mindstalk | Entries tagged with sociology

Interesting piece, though it'd be more convincing with directly presented numbers about interstate differences, and comparing non-Southern states to the countries he invokes

"In practice, however, much of what sets the United States apart from other countries today is actually Southern exceptionalism."
"thanks to mid-century Southern members of Congress, welfare-state policies from home ownership to Social Security were designed to reinforce segregation or exclude the disproportionately-Southern black and white poor. "
"According to the FBI in 2012, the South as a region, containing only a quarter of the population, accounted for 40.9 percent of U.S. violent crime."
"Between the time the Supreme Court ended the ban on the death penalty and mid-June of this year, the South was responsible for 81 percent of the executions in the United States, with Texas and Oklahoma alone accounting for 45 percent of the whole."
"All of this leaves little doubt that, in the absence of Southern exceptionalism, the U.S. would be much more similar to other English-speaking democracies, which don’t subject their leaders to religious tests, don’t suffer from high levels of gun violence and don’t rival communist China and despotic Saudi Arabia in the number of executions per capita. Without the gravitational force exerted on the South, American conservatism itself would be radically different—more Bob Dole than Ted Cruz."
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/how-the-south-skews-america-119725.html#ixzz3f1iuvie1

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/429183.html

Observations of the markets around me:

I go to Alewife Trader Joe's a lot. My impression of the 'crew' there is mostly white, especially college aged females or a bit older. Also a middle-aged white man, middle-aged or older Asian man, a younger man I suspect is a recent African immigrant, an older white woman... others. Usually anyone I ask knows where anything I ask about is in the store. They're friendly and happy-seeming energetic... some of the younger women are almost flirty, in a confusing way. They *look* middle-class, in a way. TJ has a reputation for well-paid staff with low turnover, and of course low prices.

Across the street is Whole Foods, where I hardly ever go, but when I do it's usually to look for something specific, so I interact with the staff. I have no idea of the overall makeup, but there's definitely a lot more Hispanics there, with a limited ability of English among them. Today I also interacted with a couple of African-American men. Knowledge of stuff is far less comprehensive and more department oriented; granted, WF seems much bigger. WF's reputation is of a libertarian if not Objectivist CEO who compares Obamacare to fascism, and the company has been under investigation for violating labor law. Also known for high prices, and I wonder what those Hispanic workers are getting paid.

Shaw's, now part of Star Market, doesn't have the progressive reputation. There's a big one in Porter Square. I don't attend to it that much, but once I was there around midnight, and there was a marked distinction between the white women running the cashiers and the Hispanic males stocking the aisle. Lots of the latter, but not qualified or trusted to operate the cash registers despite a sudden pile-up of customers, the way TJ crew would have been. I think I've blogged about that before.

There's also a Star Market on Beacon street. Mostly white or African-American staff, I think, and feeling/sounding lower class compared to the TJ crew, in a way I can't define.

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/415193.html

Last night at Grendel's I brought up the leaded gas crime connection, and there was the usual "correlation isn't causation" debate. I don't know if anyone involved will see this, but I realized that my old blog posts didn't call out the strongest points, so figured I would now. Italics are quotes; paragraphs adjacent here aren't necessarily adjacent in the article. Quotes also don't include some links which exist there.

...a good rule of thumb for categorizing epidemics: If it spreads along lines of communication, he says, the cause is information. Think Bieber Fever. If it travels along major transportation routes, the cause is microbial. Think influenza. If it spreads out like a fan, the cause is an insect. Think malaria. But if it's everywhere, all at once—as both the rise of crime in the '60s and '70s and the fall of crime in the '90s seemed to be—the cause is a molecule.

So Nevin dove in further, digging up detailed data on lead emissions and crime rates to see if the similarity of the curves was as good as it seemed. It turned out to be even better: In a 2000 paper (PDF) he concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America.

Reyes discovered that this reduction wasn't uniform. In fact, use of leaded gasoline varied widely among states, and this gave Reyes the opening she needed. If childhood lead exposure really did produce criminal behavior in adults, you'd expect that in states where consumption of leaded gasoline declined slowly, crime would decline slowly too. Conversely, in states where it declined quickly, crime would decline quickly. And that's exactly what she found.

