Today’s “welfare queen” has a big-screen TV and an iPhone

One of the challenges when discussing poverty in class is the looming specter of the “welfare queen.” Ronald Reagan’s version may have driven a Cadillac with the money she made from scamming the system, but Ronald Reagan’s version was also imaginary. Today’s “welfare queen” is more likely to have a big-screen TV and an iPhone, at least according to my students. A few recent articles at Slate bear this out, but they also do a good job of detailing why a student’s* perceptions of what poverty should look like don’t match up with the experience of what poverty is.

The first summarizes a recent New York Times article highlighting changing costs (as seen in the graph above) showing that although prices of consumer goods have fallen dramatically, the prices of things that are necessary for escaping poverty have risen just as dramatically. The second highlights some of the things that the bottom fifth of American households spend their money on, noting that they “devote a combined 78 percent of their spending, on average, to housing, food, utilities, transportation, and health care. In fact, they spend more on those basics than they make in total pre-tax income, which they can do thanks to government supports such as food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit.” Because they spend more than they make, they are also not able to save for a rainy day, which many Americans would define as “job loss” but those in poverty might be more likely to define as “missed a shift at work” or “visited the doctor about that nagging pain.”

The lack of savings causes problems for some students (and conservative pundits), who argue that the poor should not be buying big-screen TVs or smartphones if they aren’t saving for unexpected events. I wonder if these practices might be connected to Allison Pugh’s concept of symbolic indulgence, in which poor parents sacrifice in order to provide their children with things that will allow them to participate in peer culture. Applying this to adults, a smartphone or big-screen TV (which today is basically just known as a TV) may help adults ease some of the mental burdens of poverty because they are not denying themselves of everything that other Americans have. Pugh also mentions that purchases are sporadic, coming after a tax refund or some unexpected overtime, so this may also be when people make big purchases.

Of course, somebody’s TV may also be rented, in which case they are not only paying a high price in order to have it, but they risk losing it if their economic situation gets worse. Maybe predatory lending and rent-to-own stores will help students gain some compassion for those in poverty, especially when they can relate**.

*These perceptions may also be held by your grandparents or racist uncle.

**Obviously, student loan interest rates are nowhere near the effective interest rates charged by cash advance businesses or Rent-A-Center, but students probably perceive them to be.

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Budgeting for minimum wage

Todd Beer at Sociology Toolbox highlights a new tool from the New York Times allowing users to create a budget based on the minimum wage (watch as your money flies away!). As Beer notes, this is a great tool for students because it allows them to see how difficult many of their lifestyles would be on the minimum wage. It also works well with classroom discussions about who works for the minimum wage, as this infographic demonstrates:

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Nate Silver vs. the old guard

In case you haven’t heard, Nate Silver recently decided to leave the New York Times for the paragon of political analysis known as ESPN. Interestingly, Margaret Sullivan of the New York Times recently wrote a blog post describing Silver’s fit. She says, in part:

* I don’t think Nate Silver ever really fit into the Times culture and I think he was aware of that. He was, in a word, disruptive. Much like the Brad Pitt character in the movie “Moneyball” disrupted the old model of how to scout baseball players, Nate disrupted the traditional model of how to cover politics.

His entire probability-based way of looking at politics ran against the kind of political journalism that The Times specializes in: polling, the horse race, campaign coverage, analysis based on campaign-trail observation, and opinion writing, or “punditry,” as he put it, famously describing it as “fundamentally useless.” Of course, The Times is equally known for its in-depth and investigative reporting on politics.

His approach was to work against the narrative of politics – the “story” – and that made him always interesting to read. For me, both of these approaches have value and can live together just fine.

* A number of traditional and well-respected Times journalists disliked his work. The first time I wrote about him I suggested that print readers should have the same access to his writing that online readers were getting. I was surprised to quickly hear by e-mail from three high-profile Times political journalists, criticizing him and his work. They were also tough on me for seeming to endorse what he wrote, since I was suggesting that it get more visibility.

Many others, of course, in The Times’s newsroom did appreciate his work and the innovation (not to mention the traffic) that he brought, and liked his humility.

As John Gruber points out:

Traditional model: mostly bullshit.

Nate Silver: facts.

