I am trying to re-enter society after several days being sick, so I’m going with something short and simple today. Eden H. sent in this chart, found at Business Insider, that compares hourly minimum wages in a number of European countries to the U.S.:
The European data are available from Eurostat (though note they report minimum wages in terms of Euros per month, not hour, so the data was converted for the chart).
Deeb K. sent in a story from the New York Times about who does unpaid work — that is, the housework, carework, and volunteering that people do without financial compensation. Based on time-use surveys by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), this chart shows how many more minutes per day women in various nations spend doing such activities compared to men:
Childcare stuck out as an area with a particularly large gap:
On child care in particular, mothers spend more than twice as much time per day as fathers do: 1 hour 40 minutes for mothers, on average, compared to 42 minutes for fathers…On average, working fathers spend only 10 minutes more per day on child care when they are not working, whereas working mothers spend nearly twice as much time (144 minutes vs. 74) when not working.
The full OECD report breaks down types of unpaid work (this is overall, including data for both men and women):
The study also found that non-working fathers spend less time on childcare than working mothers in almost every country in the study (p. 19). And mothers and fathers do different types of childcare, with dads doing more of what we might think of as the “fun stuff” (p. 20):
Source: Miranda, V. 2011. “Cooking, Caring and Volunteering: Unpaid Work around the World.” OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers, No. 116. OECD Publishing.
An infographic accompanying an article at the New York Times reveals how “advanced economies” compare on various measures of equality, well-being, educational attainment, and more. To illustrate this, for each measure countries that rank well are coded tan, countries that rank poorly and very poorly are coded orange and red respectively, and countries that are in the middle are grey. The countries are then ranked from best to worst overall, with Australia coming in #1 and the United States coming in last. You might be surprised how some of these countries measure up.
Thanks to Dmitriy T.M. for the 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.
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.
Cross-posted at Reports from the Economic Front.
How do corporations escape paying taxes? Businessweek recently ran a story on Google that helps to explain how they do it.
The story begins by noting that: “Google has made $11.1 billion overseas since 2007. It paid just 2.4 percent in taxes. And that’s legal.” This is pretty incredible because Google does business in many advanced capitalist countries with high tax rates. For example, “The corporate tax rate in the U.K., Google’s second-largest market after the U.S., is 28 percent.”
While the article focuses on Google, and how it avoids paying taxes, it made clear that most of the leading high-technology companies use remarkably similar techniques to achieve similar results.
Ok, so how does Google do it? Google’s office in Ireland is the center of the company’s international operations. In 2009 it “was credited with 88 percent of the search juggernaut’s $12.5 billion in sales outside the U.S.” But Google doesn’t pay taxes on that amount, because most of the profits went to Bermuda, where there is no corporate income tax.
So, how did Google get its profits to Bermuda? Businessweek explains:
Google’s profits travel to the island’s white sands via a convoluted route known to tax lawyers as the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich.” In Google’s case, it generally works like this: When a company in Europe, the Middle East, or Africa purchases a search ad through Google, it sends the money to Google Ireland. The Irish government taxes corporate profits at 12.5 percent, but Google mostly escapes that tax because its earnings don’t stay in the Dublin office, which reported a pretax profit of less than 1 percent of revenues in 2008.
Irish law makes it difficult for Google to send the money directly to Bermuda without incurring a large tax hit, so the payment makes a brief detour through the Netherlands, since Ireland doesn’t tax certain payments to companies in other European Union states. Once the money is in the Netherlands, Google can take advantage of generous Dutch tax laws. Its subsidiary there, Google Netherlands Holdings, is just a shell (it has no employees) and passes on about 99.8 percent of what it collects to Bermuda. (The subsidiary managed in Bermuda is technically an Irish company, hence the “Double Irish” nickname.)
This set-up (as Businessweek describes it) also helps Google lower its tax bill in the U.S. Google Ireland licenses its search and advertizing technology from Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. Obviously this technology is worth a lot—but Google headquarters keeps the licensing fee to Google Ireland low. Doing so means that Google headquarters can minimize its U.S. earnings and thus its tax obligations to the U.S. government. And of course, Google Ireland knows how to move its profits around to minimize its tax liabilities.
Not surprisingly, corporations are always eager to learn from each other. Thus, “Facebook is preparing a structure similar to Google’s that will send earnings from Ireland to the Cayman Islands, according to company filings and a person familiar with the arrangement.” Microsoft already has one in place.
According to one study cited by Businessweek (done by Kimberly A Clausing, an economics professor at Reed College), these kinds of profit shifting arrangements cost the U.S. government as much as $60 billion a year. And of course Ireland also loses plenty. Too bad that the governments of Ireland and the U.S. are suffering from large federal deficits and under immense pressure to slash spending. Collateral damage I guess to the profit-making drive.
What is being done to change this apparently legal racket? According to Businessweek:
The government has made halting steps to change the rules that let multinationals shift income overseas. In 2009 the Treasury Dept. proposed levying taxes on certain payments between U.S. companies’ foreign subsidiaries, potentially including Google’s transfers from Ireland to Bermuda. The idea was dropped after Congress and Treasury officials were lobbied by companies including General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, and Starbucks, according to federal disclosures compiled by the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics. In February the Obama Administration proposed measures to curb companies’ ability to shift profits offshore, but they’ve largely stalled.
A nice cozy system, isn’t it.
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.
How have adults and young people weathered the worldwide economic downturn? This two-minute 12-second video shows that young people have been harder hit by joblessness in almost all OECD countries:
From the OECD Factblog.
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.
Reader Jennifer E.B. alerted us to the Dutch tradition of Zwarte Piet, “Black Pete.” Jennifer writes:
I grew up in a town that was overwhelmingly Dutch. Most people in town had Dutch anscestry (though not my family), there was a Dutch festival each spring, and before Christmas there was a Sinterklaas parade (Dutch Santa Claus). When we were there for Christmas this year both of my daughters received a chocolate in the shape of their initial in their stockings from my sister. I had let them have some of the chocolate several times before the background picture on the box caught my eye.
What Jennifer saw was what looked like a character in blackface (product found here):
Jennifer did some digging and she discovered that Zwarte Piet is a traditional Christmas Sinterklaas character in the Netherlands.
Lulu Helder at the Museum of Racist Memorobilia explains:
The role is usually played by a white woman or man who wears black or brown grease paint on their faces (Saint Nicholas is always performed by a man). He or she wears large golden earrings, a curly wig and red lipstick. Right now they wear brown grease paint more often because “the blackness frightens children”.
Once the transformation is completed, a change in voice and behaviour usually follow. He or she will speak improper Dutch with a low voice and a Surinamese accent.
Below the jump are some pictures (not safe for work):
