Sociological Stew

Zombie America - installment 2

2012-01-24T15:10:00.005-05:00

(Second in a series)

America is in decline. The signs are all around us. These are the words with which I began this series, but I was wrong - it isn't just America, its the entire advanced industrialized world.

Advanced capitalist industrial societies are all zombies - we all died some time ago, we just didn't notice we'd become the walking dead.

The first indicator of this decline that I talked about in the first installment is the desertion of communities, first small towns, and now urban neighborhoods and cities. All my examples were from the United States, because until today, I was unaware that the exact same trend is occurring in Europe.

Yesterday, I began reading a fascinating, almost lyrically written, work of non-fiction The Coming Population Crash And Our Planet's Surprising Future by Fred Pearce (Beacon Press 2010). There on page 87, at the beginning of chapter 10, were these words:

"Even at eight p.m. on a sunny summer's evening, the roads were empty in Chemnitz [Germany], an industrial center known for forty years as Karl-Marx-Stadt. The tiny summer houses on suburban allotments were deserted. I have seen the derelict, rust belt landscapes of former industrial towns before--not least in England, on trains from Sheffield to Doncaster or Birmingham to Wolverhampton.But this world seemed drained of people. In Bavaria, I had asked if anyone ever went to Dresden or beyond. Most shuddered at the idea. I could have been asking about Chernobyl. Of course there were people about, but far fewer than there once were."

Pearce goes on to give details of the abandonment of the industries, towns and cities of the eastern portions of Germany. In the eastern town of Hoyerswerda the main municipal activity is tearing down buildings and "giving street after street "back to nature;" a description that readily fits the conditions of Detroit in the U.S. as well.

The film below examines the dismantling of Detroit:

The second indicator that America is a zombie society, is the dismantling of basic public amenities such as roads, water systems, sewer systems that were once assumed to be part of modern community life.

I live in one of the few areas of America that never achieved those things. In the coal fields of eastern Kentucky where I live, municipal water systems have never reached more than 30 percent of the residents of this region. Municipal sewage service reaches only about 20 percent. The last significant expansion of water and sewer services in my county was 10 years ago (when my neighborhood got "city" water). Sewer was suppose to follow that within a few years, but never did. As I read reports about the retrenchment of such services in more urban communities, I begin to realize that sewer probably never is coming to my neighborhood.

Paved roads are being dismantled in America. Across the nation, smaller municipalities are finding that they can no longer afford the costs for the petroleum based components of paved roads.

In a Wall Street Journal article, "Roads to Ruin: Towns Rip Up the Pavement: Asphalt Is Replaced By Cheaper Gravel; 'Back to Stone Age'" reporter By Lauren Etter describes the process in widening phenomenon:

"Paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue. State money for local roads was cut in many places amid budget shortfalls.

The heavy machines at work in Jamestown, N.D., are grinding the asphalt off road beds, grading the bed and packing the material back down to create a new road surface.

In Michigan, at least 38 of the 83 counties have converted some asphalt roads to gravel in recent years. Last year, South Dakota turned at least 100 miles of asphalt road surfaces to gravel. Counties in Alabama and Pennsylvania have begun downgrading asphalt roads to cheaper chip-and-seal road, also known as "poor man's pavement." Some counties in Ohio are simply letting roads erode to gravel."

Roads aren't the only modern amenity to take a hit in recent years. In Jefferson County, Alabama malfeasance, fraud, construction problems, rampant political corruption and a series of debt and derivative deals that went sour have resulted in the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history. Soaring costs have meant soaring rates for water and sewer, that the poor of Jefferson County cannot pay. The poor of Jefferson County have found themselves cut off from municipal water and make due with bottled water for drinking and bathing, and setting up portable toilets in their yards in place of sewer service. That the poor are doing with less is nothing new in America. The most fascinating element of the story of Jefferson County, is that the middle class and affluent in Jefferson Counties suburban communities are responding to the high rates for water and sewer by installing individual septic systems. ("Third world in the U.S." BBC World, 14 December 2011 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16172522

When affluent suburban communities start moving backwards, from municipal sewage service to private septic systems (and all the environmental problems those pose), something is very, very wrong in America. Something vital has died.

This morning I read a comment following an Internet news article by some anonymous reader of libertarian persuasion, who argued that there would be no loss of services like police, fire, and rescue workers, when (not if) libertarians were successful in cutting federal taxes and the size of federal government. This clueless commenter suggested that people would willingly start paying higher local governments taxes to provide all those services. As someone who has made a life study of community sociology, I know that tax austerity has its roots in local governments, and that the pressures for tax cuts, and the service cuts those tax losses make necessary are far more acute at the community and county level than at the federal level.

When towns are tearing up roads and cutting off water and sewer lines due to low tax mentality, how would communities ever compensate for the loss of federal funds for necessary services (like police, fire, rescue)?

Wealth Creators

2012-01-04T13:04:00.001-05:00

I’ve heard a lot of politicians talk about tax cuts for the “job creators” in recent months, but what are we doing for the “wealth creators”? The only way to create wealth is through work, digging things, cutting things, building things, assembling things, cooking things, selling things, and providing services that people want.

Wealth isn’t created by the wealthy, they only gather it up and move it around; wealth is created by the workers – the coal miners, the plumbers, the assembly line workers, the burger flippers, the house cleaners, the nurses, the road pavers, the truck drivers, the waitresses, and computer programmers.

We need to start talking about what we are going to do for the “wealth creators” in this country.

Zombie America - installment 1

2012-01-01T21:34:00.001-05:00

(First in a series)

I was awake most of the night last night (New Years Eve/New Years Morning) thinking about things over which I have no control. The downward spiral of obsessive thought began with something very personal - my mother's mental decline into dementia - but I was quickly distracted into much more far reaching national, international, even species (human species) issues over which I have no control.

America is in decline. The signs are all around us. I started thinking about those signs in the wee hours last night (and will discuss some of them in a few moments). For decades I have been waiting for the "beginning of the end," the moment when it all begins to unravel, the day that the "shit-hits-the-fan." [I'm currently reading a right-wing paranoid post-apocalyptic sci-fi mystery that does a good job of imagining the consequences but not the causes of the day "The Shit Hits the Fan."] Last night, it came to me that that day, that moment came and went a long time ago. We're on the downward slide, not waiting to go over the crest.

We probably never will be able to fix a firm date on the beginning of the end of United States as a developed first world country. The causes are far too complex and are inevitable results of the multiplicity of contradictions buried within industrial capitalism. If you're the kind of person that wants to understand the whys and look for the beginnings, there are plenty of good books you can read, such as:

Grant McConnell's Private Power and American Democracy (Vintage Books 1966)
James O'Connor's The Corporations and the State: Essays in Theory of Capitalism and Imperialism (Harper and Row 1974) and The Fiscal Crisis of the State (St. Martins Press 1973). [The latter book goes to show that social theorists on the left understood about the dangers of deficit spending decades before the first Tea Partier took up the chant].
Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (Avon Books 1977)
Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison's The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry (Basic Books 1982)
Donella Randers, Jorgen Meadows, and Dennis Randers' Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update (Chelsea Green Publishing 2004) [original Limits to Growth was 1971]

Most of these books have more recent editions, but I refer you to the originals so that you can see that causes of Americas decline was thoroughly analyzed and well understood thirty or more years ago; some people did bother to listen, they just lacked the numbers, the money or the political power to do anything about it.

What are these signs of decline in to third world status that I'm talking about? This isn't an exhaustive catalog, just a few telling indicators.

The first sign is the abandonment, boarding up and eventual leveling of American towns and urban and suburban neighborhoods.

It began in the rural areas. The long term demographic transition of industrialization, that began in the 1880's in the United States, involves the shift in population from rural areas, small towns and villages In the 1950's the declining population of rural communities is viewed as progress. "How you gonna keep them down on the farm, after they've seen Paree?" asks a popular song of the 20th century, speaking of soldiers returning from World War I and World War II. Mechanization and science take over farming, fewer farm workers are needed, and industrial growth in the nations cities and suburbs beckon young people from farm to city. American government farm policy of the 1950's was to actively wring the people out of agriculture.

There was a brief exurban surge in the late 1960's and early 1970's, of "back to the land" folks, former hippies, disenchanted urbanites and the first trickle of elderly retirees taking advantage of improved social security benefits to return to their childhood home towns. I helped document this five or six year demographic reversal for sociologist and demographer Thomas Ford at the University of Kentucky in 1976. But it was short lived and the larger population shift away from rural areas re-emerged in the late 1970's.

