Poor -- Better Off Here Than in Scandinavia?

June 10, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Like many liberals, I had always thought that the poor in the US, those at the bottom of the income ladder, were worse off than their counterparts in Europe, especially the Scandinavian countries.

Wrong, says economist Price Fishback in a guest post a couple of weeks ago at Freakonomics. He argues that the standard measures of social spending are inadequate, and that if you do the math his way, the US, Denmark, and Sweden are very similar.

Is the U.S. safety net a better system than the universal Nordic programs? Many Nordic people seem to prefer theirs, and many Americans seem to prefer ours. Despite the difference in approaches, the striking feature here is that the amounts spent per person in the population are not that different.

OK, forget the fatuous comment about what people prefer. People don’t know enough about foreign systems for these preferences to mean much. And even if the amounts spent are similar, the important question is who gets what? Are we liberals totally wrong about how these countries treat the poor?

No. Lane Kenworthy has an excellent analysis too long to summarize here. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, take a look at both articles. (Kenworthy has links to more formal versions of Fishback’s work). The short answer is that in the US, a much smaller net portion of social spending actually benefits the poor. Also, a standard measure of deprivation finds 13% of people in the US reporting deprivation, more than twice the percentage in Sweden and Denmark.

Class Distinction on Paper

June 9, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Lisa at Sociological Images has a wonderful post about “post-World-War-I men’s magazine covers.” She compares them to today’s men’s magazines and finds that both “emphasize control over oneself and the conquest of women.”

The goals are similar but the lad mags of today choose different means to move toward those goals. The old vintage mags get there via “tests of strength, cunning, and fighting ability.” The Maxims do it via consumption: “the right exercise, the right products (usually hygiene or tech-related), the right advice on picking up women and, well, the right women.”

Lisa’s comment is typically perceptive. But she skips over a class dimension, one that would have been clear to readers back then but which is now more attenuated, a distinction based on education, occupation, and the quality of the paper.

(Click on the image for a slightly larger view.)

Neither Lisa nor her source specify the years for these covers, but my guess, based on the cover price (25-35¢), is that they are from the early fifties. That was also the time when a young Frank Zappa might have been furtively reading them and seeing teaser titles like “Weasels Ripped My Flesh.” (The yellow circle around the title is my own addition. Older Zappa fans might not otherwise notice it. If you missed the reference, click on the Zappa link.)

The large class distinction 55-60 years ago was still the classic split between blue collar and white collar, working class and middle class, pulps and slicks. Man’s Life and the other men’s magazines were all pulps. Their intended audience – the blue-collar, working class man – could choose from among several of these (see Lisa’s post for covers of Male, Real, Men’s Conquest, and the rest). Women too had a variety of pulps – magazines devoted to romance, “true stories” of celebrities, or confession.

(Click on the image for a slightly larger view.)

But slick-paper magazines for women (the middle-class and the aspiring) also abounded. They covered topics like fashion, homemaking, and beauty. Several of them are still around today (Vogue, Woman’s Day, Glamour, etc.)

But for the educated, middle-class man – the guys on Mad Men circa 1960 – there were almost no magazines. Esquire, and that was about it. Other than that, they could read the news magazines like Time or general interest slicks (Life, Look, The Saturday Evening Post).

Then came Playboy. It was Hefner’s genius (or luck) to create a magazine for this untapped market. The Playboy message back then was much the same as the one Lisa identifies in today’s lad mags – having the right products, ideas, and tastes. (Hefner and Bourdieu are singing the same song, just to a different chart. And it should be noted that Hef’s right-hand man was a sociologist, A.C. Spectorsky.)

Playboy hit the newsstands in 1953. The next year brought men that other staple of the slicks – Sports Illustrated. Sports magazines had been around, but they were all on pulp paper.  Sports Illustrated was to Sport what Playboy was to Man’s Life. And both slicks were incredibly successful.

News Flash - Sociological Prose

June 8, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Some jokes never get old, at least not at True/Slant, where Conor Friedersdorf has a pretty good parody, “What if sociologists wrote the news?”

Untangling Race & Gender from Catastrophic Incidences of Corporate Exploitation In Semi-Natural Ecosystems: A Case Study     . . . . attention is largely focused on efforts to plug the oil well undertaken by British Petroleum, a corporation founded in imperial Britain to exploit the oil resources of people of color.     It is not insignificant to cleanup efforts, however, that even today BP’s leadership lacks adequate gender diversity, its board of directors being made up of fourteen persons, only one of them who self-identifies as a female, and all of whom earn significantly more than the median income in Louisiana, Alabama, and even the relatively privileged residents of coastal Florida.

And so on. It’s nothing new, but even an old joke is funny if you’ve never heard it (or written it) before.* And from Friedersdorf’s photo, I’d guess it was only a few years ago that he was taking Soc. 101.

Also, it’s good to be reminded of the excesses and shortcomings of our prose and our ideas. Of necessity, some professional writing is going to be arcane – a convenient shorthand for insiders but opaque to those unfamiliar with the concepts and arguments. Still, when you read over something you’re about to put out there for students, the public, or even other sociologists, it’s useful to ask, “Does this sound like a parody?”

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*Speaking of old gags that are funny to the young, True/Slant also has a story from failblog about the U of Utah student newspaper’s year-end prank – farewell editorial columns set so the layout spells naughty words.

This Is Not About Sex

June 4, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Today’s Washington Post has a nice article about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. It’s by Peter Moskos, who ought to know. His father, Charles Moskos, was a military sociologist – the man who coined the phrase. The point of Peter’s article is that for his father, DADT wasn’t just some abstract rule or impersonal policy recommendation; it reflected his own feelings about sexuality.

My father believed in something that seems quaintly old-fashioned today: sexual modesty. He didn’t like being confronted with anybody’s sexuality, gay or straight.

He wasn’t going to ask, and he didn’t want to be around if somebody told.

I get the impression that a similar squeamishness is what underlies the current opposition to proposals to scrap DADT and allow gays to serve openly. The difference is that Charles Moskos was willing to admit it. The opposition today usually talks not about sex but about “good order and discipline” or “readiness.”

I remember Dale Bumpers’ speech defending Bill Clinton against impeachment. The impeachment came in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, but what Clinton was charged with was lying under oath. The charge was perjury and obstruction of justice, but as Bumpers told the Senate,

H. L. Mencken said one time, “When you hear somebody say, ‘This is not about money’– it’s about money.” And when you hear somebody say, “This is not about sex” – it's about sex.

I can’t help thinking that behind all the arguments about “unit effectiveness” and the like, what motivates these opponents is a kind of prudishness, a feeling of uneasiness about sexuality– maybe their own but certainly that of others, especially if those others are homosexual.