economics

In this six-minute video from the New York Times, past residents and developers describe how Times Square was transformed from “the sleaziest block in America” to the corporate palace that it is today.  Thanks to Dmitriy T.M. for the submission!

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 number of Americans under correctional control has more than tripled since the 1980s, up to 1 in 31 U.S. citizens.  And the U.S. incarcerates six times more of its citizens than many European countries.  As you might imagine, this is very expensive.  Between 1987 and 2007, the amount spent on corrections increased by 127%.  To put this in perspective, the amount spent on higher education has only increased 21%.

The Pew Center illustrates the disparity:

States varied in the ratio of corrections to college spending.  The dark green bars (Vermont, Michigan, Oregon, Connecticut, and Delaware) are for states that spend as much or more on higher education than corrections corrections as on higher education The rest spend less.  Minnesota has the most extreme ratio; it spent 17 cents on higher education for every dollar it spent on corrections. Vermont has the most extreme ratio, Minnesota the least:

[Sorry for the initial confusion with the graph.]

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 this video, which I found via my friend Captain Crab, Kate O’Beirne (editor of the National Review) attacked the federal subsidized school breakfast and lunch programs. She did so by stating that parents who would find the program necessary must be “criminally negligent,” since they can’t put food on the table:

Transcript (via):

The federal school lunch program and now breakfast program and I guess in Washington DC, dinner program are pretty close to being sacred cows… broad bipartisan support. And if we’re going to ask more of ourselves, my question is what poor excuse for a parent can’t rustle up a bowl of cereal and a banana? I just don’t get why millions of school children qualify for school breakfasts unless we have a major wide spread problem with child neglect.

You know, I mean if that’s how many parents are incapable of pulling together a bowl of cereal and a banana, then we have problems that are way bigger than… that problem can’t be solved with a school breakfast, because we have parents who are just criminally… ah… criminally negligent with respect to raising children.

It’s an excellent example of the stigmatization of poverty: letting your kids go to class hungry would make you a bad parent, but taking advantage of programs set up to be sure kids don’t go to class hungry (and thus less able to learn) also makes you a bad parent. The problem here isn’t structural, or even about poverty. The problem, from O’Beirne’s manner of framing it, is that individuals who enroll their children in such programs are, by default, negligent “poor excuses” for parents.

A while back, Lisa drew on work by Ashley Mears to post about different preferred aesthetics in editorial vs. commercial modeling — that is, modeling for fashion magazines and runways as opposed to modeling clothing in catalogs and other venues specifically meant to lead to sales of products. Mears (whose forthcoming book, Pricing Beauty: Value in the Fashion Modeling World I eagerly await) points out that while models earn more prestige doing editorial work, they generally earn significantly more money if they can get commercial jobs (though, since the two types of modeling require different looks, models have little control over which type of modeling they’ll be considered for).

Jezebel posted an article about a lawsuit brought by three models against the modeling agency Next that clearly shows the low compensation models receive for doing some of the most prestigious modeling. This statement of model Anna Jagodzinska’s account (including payments that are still outstanding as well as deductions from her account for agency fees and services) with Next includes both editorial work (the second two items are her pay for a day of shooting with two different versions of Vogue) and commercial work (J. Crew, H&M, and large sums from agencies that put together advertising materials, such as Laird and Partners). The pay for a day’s shoot for French Vogue? $125. For the U.S. version of Vogue, the dominant fashion magazine, it’s $250:

The daily pay rates for catalogs, by contrast, are in the thousands.

It’s a perfect example of Mears’s argument that models often face a situation where prestigious jobs actually pay very little; so many models want to be in Vogue that the magazine doesn’t have to pay much, and the same is true for a lot of editorial work. Also notice that this statement, from April 2010, shows that the French Vogue has owed the $125 daily fee since May of 2009, and one of Vogue‘s payments has been due since October 2009 and another since December 2009. The end result is that in return for the status that comes with these types of editorial modeling jobs, models have to accept low pay compared to the commercial market, and may have to wait a long time to get even that.