It's was then that we begin to realize that there's something wrong, and that people who wanted to be farmers and small town dwellers were being forced off their land and out of their communities. By the early 1980's farmers started to organize nationally and regionally, and popular culture got on board with institutions like Farm Aid (first concert in 1985), to assist farmers and farming communities facing crushing debt from mechanization.

But rural farming communities were not the only ones hemorrhaging population, the mechanization of coal mining and timbering both, helped depopulate non-farming rural areas as well.

Today its become so common place that we've stopped noticing it, stopped being aware that far from stopping, it is getting worse than ever. You drive through small rural towns through out this nation and what you see are empty store fronts, boarded up windows, and empty lots where buildings have been torn down. Around those empty down towns, there are empty houses, in various stages of decay and demolition.

But it didn't stop in the small towns. The industrial cities that rural people flocked to from 1880 to 1970, are now experiencing abandonment, decay and desolation. We noticed it first in the inner city slums of east coast cities in the 1960's. Factories moved out, property values skyrocketed, middle class families moved out, and slum landlords turned once prime housing into substandard apartments for poor people who paid exorbitant rates for tiny pockets of ill-maintained space. Then along came urban renewal and gentrification in the 1960's and the 1970's. Convention centers and upscale shops got built, upper-middle class urban professionals renovated 100 year old row houses in "transitional" neighborhoods, and built rental apartments in their basements. Only the deterioration of the inner cities continued around the convention centers, and not all urban neighborhoods made the "transition".

In some cities whole neighborhoods became ghost towns, boarded over, condemned and in some cases razed. While portions of most of the large industrial cities of the east coast, and upper mid-west have been lost, there are some cities, like Detroit that are more striking than most http://zfein.com/photography/detroit/index.html.

Photo of Detroit skyline copyright by Z. Fein Photography

Only about half the population lives within Detroit city limits compared to the city's height in the 1960's. Gone are the automotive jobs, and so are the people, leaving behind empty skyscrapers, office buildings, schools, police stations, and thousands of empty homes, and empty lots where homes once stood.

We know these things, we see the pictures of the deteriorating urban landscape in our movies and television shows, as the back drop to gritty stories of crime and drug wars. We forget that those are not movie sets, but are real places that are no longer habitable neighborhoods and communities.

The second indicator of decline will be discussed in the next installment.

Cleaning Up Air Pollution?

2011-12-22T10:30:00.000-05:00

"Unveiling a historic rule, the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday announced the first national requirement for the nation's coal-fired power plants to reduce emissions of mercury, arsenic, cyanide and other toxic pollutants." EPA announces historic rule to clean or shut coal-burning power plants McClatchy#storylink=cpy#storylink=cpy

I applaud this action by the EPA. It's necessary and long overdue. But I wonder about the net effect of these regulations on air quality, at least in the Kentucky coalfields where I live.

Electricity rates in Kentucky have gone up dramatically in the past several years. Electricity in eastern Kentucky is entirely generated from coal fired plants, and the price of coal has been rising, as more and more Kentucky coal goes overseas to feed industrial growth in places like China. Also regional utility companies face necessary upgrades to aging infrastructure, whose age and deterioration became all too apparent during the severe December and January storms of the past five years.

Although still among the lowest in the nation, the per kilowatt rate in eastern Kentucky is more than double what it was when we moved into the area 15 years ago. The EPA requirements are necessary, and long over due, and they will create construction and other types of jobs to meet the new requirements, but, they will also raise electricty rates even more.

Here's the catch. This winter, before any new regulations go into effect, I have observed that residents of my rural Kentucky neighborhood are responding to the higher electricity rates by shifting to wood and coal burning stoves for more of their heating. While at least one of my neighbors has always done some heating with wood, this year, they appear to be doing 100 percent of their heating with wood. So 24 hours a day, seven days a week, wood smoke pours from their chimney and fills the neighborhood. Several other chimneys within a quarter mile of me are also chugging out the smoke at rates not observed in previous years. At least one or two of these are burning coal rather than wood. Depending upon atmospheric and wind conditions, my home and yard can be totally engulfed by a thick miasma of asthma inducing smoke.

If electricity rates go up, even more of my neighbors will start using wood and coal -- both things are readily available inexpensively in our rural area -- and the air quality of at least my local region will suffer accordingly.

Where are people from?

2011-07-01T17:16:00.004-04:00

There are many ways in which survey research can be inaccurate, but one would not think that "where do you live?" would be all that open to interpretation. This interesting piece by Daily Kos writer David Nir, shows the dilemmas that can confront survey researchers.

Daily Kos/SEIU Station of the Nation Poll: Where are our respondents from?

The graphic in the article (above), places the dots based on the Area Code and Zip Code of the respondent, the color of the dot is based on where the respondent SAYS they are from (Northeast, Midwest, South and West).

How Can We Value Necessary Work?

2011-05-15T13:52:00.001-04:00

A friend of mine posted a link to a very interesting blog post: Being Blog - The Work We Value, The Intelligence We Ignore: Is the Work that Made America Great Valued Any Longer? The focus of the post was on the testimony from Mike Rowe, the creator and host of Dirty Jobs, before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation about the current contradiction in the American labor force. Today, while we have high unemployment, we also have thousands of skilled, blue-collar, manual labor jobs that are going unfilled. Here is Mr. Rowe's testimony in its entirety:

“Chairman Rockefeller, Ranking Member Hutchison and members of this committee, my name is Mike Rowe, and I want to thank you all very much for the opportunity to testify before you today.

I’m here today because of my grandfather.

His name was Carl Knobel, and he made his living in Baltimore as a master electrician. He was also a plumber, a mechanic, a mason, and a carpenter. Everyone knew him as a jack-of-all-trades. I knew him as a magician.

For most of his life, my grandfather woke up clean and came home dirty. In between, he accomplished things that were nothing short of miraculous. Some days he might re-shingle a roof. Or rebuild a motor. Or maybe run electricity out to our barn. He helped build the church I went to as a kid, and the farmhouse my brothers and I grew up in. He could fix or build anything, but to my knowledge he never once read the directions. He just knew how stuff worked.

I remember one Saturday morning when I was 12. I flushed the toilet in the same way I always had. The toilet however, responded in a way that was completely out of character. There was a rumbling sound, followed by a distant gurgle. Then, everything that had gone down reappeared in a rather violent and spectacular fashion.

Naturally, my grandfather was called in to investigate, and within the hour I was invited to join he and my dad in the front yard with picks and shovels.

By lunch, the lawn was littered with fragments of old pipe and mounds of dirt. There was welding and pipe-fitting, blisters and laughter, and maybe some questionable language. By sunset we were completely filthy. But a new pipe was installed, the dirt was back in the hole, and our toilet was back on its best behavior. It was one of my favorite days ever.

Thirty years later in San Francisco when my toilet blew up again. This time, I didn't participate in the repair process. I just called my landlord, left a check on the kitchen counter, and went to work. When I got home, the mess was cleaned up and the problem was solved. As for the actual plumber who did the work, I never even met him.

It occurred to me that I had become disconnected from a lot of things that used to fascinate me. I no longer thought about where my food came from, or how my electricity worked, or who fixed my pipes, or who made my clothes. There was no reason to. I had become less interested in how things got made, and more interested in how things got bought.

At this point my grandfather was well into his 80s, and after a long visit with him one weekend, I decided to do a TV show in his honor. Today, Dirty Jobs is still on the air, and I am here before this committee, hoping to say something useful. So, here it is.

I believe we need a national PR Campaign for Skilled Labor. A big one. Something that addresses the widening skills gap head on, and reconnects the country with the most important part of our workforce.

Right now, American manufacturing is struggling to fill 200,000 vacant positions. There are 450,000 openings in trades, transportation and utilities. The skills gap is real, and it’s getting wider. In Alabama, a third of all skilled tradesmen are over 55. They’re retiring fast, and no one is there to replace them.

Alabama’s not alone. A few months ago in Atlanta I ran into Tom Vilsack, our Secretary of Agriculture. Tom told me about a governor who was unable to move forward on the construction of a power plant. The reason was telling. It wasn't a lack of funds. It wasn't a lack of support. It was a lack of qualified welders.

In general, we’re surprised that high unemployment can exist at the same time as a skilled labor shortage. We shouldn't be. We’ve pretty much guaranteed it.

