economics

CNN reported yesterday on the House Republicans’ plan to reduce spending.  Staff Reporter Charles Riley writes that it’s a “dramatic budget proposal… that would result in sweeping cuts to federal agencies and government services.”

Oh really?  Gin and Tacos puts it in perspective:

See that little green sliver?  That’s the budget cut.  I’ll let Gin and Tacos be the sarcastic one: “Wow, over 4/10ths of one percent of the FY2011 budget!”

More, it’s not even actually $58 billion because, as Riley reports:

In practical terms, the spending decrease is actually closer to $35 billion, since Congress failed to pass a budget for fiscal year 2011, and agencies have been operating at 2010 funding levels.

This is an ongoing problem for political conservatives.  Cutting spending is a useful sound bite, but when asked what they actually want to cut — you know, a plan to actually balance the budget without raising taxes or while cutting them — they typically flounder.  So, in this case, they’re successfully cutting four-tenths of one percent of the budget.  And what must we sacrifice for this tremendous step towards a balanced budget?  Among other things, this:

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.

Commodification is the process by which something that is not bought and sold becomes bought and sold.   At one time, Americans grew, or raised and butchered, much of their own food.  Later, meat, grains, and vegetables became commodified.  Instead of working in the fields and with their animals, people would “go to work,” earn a new thing called a “wage,” and trade it for meat, grains, and vegetables.  With those raw ingredients, they would prepare a meal.

More recently in American history, the very preparation of food has commodified as well.   When I go to a restaurant, I am exchanging my wage for the planting, harvesting, processing, delivering, preparing, and disposal/clean up of my meal.   In this way, then, more and more components of our daily nutritional intake have become commodified.

The graph below traces the increasing commodification of “dinner.”  When it comes to family dinners, Americans are increasingly turning to restaurants, which commodify the preparation of food and the post-meal chores.  Sometime around 1988, the family dinner as a commodity became more common than family dinners at home.

Image borrowed from Claude Fischer’s Made in America.

UPDATE: In the comments, Ludvig von Mises offers this alternative explanation:

Another way to look at this would be as a form of increasing wealth. The nobility of old, after all, also did not butcher, harvest, and prepare their own meals, and neither did the wealthiest members of the new rich. Over time, the ability to afford such a thing on a more regular basis has gradually expanded to more and more people.

Matter of fact, there is very little in the way of such luxury that has been enjoyed by the elites of the past that is not available to the majority of workers today. “Commodification” is not, as you suggest, the creation of any kind of new product, but merely of making extremely expensive products affordable to a much larger fraction of the population.

“The characteristic feature of modern capitalism is mass production of goods destined for consumption by the masses.”

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 first five minutes of the clip below, economist Jeffrey Sachs explains to Dalton Conley that ending poverty in Africa requires a demographic transition, one where we move from high fertility and high mortality to low fertility and low mortality.

How to encourage such a transition?

1. Bring down mortality with advanced medicine. Declines in childhood mortality lead families to choose to have fewer children (’cause they don’t have to).

2. Make sure girls go and stay in school; they’ll get married later, and have less babies.

3. Provide free contraceptive services and family planning education.

Also see Dr. Sachs explain why Africa ended up so poor in the first place.

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 a 13-minute video in which Van Jones discusses the problems with patting ourselves on the back too much every time we put a plastic bottle in the recycle bin instead of the trash, and the need to recognize the link between environmental concerns and other social issues:

Also see our posts on the race between energy efficiency and consumption, exposure to environmental toxins and social class, race and exposure to toxic-release facilities, reframing the environmental movement, tracking garbage in the ocean, mountains of waste waiting to be recycled, framing anti-immigration as pro-environment, and conspicuous environmentalism.

Full transcript after the jump, thanks to thewhatifgirl.

more...

Tipped off by Dmitriy T.M., I enjoyed a Slate slideshow depicting and contextualizing the shrinking of the middle class and the growing advantage of the very top earners in the U.S. over time.  We’ve highlighted this slideshow before, but I thought this image deserved its own post.  Drawing on data from 1948 to 2005, put together by Larry Bartels, Slate shows that all income brackets prosper under both Democratic and Republican leadership, despite the idea that Republicans are fiscally responsible and Democrats irresponsible.  Under Democrats, however, nearly everyone is much more prosperous.  The highest income brackets are, given the margin of error, equally prosperous and all other brackets are significantly more so.

