So, with all  that said:  How do unions and corporations spend their money in elections?  What can we expect?

Dmitriy T.M. sent in a link to the Center for Responsive Politics listing the 100 corporations with the largest contributions to political campaigns between 1989 and 2009, as well as the direction of their donations (to the left or right).  Donations include:

Direct “soft money” contributions from the organization’s treasury. Under federal law, contributions from the treasuries of corporations, unions or other organizations may only be given to the parties’ “non-federal” (soft money) committees.

Contributions from the organization’s political action committee, or PAC. The money for these comes from individuals who work for or are connected with the organization, and it’s given on behalf of the organization.

Contributions by individuals connected with the organization. This includes employees, officers, and members of their immediate families.

Here are the results:

At last as far as these top 100 are concerned, it doesn’t appear that there is an overwhelming preference for Republicans, as one might expect.  Then again, a lot of these are unions.

But what does it mean when corporations and unions are sitting “on the fence”?  Basically it means that they’re covering their bases.  They win influence whether Republicans or Democrats end up in office.  Interestingly, 46 of the 100 are on the fence.  This doesn’t mean that things are somehow more fair or balanced, it means that, no matter who wins, corporations and unions win.

For another look at this type of information, see our post on partisan political contributions by U.S. companies.

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.

Dan S. forwarded a post by Matthew Yglesias in which he presents recent data from the OECD Factbook (larger version at the link).  It is another interesting way to think about income inequality.

First, we can look at a comparison of how much median income earners in the U.S. make compared to other countries (in U.S. dollars).  Luxembourg is the standout at the far right, with the U.S. not far behind, showing the fourth highest median income alongside some Scandinavian countries.  Mexico, Turkey and some Eastern European countries have the lowest median incomes.

A story starts to emerge, however, if we look at the median income of the bottom 10% of earners.  Suddenly the relative position of the U.S. shifts way to the left; the bottom 10% of earners in the U.S. make less than the OECD average.  Notice that the relative placements of the other high income and low income states don’t shift very much.  This means that while people in the U.S. are doing relatively well overall, the poorest people in the U.S. are doing worse than the poorest in about 2/3rds of the other countries:

Then, if you look at the median income of the top 10%, the relative position of the U.S. moves all the way to the right; that is, the top 10% of U.S. earners make more than the top 10% of earners in any other OECD country.  We even beat out Luxembourg:

Most other countries retain their relative position, more or less, with the exception of Sweden, which drops way down.  So the richest Swedes are, relatively speaking, not that rich.

The lesson is that income inequality–the difference between the incomes of the high earners and low earners–is significantly more severe in the U.S. than it is in other OECD countries (and that may be an understatement).

See this post for another graphic showing that income inequality is larger in the U.S. than in most other industrialized countries.  Also, the top 1/100th of a percent in the U.S. brings home a larger proportion of the total earned income in 2007 than they have since 1913.  And here is the percent of total U.S. income that went to the top 1% of earners (23% as of 2006).  Also see our posts breaking down CEO compensation, on the disproportionate tax burden by social class, and on class inequality across U.S. states.

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.

Vintage ads are an excellent way to illustrate how “the way things are” are not the way things have to be or always were.  In this post, I offer an ad for chewing tobacco.  Now, most Americans today associate chewing tobacco (eh em) “dip” with working class, rural, white men (hello family!) and, about ten years ago, baseball players (but I digress).

In contrast to this current social construction, this vintage ad suggests that dip is the province of the aristocracy (details after the ad):

Here are the parts that got my attention:

Text:

Take the aristocracy in England.  As far back as the 16th century, they considered it a mark of distinction — as well as a source of great satisfaction — to use finely-cut, finely-ground tobacco with the quaint-sounding name of “snuff.”  At first, this “snuff” was, as the name suggests, inhaled through the nose.

Then, the ad claims that “snuff” is enjoyed, today, by lawyers, judges, and scientists:

Selected text:

Why is “smokeless tobacco” becoming so popular in America?  There are a number of reasons.  One of the obvious ones is that it is a way of enjoying tobacco that is anything but obvious.  In other words, you can enjoy it any of the times or places where smoking is not permitted.  Thus, lawyers and judges who cannot smoke in the courtroom, scientists who cannot smoke in the laboratory, and many people who like to smoke on the job, but aren’t allowed to, often become enthusiastic users.

I just love the contrast between the current social construction and the attempt at social construction made in this ad.  I have no idea whether there was a time when dip wasactually enjoyed by the middle and upper classes.  Anyone?  Other comments welcome as well, of course.

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.