In high schools, the vocational arts have all but vanished. We’ve elevated the importance of “higher education” to such a lofty perch that all other forms of knowledge are now labeled “alternative.” Millions of parents and kids see apprenticeships and on-the-job-training opportunities as “vocational consolation prizes,” best suited for those not cut out for a four-year degree. And still, we talk about millions of “shovel ready” jobs for a society that doesn’t encourage people to pick up a shovel.

In a hundred different ways, we have slowly marginalized an entire category of critical professions, reshaping our expectations of a “good job” into something that no longer looks like work. A few years from now, an hour with a good plumber — if you can find one — is going to cost more than an hour with a good psychiatrist. At which point we’ll all be in need of both.

I came here today because guys like my grandfather are no less important to civilized life than they were 50 years ago. Maybe they’re in short supply because we don’t acknowledge them they way we used to. We leave our check on the kitchen counter, and hope the work gets done. That needs to change.

My written testimony includes the details of several initiatives designed to close the skills gap, all of which I've had the privilege to participate in. Go Build Alabama, I Make America, and my own modest efforts through Dirty Jobs and mikeroweWORKS. I’m especially proud to announce “Discover Your Skills,” a broad-based initiative from Discovery Communications that I believe can change perceptions in a meaningful way.

I encourage you to support these efforts, because closing the skills gap doesn't just benefit future tradesmen and the companies desperate to hire them. It benefits people like me, and anyone else who shares my addiction to paved roads, reliable bridges, heating, air conditioning, and indoor plumbing.
The skills gap is a reflection of what we value. To close the gap, we need to change the way the country feels about work.”

The gap that Mr. Rowe speaks about is entirely real. There are many fields of skilled, blue-collar, manual labor where jobs go unfilled, and workers are desperately needed. But his analysis of why we have this problem is woefully simplistic and lacking. This is no simple matter of attitudes and values, but the result of a complexity of forces that have reshaped our economy and the choices of individuals within that economy.

Which means that it is an issue too complex to be dealt with in one little blog post. However, let's look at two issues briefly: 1) the physical demands of the jobs, opportunities for advancement and retirement, and 2) the issue of health care.

While it is true that most young people think only about the job they will get when they graduate, how much it pays and what its like, their parents and teachers often encourage them to think about longer term issues, such as opportunities for advancement, and how the job will fit them as they age. The skilled manual labor jobs that are going unfilled in our economy are jobs for younger people, with flexibility and strength. The majority of people are unable to continue with physically demanding jobs past their fifties.

Unlike Mr. Rowe (who puts the check on the counter and comes back to work completed), I've been present and actively observing all the plumbing, septic, electrical and construction work done to install my new double wide. What I've noticed is that all the men (no women) who have been using shovels to dig, climbing in ditches, crawling under houses, and climbing ladders have been under 45, and all the men who have been yelling instructions, checking paper work, assigning tasks, and supervising have been over 55. Now the problem is that for each over 55 year old doing supervisory work, there are three to five young men carrying out the physical labor, meaning that not every young man who goes into manual labor will have an opportunity to become a supervisory worker or construction business owner. So what does that person do when they hit 50 and their knees no longer bend easily, and their back spasms every time they try to crawl under a house, or pick up a load of bricks, or climb a ladder to install wiring?

Part of the problem of getting young people to go into skilled manual labor fields of work, is the problem of what happens to them when they hit middle age and can no longer handle the physical demands of that job. We have to think seriously and realistically about how to provide work for older blue collar workers, that doesn't treat them as surplus labor to be thrown on the heap of long term unemployment and disability. As a society we are not currently doing well for our 45 to 65 year old blue collar workers. Young people know these workers as their parents and grandparents, and seeing what has happened to them is part of what deters them from going into those fields.

Related to this, of course, is the issue of retirement. A person going into manual labor has to have a realistic expectation that they will be able to retire while they still have some strength and vitality (early to mid-60's at least) and have adequate income to live comfortably. As a society we are not doing a good job of providing young people with any kind of assurance that social security, much less private pensions, will be there for them.

The second issue is health care. When I graduated from college in 1973, during a recession, I took a secretarial position paying minimum wage ($1.80 an hour). With that income I paid for rent, food, transportation and clothing, and I was also able to afford to buy my own, individual health insurance policy from Blue Cross/Blue Shield. The skilled manual workers at the businesses where I was employed made considerably more money than I did, and could afford health care not only for themselves but for their families as well.

Although young people are more cavalier about their needs for health insurance than older people, health insurance coverage is one of the incentives that a occupational choice may offer someone. Physical labor, puts greater demands on workers, and although actual accidents are usually (but not always) covered under workman's compensation, the general wear and tear on the body's joints and systems is not.

A truly universal health care system that seriously attacks the costs of medical care and medication would go a long way towards allowing young people to consider a wider range of occupational choices. If health care stops being tied to jobs, than jobs can be chosen for reasons other than health care coverage.

These are only two of the dozens of complex issues that affect occupational choices of young people in this country, and must be addressed as part of a multi-faceted approach to develop the workforce we actually need to move this nation forward.

the report of the "death of marriage" was an exaggeration

2011-02-26T21:18:00.000-05:00

November 18, 2010 the Pew Research Center released a research study conducted in conjunction with TIME, that was provocatively, if inaccurately, titled "Decline of Marriage." The research was a survey of Americans' attitudes about marriage and family.

The headline finding of this survey was that 39 percent of respondents to the study agree that "marriage is obsolete." This is an increase from 1978 when only 28 percent thought marriage was obsolete.

The problem is, this is the perception of people, not reality. Moreover, it is the perception of people only 5 percent of whom can accurately describe societies divorce trends for the past twenty years. In other words 95 percent of the respondents to this survey did NOT know that divorce has been declining for the past 30 years.

Turns out that's not the only fact about marriage and the family the respondents got wrong. On seven key questions of fact about marriage and family trends, less than half of the respondents knew what the actual marriage and family trends are.

No wonder their perceptions of marriage and the family are so screwed - they lack the facts.

Booming businesses, weakened workers

2010-08-23T16:40:00.004-04:00

This short snippet of a report from an economic journalist is worth a look, but even more important and insightful are many of the comments attached to the article:

Booming businesses, weakened workers | Journalist Profile |

Put succinctly in terms of social class: capitalists (upper class) benefit from a wider world in which to invest capital and sell products and services, workers (whether working class, middle class or even many upper middle class) suffer from loss of jobs, and declining wages and benefits.

one small proposal for getting from here to there

2010-07-29T13:17:00.012-04:00

Our earth is undergoing measurable global climate warming that has a significant anthropogenic component, with the primary anthropogenic contribution to warming coming from the steady increase in CO2 emissions from the use of fossil fuels such as oil and coal. Moreover, warming that has already occurred over the past century and warming that is certain to occur in the next century, have had and will have recognizable negative impacts on the health of human beings and human societies. Those impacts include, but are not limited to, rises in sea level and loss of shoreline, changes in plant and animal populations (declines, increases, shifts in range) including changes in disease vectors (such as West Nile Virus and Malaria carrying mosquitoes), increasing drought with its impact on food crops and human water supplies, and increasing extreme precipitation events with concomitant flooding.

Among the scientific community there is debate and need for continuing research on how much warming and how fast future warming will occur, and the regional patterning of impacts, but there is general consensus on the basic facts of warming and its causes and its consequences. Recent polling of the general population in the United States shows that about three quarters of the American population accept the scientific consensus on the reality of global warming and the anthropogenic causes of that warming. However, there is a decided lack of consensus both within the scientific community and the general population on exactly what should be done to address the problems posed now and in the future by global warming.

Just because people agree that a problem exists and that something should be done, has never meant that they will agree on what to do about that problem. This has always been true. There are lots of good sociological and psychological reasons for this lack of agreement. From a psychological perspective immediate, present threats to one's livelihood and material well-being are more salient and real than predicted future threats no matter how real we consider those future threats to be. A parent will always be more concerned about the present day need to keep a roof over their children's heads and food on the table today, than they will be about the availability of housing and food for those children in 20 years.

From a sociological perspective we have organized our economy around the need to maintain very short term current profitability to retain investors, rather than around long term future. The structures, rules and practices of business decision-making and investor decision-making, make it difficult for either business managers or investors to forgo current profits in exchange for long term sustainability.

