Posts Tagged ‘economics’
February 24, 2010
In the March issue of the Atlantic, Don Peck interviews William Julius Wilson, Kathy Edin, Brad Wilcox, and Glen Elder about the different ways that the Great Recession has ripped holes in the social fabric. Here are a few of the high points:
- Like Elder’s children who grew up during the Great Depression, today’s young adults are likely to see their opportunities diminished by the recession. Citing the work of Lisa Kahn at Yale, Peck writes: “In one recent study, she followed the career paths of white men who graduated from college between 1979 and 1989. She found that, all else equal, for every one-percentage-point increase in the national unemployment rate, the starting income of new graduates fell by as much as 7 percent; the unluckiest graduates of the decade, who emerged into the teeth of the 1981–82 recession, made roughly 25 percent less in their first year than graduates who stepped into boom times.”
- Amazingly, that gap persists throughout life. According to Kahn, “ Seventeen years after graduation, those who had entered the workforce during inhospitable times were still earning 10 percent less on average than those who had emerged into a more bountiful climate. When you add up all the earnings losses over the years, Kahn says, it’s as if the lucky graduates had been given a gift of about $100,000, adjusted for inflation, immediately upon graduation—or, alternatively, as if the unlucky ones had been saddled with a debt of the same size.”
- Edin draws on her research in books such as Promises I can Keep to argue that among low-income couples “marriage has become an ‘increasingly fragile’ institution.” Peck writes that Edin “fears it is being supplanted as a social norm by single motherhood and revolving-door relationships. As a rule, fewer people marry during a recession, and this one has been no exception. But ‘the timing of this recession coincides with a pretty significant cultural change,’ Edin says: a fast-rising material threshold for marrying, but not for having children, in less affluent communities.”
- Peck cites Wilson’s When Work Disappears and interviews the sociologist about how the Great Recession might affect inner-city blacks. “Wilson believes that once we start getting detailed data on the conditions of inner-city life since the crash, “we’re going to see some horror stories”—and in many cases a relapse into the depths of decades past. “The point I want to emphasize,” Wilson said, “is that we should brace ourselves.”
Posted in sociology | 1 Comment »
Tags: atlantic, cities, economics, education, families, glen elder, kathryn edin, poverty, race, recession, sociology, wilcox, William Julius Wilson, work
January 12, 2010
I must have missed this post on Graphic Sociology over the holidays. Linking to a post by Philip Cohen on the Family Inequality blog, Graphic Sociology highlights why infographics can be misleading when we don’t give more data. Cohen does an excellent job challenging Wilcox’s assertion that the recession has been good for marriage rates by pulling back and showing the divorce rate over the last few decades. In that light, divorces have been trending downward for awhile and have nothing to do with the Great Recession.
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Tags: data, divorce, economics, families, infographics, philip cohen, sociology
December 17, 2009
Lloyd Armstrong offers a detailed analysis of the rising costs of college on his blog, Changing Higher Education. There’s a lot to chew on in Armstrong’s post. The data that caught my attention, though, was his comparison of the growth of household income and tuition prices over twenty years. I was surprised to see tuition out-pacing even the highest quintile of earners in the U.S. Unfortunately, we don’t have data for 2009 yet. I have to think this picture will get even uglier, once he factors in the recent tuition and fee increases.
SOURCE: Lloyd Armstrong
Armstong doesn’t stop w/ this analysis of college costs. He also examines it from the students’ perspective and the colleges’.
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Tags: data, economics, education, inequality, sociology
December 15, 2009
If you have the Black Friday blues, take comfort in a few posts on consumerism:
- George Ritzer has a guest post on Sociology Compass about hyperconsumption and how we got ourselves into this mess.
- Karen Sternheimer wrote an excellent piece on “the virtue of not buying” on the Everyday Sociology Blog that includes some useful links. In particular, she points to a book by Ellen Ruppel Shell that sounds great.
- Joel Waldfogel, an economist from Penn, has been making the rounds thanks to well-timed book called Scroogenomics from Princeton UP. You can hear an interview with him about why gift giving is bad for the economy here.
- Finally, an op-ed (predating the economic crisis by a several years) by Paul Boyer in the Christian Science Monitor highlights the psychological freedom that shedding unnecessary “stuff” can give us. Paul writes:
Consumption is presented as our right, even as a patriotic act. We celebrate stores filled with goods. But once the novelty of my purchases wears off, I often feel more burdened and dissatisfied. In my heart I know that most of the things I buy will end up in the trash or a Salvation Army sales rack – adding to the huge surplus that is the inevitable, although hidden, part of our society’s unprecedented wealth.
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Tags: consumption, economics, happiness, sociology
December 2, 2009
The Global Sociology blog has put together some useful maps on the minimum wage in the U.S.
