economics

db, Lindsey B., and ABC News asked us to talk about the recent scandal over Walmart pricing a darker-skinned version of the Ballerina Theresa doll less than its white counterpart.  The evidence (from FunnyJunk):

Walmart claimed that the doll was priced less because they were trying to move inventory (ABC News).  It’s possible that the doll wasn’t selling (low demand) or they had ordered more than they could sell (high supply) and so the doll went on sale.  In fact, we know that people of all colors tend to absorb a color hierarchy in which whiteness is nicer, more beautiful, and more valuable (test your unconscious preferences here), so maybe the white doll WAS outselling the non-white doll because both white and non-white people were buying it, but not the darker-skinned doll.  Walmart, in this case, would only be following the market so as to maximize profits.

Walmart, however, could have chosen, in this case, to opt out of profit maximization.  The market isn’t physics; a company doesn’t have to follow its laws.  Walmart could have said, “You know, putting the dark-skinned doll on sale symbolically values whiteness higher than blackness.  Perpetuating that stereotype isn’t worth the money.”  That is, they could have decided that anti-racism trumped profits.

But they didn’t.

It’s important to say that I know of no study showing that, as a rule, white dolls are priced higher or are less likely to go on sale than other dolls.  It may be true that, if we were paying attention, we’d see all kinds of disparate pricing and it wouldn’t pattern itself on race.  Even in this case, I still think that companies need to be cognizant of the context in which they price their products.  In fact, I will go so far as to say that I think it is perfectly fine to discount white dolls while other dolls are left undiscounted, but not vice versa.  Why?  Because we live in a world where discounting dark-skinned dolls resonates with a discourse the symbolically devalues dark-skinned human beings.  Discounting white dolls simply does not carry the same problematic message.

Costco faced this kind of problem when it’s black Lil’ Monkey doll was pulled from shelves.  It turned out that the Lil’ Monkey doll came in three different races, but the black doll carried connotations that the others did not because black people have been compared to primates for centuries in an effort to dehumanize them.  A black Lil’ Monkey is wholly inappropriate in a way that a white Lil’ Monkey is not.

Companies make and sell products in a context.  Following market demands is not opting out; often, it reproduces the status quo.

NEW (Mar. ’10)! Sarah G., after seeing a different post on a multicultural cast of Barbies, looked them up on Target only to discover that the light-skinned Barbies were all priced at $19.99 and the dark-skinned Barbies were all priced at $19.95.  Here are all of the Barbies:

I don’t know, people.  I just don’t know.

See another example here.

NEW! (July ’10): Christine B. sent in images from Target that show Black Baby Alive dolls (two different types) on clearance (down from $19.29 to $13.50) while the White versions aren’t; the Black dolls are clearly marked on the shelf and with individual stickers:

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 30-second video below powerfully illustrates the spread of high joblessness rates from January 2007 to January 2010 (map by Latoya Egwuekwe; data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics).

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.

When I visited New Orleans, I was tickled to see Mardi Gras beads, months after Mardi Gras, still hanging from trees along the parade route:

It was neat to see the beads, so pregnant with local meaning, glinting in the trees.

But later, I wondered, where do Mardi Gras beads come from? It turns out, according to Kevin Fox Gotham, who’s written a great book on New Orleans tourism, they’re made largely in China. He writes:

Workers in China sew the plastic beads for $4.25 a day, or about $85 a month. Local krewes contract with U.S. bead distributors to order customized beads to sell to individual members, who toss the beads from the parade floats. In short, the production of Mardi Gras beads, products, souvenirs, and memorabilia is no longer the province of local craft skills geared toward local consumption; it has been appropriated, reimagined, and retooled for mass production and mass consumption.

It turns out there is a documentary called Mardi Gras: Made in China, that is all about the bead industry. The trailer:

A great example of the global economy.

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 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.

Sociologists have noted that race and gender have been more politicized in the U.S. than class.  In contrast, class is highly politicized in Europe, leading to a much stronger labor movement.   The weak labor movement in the U.S. is partly to blame for the stingy federal policies around vacation and holidays.  The U.S. federal government dictates that employees are given exactly zero paid holiday and vacation days a year (that means, if you get such things, it is because your employer is being generous/in a benefits arms race with other employers).  This is in stark contrast to most other OECD countries:

Yep, that’s right.  In every country included except Canada and Japan (and the U.S.), workers get at least 20 paid vacation days.  In France and Finland, they get 30… an entire month off, paid, every year.

When I show figures like these (and there are many of them, parental leave, work hours, military spending, class inequality, etc) to my students, they are STUNNED.  Most Americans are woefully ignorant of how pro-business U.S. policies are compared to the policies of like countries.  I think this ignorance contributes to the resistance many Americans display when politicians and activists talk about improving protections for workers.

Gin and Tacos:

We’re a nation of people working harder and harder for less and less, and the merest suggestion that we should do anything other than work 9 hour days without pause until we drop dead is met with cries of socialism…

The quality of life of a typical American certainly suffers from our ignorance of life in other nations.  If we were more aware of what a strong labor movement could offer, we might be more supportive of those movements.

I’ve always loved this bumper sticker:

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.

Nicolé L.-G. sent along a story on Jezebel about a new policy that Whole Foods is offering to its employees.  Whole Foods has heretofore offered a 20% discount to all employees but, from now on, employees who are willing to undergo surveillance of a selection of body measures (blood pressure, cholesterol tests, and BMI calculations) and refrain from nicotine use, can try to qualify for better discounts:

Whole Foods specifies that you are only allowed the discount that correlates with your “worst” measure.  So, even if you’re a non-smoker with 110/70 blood pressure and <150 or LDL <80 cholesterol, if you have a BMI of 30 or higher, you’re stuck at the “Bronze” level.

As has been discussed on this blog, and excellently at Shapely Prose, BMI does not translate directly into “health.”  But Nicolé did a great job offering some additional analysis of this policy.  She wrote:

…according to the popular media’s perception of weight management, eating healthy (whole) foods is one of the best ways to achieve health, so why make it easier (cheaper) for already “healthy” people to continue eating healthy and make it harder (more expensive) for “unhealthy” people to eat better quality food? I wonder how the employees with a healthy (thin) appearance would have felt if the increased discount was given to those with bad cholesterol, higher BMI’s and high blood pressure?!

Then there’s the idea that your employer will now be keeping track of your health information! It supports the idea that our bodies and weight (across genders) are being relegated to the role of either a commodity or liability for a company; useful for aiding or damaging the bottom-line. The way [CEO John] Mackay speaks of the collection of the “bio-marker” data as being cheap or expensive denotes a sense of ownership that the company then has over our physical autonomy that no company has a right to.

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.