For a utility company currently generating most of its electricity from coal fired plants shifting to solar or wind generation has many economic drawbacks. If a utility simply purchases "green" power from another electricity producer who is already invested in wind, solar or hydro-power, the primary profit from power production goes to the actual producer not the utility company purchasing the power. To make any profit, they have to raise the cost of that power to the customer, making it more expensive than the coal generated power, and thus less attractive to consumers of electricity. Such a move also introduces greater inefficiencies -- the further electricity is transmitted the greater the loss, so purchases power from a distant provider means that you get less power for your buck as well.

On the other hand, if a utility company decides to themselves begin producing electricity from wind, solar or hydro sources, there is the huge upfront capital investment that must be made. While this may have great long term profit potential (once constructed one never has to pay for sunlight or wind unlike coal), it has tremendous short term costs that affect profitability and investor satisfaction. If a utility attempts to pay for this by raising utility rates up front, there is substantial customer dissatisfaction, and in states (like Kentucky) with strong political incentives to protect coal, little political interest for public utility commissions to support such rate increases. Additionally, the construction of a centralized solar or wind generation plant requires huge acreage, that may not be readily available to a utility company near its customer base.

Finally, another reason that utility companies become nervous about discussions, is that the idea mode of generating electricity from solar energy is a pattern of dispersed, household level or building level generation, where solar panels sufficient to the needs of a particular housing unit or office building are placed on the building itself. This eliminates two problems: first, all the extra land that would be needed for centralized solar generation, and second, the problem of electricity losses due to transmission over distance. However, since currently housing unit and office building solar electricity generation is financed and operated by individual families or businesses it represents a loss of revenue for the utility company, and certainly not something they really want to encourage.

Moreover, from the point of view of the individual, family or business, the cost of constructing small localized solar (and wind) generation is quite large (at least $20,000), and far beyond the reach of the median household. While such household level solar (and wind) electricity generation does pay for itself over twenty to twenty-five years (the vast majority of the costs are in the initial hardware and installation and after that the electricity itself is essentially free), the upfront costs are prohibitive for all but the most affluent and most environmentally committed.

Now, finally to my proposal. I acknowledge up-front, as a person who is uncomfortable with the power of utility companies now, this is not my ideal solution, but it is a means of decreasing the input of CO2 into the atmosphere, to ameliorate future extent of global warming and its impact, while dealing with many of the problems outlined above. My proposal is that electric utility companies currently heavily invested in their own coal-fired generation consider adopting the model used by Bell Telephone in the 1950's. In exchange for a modest installation fee (say a few hundred dollars that could be prorated over a period of time) well within the budgets of middle and working class families with "green values," the utility company would deliver and install solar panels on the consumers home -- but, and here's what I think is a new idea (at least as applied to electricity generation) the utility company would retain ownership of those panels in perpetuity, and charge the consumer a monthly fee for the electricity consumed from those panels.

Here's the details -- the one's that I think would make this idea appealing to both the consumer and to the utility company. The individual solar installations would 1) be large enough to provide for ordinary, peak daylight hours electricity use and 2) would be tied into the grid allowing for both inflow and outflow. The utility company would benefit, because all excess electricity generated would flow into the grid for use by other customers (and unlike the situation where a household customer owns the solar installation, the utility company would own that excess flow outright and not be paying the customer with the installation for it). With each household or business that added solar generation, the electricity generating capacity of the entire grid would be expanded. The capitalization costs would be spread out over time -- no huge up-front investment in generation capacity years before any new power can be generated. Moreover, following current phone company and cable company practices, the utility company could charge a very small (a few dollars) monthly maintenance fee to consumers, to cover costs of periodic maintenance and repair.

The consumer would benefit in two ways: they would have the assurance that in the absence of sunlight they would still have electricity, and conversely, during widespread power outages due to downed transmission lines they would also still have their locally generated power. Indeed, if several households in a neighborhood had contracted with the utility for solar panels, the entire neighborhood circuit might be protected from electricity loss during a widespread outage.

In the beginning only middle income and upper income families that are highly committed to environmental, "green" values would participate. I know I would. I would be very willing to pay a reasonable premium in installation costs just to be assured that while I was sitting at my computer typing away I was using electricity generated by solar power rather than by coal obtained by scalping the mountains around me. Overtime, as people begin to notice, that one of their neighbors still has electricity after a storm has knocked out everyone else, the appeal of solar panels might spread. If the utility made the cost of electricity generated in situ from the solar panels marginally less expensive (say 1/2 cent per KWH) compared to electricity pulled from the grid, this would increase the appeal of participation.

From the utility company's perspective, they are able to gradually expand their generating capacity, using "green" sources, with small, periodic expenditures of capital that can be partially charged to the customer (installation fees), and also recouped by feeding all excess electricity generated into the grid. Customers without the panels who depended solely on the grid would pay the standard rate for their electricity. By dispersing solar generation through out the households served by a utility, there would be a substantial increase in efficiency, as electricity would be consumed closer to where it was generated, reducing the losses to long distance transmission. Most of all this idea allows utility companies to make the transition to renewable electricity generation gradual and incremental, and thus less painful and more acceptable.

So there is my idea -- somebody tell me what's wrong with it!

weather is not climate, but....

2010-07-24T16:05:00.002-04:00

The Weather Channel's website has a number of nifty new features. One of which provides you with lots of information about how your current month (and previous month) stack up against historical weather patterns. I've captured the screen shots for my zip code 41825, for June 2010 and July 2010.

Notice that for both June and July the "highest temperature recorded so far" is higher than the historical record for that month -- so we broke the all time temperature records for both June and July in Eastern Kentucky. Notice also that the total rain fall amounts for both June and July are well below the average. June's precitipation total was 1.05" below the average. Of course July isn't over yet, but let's hope we don't get 3.65" of rain in one week. While the July total rain is more than three and a half inches below normal, eastern Kentucky did get one whale of a gully-washer, to the great dismay and anguish of hundreds of folks in Pike county.

While it is important to remember that weather is not the same as climate, and unusually hot days occur periodically, as do droughts and floods, overall warming of the climate as is currently occurring on planet earth, does give rise to more frequent extreme heat, more common droughts, and paradoxically more frequent intense rain events like that seen in Pike County this month.

how shall we live? part 1

2010-07-17T18:50:00.001-04:00

My attention has returned in recent days to a theme that has long concerned me, a theme that has popped up in several very interesting blogs.

Will of Zen Agnostic sums this theme up nicely in this quote:

"most of what the doctors are calling mental illness, clinical depression, neurotic behavior - this not illness. It is a natural reaction to an insane culture and a dying planet....Part of the problem in this insane screwed up world is that people can't be open about their grief and anger. Our emotions are natural and healthy - but society at large labels us as unhealthy if we don't put on a smile every day and joke about the weather and sports and the latest celebrity DUI arrest. Simply writing about it, naming it, not hiding from it, is an act of resistance."

Over at CommonDreams.org Robert Jenson writes:

"To be fully alive today is to live with anguish, not for one's own condition in the world but for the condition of the world, for a world that is in collapse."

And Dave Pollard at how to save the world writes of the dissonance between the messages from our bodies (physical survival, avoidance of pain, procreation of our genetic material), our culture (values, beliefs, attitudes and norms), and from our environment or biosphere which he labels gaia. Dave argues that:

"this dissonance is paralyzing; it renders us ill, physically and mentally, and ultimately we get exhausted trying to handle it so we become desensitized, shut down."

Like these three bloggers, everything I know, everything I study as a sociologist, as a observer of human society and culture, suggest to me a world in collapse, that has already "overshot" the material basis (resources, food, energy) on which its existence depends. I strongly recommend reading the work of Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows, The Limits to Growth (1972), Beyond the Limits (1992) and The Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update (2004). Meadows, Randers and Meadows wrote in their first book (1972) that:

"If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next 100 years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrolled decline in both population and industrial capacity."

By 1992, Meadows, Randers and Meadows were convinced that those limits had already been reached in several areas (for example world wide grain production peaked in the 1980's), and by 2004 the conclude that we were approaching other limits much faster than their original hundred year time line.

Most people in modern industrial societies have lost awareness of how deeply the health of society is tied to the health of the environment. They think of our technology as lifting us above the vicissitudes of weather and changes in climate. Yet all one has to do is examine the extent to which "normal" daily activities in our society are fouled up and even stop dead, when it gets too snowy or too hot, or when a hurricane stops the pumping of oil for the Gulf, to realize that our technology has made our societies more rather than less vulnerable to changes in our environment.