From a sociological perspective the strangest thing may be that it has taken so long for somebody to cut through the bullshit that pervades our conversations about politics, especially when a simple aggregation of the polls is incredibly effective. Lest we forget the political spectacle, though, Matthew Yglesias at Slate writes that Silver has been extremely successful because of his numbers combined with his ability as a journalist:

He’s a fantastic and engaging writer, who not only came up with an election forecasting method that far outpaces the TV pundits but more impressively he found a large audience for it. After all, even though the TV pundits’ methods are totally wrong and arbitrary they don’t do what they do for no reason. The idea is that it makes good television. And you don’t crowd out terrible analysis just by doing better analysis, you have to find the better analysis and find a way to make it compelling to people. That’s what Nate Silver accomplished.

It will be interesting to see what Silver brings to ESPN. Josh Levin, also at Slate, already has some suggestions.

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Your book told me you’re not reading it

Your students aren’t reading, what are you going to do about it? If you teach a class with an online textbook linked to CourseSmart, you may soon have the option of checking up on them, whether you use this ability to assign grades, decide whether you’ll answer their questions, or just give helpful advice on study habits. Technology from CourseSmart that is currently undergoing testing at eight schools will allow professors to see a number of things about their students’ reading habits, including an “engagement index” based on whether students had opened each page, how often, how long they’d spent on it, and whether they’d taken electronic notes.

Slate plays up the Big Brother aspect, while Ars Technica focuses on students’ ability to game the engagement index. Perhaps the most telling quote comes at the end of the New York Times article:

After two months of using the system, Mr. Guardia is coming to some conclusions of his own. His students generally are scoring well on quizzes and assignments. In the old days, that might have reassured him. But their engagement indexes are low.

“Maybe the course is too easy and I need to challenge them a bit more,” Mr. Guardia said. “Or maybe the textbooks are not as good as I thought.”

I vote for that.

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How will a MOOC serve my students?

In any given class, I have some combination of first-generation college students, students whose parents have professional degrees, lower class, middle class, and upper class students, students who are engaged, students who are not, students who can learn on their own, and students who cannot. One of the most difficult parts of my job is teaching in a way that works for as many of these students as possible. I recently wrote about my belief that massive open online courses (MOOCs) are not a good match for my institution. Yesterday’s editorial in the New York Times makes the point that MOOCs are also unlikely to be a good match for many of my students.

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Race and the second amendment

David Cole, in a recent op-ed for The New York Times, discusses the connection between race and attitudes about the second amendment:

The history of gun regulation is inextricably interwoven with race. Some of the nation’s most stringent gun laws emerged in the South after the Civil War, as Southern whites feared what newly freed slaves might do if armed. At the same time, Northerners saw the freed slaves’ right to bear arms as critical to protecting them from the Ku Klux Klan.

…

But as long as gun violence largely targets young black men in urban ghettos, the nation seems indifferent. At Newtown, the often all-too-invisible costs of the right to bear arms were made starkly visible — precisely because these weren’t the usual victims. The nation took note, and President Obama has promised reform, though he has not yet made a specific proposal.

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The value of the liberal arts

One of the things I’ve found interesting about higher education in the United States is that the public seems to increasingly favor specialized degrees while the job market is moving toward uncertainty, meaning that students with specialized skills are less likely to get the jobs they are trained for. For today’s job market, it appears (from my potentially biased position as a liberal arts professor) that what students actually need is a well-rounded education that will prepare them to think through a variety of potential situations rather than to perform any particular task. Two recent articles reveal that I’m not alone.

The first, an op-ed by Michael S. Roth in the New York Times, argues that the goal of any education should be to instill students with “the inclination to learn.” He states:

The inclination to learn from life can be taught in a liberal arts curriculum, but also in schools that focus on real-world skills, from engineering to nursing. The key is to develop habits of mind that allow students to keep learning, even as they acquire skills to get things done. This combination will serve students as individuals, family members and citizens — not just as employees and managers.

The second, by Barry Glassner in USA Today, reports that a national study by the Annapolis Group has found that this belief in developing one’s ability to learn and to reason is echoed by liberal arts graduates:

Among the key findings: Liberal arts students are academically anchored — not adrift — and community minded. They value supportive learning environments and teaching that stretches their abilities. Strong mentoring, abundant intern and community service opportunities, and working directly with professors rather than graduate assistants — these things matter.

So, what is the ultimate liberal arts payoff? Alumni declare they are well prepared for both graduate study and the workplace, having developed intellectual, practical and leadership skills vital to scholarly inquiry, career advancement and life as public citizens.