SOURCE: P.A.P. Blog
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Tags: data, economics, inequality, poverty, sociology, work
December 1, 2009
SOURCE: Guardian Data Blog
(h/t infographic news) The Guardian’s Data Blog posted this infographic showing how much money people earn from the public sector in the UK. It’s a sequel to a table that they posted a couple of weeks ago that looked at overall earnings by job in the UK. I’d love to see an infographic with this sort of data on earnings by job in the U.S.
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Tags: data, economics, inequality, sociology, work
October 15, 2009
Tim Carmody at Snarkmarket links to an interesting blog by Max Fischer. Carmody and Fischer respond to libertarians and conservatives who worry that the public option would destroy the “free market” by pointing out that the insurance industry is not a free-market now and that they “have dis torted incen tives to inno vate or pro vide a more cost-effective product.” They also make some interesting comparisons to public education and argue that health care is not an ordinary commodity where “zero-position ownership is acceptable.”
In his blog, Fischer writes about the Baucus plan, which seems like the most likely one to get passed by Congress:
In short, [the Baucus plan] means 29 million more people will buy private health insurance, which is great for them. But with insurers getting millions of guaranteed customers without having to improve their product, the incentives for innovation go way down. The already unfree health insurance market would become even less free.
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Tags: health, economics, insurance, snarkmarket
September 23, 2009
SOURCE: Daily Mail
Via Fringe Thoughts, I came across this article in the Daily Mail about a fleet of ships anchored off the coast of Singapore. The number of containers ships idling near Sungai Rengit is equivalent to the British and U.S. navies combined. According to the article in the Daily Mail, “if ever you had an irrational desire to charter one, now would be the time. This time last year, an Aframax tanker capable of carrying 80,000 tons of cargo would cost £31,000 a day ($50,000). Now it is about £3,400 ($5,500).”
You may be wondering what ships abandoned in Southeast Asia have to do with us. The Daily Mail explains:
These empty ships should be carrying Christmas over to the West. All retailers will have already ordered their stock for the festive season long ago. With more than 92 per cent of all goods coming into the UK by sea, much of it should be on its way here if it is going to make it to the shelves before Christmas.
But retailers are running on very low stock levels, not only because they expect consumer spending to be down, but also because they simply do not have the same levels of credit that they had in the past and so are unable to keep big stockpiles.
Stopford explains: ‘Globalisation and shipping go hand in hand. Worldwide, we ship about 8.2 billion tons of cargo a year. That’s more than one ton per person and probably two to three tons for richer people like us in the West. If the total goes down by five per cent or so, that’s a lot of cargo that isn’t moving.’
The knock-on effect of so many ships sitting idle rather than moving consumer goods between Asia and Europe could become apparent in [the West] in the months ahead.
‘We will find out at Christmas whether there are enough PlayStations in the shops or not. There will certainly be fewer goods coming in to Britain [and the United States] during the run-up to Christmas.’
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Tags: economics, globalization, sociology
September 16, 2009
In 2008, the French government created the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. The commission, chaired by Joe Stiglitz, are searching for alternatives to GDP. Many social scientists are critical of using GDP as a measure, because it is imprecise. GDP also encourages developed countries to chase economic growth at all costs. However, according to many psychologists, sociologists, and economists economic growth has a limited relationship to happiness or social well-being. The commission writes:
For example, traffic jams may increase
GDP as a result of the increased use of gasoline, but obviously not the quality of life.
Moreover, if citizens are concerned about the quality of air, and air pollution is
increasing, then statistical measures which ignore air pollution will provide an inaccurate
estimate of what is happening to citizens’ well-being. Or a tendency to measure gradual
change may be inadequate to capture risks of abrupt alterations in the environment such
as climate change.
For example, traffic jams may increase GDP as a result of the increased use of gasoline, but obviously not the quality of life. Moreover, if citizens are concerned about the quality of air, and air pollution is increasing, then statistical measures which ignore air pollution will provide an inaccurate estimate of what is happening to citizens’ well-being. Or a tendency to measure gradual change may be inadequate to capture risks of abrupt alterations in the environment such as climate change.
The panel argues that we should measure both current well-being and sustainability, and they made 5 recommendations:
- Recommendation 1: When evaluating material well-being, look at income and consumption rather than production
- Recommendation 2: Emphasise the household perspective
- Recommendation 3: Consider income and consumption jointly with wealth
- Recommendation 4: Give more prominence to the distribution of income, consumption and wealth
- Recommendation 5: Broaden income measures to non-market activities
You can read the full commission report here.
Here is video of the presentation of the commissions findings.
You can also see a short interview with some of the panelists here.
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Tags: amartya sen, economics, happiness, sociology, stiglitz