We are on a path that is unsustainable in human social terms, not just in environmental terms. The two are so intimately intertwined that we cannot deal with one without dealing with the other. Our economy is not only unsustainable in terms of its use of resources and energy, but it is unstable and unsustainable in terms of the ever increasing disparity between the tiny percentage whose wealth is growing and the other 95 percent whose wealth is declining. We are impoverishing our people and our society as well as our ecosystems and biosphere.

[I realize that this is a larger topic than I can do in one post, given all the other immediate deadlines in my life, so I'm going to make this a multi-part post, with this installment just identifying the problem and linking to some great blogs. more on the actual question posed in the title another day.]

Obama administration beats Reagan hands down on unemployment

2010-07-02T11:02:00.016-04:00

The recession of 2008-2010 is acknowledged by economists and politicians alike as having been by far the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930's. President Obama and his administration have been attacked for having high levels of unemployment as a result of this recession. Yet when we look at the record, we see that the policies of the Obama administration have kept unemployment rates far lower than those that occurred during the middle of Ronald Reagan's first term, during what everyone acknowledges was a far less severe recession.

Under Reagan unemployment rates rose higher and stayed there for longer than under Obama. Here's the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Ronald Reagan, President
Recession of 1982-83

Year	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
1982	8.6	8.9	9.0	9.3	9.4	9.6	9.8	9.8	10.1	10.4	10.8	10.8
1983	10.4	10.4	10.3	10.2	10.1	10.1	9.4	9.5	9.2	8.8	8.5	8.3

Total number of months unemployment was above 9% under Reagan was 19, number of months unemployment was above 10% under Reagan was 10 months.

Barack Obama, President
Recession of 2008-2010

Year	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
2009	7.7	8.2	8.6	8.9	9.4	9.5	9.4	9.7	9.8	10.1	10.0	10.0
2010	9.7	9.7	9.7	9.9	9.7	9.5	-	-	-	-	-	-

Total number of months unemployment was above 9% under Obama so far has been 14, number of months unemployment was above 10% under Obama was only 3 months, less than one-third the number of months above 10% under Reagan.

an unholy alliance

2010-06-14T17:43:00.004-04:00

Today the Chronicle of Higher Education posted an interesting story Is "Wal-Mart U." a Good Bargain for Students?, about a deal made between the Walmart corporation and American Public University, a for-profit institution that specializes in on-line instruction.

Here are some excerpts from the story:

A closer look at the deal announced this month shows how American Public slashed its prices and adapted its curriculum to snare a corporate client that could transform its business. It also raises one basic question: Is this a good bargain for students?

Adult-learning leaders praise Wal-Mart, the nation's largest private employer, for investing in education. But some of those same experts wonder how low-paid workers will be able to afford the cost of a degree from the private Web-based university the company selected as a partner, and why Wal-Mart chose American Public when community-college options might be cheaper. They also question how easily workers will be able to transfer APU credits to other colleges, given that the university plans to count significant amounts of Wal-Mart job training and experience as academic credit toward its degrees.

For example, cashiers with one year's experience could get six credits for an American Public class called "Customer Relations," provided they received an "on target" or "above target" on their last performance evaluation, said Deisha Galberth, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman. A department manager's training and experience could be worth 24 credit hours toward courses like retail ethics, organizational fundamentals, or human-resource fundamentals, she said.

Altogether, employees could earn up to 45 percent of the credit for an associate or bachelor's degree at APU "based on what they have learned in their career at Wal-Mart," according to the retailer's Web site.

Janet K. Poley, president of the American Distance Education Consortium, points out that this arrangement could saddle Wal-Mart employees with a "nontransferable coupon," as one blogger has described it.

"I now see where the 'trick' is—if a person gets credit for Wal-Mart courses and Wal-Mart work, they aren't likely to be able to transfer those to much of anyplace else," Ms. Poley wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle. Transferability could be important, given the high turnover rate in the retail industry.

The cynic in me wonders if the lack of transferability of the credits may be exactly the point for Walmart. As the last paragraph above points out, there is very high worker turnover in the retail industry. Walmart expends time and money training workers, only to have them leave. The ones most likely to leave are those who obtain a college degree and move on to new careers. What better way to gain more stability in their labor market -- provide workers with something they crave -- access to a college degree that will give them huge amounts of credit just for working at Walmart, and they'll discover that the degree is only good for advancing within Walmart.

My experience college teaching in the past thirty years has shown me that college students from lower and working class families, and even many from middle class families, are extraordinarily naive about the different values that employers put on degrees from different institutions. They also actively resist knowing how different the content of education differs between colleges. My students refuse to acknowledge any difference between the content of their college courses and those at four year colleges and universities. Yet they find ways not to read the forty or fifty pages a week assigned in my class, and will not listen to the facts, that students at four year school are expected to read and comprehend, two and three times the amount of content.

The reality is, I could assign as much reading as I thought was necessary and test students on that reading, but then my course failure rate would be unacceptably high, and my teaching evaluations unacceptably low. So slowly as years have gone by, I've bowed the quiet, subtle pressure NOT to "dumb" down the class, but to cover less material, and to cover it differently (like not getting into esoteric discussions about the deeper meaning and implication of materials).

Community college faculty are constantly commanded to accommodate students who are married, with children and full-time jobs. These students cannot read three full books a week (as I often had to do in my own undergraduate career at an elite four year college) -- heck they cannot even seem to find the time to read three full books a semester.

The depth and breadth of knowledge acquired by community college students simply pales compared to that acquired at more demanding four year colleges and universities. This fact is well understood by colleges, graduate schools, professional programs, and employers. Which is why graduates from elite schools have different doors open to them than do community college students.

So an educational institution that is willing to say, oh sure we'll give students up to 45 percent of their academic credit for just doing their Walmart job, is reducing the content of education even lower. Students will be able to get "degrees without all that troublesome knowledge" (my husband's favorite saying) even easier than they already can with this alliance between Walmart and American Public U.

global warming models predict extreme snow events

2010-02-13T09:51:00.001-05:00

The piles of snow blanketing the mid-Atlantic states have inspired global warming deniers in politics and the media to gleefully declare the demise of global warming...and a number of great comic responses, like this one by Jon Stewart:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Unusually Large Snowstorm

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Crisis

Comedy aside, folks, heavy -- even apocalyptic snow falls -- are predicted by global warming theories. This is not a case (as suggested by folks like Glen Beck) of proponents of global warming seizing on every passing weather condition as it occurs and declaring it a result of global warming. The likelihood of increased extreme snow fall events arising from global warming have been predicted well in advance of this years snowmaggedeon, as the following excerpt from an article in a referred scientific journal supports:

“To assess possible future snowstorm conditions, the relationships of the storm frequencies to seasonal temperature and precipitation conditions, both estimated to undergo future changes, were defined for 1901–2000 using data from 1222 stations across the United States. Results for the November–December period showed that most of the United States had experienced 61%–80% of the storms in warmer-than-normal years. Assessment of the January–February temperature conditions again showed that most of the United States had 71%–80% of their snowstorms in warmer-than-normal years. In the March–April season 61%–80% of all snowstorms in the central and southern United States had occurred in warmer-than-normal years. The relationship of storm incidence to precipitation in all three
2-month periods of the cold season showed that 61%–85% of all storms occurred in wetter-than-normal years. Thus, these comparative results reveal that a future with wetter and warmer winters, which is one outcome expected (National Assessment Synthesis Team 2001), will bring more snowstorms than in 1901–2000. Agee (1991) found that long-term warming trends in the United States were associated with increasing cyclonic activity in North America, further indicating that a warmer future climate will generate more winter storms.” page. 1149
Stanley A. Changnon, Changnon Climatologist, Mahomet, Illinois; David Changnon,
Northern Illinois University, De Kalb, Illinois; and Thomas R. Karl, National Climatic Data Center, Asheville, North Carolin. (2006) “Temporal and Spatial Characteristics of Snowstorms in the Contiguous United States.” Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology Vol. 45, August 2006. The American Meteorological Society. (Manuscript received 17 May 2005, in final form 30 December 2005).

Read the real science at http://ams.allenpress.com/archive/1558-8432/45/8/pdf/i1558-8432-45-8-1141.pdf

college students today....

2009-12-12T12:28:00.012-05:00

College professors have always complained about college students. The complaints usually starts with the phrase "the trouble with college students today..." and usually also contains the phrase "when I was a student..."

