economics

In the TED video below, Lisa Margonelli of the New America Foundation Energy Policy Initiative gives a fascinating 17-minute talk on the political psychology and the political economy of oil… and how the former distracts us from the latter.

Among other revelations, she tells us that:

1.  Oil pumps are purposefully designed to look like ATMs to make us feel better about using them.

2.  Having a car that runs predicts employment more than a GED.

3.  Oil production reform has amounted, largely, to exporting the risk to other countries, and…

4. We pay for our oil dependence not only at the pump, but with our taxes.

Watch:

Via BoingBoing.

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 an interesting discussion of tax collection in Pakistan by the New York Times.   The narrator argues that rich Pakistanis, among others, do not pay taxes, forcing the government to rely on foreign aid.  Essentially, then, it is argued, “[t]he American taxpayer is subsidizing the Pakistani rich.”   Since the politicians are rich themselves, and happily evading taxes, there is little will to change the system.

One solution? Send in a team of transgender people to embarass homeowners into paying their property taxes, 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.

My friend Captain Crab (happy late birthday!) pointed out a graphic at Portfolio that displays the results of their metropolitan “stress test,” in which they use ten measures such as poverty level, unemployment rate, commute, mortgage affordability, etc., to quantify how stressful different metro areas are to live in currently. Obviously it’s a rough measure — they usually use the rates of central cities rather than the larger metro area, people may interpret the same seemingly objective levels of negative or positive factors very differently in terms of how stressed they feel, only the 50 largest metro areas are included, and I don’t know if there’s clear evidence linking less-sunny places to less stress (anyone know?) — but it does provide a snapshot of how different cities compare.

You can hover over a city to get info on its ranking; since I live in Vegas, I checked it out, which has the highest unemployment rate of the 50 metro areas studied, but hey, we get lots of sun!

Just to clarify, the mortgage indicator isn’t the average mortgage, it’s the “affordability” of the mortgage “expressed as median house value per $1,000 of median household income”. The most unaffordable city? New York, followed by L.A.

The overall most stressful city is Detroit; the least is Salt Lake City. If you want to waste more time comparing the rankings on each of the ten measures, they have tables listing the results.

I’m back! I was in the middle of moving and just overwhelmed with everything. Anyway. Talking Points Memo posted a link to an article at Slate about income inequality in the U.S., and particularly the increasing proportion of total U.S. income earned by the very rich. Timothy Noah refers to the “great compression” as a time period when income concentration among top earners dropped significantly, and argues that in the past three decades we’ve seen a “great divergence,” with increasing income inequality hitting levels not seen since the Great Depression:

A slideshow accompanies the article, providing more info on the changes Noah discusses. A few examples (the slideshow provides the data source used to create each image):

Even among the very rich, we see increasing divergence, with the super-ultra rich, the top 0.1% of earners, now making 8% of all U.S. income:

A comparison to some other countries (I don’t know why these specific nations were chosen for the comparison):

Keep in mind, this data includes only income. Wealth — the worth of all assets, including retirement and savings accounts, stocks, homes, cars, and anything else of value — is much more unequally distributed.

Congress is about to be embroiled in a major debate about whether to extend the tax cuts on high incomes; as both sides weigh in, here’s some context to keep in mind:

The effective tax rate is what people actually pay, as opposed to what their tax rate theoretically is. While we’ve certainly seen a large drop since the late ’70s, Noah argues that, compared to other economic changes, the effective tax rate hasn’t affected the rise in income inequality much. It plays a role, yes, but changing the tax rate on the very rich doesn’t affect the overall distribution of income a huge amount, in part because the effective rate, what people end up actually paying, generally ends up being smaller than what they theoretically owe based on the stated tax rate, once you take into account deductions, write-offs, loopholes, and so on.

So…happy post-Labor Day!

Cross-posted at Jezebel.

Sarah P. sent in this stunning video, from the the Wall Street Journal, about how to advise women about investing. The video has a simple message:

Women are women. They’re weird and need their weirdness to be attended to. But they don’t want to think that you’re treating them like women. They want to think that you’re treating them like human beings (whatevs!). So, whatever you do, never let them know that you’re treating them like women. If you do this, you will make gazillions off of them. Go forth!

The video after a short commercial (selected transcription below):

Selected transcription:

We all know women can be a little difficult… no one wants to feel that they are… being treated differently from the men, so what can advisers do to try to connect with women and keep from following that stigma?

In other words, women are different and also more annoying than real people (e.g., men), so you need to treat them accordingly. But they don’t know that they’re different from real people (they’re “difficult,” after all), so you have to work around that.

First… you can’t approach women as women… don’t treat her like a lady, treat her like a person… women need more time, they ask more questions… get to know what motivates her… if you connect with her on that level, not on the basis of her gender, that’s the first mistake most advisers make…

In other words, pretend like you’re treating her like an individual, but know that what you’re really dealing with is a creature named W.O.M.A.N.

