Posts Tagged ‘poverty’
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.”
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Tags: atlantic, cities, economics, education, families, glen elder, kathryn edin, poverty, race, recession, sociology, wilcox, William Julius Wilson, work
February 19, 2010
SOURCE: NY Times
Great to see Matt Desmond’s research featured in the Times. I can’t remember the last time the unpublished research of a sociology grad student received that level of attention. Maybe Devah Pager?
Also available from the NY Times, a slide show, called Home No More.
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Tags: eviction, foreclosure, gender, inequality, matthew desmond, milwaukee, poverty, race, 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
October 28, 2009
(h/t J.D.) The International Museum of Women has a new online exhibit called “Economica” about the experiences of women in the global economy. The site features podcasts, slideshows, and forums on gender and globalization. In particular, I’d recommend checking out their list of films. It’s a terrific resource. The “Your Voices” section is also interesting.
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Tags: families, gender, globalization, inequality, poverty, sociology
October 13, 2009
Check out the profile of photographer Brenda Ann Kenneally in the NY Times Lens Blog:
The searing photographs in “Upstate Girls” have brought her prestigious awards, including a Canon Female Photojournalist Award, a Getty Images Grant for Editorial Photography and first prize for stories about daily life, from World Press Photo.
Not content simply to photograph her subjects’ tattered lives, Ms. Kenneally is trying to help girls who have run afoul of the legal system, as she did. She is working on a graphic novel that will include her photographs, and she has started workshops in which girls make scrapbooks to help them think about their lives and choices they can make.
With the filmaker MacGregor Thomson, Ms. Kenneally is editing a series of minidocumentaries on the girls. She has also relaunched her Web site, Upstate Girls, produced by Steven Zeswitz. She is trying to raise money for these projects while also studying for a Ph.D. in electronic media at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
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Tags: Brenda Ann Kenneally, gender, inequality, new york times, photos, poverty
July 5, 2009
There’s a terrific article in the New York Times today featuring the research of Chris Wildeman and Sarah Wakefield.
The article concludes with a note that one of the men profiled in the article, who had said he was trying to break the cycle of going in and out of prison was arrested again for failing to show up for a drug test. His struggle to stay out of jail reminded me of Alice Goffman’s terrific article in the most recent ASR. You can read the abstract below:
On the Run: Wanted Men in a Philadelphia Ghetto – Alice Goffman
Beyond the Felony Conviction: How the Fugitive Status of Young Black Men Disrupts Work and Family Life in Impoverished Communities (American Sociological Review, Volume 74, Number 3, June 2009 , pp. 339-357(19))
The dramatic rise in imprisonment the United States experienced over the past 30 years is typically thought to impact poor minority communities because it places large numbers of men in prison and grants them a felony conviction upon their release. After conducting six years of fieldwork in Philadelphia, Alice Goffman of Princeton University finds that many young men living in these neighborhoods–before they are convicted of felonies, and after they have served their sentence–have low level warrants out for minor infractions, such as failing to pay court fees or breaking curfews while on probation. With the police ever-present, avoiding jail becomes a daily preoccupation for these fugitives, and the threat of incarceration has a significant impact on their lives and relationships. Young men who are wanted by the police find that activities, relations, and localities that others rely on to maintain a decent and respectable identity are transformed into a system that the authorities make use of to arrest and confine them. Going to the hospital is unsafe, as is keeping a regular job or spending time with their families. A mother’s house becomes a “last known address” and their closest relatives potential informants. In an effort to stay out of jail, wanted men avoid these places and relations altogether, or learn to be unpredictable. Goffman also reports that some family members, girlfriends, and neighbors exploit the fugitive, controlling men’s behavior with threats to turn them in to the police. Wanted men also make use of their status as a crutch to explain various failures in their lives. Goffman’s analysis questions whether the system of intense supervision and policing that accompanied the rise in imprisonment is beneficial for individuals and communities.
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Tags: crime, inequality, new york times, poverty, prison, race, sociology
June 11, 2009
Source: Pew
Kevin Drum has posted a new chart on Mother Jones that looks at levels of financial satisfaction organized by socioeconomic status. It’s from a larger report from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. Like Drum, I’m a little surprised about this data. I wonder if the working class and lower-middle class haven’t registered much change, because they never saw any of the benefits of the boom? Drum writes:
The rich becoming less financially satisfied is easy to understand. But why is it that the non-rich seem to be mostly taking things in stride? Some kind of weird Obama optimism effect? A sudden realization that plasma TVs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be? I’m a little stumped here.
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Tags: data, economics, inequality, mother jones, poverty, social change, sociology
June 11, 2009
In her Brainstorm blog for the Chronicle of Higher Ed, Sara Goldrick-Rab raises some questions about the high dropout rate among low-income college students. After attending the Cell to Society Summer Institute at Northwestern, she has started thinking about the ways medical tools can help us understand social behaviors. Since she is a sociologist studying education, she sees useful applications for these methods to help understand student performance, in particular the high dropout rate among low-income college students. She writes:
What if the conditions in which low-income kids experience college actually make them less healthy? We all understand stress, and most of us think it’s a regular part of life everyone deals with. But we have differing types and degrees of stress, and in turn differing responses and reactions. Some of us think being stressed out is about trying to fit in an optional French class to our busy schedules, because we’d like to hang out with that cute French boy. Others feel stressed because they do not have enough money to pay for lunch, and are working two jobs on top of four classes to try and make ends meet.
Looking at sleep patterns, and sleep quality, is one way to try and quantify the effects of college — and policies associated with college-going — on health.
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Tags: chronicle of higher ed, education, health, inequality, poverty, sociology