The fact is that college students today are different from the past, in a whole host of ways. Let's look at the demographics: in 1966 the total number of undergraduate college students of all ages was 6,085,000 which represented 3% of the total U.S. population, in 2008 the total number of undergraduate college students of all ages was 14,955,000, which represented 5% of the total U.S. population ; in 1966 39% of college students were 18-19 years old, 15% were age 25 or older, 94% were white and 5 percent were black, 38% were women and 62% were male; in 2008 22% were 18-19 years old, 37% were age 25 or older, 77% were white and 13 percent were black, 55% were women and 45% were male. In the year 1970 (first year for which the government collected data on this) the percent of all undergraduate students attending community colleges was 27%, in 2008 that had risen to 36%.

As discussed this past week in the Chronicle of Higher Education most of the increasing numbers of college students in the last couple of decades have gone into the community colleges, and to a lesser extent into less selective four year colleges (public and private). More selective colleges and universities have used the increased numbers of students applying to become more selective, more choosy.

Family income which impacts college choices due to rising costs, also has a strong positive correlation with standardized test scores and to a more moderate correlation with high school grade point average. Other aspects of social class, such as parental educational levels influence students' selection of or assignment to courses of study in high school. [The college educated parent is more likely to know that taking algebra in summer school before high school can put their child on a fast track to advance math classes in high school making him or her more attractive to selective colleges and universities.]

As a result of the confluence of increased selectiveness and rising costs, social class and income stratification between colleges has increased steadily over the past twenty years. Students from poor and working class families are becoming a smaller and smaller percentage of elite, selective colleges and universities, while community colleges become the primary educational institutions for poor, working class, and even lower middle class families.

The flood of new college students into community colleges and less selective four year colleges, is made up primarily of poorer, working class and lower middle class students who are the first in their family to go to college. Educational pundits have pointed out the impact of this on the level of college preparation -- a large percentage of these new students were shunted by their high school advisers into non-college preparatory tracks or classes. They did not take the mathematics, science or even English, history, etc. usually taken by college bound secondary students. Pundits have also made much about the lack of monetary resources of these students, and the high percentage of them that have jobs (all of these things have been discussed extensively in The Chronicle of Higher Education in recent weeks and over the last few years).

One thing that has not been discussed at all, that is painfully obvious among our poorer and working class student body at my Kentucky community college, is the impact of poor health and health care problems on students. Our students themselves have a very high level of health problems, including diabetes and its complications, heart disease, other obesity related conditions, back problems, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and a frighteningly high level of cancer for a relatively young population. As many health problems as my students have, their families -- spouses, parents, grandparents, mothers- and fathers-in-law, siblings, aunts and uncles, have even more. Because in lower income communities, people are highly dependent on family and kin for aid during crises, students often are primary care-takers for ill family members, providing emotional support, transportation, and nursing care at home or in the hospital. [These days with nursing staffs stretched so thinly -- especially in poor rural areas like this -- some one needs to be present in the hospital with a patient to insure proper nursing care.]

This semester I had one student providing physical, household, medical/nursing, and emotional support for her mother with cancer and her mother-in-law with congestive heart failure (the mother-in-law died just before the end of term). An other student spent weeks in the nearest research hospital (3 hours away from her home) providing support for her long term partner who was dying, and then came home to her own diagnosis of heart disease and need for heart surgery. At least a dozen other students in my classes (I only teach about 75 students a semester) had serious health issues for themselves or family members this term, and this was not an unusual semester.

All these forms of illness have a higher incidence among lower income and working class populations. On top of that, are the burdens imposed by lack of good health coverage. Many of them have the additional struggle of having to worry about mounting medical bills that they may never be able to pay off. If they have assistance from Medicaid or from the local public health department, they often have very little control over the times of appointments and have to invest more time than some one with insurance would have to invest.

Just this week as I was getting my mammogram I overheard the following situation -- a woman with a suspicious lump had been referred by the public health department to a private physician to order a diagnostic mammogram and had authorized payment for that mammogram. The physician however, had decided that an ultrasound would provide him with more information and wrote an order for an ultrasound. The woman showed up at the radiography department for her appointment, only to be told that she would have to return to the public health department, so that they could write a new authorization for payment for the ultrasound, and then go back to the physicians office for a new order to go with it, and have to reschedule the mammogram for a day later in the week. It was obvious from the conversation that her husband who accompanied her, had taken off from work and was losing pay, and would have to take off yet another day later in the week to accompany her for the second go-round.

Poor health and poor health care are huge obstacles to successful college completion for lower income and working class students.

electronic textbooks and textbook costs

2009-10-09T17:19:00.009-04:00

College textbook costs have been skyrocketing in the past decade. As a professor who has worked diligently to find the lowest cost books possible, often forgoing textbooks to use quality trade books (at $14 and $15 dollars a piece) in upper level courses, I had not really understood why students were complaining so much about textbook prices. Then I had to foot the bill for my husband's textbooks this semester -- $600 for two classes (anatomy and developmental psychology). No wonder students are complaining, that's simply outrageous.

Textbook companies have been trying to encourage the use of electronic texts, touting them as a solution to the rising cost of textbooks. The use of electronic versions of textbooks in on-line classes has caught on rapidly, and many colleges, such as Northwest Missouri, are experimenting with the use of portable electronic text readers such as Kindle (from Amazon.com) and the Sony PRS-505 e-reader.

There are a number of good arguments in favor of electronic texts (such as the "save the trees" argument), and a number of good arguments against electronic texts (they don't really fit the way students study - jumping from one page to another 20 pages away and back again). But the primary argument in favor of electronic texts -- that they will save students money -- just does not hold water.

Let's begin with the cost of the readers. The Kindle DX (the larger format Kindle suitable for use in reading large format college textbooks like anatomy and development psychology) is $489 plus tax and shipping. Smaller Kindle readers are $279, while the Sony PRS-505 e-reader (same dimensions as the smaller Kindle reader) are $299.

Second there is the terms and conditions under which students rent textbooks -- yes, RENT not buy. My husband's hardback traditional copy of Anatomy and Physiology, 5th Edition by Saladin cost $200 from the college bookstore. It would cost $98.50 from CourseSmart.com (one of the lower cost etextbook sellers). However, for this fifty percent cost reduction, the student only rents the book for 360 days. That's not even a full year. Many e-textbooks rental period is for 180 days or less. At the end of the rental period the textbook becomes inaccessible.

Most of the students taking Anatomy and Physiology (like my husband), are planning to take the second part of the course which uses the same book. If they can fit the two parts of the course into two sequential semesters, the 360 day subscription might be sufficient to get them through two semesters. But should something interfere with taking the classes sequentially, they would have to re-purchase the electronic text to have it available for the second semester. That means they have to pay $98.50 TWICE to rent the same book. Now there is no price advantage to the electronic version at all.

At our college, most students taking Anatomy and Physiology are also doing so as preliminary to entering an allied health field (nursing, respiratory therapy, radiography, and physical therapy are the fields at my college). Students going into these fields frequently keep their anatomy textbooks to use for reference while pursing their career courses. Electronic textbooks cannot be "kept" -- they expire in 360 (or 180) days.

Those students who do not keep their texts for reference almost always sell them. While the payback on selling textbooks is not 50 percent of the cost, it still does lessen the overall cost. eTextbooks cannot easily or readily be sold to others. Electronic texts on readers like Kindle and the Sony PRS-505 e-reader cannot be transferred from the device. Electronic text that are purchased on-line can be viewed from many machines, but what student with any sense would want to purchase a rental agreement that could make the book inaccessible before the course is over (or even before the course has barely begun).

This last fact (the inability to sell your electronic book) leads inexorably to the most important way in which a shift to electronic textbooks would negatively impact the overall cost of college textbooks -- the entire supply of used textbooks, that many students depend upon purchasing to reduce their costs, would dry up. All students would have to buy "new" in an all electronic textbook world.

Since all students would be buying "new" textbooks, textbook publishers would no longer have an incentive to come out with new editions every two years. This practice is almost entirely driven by the desire to limit the sales of used books which cut into textbook publishers profits.

Textbook publishers will have a steadier, more reliable stream of revenue (no competition from the used book sellers), and substantially lower costs. Publishers won't have to pay faculty to write new editions as often, they will eliminate many resource costs (paper, ink, presses) and transportation costs. While this may prevent textbook costs from rising quite as quickly, chances are, businesses being what businesses are, most of the publishers' savings will become publishers' profits rather than student savings.

