will UTSA be just for rich kids?

Hannah Carney's recent article in The Texas Observer addresses the provocative question: are Texas' public universities just for rich kids? Although data pertinent to this issue are limited, she cites evidence which suggests that this may be the case for at least some public universities in the state. For example, median parent income of UT Austin students is almost twice that for households statewide. According to Carney, "The numbers expose a higher education system that’s suffering from profound economic inequality. The more “elite” the university, the less representative it tends to be of the state’s economic diversity." In addition to difficulties with financing an education, she goes on to connect the issue to enrollment policies, implying that affirmative action for racial and ethnic minority students may be a bit misdirected. A fairer approach, she contends, would have admission at least partially hinged on students' class backgrounds. In all, Carney's analysis is consistent with social reproduction explanations of inequality which hold that schooling in capitalist societies primarily serves to maintain privilege among the haves, while neglecting the interests of those toward the bottom of the class structure.

What about UTSA? It may not be your impression that our students largely come from affluent homes, but what of social class composition down the line? Will continued growth lessen diversity by tightening admission requirements and, particularly what of Tier 1? If realized, will it mean a student body that replicates UT Austin's?

Note: no analysis for UTSA appears in Carney's article, but at its end she does link data for entering students. Although obviously dated (collected in 2004), what does it suggest about economic diversity among our students?

educating black boys

See video at 
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/aljazeeracorrespondent/2012/10/201210249148948252.html 
The following post is a direct quote from that site.

Baltimore, Maryland has come to be known as 'Charm City' because of its harbour, which attracts a vibrant nightlife and thriving tourism business. But just beyond the harbour's calm waters is one of the toughest and most violent inner cities in the US. Baltimore is also home to Al Jazeera presenter Tony Harris and in this episode of Al Jazeera Correspondent he takes us on an up close and personal journey to his old neighbourhood to witness the challenges facing black youth today as they struggle to get out of the dead end of life on inner city streets. Most of the crime in Baltimore is committed by black males with other blacks as victims, making black males an easy target for the police. And many believe that the stereotyping of black kids starts at an early age in the US--as as early as grade school. In this film, Harris examines how the education system has failed black boys and reflects upon why he managed to make it out successfully while so many of his friends did not. A visit to his former high school reveals the desperation felt by both the pupils and the teachers. "School and criminal justice systems biased against black boys; all echoes of my childhood. But I managed to avoid the trap of Baltimore's cycle of poverty and violence," he explains. "But now I was going back to my hometown to get to the bottom of what I considered the new civil rights fight in America--educating black boys."

...a thousand cuts

what happened to The American Dream?

This post was contributed by Tara McQuay, UTSA student in Miller's SOC 3013 class.

Although The American Dream says that hard work will lead to wealth and success, it doesn't seem to apply to most of us. Indeed, the smallest economic returns go to those generally laboring the hardest of all: the working poor. In the previous post, billionaire Thomas Peterffy argues in his anti-Obama ad that America's rich will lose motivation to work if they are required to pay more taxes. But while preaching the value of hard work, he fails to note that the rich have virtually monopolized income gains over recent years. Reflecting on the unequal opportunity for financial security that the class structure presents, the late Beth Shulman, in her 2005 book, The Betrayal of Work, was one of the first to examine the diminishing well-being of the working poor. In an interview on PBS's NOW in 2007 (view here, starting at about the 12:20 mark), she observed that worker productivity has grown significantly, but this has not trickled down to those in the bottom reaches of the American class structure. Indeed, "The top 1% is garnering 80% of income gains." (Today, it's over 90% going to the top 1%, according to Saenz). With this being said, how is it possible for most American workers, and particularly the poor, to sustain their dream of a better life when their incomes remain so low and stagnant that they continue to struggle just to get by?

ad suggestion: Obama = socialist (or worse?)

