Thank you Rachel Bloom for this cringe-worthy, plague-ridden parody of the Disney princess franchise!
And thanks to @AJP_lighthouse for sending it in!
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.
One conventional explanation for our economic problems seems to be that our businesses are strapped for funds. Greater business earnings, it is said, will translate into needed investment, employment, consumption and, finally, sustained economic recovery. Thus, the preferred policy response: provide business with greater regulatory freedom and relief from high taxes and wages.
It is this view that underpins current business and government support for new corporate tax cuts and trade agreements designed to reduce government regulation of business activity, attacks on unions, and opposition to extending unemployment benefits and increasing the minimum wage.
One problem with this story is that businesses are already swimming in money and they haven’t shown the slightest inclination to use their funds for investment or employment.
The first chart below highlights the trend in free cash flow as a percentage of GDP. Free cash flow is one way to represent business profits. More specifically, it is a pretax measure of the money firms have after spending on wages and salaries, depreciation charges, amortization of past loans, and new investment. As you can see that ratio remains at historic highs. In short, business is certainly not short of money.
So what are businesses doing with their funds? The next chart looks at the ratio of net private nonresidential fixed investment to net domestic product (I use “net” rather than “gross” variables in order to focus on investment that goes beyond simply replacing worn out plant and equipment). The ratio makes clear that one reason for the large cash flow is that businesses are not committed to new investment. Indeed quite the opposite is true.
Rather than invest in plant and equipment, businesses are primarily using their funds to repurchase their own stocks in order to boost management earnings and ward off hostile take-overs, pay dividends to stockholders, and accumulate large cash and bond holdings.
Cutting taxes, deregulation, attacking unions and slashing social programs will only intensify these very trends. Time for a new understanding of our problems and a very new response to them.
Cross-posted at Reports from the Economic Front.
Martin Hart-Landsberg is a professor of economics at Lewis and Clark College. You can follow him at Reports from the Economic Front.
The Pew Research Center has released the data from new survey of religious and non-religious Jews. They find that almost a quarter of Jews (22%) describe themselves as being “atheist,” “agnostic,” or “nothing in particular.” The percentage of Jews of no religion correlates with age, such that younger generations are much more likely to be unaffiliated. Nearly a third of Millennials with Jewish ancestry say they have no religion (32%), compared to 19% of Boomers and 7% of the Greatest Generation.
A majority of Jews with no religion marry non-Jews (79%); 67% have decided against raising their children with the religion.
As a result of intermarriage, the percent of all Jews who have only one Jewish parent is rising. While 92% of people born between 1914 and 1927 had two Jewish parents, Millennials are as likely as not to have just had one.
Cross-posted at Pacific Standard.
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.
Young black adults are less likely than whites to use marijuana, but extraordinarily more likely to be arrested for its use, according to a new report by the ACLU. This is old news, but the data never fails to stun.
First, notice that arrests for marijuana possession have grown over the past 15 years, even relative to arrests for other types of drugs. The first chart is total marijuana possession arrests, the second is the percent of all drug arrests that were for marijuana (note that in neither chart does the vertical axis start at zero and truncated axes tend to make data look more dramatic, as if that were necessary here).
This rise in arrests has disproportionately affected African Americans. The arrest rate for blacks has consistently been substantially higher than that of whites, but it increased, even so, over the 2000s.
According to the report:
…in every state the Black arrest rate is disproportionate to Blacks’ percentage of the population. In fact, in 42 states the Black percentage of marijuana possession arrests is more than double the Black percentage of the population, while in 18 states Blacks account for more than three times the percentage of marijuana possession arrests than they do of the population. In four states, the difference is a factor of at least four.
Most of these arrests are of young people. Almost half (46%) involve 18 to 24 year olds:
The black arrest rate cannot be attributed to different rates of use. Overall, blacks and whites have very similar rates of marijuana use (the first figure below), but among 18 to 25 year olds — the population being arrested the most — whites have slightly higher rates than blacks (second figure):
This is a long-standing, well-documented Civil Rights issue. The war on drugs is a war on black people. These practices are harmful to individuals, their families, and their communities. It functions to further the disadvantage faced by black Americans in a society rife with institutions already stacked against them.
More than half of Americans would like to see marijuana legalized. Legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana would relieve this egregious attack on black communities and save states billions of dollars. There is little downside. Relative to other substances, it’s a minor problem.
