politics: the state

The figure below contrasts the average U.S. response to various questions measuring perceptions of mobility and inequality with the average response of 27 comparison countries (from the International Social Survey Programme).  In other words, how far from the mean are U.S. citizens’ beliefs about life chances and the value of social inequality?  The pink triangle is the U.S. and the orange line is everyone else.  It’s a bit difficult to read (click to enlarge), so I’ll describe the data below.

• About 62% of Americans think that “people get rewarded for their effort,” compared to about 35% of citizens in our national comparison group.
• About 70% of Americans think that “people get rewarded for their intelligence and skills,” compared to about 40% of citizens in our national comparison group.
• About 19% of Americans think that “coming from a wealthy family is essential/very important to getting ahead,” compared to about 29% of citizens in our national comparison group.
• About 62% of Americans think that “differences in income in their country are too large,” compared to about 87% of citizens in our national comparison group.
• And about 33% of Americans think that “it is the responsibility of the government to reduce the differences in income,” compared to about 69% of citizens in our national comparison group.

Americans, then, are much more likely than the average citizen in our comparison countries to believe that individual characteristics determine success, wide gaps in income are acceptable, and the government should let them be.   No wonder Americans tend to vote to cut taxes and services, tolerate unequal educational opportunity, and resist top-down solutions to inequality.  They think inequality is good and that individuals will always get what they deserve.

Like I said, “stunning,” given the depth of our income inequality and the data on class mobility.  Though it makes perfect sense in light of our deep and abiding patriotism.

Via the MontClair SocioBlog.

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.

Benedict Anderson coined the phrase “imagined communities” to point to the way that humans believe they are meaningfully connected, by virtue of some commonality, to people they will never know, and may have very little in common with.  He applied the idea to the nation.  Why do all of the citizens of China, for example, have in common with other citizens of China?  In some cases little, other than their citizenship.  Yet, the fact that “we are all Chinese” can motivate many people to do and feel things.

In an RSA video featuring Jeremy Rifkin, sent in by Dmitriy T.M., it is argued that the human ability to imagine a community is a neurological capacity for empathy that has evolved, both neurologically and socially, throughout human existence.  First, he argues, we identified with close relatives, then with our religious community, and later with our nation-state.  Our future, then, he argues, is dependent on our ability to imagine the whole world as a community.  New technologies may very well enable this and Rifkin has his fingers crossed.

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.

Iconic Photos documents at least two instances in which the U.S. postal service rewrote history, so to speak, taking smoking out of the stamp:

Pollack and Johnson are important figures in American history, who smoked before it carried the stigma it carries today, and whose smoking represents the time and culture that inspired their genius.  How do you balance the desire to be historically accurate and true to the individual, with the desire to avoid endorsing a habit newly framed as a social problem?

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.

The number of Americans under correctional control has more than tripled since the 1980s, up to 1 in 31 U.S. citizens.  And the U.S. incarcerates six times more of its citizens than many European countries.  As you might imagine, this is very expensive.  Between 1987 and 2007, the amount spent on corrections increased by 127%.  To put this in perspective, the amount spent on higher education has only increased 21%.

The Pew Center illustrates the disparity:

States varied in the ratio of corrections to college spending.  The dark green bars (Vermont, Michigan, Oregon, Connecticut, and Delaware) are for states that spend as much or more on higher education than corrections corrections as on higher education The rest spend less.  Minnesota has the most extreme ratio; it spent 17 cents on higher education for every dollar it spent on corrections. Vermont has the most extreme ratio, Minnesota the least:

[Sorry for the initial confusion with the graph.]

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.

Michael Konczal summarizes a depressing story for today’s unemployed and all of us in nations hardest hit by the current recession (via ginandtacos).

Till von Wachter, Jae Song and Joyce Manchester show that unemployment’s negative effect on your pocketbook persists long after re-employment. The figure below shows what happened to the incomes of people who did and did not lose their job during the 1982 recession. It shows that those that lost their jobs (the grey line) saw a decrease in earnings that has yet to recover. Controlling for inflation, on average the unemployed make less now than they did before they lost their jobs 20 years ago.