Every time, the two curves fit each other astonishingly well. When I spoke to Nevin about this, I asked him if he had ever found a country that didn't fit the theory. "No," he replied. "Not one."

[The linked paper, open access, lists eight countries besides the USA.)

Just this year, Tulane University researcher Howard Mielke published a paper with demographer Sammy Zahran on the correlation of lead and crime at the city level. They studied six US cities that had both good crime data and good lead data going back to the '50s, and they found a good fit in every single one. In fact, Mielke has even studied lead concentrations at the neighborhood level in New Orleans and shared his maps with the local police. "When they overlay them with crime maps," he told me, "they realize they match up."

Groups of children have been followed from the womb to adulthood, and higher childhood blood lead levels are consistently associated with higher adult arrest rates for violent crimes.

(From the editor's summary of a linked paper: "For example, for every 5 μg/dl increase in blood lead levels at six years of age, the risk of being arrested for a violent crime as a young adult increased by almost 50% ")

because big cities have lots of cars in a small area, they also had high densities of atmospheric lead during the postwar era. But as lead levels in gasoline decreased, the differences between big and small cities largely went away. And guess what? The difference in murder rates went away too. Today, homicide rates are similar in cities of all sizes. It may be that violent crime isn't an inevitable consequence of being a big city after all.

(Last night I was saying the difference was urban vs. rural, and Martin I think was skeptical; I misremembered, it's big city vs. small city that have converge.)

Although both sexes are affected by lead, the neurological impact turns out to be greater among boys than girls.

Other recent studies link even minuscule blood lead levels with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Even at concentrations well below those usually considered safe—levels still common today—lead increases the odds of kids developing ADHD.

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/364420.html

http://www.aeonmagazine.com/living-together/james-palmer-chinese-youth/

Longish article on Chinese young adults and their relationship with their parents. Their parents survived the Cultural Revolution, and are described as obsessed with security to the point of amorality; lots of bribes, and approval of selling fake drugs to hospitals, and such. The youth are regressing to the secure human mean and want more normal lives and values, and get along better with their grandparents.

"Next door, in prosperous South Korea, with the longest unbroken
Confucian culture in the world, the elderly are poorer, more likely to
still be working, and four times more likely to kill themselves than the
already suicide-prone Korean young. The suicide rate among older
Chinese lags just behind Korea?s, and has tripled in the past decade."

"A Chinese acquaintance of mine, now in his fifties, once described
having to kill his own brother to stop him turning in their parents for
owning banned books."

***

NYC subway rider behavior http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/16/nyregion/subway-riders-quirks-studied.html

Austerity policies (austerian) may rest on bad arithmetic and accidentally missing data:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/16/holy-coding-error-batman/
http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/researchers-finally-replicated-reinhart-rogoff-and-there-are-serious-problems#.UW14rDQo2L4.twitter

Myths of Christian persecution and the Age of Martyrs http://chronicle.com/article/The-Myths-Behind-the-Age-of/137423/

URL says it all: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/04/how-we-got-all-this-great-data-on-american-baby-name-popularity/274989/

***

News is bad for your brain?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli

"In a 2001 study two scholars in Canada showed that comprehension
declines as the number of hyperlinks in a document increases. Why?
Because whenever a link appears, your brain has to at least make the
choice not to click, which in itself is distracting. News is an
intentional interruption system"

Transportation options in Jane Austen's world http://www.jasnanorcal.org/ink9.htm

***
Samaritans, the true Jews
http://geocurrents.info/cultural-geography/religion/jewish-or-not-the-samaritans-celebrate-passover-but-a-month-later
most inbred population

Karaites; also Torah+Joshua only, but use standard Passover date
http://geocurrents.info/cultural-geography/religion/karaites-who-are-they-and-where-do-they-live
Samaritans pre-Diaspora, Karaites 8th century Baghdad spinoff?
patrilineal
oldest synagogue in Jerusalem
The largest Karaite community in the U.S. (though mostly of Egyptian
rather than Crimean Karaim origin) resides not far from the GeoCurrents
base, in Daly City