"Friends of Coal"

2009-09-30T09:42:00.010-04:00

There is a sociologically and politically interesting phenomenon sweeping the coal fields of Kentucky (similar things are happening is West Virginia) called the Friends of Coal.

Friends of Coal is the brainchild of a coal industry organization Kentucky Coal [note the nearly identical websites]. The Kentucky Coal Association central membership is coal companies and associate members comprised of businesses related to coal mining such as engineering firms, equipment firms, (even law firms) and individuals employed in the coal mining and related industries.

Friends of coal began as an exercise in what political pundits call "AstroTurfing" -- industry sponsored and supported activity posing as grassroots organizing -- but it has become a genuinely popular organization garnering membership, support and funding from thousands of Kentuckians from all walks of life. This may be a political first, a popular movement in support of a particular industry, not by its workers, but by a wide cross section of individuals and families living within the communities where an industry operates.

Not only does one see the bumper stickers, window stickers, yard signs, pins and t-shirts declaring "Friends of Coal" in eastern Kentucky. But most intriguingly, the Friends of Coal organization proposed a special issue Kentucky license plate (see photo at top taken at a stop light in Letcher County), which has been wildly successful and can be seen on cars (and especially trucks) everywhere in eastern Kentucky.

This may be the first time in the United States that an industry actively engaged in whole series of major political battles (over the regulation of carbon dioxide emissions, mountain top removal, and fly ash storage) has been able to get the general public to voluntarily help fund their public relations battle through a official state sponsored tax (license plate fees). Usually industries have to use their own monies (albeit coming from customers) for legitimation advertising and activities.

The average person in eastern Kentucky who sports a "Friends of Coal" sticker or license plate views supporting "the coal industry" as identical to supporting "coal miners." A view which flies in the face of the very long record of industry abuses of the health and safety of miners, and successful efforts to undermine unionization of coal mining.

Supporters of Friends of Coal fear that new environmental regulations will bring a sudden and abrupt end to all coal employment in the mountains. They lack awareness that the coal industry has done quite well on its own to cut coal mining employment despite many decades of special treatment and tax advantages from the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Employment in coal in Kentucky has dropped by two-thirds from a high of about 48,000 in 1981 to 17,893 in 2006. [graphic from MACED based on data from CoalEducation.org].

The pharmaceutical industry and American health care

2009-08-05T19:58:00.006-04:00

Today I sat in our family doctor's waiting room for three hours while my husband was seen for broken ribs. While we were there (and waiting for three hours), a total of eight different drug company representatives were allowed welcomed in to speak to our family doctor. Eight.

The numbers today may have been a little unusual, but the presence of drug representatives is not. I have yet to come to see my physician with out spotting at least one and more often two or three drug representatives during the time of my visit.

Why be concerned? Well first, why with people waiting for hours in the lobby, should drug reps be given the fast track to doctors time? But far more importantly, how much pressure is being brought to bear on family physicians and internists to prescribe new, more costly, patented medicines instead of older, less expensive, generic medicines?

More than a decade ago, after some type of injury my physician prescribed a generic muscle relaxant for me. It worked well, was helpful, and cost me (with health insurance) $5. A year or so later, after another injury, she prescribed a new brand new, name brand muscle relaxant, that when I got to the pharmacy turned out to cost $45 (with insurance -- imagine what it would have cost without insurance). Well it didn't work as well for me as the generic. Some time later, another injury, another visit, and time for another prescription. This time I specifically told her that I wanted the generic, that I found it worked better than the name brand and was 1/9th the cost. She mumbled a bit and said, oh, well I was told that this new medicine would be better, and wouldn't upset people's stomachs. While this may be true, it never once occurred to my doctor to 1) ask if I'd had any problems with the generic drug and needed a substitution or 2) think about the huge difference in cost. This kind of blind acceptance of drug company sales pitches is part of the current problem with health care.

Definitions -- broad for family, narrow for marriage

2009-07-30T20:42:00.005-04:00

Once again, I am fascinated by the responses of my students to my discussion questions on the topic of family in Introductory Sociology.

The overwhelming majority of students, about 95 out of every 100 who respond to the discussion, when asked what a family is provide a very broad definition that focuses on things like "love," "caring," "supportiveness," and other qualities of relationships. These students explicitly include homosexual couples living together, especially those with children, as qualifying to be included in the concept of "family." Sometimes students even will state, that while they do not approve of homosexual relationships, they are still examples of "family."

When the same students when asked about what constitutes "marriage," about sixty percent of them (in Kentucky), are adamant that a marriage consists of one man and one woman only. They reject homosexual relationships as qualifying for marriage, and they reject polygamy in any form as well.

stereotypes of Appalachia/Eastern Kentucky

2009-07-18T10:51:00.004-04:00

My students frequently bemoan the stereotypes that outsiders hold of Appalachians and especially of folks in Eastern Kentucky. They wonder where these stereotypes come from, and mumble about the meanness of flatlanders and city folks.

In Wednesday July 15th edition of the local weekly paper was a news story that gives insight into the origin of the stereotypes. In an old mining camp town called Seco (derived from the acronym for South East Coal), an enterprising family named Looney has operated a very successful winery (the grapes are grown on old strip mine property) and bed & breakfast for more than a decade. The headline of the article read as follows: "Owner says facility forced to suspend operations until neighbors behave."

The key passage of the article is as follows:

Meanwhile Looney remains up in arms over the shots being fired a round the houses and cottages on the winery's property.
"We had a couple from Oregon here," said Looney, "and in the middle of the night someone fired shots outside their window and told hem they wouldn't live to see the light of day if they didn't leave."
Looney said the couple immediately packed their bags and left. "...when we found out what happened we didn't blame them."

While it certainly is unfair to label all residents of Appalachia as gun-toting imbeciles that hate outsiders, obviously there are some folks here that really are just that. And thus stereotypes are born!

social issues: obesity and air conditioning

2009-06-14T11:18:00.007-04:00

Obesity may have once been an individual trouble (to use C. Wright Mills' terminology), that was the consequence of individual decision-making and behavior, but today it is a complex social issue that is the result of patterns of modern economic and social life. Mills distinguished between troubles (which were purely individual or interpersonal in origin) and social issues which were created by the structure of society.

The media (as well as the government) has recognized obesity as a social "problem" largely because the many of the costs of obesity in medical expenses and lost work days are born by society. There has also been some recognition of social factors contributing to obesity -- such as the pervasiveness of candy and soda machines in schools. However, for the most part, while recognizing the social consequences, government decision-makers and the media are blind to the social causes of obesity, focusing perversely on individual behavior and individual decisions about food and exercise.

Each semester I use the topic of obesity as a way to engage students in SOC 101 in the sociological imagination (C. Wright Mills); getting them to move beyond individualistic thinking to sociological thinking. Asking them to explore questions about how work, school, transportation, community design, and many other aspects of social life contribute to the problem of obesity. We talk about things such as how the occupational structure of society has changed (away from active blue collar to sedentary white collar work), how the cost of living has changed (from the family wage earned by men, to the dual pay-check family), how the layout of communities have changed(from walking friendly to car-essential designs), and so forth.

This summer term (today in fact) one of my students mentioned something, that caused a proverbial light bulb to go on in my mind. She said that kids today don't want to go out in the heat during the summer. She didn't realize that she was bringing up something that represented a change. Indeed she pronounced this as if it were an unchanging element in American life: indoors was always cooler than outdoors during the summer. I immediately recognized that the relative comfort of indoors and outdoors during the summer months is something that has changed drastically in the past 50 years, and could be an important missing piece of the puzzle for understanding the development of the obesity epidemic during that time.

Practical home air conditioners were developed in the late 1920's, but until forty ago, air conditioning was extraordinarily rare in homes. It wasn't until the early 1970's that air conditioning reached more than fifty percent of American homes (by 1978, only 45 percent of American homes did not have air conditioning). In the 1950's only the most affluent had air conditioning. Even fans, which were made of metal and relatively more expensive were not within the reach of many people.

The need for air conditioning of course varies geographically, but in much of the U.S., sweltering summer heat and humidity forced people, and especially children, out of doors, to seek summer breezes and shade and cooling sources of water. I spent part of many childhood summers in Virginia and a vivid part of those childhood memories is smothering damp heat, and the various ways we attempted to stay cool, with cool drinks and splashing in water (lawn sprinklers, wading pools, creeks and streams). Riding bicycles, roller skating, even running around in the shade of the back yard was cooler than sitting still inside.