Quotes Konczal:

…the net loss to a displaced worker with six years of job tenure is approximately $164,000, which exceeds 20 percent of the average lifetime earnings of these workers. These future earnings losses dwarf the losses associated from the period of unemployment itself.

This same pattern can be found at the society level. Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney made the same comparison across countries that were hit the hardest by the recession (purple line) and countries hit less hard (green line). The incomes of individuals in the hardest hit nations were harmed long-term:

Greenstone and Looney show the same pattern for the unemployment rate:

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 two google maps below — showing Las Vegas and Laguna Woods — help us understand the extent of the foreclosure crisis in the U.S. (at HuffPo).    Each red dot represents a foreclosure.

Las Vegas, NV:

Laguna Woods, CA:

These illustrations are nicely complemented by our posts featuring the empty housing grids of California City andhalf-home foreclosures, or the dilemma of the duplex.

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.

Amanda S. sent in a great example of the assumption that only women care for children, this one from a government agency. The photograph is of a section of the California Department of Motor Vehicles Driver’s Manual. It specifies that one might want to give a little bit of extra street-crossing time to older people, disabled people, and “women with young children” (apparently dads are never in public with their children… or else they hurry those slowpokes right along):

What I like about this example, in particular, is that it shows that gendered assumptions about parenting (mostly the assumption that women do it) isn’t just something that advertisers and other cultural producers do, it is also reflected in official government business. And, while this mistake doesn’t have any concrete consequences, if it is easy for this sort of thing to go unnoticed in this context, you could imagine it going unnoticed in materials that do, in fact, affect public policy.

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.

A recent New York Times article on cheese, brought to my attention by Jordan G., beautifully illustrates the fact that the U.S. government is not a coherent bloc, but a collection of competing interests.

Last month Domino’s Pizza released a new pizza named “The Wisconsin.”   Named after a superbly cheesy state (one close to our hearts here at SocImages), the pizza has six cheeses on top and two in the crust.  The New York Times reports that one quarter of a pie (an amount I could certainly put away without effort), had more than 3/4ths of the recommended maximum in a day and double the calories of some of its other pizzas.

The Wisconsin:

Cheese, it turns out, is the main source of saturated fats in American diets and saturated fats contribute to significant morbidity and mortality in the U.S.  The government, accordingly, recommends that we eat less of it.

Document from the Department of Agriculture:

And here’s where the story gets interesting.  The Department of Agriculture is not only responsible for the health of Americans, it’s responsible for the health of the American food industry.  As consumption of cheese and non-low-fat milks declines in the U.S., the dairy industry suffers.  According to the New York Times:

Every day, the nation’s cows produce an average of about 60 million gallons of raw milk, yet less than a third goes toward making milk that people drink. And the majority of that milk has fat removed to make the low-fat or nonfat milk that Americans prefer. A vast amount of leftover whole milk and extracted milk fat results.

The government used to buy cheese and butter from its dairy farmers, leading to a vast collection of dairy products stored in underground caves in Missouri (totally not kidding). It’s switched strategies — after all, how much cheese and butter can one country hoard? — and while one arm of the Department of Agriculture tells us to eat less cheese, another is telling us to eat more.

In fact, the government spent $12 million American tax dollars marketing The Wisconsin pictured above.  Dairy Management is the dairy marketing arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.  It has a budget of nearly $140 million per year… and it is in cahoots with pizza chains.

“This is one way that we can support dairy farms across the country: by selling a pizza featuring an abundance of their products,” a Domino’s spokesman said in a news release. “We think that’s a good thing.”

…

“Let’s sell more pizza and more cheese!” said two officials with Pizza Hut, which began putting cheese inside its crust after holding development meetings with Dairy Management, according to a memorandum released by the Agriculture Department.

Random suspicious documents:

Dairy Management’s Pizza Hut promotion in 2002 (the “Summer of Cheese”) reportedly pushed an additional 102 million pounds of cheese into American bellies.  And consumers are eating up Domino’s new pie.  The Times reports that sales have “soared by double digits.”

It is a deeply, deeply divided government entity, with the “let’s sell more!” side almost always better funded… [than] the “but it kills people!” side.

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.