Jews of India
http://geocurrents.info/population-geography/the-jews-of-india

Heterodox Zone
http://geocurrents.info/geopolitics/the-heterodox-zone

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/363311.html

http://www.thenation.com/print/article/secret-history-lead

Really long, but really good if you want to read an appalling tail of corporate malfeasance. GM and Sloan knew full well lead was poisonous, and they already knew of a fine anti-knock additive, ethanol. But you couldn't patent ethanol, while with patents on tetraethyl lead GM could make a profit on every gallon of gasoline sold. And there's conspiracy, and Caltech involvement (good) and companies still denying danger to this day. Quotes:

( Read more... )

As for General Motors, Du Pont, Standard Oil, Ethyl, Associated Octel and rest of the lead cabal, it's conceivable they'll be hauled into court sooner or later, which is one reason these companies all take such an active interest in so-called tort reform legislation. You would too, if you had been a key actor in one of the most tortious episodes of twentieth-century industrial history.

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/351863.html

short version
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/01/lead-crime-connection

Followup, including George Monbiot being skeptical, then convinced:
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/01/lead-and-crime-assessing-evidence
http://www.monbiot.com/2013/01/07/the-grime-behind-the-crime/

why leaded gasoline, or how corporations got what they already knew was a known neurotoxin into our gas supply (and it's still being made and sold to poor countries!)
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/01/how-did-lead-get-our-gasoline-anyway
http://www.thenation.com/print/article/secret-history-lead

contains links to 20 page articles on international lead levels
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/01/lead-and-crime-ill-be-melissa-harris-perry-show-sunday-10-am

lead paint and murder
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/01/does-lead-paint-produce-more-crime-too

Personal observation: American white flight from the cities may have been motivated by a mix of justifiable fear of crime and less justifiable fear of black people, but in retrospect getting away from all the lead was sensible too. People are moving back now, to cities with lower crime rates (in fact, crime rates matching those of smaller cities) and lower lead levels to endanger one's children.

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/351386.html

From Pinker's Better Angels I learned of the OECD-wide rise in crime rates in the 1960s and the fall in the 1990s. He wasn't sure why, and even speculated about Sixties values and disrespect for authority having an effect. Elsewhere, I've heard of childhood lead exposure being connected ot IQ drops and higher crime rates. But this makes it sound like a much more solid case, and one with primary responsibility for the crime wave. It's long, and in two parts, but well worth reading.

A few snips:

Like many good theories, the gasoline lead hypothesis helps explain some things we might not have realized even needed explaining. For example, murder rates have always been higher in big cities than in towns and small cities. We're so used to this that it seems unsurprising, but Nevin points out that it might actually have a surprising explanation—because big cities have lots of cars in a small area, they also had high densities of atmospheric lead during the postwar era. But as lead levels in gasoline decreased, the differences between big and small cities largely went away. And guess what? The difference in murder rates went away too. Today, homicide rates are similar in cities of all sizes. It may be that violent crime isn't an inevitable consequence of being a big city after all.

***

Lead in soil doesn't stay in the soil. Every summer, like clockwork, as the weather dries up, all that lead gets kicked back into the atmosphere in a process called resuspension. The zombie lead is back to haunt us.

Mark Laidlaw, a doctoral student who has worked with Mielke, explains how this works: People and pets track lead dust from soil into houses, where it's ingested by small children via hand-to-mouth contact. Ditto for lead dust generated by old paint inside houses. This dust cocktail is where most lead exposure today comes from.

***

Put this all together and the benefits of lead cleanup could be in the neighborhood of $200 billion per year. In other words, an annual investment of $20 billion for 20 years could produce returns of 10-to-1 every single year for decades to come. Those are returns that Wall Street hedge funds can only dream of.

And one thought of my own: could America's higher rates of violent crime be connected to our greater car culture? I don't know how far that goes: these days our homicide rate is high but I'm not sure our other crime rates are relatively high, and all that suburban building might have brought lots of people to new 'clean' soil. But worth a thought.

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/350661.html

A long piece by Adam Gopnik on the mass incarceration of America, theories about Northern (rehabilitation 'science') and Southern (control the darkies) causes, and why NYC's crime rate plummeted. Well worth reading.

Most wealthy societies imprison at about 100 per 100,000; the US does at 700 per 100,000.

Stuntz startlingly suggests that the Bill of Rights is a terrible document with which to start a justice system—much inferior to the exactly contemporary French Declaration of the Rights of Man.

