international comparisons

The United States is a nation of immigrants… in that the majority of its citizens are not part of the native population of North America.  In other words, because it was and remains a colonized land.

That aside, is the United States unique in receiving an extremely large number of new immigrants relative to its size?  It turns out, No.

Lane Kenworthy, at Consider the Evidence, posted this figure, showing that the U.S. population does indeed include a substantial proportion of first generation immigrants (both legal and illegal), but it is not unique in that regard, nor does it carry the highest percentage:

It also fails to be true, as many anti-immigration people claim, that the U.S. accepts a uniquely large number of immigrants who need help once they arrive:

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 video where Hans Rosling illustrates changes in wealth and life expectancy in 200 countries over the past 200 years, all in four minutes. Pretty neat!


In this seven-minute video, Economist Jeffrey Sachs explains why economic development in Africa remains elusive. He summarizes the geographical, technological, social, and political conditions that held Africa back but propelled parts of Asia forward (he compares to India). Development, he notes, is not simply a matter of wishful thinking and hard work on the part of Africans (as many like to claim), nor is it a matter of just doing what worked elsewhere (as others like to say), but instead requires institutional commitments, economic resources, and global political will.

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 World Economic Forum recently released its Global Gender Gap Report for 2010, authored by Ricardo Hausmann (Harvard University), Laura Tyson (UC Berkeley), and Saadia Zahidi (World Economic Forum).  The report ranks countries according to concrete measures of gender inequality.  They write:

The Global Gender Gap Index… is a framework for capturing the magnitude and scope of gender-based disparities and tracking their progress. The Index benchmarks national gender gaps on economic, political, education – and healthbased criteria, and provides country rankings that allow for effective comparisons across regions and income groups, and over time.

You can read about their methods, in depth, in the Report.

Here are the rankings:

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.

Flavia Dzodan, of Red Light Politics, sent in a link to the Global Media Monitoring Project’s new report, Who Makes the News? The document looks at the gender imbalance in news production, based on an analysis of 1,281 newspapers, TV, and radio stations in 108 countries on November 10, 2009.The results indicate that women are still under-represented as news subjects, and that stories about women often reinforce stereotypes (focusing on women in family roles, using women for “ordinary person” quotes rather than experts, emphasizing women in stories about criminal victimization, birth control, and so on but not economic policy or politics, etc.).

A note on the methodology:

The research covered 16,734 news items, 20769 news personnel (announcers, presenters and reporters), and 35,543 total news subjects, that is people interviewed in the news and those who the news is about.

Internet sources were analyzed separately.

Overall, the analysis shows that both local and international news show a world in which men are highly over-represented as subjects, though women are more likely to be represented as victims, to have their family status mentioned, or to be in newspaper photos:

Interestingly, those reporting the news are more gender balanced, indicating that having more women producing the news doesn’t lead to an automatic reduction in under-representation of women in the news:

The representation of women as news subjects differs widely by category of news, from 12% of subjects in stories about agriculture to 58% in stories about family relations or single parenting (and 69% in a category they called the “girl-child,” stories about cultural practices impinging on or harming specifically female children, as opposed to children in general):

I’ll put the rest after the jump since there are quite a few images.

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No one knows.

But here is some rather fascinating data about exactly how HUGE it is in Europe and North America (with many other parts of the world not too far behind).

How many people are on Facebook?

What percent of people are on Facebook?

What percent of internet users are on Facebook?

Lots and lots of people are on Facebook.  I suppose what this means has everything to do with what we do with it.

Via Thick Culture.

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.

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!

Sociologist Amy Schalet has done wonderful research comparing American and Dutch approaches to teen sexuality.  Among other fascinating findings, she has shown that, American parents approach their children’s sexual initiation with fear and loathing; while Dutch parents treat sexuality like any other realm of life that a child must learn to manage.  Accordingly, most American teenagers hide their virginity loss from their parents, furtively popping the cherry in risky situations, often without protection against pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections (STIs).  In contrast, most Dutch teenagers lose their virginity in their own bedrooms with their parents approval… and condoms.

This different approach to teen sexuality helps explain the dramatic differences between the U.S. and the Netherlands in rates of contraceptive use, teen pregnancy, abortion, and STI transmission.  Check it this data from Advocates for Youth:

You can read the full report here (thanks to Du Hoang for the specific link!).

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.