I wonder when the public, and those in charge of the shrinking higher ed budgets, will catch on.

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Sex and gender at the Olympics

Watching Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh Jennings win their third consecutive gold medal in beach volleyball the other night, I noticed something interesting about their uniforms (no, it was not related to their asses – I’ll get to their asses in a second). The backs of their uniforms only displayed their maiden names (as you can see on May-Treanor above). Women taking their husbands’ names personally while keeping their maiden names professionally is nothing new (the two of them even demonstrate two sides of the “to hyphenate or not to hyphenate” decision), but the announcers never used just their maiden names (they did, however,  sometimes use just their first names). It would be interesting to know how these decisions were made, though they might have had more to do with the small space available on their uniforms than statements about gender. Hell, maybe they’re just superstitious.

Gender is certainly involved, however, in the fact that I had to work fairly hard to find a picture of one of their backs that did not also show their asses. This phenomenon is not limited to May-Treanor and Walsh Jennings. Lisa Wade over at Sociological Images took a look at the photographs of a few different Olympic sports and found that those focusing on beach volleyball players were conspicuously different:

I googled beach vollyball and three other sports: track, diving, and gymnastics.  All involve relatively skimpy uniforms, but beach volleyball certainly stood out.  The top results included five photographs of just butts in bikini bottoms and four “cheesecake” pictures in which women are posed to look like pin-ups and volleyball is not part of the picture.

That may not seem like a lot but, in contrast, none of the top photos for the other three sports included butt shots or pin-up poses (with the exception of one butt shot for track, but it was of a fully-clothed man and used as a photographic device, not a source of titillation).

Wade doesn’t suggest any reasons for this phenomenon but I suspect that it comes down to some combination of age and the motions involved in the sport. Like beach volleyball players, female gymnasts wear clothing that is similar to a swimsuit but they are typically younger (see this graphic for a breakdown of men’s and women’s age ranges by sport) than beach volleyball players, making their usage as sex symbols taboo. Female divers actually wear swimsuits but their age range also includes those in their mid-teens. Finally, female track athletes are both older than gymnasts and divers and sometimes wear uniforms that are similar to the bikini-style uniforms worn by female beach volleyball players. Running, however, does not lend itself to titillating photos in the same way as a sport involving bending at the waist and diving face-first into the sand does. Off the track, however, female runners are still commonly depicted as sex objects, as the recent debate over the coverage of Lolo Jones in the New York Times demonstrates. Jones also demonstrates the challenge that athletes face to earn as much notoriety and endorsement money as possible when and their sports only gain the general public’s attention every four years.

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It’s not true! Global warming and student experiences

One of the great things about teaching sociology is that students can connect with some of the subject matter.  Of course, one of the downsides to teaching sociology is that students may decry research findings that do not match their personal experiences as “not true.”  As an instructor, I have stressed the fact that the experiences of individuals differ based on their differing locations in various social structures (it’s like some sort of sociological imagination…).  Public debates on climate change indicate that this problem is not limited to the social sciences.

The claim that global warming is bunk can probably be heard on any relatively cold summer day but the recent snowstorms on the East coast seem to have riled up hordes of people who forget that the global climate is not necessarily reflected in the readings of their backyard thermometer.  This has resulted in coverage of the issue by the New York Times, which reminds us that:

Climate scientists say that no individual episode of severe weather can be attributed to global climate trends, though there is evidence that such events will probably become more frequent as global temperatures rise.

Jeff Masters, a meteorologist who writes on the Weather Underground blog, said that the recent snows do not, by themselves, demonstrate anything about the long-term trajectory of the planet. Climate is, by definition, a measure of decades and centuries, not months or years.

But Dr. Masters also said that government and academic studies had consistently predicted an increasing frequency of just these kinds of record-setting storms, because warmer air carries more moisture.

“Of course,” he wrote on his blog Wednesday as new snows produced white-out conditions in much of the Eastern half of the country, “both climate-change contrarians and climate-change scientists agree that no single weather event can be blamed on climate change.

“However,” he continued, “one can ‘load the dice’ in favor of events that used to be rare — or unheard of — if the climate is changing to a new state.”

Of course, this is unlikely to prevent your neighbor (or an entire blog) from pointing to a winter snowstorm as a sure sign that years of scientific research is invalid.  It’s too bad your neighbor has never heard of sociology.

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