The Jezebel article I linked to above includes an excellent explanation of the various charges on the account statement and the reason modeling agencies don’t aggressively pursue overdue accounts. Notice how it says “unavailable balance” at the bottom of the statement? That means the clients haven’t paid the modeling agency, so she has that much coming but hasn’t actually been paid yet, since the agencies treat the models like independent contractors and only pay them when the agency gets the money from the client.

Michael Konczal summarizes a depressing story for today’s unemployed and all of us in nations hardest hit by the current recession (via ginandtacos).

Till von Wachter, Jae Song and Joyce Manchester show that unemployment’s negative effect on your pocketbook persists long after re-employment. The figure below shows what happened to the incomes of people who did and did not lose their job during the 1982 recession. It shows that those that lost their jobs (the grey line) saw a decrease in earnings that has yet to recover. Controlling for inflation, on average the unemployed make less now than they did before they lost their jobs 20 years ago.

Quotes Konczal:

…the net loss to a displaced worker with six years of job tenure is approximately $164,000, which exceeds 20 percent of the average lifetime earnings of these workers. These future earnings losses dwarf the losses associated from the period of unemployment itself.

This same pattern can be found at the society level. Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney made the same comparison across countries that were hit the hardest by the recession (purple line) and countries hit less hard (green line). The incomes of individuals in the hardest hit nations were harmed long-term:

Greenstone and Looney show the same pattern for the unemployment rate:

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.

To provide a little context to the current discussion about extending the Bush-era tax cuts, the New York Times has an interesting graph up that shows changes in the level at which the top tax bracket kicked in, as well as the % tax rate in the top bracket:

So on the one hand, in constant dollars, you used to have to be quite a bit richer before you hit the top marginal tax bracket, because we had a wider range of brackets and differentiated incomes more than we do now (taxing an income of $500,000 differently than one of $5 million, whereas now we’ve basically collapsed all those brackets). But now, the highest income tax rate is well under half of what it was in the ’50s.

This chart shows the incomes and tax levels of the 10 Americans with the highest salaries (as opposed to wealth from investments, capital gains, etc.) in 1941, data we have because in 1943 President Roosevelt asked for a report on top earners:

I keep hearing news organizations discuss the existing tax cuts, and their possible extension, in a way that seems a bit confusing, by saying it’s a tax cut for people making “up to” $250,000, or $500,000, or however much the cap is for the different plans being thrown around. That seems to imply that, say, everyone making $250,000 or less gets a tax cut, and anyone making $250,001 gets nothing at all. Just to clarify, under all these plans, everyone would receive (or, more accurately, keep the existing) cut on their first $250,000 (or whatever the chosen cutoff would be).

At issue is whether that same tax rate should apply to all income, or whether beyond a chosen cutoff, the Bush tax cuts would expire. In that case, if you made $300,000, say, you would keep the tax cuts on your first $250,000 in income (and thus pay roughly 35% in taxes), but pay a higher rate on that last $50,000 (about 39%). You wouldn’t pay the higher tax rate on your entire income. And I think that’s getting lost a bit in the use of phrases like “middle class tax cuts” or “tax cuts up to X dollars.” That’s separate from whether or not you think extending the tax cuts are a good idea, but I just wanted to take a second to clarify what I think is an easily misunderstood point, made worse by the way it’s being reported on.

Abi, a professor of Materials Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science, pointed out an interesting graph posted by Ezra Klein at the Washington Post. The graph, using data from a survey of public opinion about the U.S. budget, shows how much of the U.S. budget respondents believe goes to foreign aid, how much they think should go to foreign aid…and how much actually does:

The actual figure? 0.6% in 2009.

Annie Leonard tackles e-waste (what happens after we’re done with our computers, cell phones, etc) in the latest 7-minute edition in her Story of Stuff series (see also her first story of stuff and her analysis of bottled water and cap and trade).

Via Reports from the Economic Front.

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.