The trouble with the Bill of Rights, he argues, is that it emphasizes process and procedure rather than principles. The Declaration of the Rights of Man says, Be just! The Bill of Rights says, Be fair! Instead of announcing general principles—no one should be accused of something that wasn’t a crime when he did it; cruel punishments are always wrong; the goal of justice is, above all, that justice be done—it talks procedurally.

This emphasis, Stuntz thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice.

The other argument—the Southern argument—is that this story puts too bright a face on the truth.

Ouch!

For-profit prisons:

the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:

He then talks about the wave of urban crime, especially in NYC, from the 1960s to 1980s. Real stuff, not conservative bogeymen.

And then, a decade later, crime started falling: across the country by a standard measure of about forty per cent; in New York City by as much as eighty per cent. By 2010, the crime rate in New York had seen its greatest decline since the Second World War; in 2002, there were fewer murders in Manhattan than there had been in any year since 1900.

One thing he teaches us is how little we know. The forty per cent drop across the continent—indeed, there was a decline throughout the Western world— took place for reasons that are as mysterious in suburban Ottawa as they are in the South Bronx.

But the additional forty per cent drop in crime that seems peculiar to New York finally succumbs to Zimring’s analysis

Zimring says the extra decline came raising the cost of entry into crime. Hot spot policing, and stop and frisk policies of youth, which hit poor neighborhoods more, but the decline in crime also benefited them more. Long prison sentences aren't it -- NYC is actually locking up a lot fewer people than at the height of the crime wave, and has gone lax on drugs and prostitution.

“In 1961, twenty six percent of New York City’s population was minority African American or Hispanic. Now, half of New York’s population is—and what that does in an enormously hopeful way is to destroy the rude assumptions of supply side criminology -- more minorities, less crime. Oops.

Tangentially, an interesting idea:

the coming of cheap credit cards and state lotteries probably did as much to weaken the Mafia’s Five Families in New York, who had depended on loan sharking and numbers running, as the F.B.I. could.

===

Wow, I had a crime tag in use already.

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/316414.html

Study of middle class American families:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304450004577277482565674646.html?fb_ref=wsj_share_FB&fb_source=home_oneline

American children seemed relatively helpless compared with those in
other cultures she and colleagues had observed.

Another video clip shows a girl around 5 years of age in Peru's Amazon
region climbing a tall tree to harvest papaya, and helping haul logs
thicker than her leg to stoke a fire.

In 22 of 30 families, children frequently ignored or resisted appeals to
help, according to a study published in the journal Ethos in 2009. In
the remaining eight families, the children weren't asked to do much.

Relevant report: anecdotal observations of French childraising: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204740904577196931457473816.html
and thoughts on "the teenage mind", caught between early puberty and late responsibility
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203806504577181351486558984.html

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/315871.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/realestate/how-many-people-can-manhattan-hold.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
Manhattan has 1.6 million, had 2.3 million people in 1910.
Workday population doubles to 3.9 million. Thanksgiving Day Parade can see 5 million.
Top Hong Kong density would mean 2.6 million.
Kowloon Walled City density could mean 65 million.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/03/los-angeles-seeks-pedestrians/1410/

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2012/03/why-driverless-cars-would-be-bad-cities-and-suburbs-alike/1393/

location affordability
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2012/02/how-more-expensive-housing-can-actually-cost-you-less/1347/
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/kbenfield/cnt_takes_location_efficiency.html

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/314758.html

http://www.law.upenn.edu/blogs/dskeel/archives/2008/03/race_and_crimestuntz.html

Article argues that inner cities get too much drug enforcement policing and not nearly enough violent crime policing -- clearance rate for violent crimes there being much lower than in white suburbs. Makes brief analogy to the "boots on the ground" and surge policies in Iraq; brings up lack of local control of police and prosecutors.

Comments bring up other factors, like "no snitch" culture in the neighborhoods; cause and effect between police ineffectiveness and local distrust of police might be entangled.

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Page Summary

How the South skews America
supermarkets, race, and class
The case against lead, revisited
Links: Chinese, martyrs, Jews, babies, and why lists of links are bad for you
The secret history of leaded gasoline
More on lead
Lead and Crime
The Caging of America
The American Family
Manhattan density, and benefits
Inner cities, underpolicing and Iraq

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