Unwed Moms or The Hood

October 17, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

The question to Obama was:

In 2008, you stated you wanted to keep AK-47s out of the hands of criminals. What has your administration done or planned to do to limit the availability of assault weapons?

Obama did actually respond to the question, in part. 

I also share your belief that weapons that were designed for soldiers in war theaters don’t belong on our streets.

And he even offered a relevant fact:

in my home town of Chicago, there’s an awful lot of violence and they’re not using AK-47s. They’re using cheap hand guns.

And then he wandered off into schools and opportunity.*

CROWLEY: Governor Romney, the question is about assault weapons, AK-47s.

Romney ignored the moderator ad made no mention of AK-47s.  He merely said he wanted no new gun laws. Then he too quickly skipped to matters that have nothing to do with the availability of AK-47s: education, hope, opportunity, and . . .

let me mention another thing. And that is parents. We need moms and dads, helping to raise kids.  . . . But gosh to tell our kids that before they have babies, they ought to think about getting married to someone, that’s a great idea.

Or as someone said or tweeted:

Guns don’t kill people. Unwed mothers kill people.

With variables like unemployment and single-parent families, it’s crucial to distinguish between individual effects and neighborhood effects.  Romney is thinking only about individual effects  – the effect of the family on the child.  The assumption behind Romney’s statement is that single parenting is bad parenting, and therefore it will have bad consequences.**

I confess that I haven’t kept up with the literature on crime, but as I recall, the individual-level correlations are not all that strong.  When you control for other variables, children of single parents or children of unemployed parents are not much more likely to commit violent crimes. 

So the problem is not the unwed mother or the unemployed parent.  The problem is what happens to a neighborhood with high rates of single-parent families and high rates of unemployment. 

We know this intuitively.  Imagine two boys – one with a two-parent family, the other with a single mother.  The two-parent kid lives in a neighborhood where most families are headed by single mothers and there are few employed men.  The single-mother boy lives in a neighborhood where most families have two parents, and most men have jobs.  Who is more likely to commit a violent crime? 

Or imagine that you yourself have a kid and a spouse.  If family structure is the overriding factor, and you wanted to be sure your kid didn’t commit violent crimes, then you would have no preference between those two neighborhoods.  But would you?

Back in the 1980s, researchers like Rob Sampson were shifting the focus from individuals and families to neighborhoods.   Unfortunately, political debates about crime and violence often ignore what every parent knows: that  parents can do only so much, and kids are subject to many influences outside the home.***

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* When I become czar of presidential debates, we will have not just time-keepers to make sure speakers stay within their time but topic-keepers to remind candidates when they are not addressing the question that was asked.  In the three debates this month, topic-keepers would have been very, very busy.

** Romney hedges – “A lot of great single moms, single dads” – but it’s clear that he thinks these are lucky exceptions to the general rule.

*** Philip Cohen has conceptual blog post about the link between unwed mothers and violence (here).

Dialing for Donations . . . and Deductions

October 16, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Google finishes your sentences for you. At least, they finish your partially typed search string, based on what searchers before you have sought. 

Then Google gives you a list of Websites based on their Algorithm. The way people talk about The Algorithm, I get a picture of some powerful, mysterious god.  Those who can unravel its secrets stand to gain mightily by having their Website win the race to the top. 

Maybe the Republicans have nailed it. Or maybe they just paid for it.   Here’s what you get if you want to donate money to the Democratic National Committee.  (Pink-background sites are paid ads.)

I guess the GOP thinks they’ll get some money by advertising to people who want to give to the Dems.

A search for donating to the Republicans has no Democratic ads. 

(Click on the image for a larger and possibly clearer view.)

What’s interesting here is the autocomplete.  Apparently, a lot of people who want to donate to the Republicans are also concerned that they get a tax break for their largesse.  Which  pretty much confirms what they’ve been telling us about their position on taxes all along – paying less on their taxes is really, really important to them.

Do Pro Athletes Want Gambling?

October 14, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

The obits for Alex Karras  all noted that the NFL suspended him and Lions teammate Paul Hornung for gambling.  Then there’s Pete Rose, whose gambling has kept him out of the Hall of Fame.  And Tim Donaghy, the NBA ref who later said his gambling affected the way he called games. 

What’s up with White sports dudes and gambling? 

Chad Millman at ESPN touts the latest issue of their  magazine (he’s the editor) with the promise of some data.

In that issue we run one of our Confidential polls, in which we question dozens of athletes about taboo topics. In the current version we asked 67 jocks from the four major sports: . . . do you think sports betting should be legalized?

Let’s stipulate that a non-random sample of 67 jocks-we-could-get-to-answer-our-phone-call divided into four categories is less methodologically rigorous than we would prefer.  Still the differences among the sports are striking.  The NHL players were overwhelmingly in favor of legalized sports betting, the NBA players against it.

Here’s a graph that makes the ESPN data look more impressive than it actually is.

The Whiter the sport, the more its professional practitioners want legalized gambling.

Millman is not an academic, so he didn’t end his article with a call for further research (and funding).  But maybe he should have.

Majestic Inequality

October 12, 2012

Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross posted at Sociological Images

In 1894, Anatole France said,

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

Back in June, Mitt Romney said

I want to make sure that we keep America a place of opportunity, where everyone . . . get[s] as much education as they can afford

After all, Mitt got as much education as he (his parents, really) could afford, so he thought it best if everyone had that same majestic equality of opportunity. 

Opportunity – how much is that in American money? 

Yesterday, Planet Money posted this graph showing the costs and benefits of a college education in several countries. 

The title of the post summarizes the interpretation of the college-educated folks at Planet Money.

College Costs More In America, But The Payoff Is Bigger

But what if you look at the data from the other side? Here’s the glass-is-half-empty title

    College in the US Costs a Lot, and If You Can’t Afford It, You’re Really Screwed

or words to that effect.

What the chart shows is inequality – specifically, the inequality between the college educated and everyone else. In advanced economies, like the those of the countries in the chart, education is important. But some of those countries, like the Scandinavian countries, have reduced the income sacrificed by non-college people relative to the college educated. Other countries, those toward the right side of the graph, favor a more unequal distribution of income. 

I looked at the Gini coefficient for the ten countries in the Planet Money chart. The correlation between the Gini and the economic benefit of college for men was 0.83, which seemed a bit extreme.  So I added another ten OECD countries.

The correlation is 0.44.  Either way, the US is the clear outlier.  In the land of opportunity, if you’re a male, either you pay the considerable price of going to college, or you pay the price for not going to college. 

With this inequality come the kinds of social consequences that Charles Murray elaborates in his latest book about non-educated Whites – disability, divorce, demoralization, death.