Necessities

February 15, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

In debates about poverty in the US, conservatives will usually point out that many people with incomes below the poverty line have a standard of living equal to that of middle class people of earlier times or other places. Here’s a typical version, by Robert Rector, written in 1990 and posted on the conservative Heritage foundation Website. After noting that the poor own homes (38%) and cars (62%), Rector concludes,

“Poor” Americans today are better housed, better fed, and own more property than did the average U.S. citizen throughout much of the 20th Century. In 1988, the per capita expenditures of the lowest income fifth of the U.S. population exceeded the per capita expenditures of the median American household in 1955, after adjusting for inflation.

(The quotation marks are enough to clue you in that Rector doesn’t think that a family living on $15,000 a year is really poor. They’re merely “poor.”)

By a similar logic, the “poor” today are better off than J. P. Morgan because Morgan didn’t have a washing machine. And they’re better off than Louis XIV because the Sun King didn’t have indoor plumbing.

Bill O’Reilly put the “not really poor” argument more succinctly, “Even the poor have color television sets and pretty much everything they need.”

O’Reilly at least comes closer to the real issue. Being poor is not simply a matter of what you have. It’s what you have compared with what you need.

But what do you need? In the 1600s, nobody needed a flush toilet because nobody had one. And for a similar reason, nobody in the Gilded Age of the late 1800s needed a washing machine.

Needs are determined by what people have. If nearly everybody in a society has a car, that society becomes a place where a car is a necessity. And if you can’t afford to buy what people think are the necessities, you are poor.

Here are the results of Pew Research poll published late last year. The poll asked people whether they thought an item was "a necessity" or "a luxury you could do without."
(You don’t have to be a social constructionist to see that what people need is not much different from what they think they need.)

(Click on the graph to see it in a larger version)

Have you got what it takes?

Note that ten years ago, a microwave was a luxury for two-thirds of the population. Now it's a necessity for two-thirds. I’m in the minority on that one, and I'm missing two of the other top five items as well.

Operationalizing Investment

February 13, 2007

Posted by Jay Livingston

How do you turn a vague concept like “decline in the moral authority of the family” into a variable you can actually use in research? This week, I told my students that operationalizing concepts is the key to thinking like a sociologist. Of course, at the beginning of the semester when I introduced the idea of social facts, I told them that thinking in terms of social facts was the essence of thinking like a sociologist. (Moral authority happened to be the subject that came up; it's not the subject of this post.)

I also tell students that no matter how you operationalize it, someone is going to complain that you've left something out. And they're right. Most of these conversions from abstract to measurable are imperfect. But you go to research with the variables you have, not the variables somebody else would like you to have.

I've been thinking about this problem in connection with parental “investment” in children. Back in November, one of the candidates we interviewed for a position this year, Kristen Schultz Lee, taught a sample class based on her research, which was about “parental investment in children’s education” and whether it was greater for boys than girls. I thought that was an interesting idea. I don’t usually think of what my parents did for me as an “investment,” i.e., something with an eventual payoff for the investor.

Kristen operationalized “investment” (at least in her talk to my class) as merely how far the child went in school. It works, but I wondered if there might not be more to this idea of investment. After all, she did her interviewing in Japan, where, supposedly, the stereotype “kyoiku mama” (education mama) stays up late with her son, helping him with homework and going over drills in preparation for the all-important college entrance exams. (Click on that link and you’ll get several other negative female stereotypes in Japanese.)

Now an article in the latest issue of the American Sociological Review looks at something similar. It compares adoptive and biological parents’ investment in children’s education, but the researchers (Laura Hamilton, Simon Cheng, and Brian Powell) define investment more broadly: “the economic, cultural, social, and interactional resources that parents provide for their children.”

• Economic: the things that money buys (books, computers, private school).
• Cultural: not just music lessons, but even the time parents spend with kids, reading or just playing.
• Interactional: what non-sociologists call “talking” with the child.
• Social Capital: Talking with other school parents, going to PTA meetings, etc.

(I guess I’m not much of a sociologist after all. In all those hours I spent squeezing Play-doh with my kid, I never thought of it as providing him with Cultural Capital. And when I went out for coffee with other parents after drop-off, I thought I was just putting off going to work. Now I realize I was building up my kid’s Social Capital.)

The importance of this research lies in its implications for biology-based theories about human behavior. These theories, under names like “sociobiology” or “evolutionary psychology,” have become increasingly influential in social science. In this case, they would probably predict that adoptive parents would be less invested in their children.

But this study found nothing of the sort: “two-adoptive-parent families invest at similar levels as two-biological-parent families but still at significantly higher levels in most resources than other types of families.”

Interestingly enough, Kristen Schultz Lee had included similar variables in her research (homework helping, cram schools) though she didn’t mention them in my class. Somewhat in keeping with the kyoiku-mama stereotype, extracurricular activities were somewhat gender-related (girls do cultural classes, boys do academic classes). But I don't think the overall differences in education were as large as I might have expected.

(Hi, Kristen. As I write this, Oswego County has had twelve feet of snow in the last ten days or so. In Montclair, there’s not a snowflake to be seen.)

Minding the Gap

February 11, 2007

Posted by Jay Livingston

Back in November, I blogged about Google Trends. Now Google has another cool tool, still in beta. It's called Gapminder, and as the name implies, it shows the gaps among countries of the world. You can choose from about a dozen variables, mostly economic and health data, and get an XY graph with the size of each dot corresponding to the population of the country. You can also select which countries to identify with a name label. Here’s a chart showing the proportion of doctors and per capita income. (The actual screen will look clearer than this reprodution.) Belarus, like many of the other former Soviet republics, has much lower income than the US but slightly more doctors per capita.



The flash presentation also tracks changes since 1975. The chart below shows trends in infant mortality and income for the US and the Czech Republic (which has data starting in 1992, the year of its founding).



A similar site, gapminder.org, has slideshow presentations of some of the same variables. It groups countries to show differences among countries of similar economic levels.

Losing Our Religion?

February 9, 2007

Posted by Jay Livingston

I have been assuming that the Bush years have been good for religion. His “faith-based initiatives” have sent billions of government dollars to churches and other religious organizations. And when religion-based policies have conflicted with scientific findings, guess which carried the day, at least in the federal government.

Thomas Jefferson wrote famously of the “wall of separation between church and state.” George W. Bush seems to have heard a voice telling him to tear down that wall. More than any other president in modern times, or perhaps since the founding of the republic, Bush has tried make religion a part of government and politics.

Bush’s policy success in tearing down Mr. Jefferson’s wall does not seem to have won over more of the public. Here are the results of two Gallup polls, one taken just as Bush was coming into office, the other just last month.

The question was: "Next, I'm going to read some aspects of life in America today. For each one, please say whether you are very satisfied, somewhat satisfied, somewhat dissatisfied, or very dissatisfied. How about the influence of organized religion?"


Americans are still satisfied with the role of religion (56% vs. 39%) , but dissatisfaction has grown during the Bush years. Do people want to see the Bush trend continue?

The proportion of Americans saying they want religion to have less influence has increased by 45% (from 22% in 2001 to 32% in 2007).

It's hard to know what to make of the change. Thirty-two percent wanting less religious influence (maybe only a little less), is still a clear minority, and America is still far more religious than other advanced industrialized countries. Executive, legislative, and judicial branches have greatly favored religion.

The puzzling irony is that despite its dominance, the Christian majority feels threatened. Nearly sixty percent of Americans agreed that "Christianity is under attack in the US today." OK, this does come from a Fox News poll, and maybe people have just been listening to Bill O'Reilly. But it's possible they see these Bush-era trends as omens for the future.