A new nationally distributed television ad implies Obama and the Democrats are leading us down a "slippery slope" towards socialism. Thomas Peterffy, the Hungarian-immigrant founder of a discount brokerage chain, both independently sponsored and appears in a sixty-second message that takes him from a boy in his impoverished, communist homeland to a self-made billionaire, a transformation only possible because of the freedoms and opportunities available in America. He warns specifically that "America's wealth comes from the efforts of people striving for success. Take away their incentive with badmouthing success and you take away the wealth that helps us take care of the needy. Yes, in socialism the rich will be poorer--but the poor will also be poorer. People will lose interest in really working hard and creating jobs." 
Read more at http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/10/10/rich-worried-and-buying-ad-time/

super-rich feel dissed by Obama

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This Colbert Report video touches on the growing antipathy of the super-rich towards President Obama, despite the fact they have enjoyed incredible prosperity over the span of his term. Colbert particularly takes off on a recent article that appeared in The New Yorker about hedge-fund investor anger about Obama's insufficient rhetorical respect for such "wealth creators." 

what to do with your wealth? get help at "Mansion"

In this age of growing income disparities and economic hardship, Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal has chosen to further glamorize the rich and their wealth by starting a section called Mansion. According to the launch press release, the new section will appear weekly in the paper copy and daily at WSJ.com. “The mantra for real estate has always been location, location, location – the location for the most intelligent, original, trustworthy and insightful journalism on prestige property is now The Wall Street Journal,” said Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of Dow Jones & Company and managing editor of The Wall Street Journal. “We all like to think of our home as a mansion, even if it is a humble abode, and we all have the license to aspire, so we have created Mansion to be the home of both aspiration and real estate realization.” For more information on the addition, see introductory video. 

Unfortunately, it does not appear that Mansion will likely offer the kind of coverage about the lifestyles of the rich that readers came to appreciate in Robert Frank's recently discontinued WSJ blog, The Wealth Report. However, Frank's work is now available at CNBC's Inside Wealth.

tall poppy syndrome

Amy Stein and Stacy Mehrfar have just published a collection of photos which explores tall poppy syndrome in Australia. As Amy states in a recent interview with Benjamin Starr, “Stacy was visiting NYC from Sydney and... in the course of discussing life in Australia she mentioned the term. I immediately said that would be a great book. The term was so strange and arresting to me. When we realized that it represented a viewpoint and practice so far from ideas of American individualism and exceptionalism we knew that we potentially had an interesting project.” For rest of brief interview and selected images go to http://www.visualnews.com/2012/09/29/tall-poppy-syndrome-on-a-cultural-phenomenon/.

Given current election campaign dynamics, perhaps the ideological proponents of great wealth would do well to address critics in relation to this particularly "unAmerican" concept.

dissecting "the 47 percent"

Candidate Mitt Romney continues to wield a very blunt scalpel in his dissection of the U.S. class structure. A video clip from a May 2012 speech to prospective contributors has ignited the most recent campaign firestorm. In it, he states that "47 percent" of Americans "view themselves as victims," and he's not interested in reaching out to them. The clip, initially published in a Mother Jones article by David Corn, will no doubt receive big press over the duration of the campaign. Romney goes on to claim the "47 percent" are government dependents, who pay no federal income taxes. Juliet Lapidos in a New York Times article examines the 46.4 percent of Americans who paid no federal income taxes during 2011. This population, quoting Lapidos, has the following characteristics:

• They are more likely to live in Republican states. The states with the highest percentage of non-filers, with the exception of Florida and New Mexico, are solidly red. Ezra Klein calculates that Mr. Romney will receive “96 electoral votes from the ‘taker’ states” while Mr. Obama will receive 5. (29 are tossups.)
• More than one-fifth are elderly. David Frum says they’re “people who pay no income taxes because their income takes the form of Social Security.”
• Most of them pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes than Mr. Romney. Here’s Ezra Klein again: “Among the American who paid no federal income taxes in 2011, 61 percent paid payroll taxes—which means they have jobs and, when you account for both sides of the payroll tax, they paid 15.3 percent of their income in taxes, which is higher than the 13.9 percent that Romney paid.”
• Some of them are simply too poor to pay federal taxes. In 2011, 18.1 percent of households paid neither income tax nor payroll taxes. Within that group, more than half are elderly; over one-third are nonelderly with annual income under $20,000.
• Some of them are wealthy, and manage to slip into Mr. Romney’s dependent-victim category due to exemptions and deductions. As ABC noted in June, “20,752 households that reported earning more than $200,000 in 2009 paid no federal income taxes. About 1,500 of those tax-free Americans were millionaires.”

A series of graphics providing greater detail about those Americans who paid no federal income taxes during 2011 is available at NPR.   