The figure reminds us that stereotypes about Republicans and Democrats don’t reflect reality and economic prosperity isn’t a zero sum game.

More slides at Slate.

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.

scatx sent in a link to the National  Alliance to End Homelessness website, which includes a number of maps illustrating the increase in the homeless population over the past few years. The data come from community counts conducted each January of individuals in shelters as well as counts by outreach workers and volunteers of those sleeping in public places, in cars, abandoned buildings, and so on. Of course, counting the homeless will always be a challenging task, but these community counts provide at least some baseline data for those areas that take part.

This map shows the percent change in the homeless population by state:

If you go to the website, you can hover over an individual state to see the relevant data. The page also has a map of the total number of homeless individuals by state.

A more detailed interactive map lets you get information for individual communities. When you click on one of the circles on the map, a bar graph pops up underneath showing any data available for that city from 2005-2008. Here I selected Philadelphia:

A breakdown of the data shows that though most of those who are currently homeless are sheltered in some way, a significant number are living on the street, in a car, or in some other situation that wasn’t designed for human habitation:

The full report shows a striking increase in the number of people “doubled-up” — that is, staying with other families because of economic hardship (based on U.S. Census Bureau data):

While moving in with others is a common strategy, it is also often temporary; significant proportions of individuals in shelters end up there when they can no longer stay with friends or family.

The website has tons of data on homelessness — risk factors, demographics, changes, and so on — so it’s worth a look.

Laura Heron sent in a article from the Economist about changes in union membership. The article, which takes a fairly negative view of the effects of unionization, includes a graph, titled “Where trouble lies,” that illustrates how much union membership has shifted from the private to the public sector in the U.S. Today, 36% of public employees (7.6 million) are members of a union, while only about 7% of employees of private companies (7.1 million) are:

Such a change, from primarily private-sector and often blue-collar workers to government employees, many of whom will be white-collar, middle-class, and relatively highly educated, has significant consequences for employers, governments, employees, and the issues likely to be of primary concern to the labor movement more broadly.

I used the data given in the article to create a chart comparing the percent of private- and public-sector employees in unions in Canada, the U.S., and Britain “today” (by which I assume they mean 2010, though they don’t specify, so be cautious there; also, they didn’t provide the private-sector rate for Canada, so I just used the data I had):

Aside from that, Laura’s attention was drawn to the post partially by the way labor was represented. To make sure we don’t miss the fact that unions are “trouble,” they illustrate the story with this image depicting labor as a fat, ravenous, naked figure devouring resources from the trim man in business attire:

A subsection of the article is also titled “Fattening the Leviathan,” and as the image at the end of the article makes clear, we need to cut this monster down to size:

It’s sort of the mirror image of the “fat cat” rhetoric often used to depict the wealthy as greedy individuals who gorge themselves on profits at the expense of workers. In either case, the central element that makes such rhetoric work is the perception of fat people as lazy, ravenous, greedy individuals who take more than their fair share of available resources.

In an earlier post we reviewed research by epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett showing that income inequality contributes to a whole host of negative outcomes, including higher rates of mental illness, drug use, obesity, infant death, imprisonment, and interpersonal trust.

In the 3 1/2-minute video below, Kate Pickett argues that social inequality causes violence by creating status inequalities that those on the bottom respond to with violence.

Pickett and Wilkinson’s data is striking, but I’m not sure I buy that low status combined with status-sensitivity instigates violence.  Sociologists have made this argument; but others have questioned these conclusions.

Villanova University’s Lance Hannon, for example, tested this “subculture of violence” thesis as applied to poor African Americans. Using police department homicide data, he found no evidence that Black people were more likely than White people to react to an insult with violence.  This is swapping race for class, of course (and Hannon doesn’t control for class because the data was limited), but it does suggest that we should think carefully about the kind of argument Pickett is making.

See Dr. Pickett making similar arguments as to why raising the average national income in developed countries doesn’t make people happier or enable them to live longer and how status inequality increases stress.  And see more about income inequality and national well-being at Equality Trust.

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.