Second… she’s gonna triangulate, women seek many sources of opinions… just know she’s gonna do that, why don’t you play along… give her other sources of information that augment the advice that you’re giving her… that’s a good way to play to women’s natural ability and need to triangulate on advice that they’re getting. She’s gonna do it anyway, put that to your advantage.

In other words, the goal here is to manipulate her essential woman-ness to your advantage. Don’t actually help her learn more about investing, just feed her information that confirms what you’re telling her. She’ll never know the difference!

Third… be aware and be prepared to invest. It’s gonna take more to serve her… It takes time, she needs education… she’s gonna ask a lot of tough questions… but if you invest that time up front… she’s a better client… what advisers tell me time and time again: women are more fun.

In other words, women are “better clients,” even though they’re a drag because they’re “more fun”!  Woo hoo!  If women aren’t good for fun, what are they good for!

The conversation just goes on from there… the expert here tries so hard to balance the essentialization of women’s nature and the social construction of gender, but she just really fails because she goes back and forth between both and her interviewer keeps cornering her with questions about how frustrating it is to work with women.

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.

Allie B. sent us a link to an image at GOOD that presents some pre- and post-Katrina information about New Orleans. The map indicates levels of population recovery; the darker the shade of green, the more the population has rebounded:

A close-up of one section (areas with black shading had over 6 feet of floodwater):

Notice that the Lower Ninth Ward, one of the hardest-hit areas, has among the lowest level of redevelopment.

There’s a much larger version of the map (with a not-too-specific list of sources) here.

Changes in the populations of different parishes:

The income distribution has changed somewhat as well, with a smaller proportion in the lowest income categories (though notice that the dollar range included in each color isn’t consistent as you get into the higher incomes):

Miriam H. noticed that the “Plus Size” section of the Frederick’s of Hollywood website uses very thin women to model the clothes, a phenomenon we’ve documented at Woman Within, even as it boasts “SEXY AT EVERY SIZE” and “Styles in sizes up to 3X and 42F”:

I browsed through all of the front pages for the categories at the left and noticed only one photograph of a woman that could pass as a “plus size” model:

This got me to wondering where these photos come from… and I have absolutely no answer to this question.  I don’t know if Frederick’s arranges for these photos to be taken, if they hire a company to take these photos, if the manufacturers have the photos taken and give or sell them to Frederick’s.  That might explain the single image with a plus-sized woman.  It also seems to me that the photos vary quite a bit stylistically, suggesting that they were coming from different places.  For example:

I suspect, as well, that the reason all of the products are modeled by thin models is because only one photo of each product is produced (one with a thin model on the assumption that plus-sized models could not be used to sell to non-plus-sized people).  That is, it would be twice as expensive to show two differently sized women in the garment, so women searching for plus-sized clothes don’t get to see the garment in their size.

Then again, as I continue to think out loud, almost no women buying any of these clothes has a body that approximates that of the models in these photos.  So this is not a non-representation issue for larger women, it’s a non-representation issue for almost all women.

So this seems to me to be an issue of representation, but also an issue of the institutional and financial constraints of the fashion industry.  Thoughts?  Insights?  Answers?

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.

Last month the cast of Jersey Shore rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). The public responded negatively.  Says one snarky observer on the NYSE’s Facebook page:

The kids of the Jersey Shore rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange this week.  In a related story, civilization is down 500 points.

The trouble, it seems, comes from the weirdness of bringing together trivial-and-fake-“reality”-stars with the very-important-and-really-real-U.S.-financial-market.

Economic sociologist Brooke Harrington, however, thinks the two are less incongruent than they seem.  She writes:

I’d like to suggest that what seems so wrong with that picture of Snooki and company ringing the opening bell actually makes a lot of sense sociologically. If this meeting of worlds—entertainment and the stock market—seems strange, it may be because we’re so used to regarding the markets as “real,” rather than as a performance (or even as entertainment in their own right).

Markets, she explains, aren’t “more ‘real’ than ‘reality TV.'”  Instead, both the characters on Jersey Shore and markets are playing themselves.   The reality show stars respond to expectations of “Guido” and “Guidette” personalities.  Likewise, the market responds to  economists whose predictions often create the very reality that they anticipate.

Harrington brings in a fancy concept:

Both are engaged in producing what French sociologist and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard calls “the simulacrum:” a copy without an original, a pretense that replaces and ultimately negates “reality” so successfully that we no longer care about what is real.

She finishes:

Theorized through this lens, the image of the Jersey Shore cast ringing the opening bell at the NYSE persists in memory not because it is represents a collision of worlds, but because it brings together two genres of performance whose entertainment value depends on their purported “reality.”

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.