Update: see Jamelle Bouie's July 2014 Slate article for a history on the use of the "47 percent" meme among conservative politicians and pundits.

income, unemployment, and foreclosure: interactive map of U.S. states and counties

NPR has published a handy interactive map of the U.S., providing recent data relevant to household income, unemployment, and housing foreclosures. Data, color-coded per county, allow for easy visual comparisons between states and regions. Users may drill down to obtain precise county level figures.

why prole day? how about bourgeoisie day?

Why is there a holiday set aside to celebrate labor? This brief video from the History Channel provides an overview of its origins within the context of class division and strife. On the other hand, Gerald Skoning in an article today for that bastion of capitalism, The Wall Street Journal, asks "Why Not Corporation Day?": "Corporation Day would be a joyous celebration of capitalism, a three-day national holiday honoring the great industrialist pioneers, business barons and tycoons of our nation. We would pay grateful respects to the Mellons, Carnegies, Gettys, Fords, Rockefellers and, yes, the Kochs, for their contributions to our country's prosperity." 

Happy Labor Day!

Today's Labor Day edition of The Washington Post includes a brief animated video depicting the status of labor relative to the pro-deregulation position that is being articulated by Romney-Ryan. In your opinion, does this cartoon provide further support for claims by conservative critics, as suggested in this video, that mainstream media evinces a decided "liberal bias"? 

single and unequal

This post was written by Paul Dean and originally appeared in The Sociological Cinema. 

In this video, The New York Times notes that "as a single mother of three, Jessica Schairer falls in the middle of a sharp debate about how economic inequality is increasingly linked to changes in family structure" (see accompanying article and infographic). Through Jessica's story as a working class mother, it illustrates how family structure can exacerbate already existing class inequalities. Jessica explains her stress trying to raise her children as a single parent, including the difficulties of getting home and needing to meet the needs of children and her inability to pay for all the activities her children would like to do. This is contrasted with her married supervisor at work, who is able to rely on a partner when going home from work. The narrator notes that like Jessica's supervisor, college-educated people are more likely to marry and that their combined resources help provide an additional advantage in raising their income, which provides additional advantages conferred to their children. The narrator also notes that "many children of single parents flourish, but studies have shown that on average, children raised by single parents are more likely to fall into poverty, do poorly in school, or become teenage parents." The accompanying article provides many additional statistics. For example, it notes that "estimates vary widely, but scholars have said that changes in marriage patterns — as opposed to changes in individual earnings — may account for as much as 40 percent of the growth in certain measures of inequality." Viewers can be encouraged to consider how class and family structure intersect to shape intergenerational economic inequality, and how low-income workers face more job-related difficulties in meeting family needs as compared to salaried professional workers.

Image by Stephen Crowley/New York Times

do men really earn more than women?

This entry was written by Lester Andrist and originally posted at The Sociological Cinema.


A few months ago, sociologist Phillip Cohen blogged about a feminist viral statistic meme, which claims that women own less than 1% of all the world's wealth. It turns out, a credible source for this figure can't be traced and is unlikely to exist. As Cohen's post reminds us, the very statistics that shape how we understand the world are sometimes little more than elaborately disguised rumors. So what about other influential statistics? What about that viral statistic which states that women earn about 77 cents for every dollar men earn? When people have denied gender inequality exists and when they have implied it is unnecessary to enact policies aimed at eradicating it, the 77-cent statistic has often come to the rescue and thwarted derailment, so whether the statistic is accurate is an important question. In the above clip, Republican Party strategist Alex Castellanos asserts the 77-cent statistic is untrue. Could it be just another viral statistic meme without a source? The short answer is no. The longer answer is that 77 cents is an average, and the number varies based on profession, age, and race. The 77-cent statistic can easily be traced to a respectable source--the Census Bureau (the U.S. Bureau of Labor calculates the number differently and arrives at about 81 cents on the male dollar). The point is society needs an accurate description of the world, lest our dominant understanding of the world become solely derived from eloquently stated assertions by elites with narrow interests. In part, this clip makes a good case for the potential importance of sociology, and in particular, a sociology that checks its sources. It is also important to have a sociology that is capable of setting the record straight, if only to rebuke those talking heads who seek to confuse the public with baseless assertions. In this clip, Alex Castellanos' baseless assertion begins at about the 7:35 mark.

Marx rolls over in grave

A Reuters release notes that bank cards with a likeness of Karl Marx have proven to be popular among those living in the former East Germany. A subsequent NPR story has generated some interesting twitter hashtags for suggested logos (e.g., Revolution of the Proletariat: Priceless. #marxcard).