Cross-posted at Pacific Standard.
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.
While the first flight attendants were male and many early airlines had a ban on hiring women, flight attending would eventually become a quintessentially female occupation. Airline marketers exploited the presence of these female flight attendants. Based on my reading — especially Phil Tiemeyer‘s Plane Queer and Kathleen Barry’s history of flight attendants’ labor activism — there seem to have been three stages.
First, there was the domestication of the cabin. As air travel became more comfortable (e.g., pressurized cabins and quieter rides), airlines were looking to increase their customer base. Female “stewardesses” in the ’40s and ’50s were an opportunity to argue that an airplane was just like a comfortable living room, equally safe for women, children, and men alike. Marketing at the time presented the flight attendant as if she were a mother or wife:
Twenty years later, air travel was no longer scary, so airlines switched their tactics. They sexualized their flight attendants in order to appeal to businessmen, who still made up a majority of their customers. Here’s a ten-second Southwest commercial touting the fact that their stewardesses wear “hot pants”:
The intersection of the labor movement and women’s liberation in the ’60s and ’70s inspired women to fight for workplace rights. Flight attendants were among the first female workers to organize on behalf of their occupation and among the most successful to do so. Their work won both practical and symbolic victories, like the discursive move from “stewardess” to “flight attendant” that transformed women in the occupation from sex objects to workers. A quick Google Image search shows that the association — stewardess/sex object vs. flight attendant/worker — still applies. Notice that the search for “stewardess” includes more sexualized images, while the one for “flight attendant” shows more images of people actually working.
“Stewardess”:
“Flight attendant”:
My impression is that today’s marketing tends to feature flight attendants in all three roles — domestic, sex object, worker — echoing each stage of the transformation of the occupation in the public imagination.
Cross-posted at The Huffington Post, Pacific Standard, and Work in Progress.
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 year marks the 40th anniversary of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. This granted women the right to have a credit card in her own name. This translated into an unprecedented degree of independence for women. Feminists and their allies fought for this new world and it’s a good thing because we love to buy things with our credit cards sooooooo muuuuuuuuch!
And, thankfully, credit card companies like Banif know just how to make us comfortable, by combining feminism and infantilization and kissing our asses because We. Are. So. Special. “Every day is women’s day!” Wheeeee!
The husband in this ad, though, likely thinks he would have been better off if his wife wasn’t allowed to make financial decisions without his approval. Stupid women and their stupid financial decisions. Ruining everything.
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.
You absolutely must find three minutes to watch Aamer Rahman defend the idea of reverse racism. Yes, he says, of course reverse racism is possible: “All I would need is a time machine…” The rest is glorious.
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.
We’re celebrating the end of the year with our most popular posts from 2013, plus a few of our favorites tossed in. Enjoy!
I have driven across the United States several different times. I always enjoy the experience. It reminds me of just how vast and diverse this country really is, in terms of both its nature and culture. Catching up with a friend after such a trip, I discovered that he’d never driven across the country and I insisted that he absolutely must. “Lisa,” he said intensely, lowering his head, “not everyone is welcome in every small town in America.” My friend, you might guess, was Black.
It was a memorable lesson about my own white privilege.
This was in the 2000s, but I couldn’t help but think of it when I learned about the Green Book. A story on NPR about the book starts with the following summary:
In part, the Jim Crow era could be defined by the places African-Americans could go and the places they couldn’t. In the towns and cities where they lived, of course, blacks knew where they were welcome. On the road, though, who knew which restaurants and hotels, beauty shops and night clubs would slam doors in their faces?
The answer was “The Negro Motorist Green Book.” First published in 1936, and revised and re-published for almost 30 years, it helped Black people travel across a hostile America.
Green wasn’t just the color. It was named after the book’s author — Victor Green — who was a postal worker. Most African Americans were familiar with where they could and couldn’t go in their own cities. So Green used his connections through the post office to collect lists from all over America, and even some other countries. These lists were invaluable to Black travelers.
Even in the depth of Jim Crow, however, Green dreamed of a better time. In the introduction he wrote (source):
There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal rights and privileges in the United States.
His dream, I suppose, sort of did and sort of didn’t come true. The Green Book is out-of-print. Yet men and women like my friend still have good reason to feel uncomfortable showing their face in unfamiliar places.
Book covers borrowed from Electronic Village, AutoLife, and Phoenix Magazine. You can see a complete pdf of the book here.
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.