The heat and humidity affected how we cooked and ate. Few people wanted to heat up the house even more by using their ovens for extended periods. One also felt less like eating a heavy meal on the hottest days. Of course, in addition to air conditioning, the microwave has changed how we view summer cooking.

Air conditioning has made the indoors far more attractive than the outdoors during the summer for scores of Americans. Coupled with an explosion in fun things to do indoors (computers, video games, Tivo, DVD's) and with the ability to easily microwave highly processed meals and snacks, it is not surprising that there has been a dramatic increase in the prevalence of obesity in America.

reconstituting working class neighborhoods

2009-05-29T16:57:00.008-04:00

I grew up (1954-1969) in a suburb of San Francisco -- San Mateo -- in a neighborhood of blue collar/working class families. Construction on the subdivision in which we lived began in about 1948, and was not fully completed until a few years after we moved there in 1954. The first wave of houses were two and three bedroom, one bath, with a attached single car garage, and lots under a quarter acre. The later wave of houses built between 1953 and 1956, were three bedroom, two bath, with attached two car garages. These were on the same sized lot, so had less yard.

By 1954, solid six foot high privacy fences completely divided the backyards of each single family home from its neighbors. The only shared/public spaces were the sidewalks, the elementary school ground, and the single, large municipal park located across from the elementary school at the center of the subdivision. Children roamed from yard to yard, but adults stayed within the limits of their own yard, and did not socialize frequently with neighbors.

The residents of the homes during the 50's and 60's were primarily nuclear families, consisting a husband employed in a blue collar or working class occupation, wives who were rarely employed outside the home, and 2+ children. Occasionally a home was occupied by a retired couple, without children. Many of the men in this subdivision worked in maintenance departments of major air lines based at San Francisco International Airport (less than 8 miles away). There were also large numbers of men in the construction trades -- carpenters, electricians, bricklayers, plumbers, etc.

Almost all of the adults were from outside California, and many of the older children had been born outside the state as well. None of the families were related to each other, all were stripped of kinship ties. Grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins all resided "back east" or in the Midwest, rather than California. Rarely families would go "home" for brief vacations, usually during the summer months. Even more rarely kin would come for short visits. Thanksgiving and Christmas were holidays celebrated by isolated nuclear families.

Those of us who grew up in these communities took this isolation from kin for granted. Leaving behind extended family, to move great distances for work opportunities, and new communities was the norm for the majority of white working class families in California of the 1950's and 1960's. So it was not unexpected that most of the first wave of children would leave the area to go to college, find work and build futures in other cities and other states.

Attending college in Ohio and later graduate school in Kentucky, most of my fellow students had also left their homes and families some distance away. So the family and neighborhood patterns of my childhood seemed quite normal. It was not until I obtained my first full-time teaching position in Johnstown, Pennsylvania that I got a good, close hand look at a very different pattern of working class family and community life.

In Johnstown, the majority of working class and lower middle class adults lived within a few miles of their parents and grandparents, frequently on the same street, and not uncommonly in the other half of a double house -- a two or three story house under a single roof, that was divided down the middle into two distinct separate living units with separate kitchens, etc. This type of housing is extremely common in older working class neighborhoods of older industrial cities and towns east of the Mississippi.

Not only did the generations stay close to each other physically, but they often formed cooperative economic and social units. Children were cared for by grandparents, while parents worked. The increasing necessity for married women to be employed outside the home, made the assistance of grandparents in child care more and more crucial to economic well-being of working and lower middle class families in the 1980's.

The period of time that I spent in Johnstown included 1984-1985 during which time official unemployment rose to 25 percent as Bethlehem and U.S. Steel closed down the majority of their steel works. The permeable boundaries of family/household across generations was essential to many families survival, as those who retained jobs shared income with those who lost jobs. Many of the family and community patterns chronicled by Gans in Urban Villagers were alive and well in Johnstown in the 1980's.

I have since observed that trans-generational/trans-household family patterns are also exceedingly common among the working and lower middle classes in small town Virginia and rural Kentucky, and part of long standing traditions of kin helping kin.
What I find fascinating is that fifty years later in the 21st century, working and middle class families in San Mateo are reconstituting similar family and neighborhood patterns. This is being done both by new ethnic in-migrants to California (Filipino, Tongan, Vietnamese, Cambodian etc.) and by the later generations of the original working class families that populated the second wave in San Mateo's subdivisions.

It has become extremely common for two to four houses on one street to be owned by successive generations of the same family, and for other homes to be inhabited by cousins or other relatives. Because of vastly inflated housing values, often the older generation owns several homes that are rented to younger couples starting out. One family that first bought into the neighborhood in 1962 (the second wave) has three generations living in four houses at one end of one street. Two other houses nearby are owned by cousins who settled in the neighborhood in the 1970's and their adult child.

The entire neighborhood that was once populated by isolated nuclear families has become a complex web of family ties across generations, and extending out to collateral kin. The behavior of these families, providing assistance, child care, and financial aid, is far more similar to the old working class neighborhoods of Johnstown, than to the same neighborhood in the 1950's. All it took was time.

co-optation or political savvy?

2009-04-09T16:53:00.003-04:00

Today (among many other things) I participated in a system-wide curriculum meeting and taught Appalachian studies. In the curriculum committee, I represented the views of a group of faculty that opposes our system's move to modularize and "McDonaldize" college courses on-line. In Appalachian studies we continued our exploration of various Appalachian based opposition movements, with a look at the Black Lung Association, and the role of mountain music in building community and helping mobilize opposition in coal mining strikes and the anti-strip-mining movement.

One of the common themes that crossed tied these two experiences together today, was a question that often faces groups that oppose the prevailing power structure, which is when failure is likely should one maintain a position of opposition for the sake of principle and be frozen out of the decision-making, or capitulate and compromise in order to have some input into the path of the future.

The first consideration is whether or not failure is likely. The assessment of that is often based on which position a person is taking. Those who advocate supporting principle to the end, take the optomistic view, believing that failure is not likely, and that it is only capitulation and compromise that make it inevitable. Those supporting compromise for the sake of having some stake in the decision-making tend towards pessimism, viewing the cause as lost already.

At the beginning of 2008, I would have said that the modularization of sociology was inevitable, and that the prudent course was to compromise in order to have some say in how that modularization took place. But the majority of the people on the committee I chaired took the other position to stand on principle. Five months later, I was surprised, and pleased to discover, that at least for the forseable future those that argued for standing put were correct. Faced with nearly unanimous opposition by faculty in the discipline, the system's plan to modularize sociology was abandoned.

Instead, the system mandated modularization program found an individual in another discipline (psychology) willing to provide what was desired (a modularized social science course), and a college willing to sponsor the proposal providing a way around the system committee I chair. So the overall project goes forward, but without sociology. But in the process, my committee and the system psychology faculty it represents have loss some of their ability to influence the development of this alternative modularized course. The committee I chair will get to review and "endorse" or "not endorse" the project, but unlike the sociology case, the committee will not be able to reject the proposal, and it will go on to become fact. We may have won the battle over sociology, but lost the war over the principle of modularization, and lost influence in shaping curriculum in the process.

The view of the pessimists is that some input is better than no input, while the view of the pessimists is that if they are going down, they sure as hell aren't going to dig their own graves by compromise.

co-opting opposition through leadership

2009-04-02T16:56:00.005-04:00

My students in Appalachian Studies are currently reading a collection of essays on grassroots political and economic organization in Appalachia entitled Fighting Back in Appalachia: Traditions of Resistance and Change, edited by Stephen L. Fisher. This is not a new book; published in 1993 it has been a standard for Appalachian studies, social movements and political science courses for more than a decade.

Although I had read most of the essays when the book was published, I had not picked it up in the intervening 15 years. So re-reading the articles with my students has been a little like seeing them for the first time. However, I am seeing them with new eyes, with 15 years more experience of participation in grassroots organizations, and suddenly I'm not sure I like what I see.

Three grassroots organizations highlighted in part I of the book are Save Our Cumberland Mountains (SOCM) of Tennessee, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC), and the Community Farm Alliance (CFA)of Kentucky. SOCM was started in 1972 to deal with coal mining, especially strip-mining, issues in five Tennessee counties. KFTC began in 1981 as a response to unfair tax exemptions for large mineral owners in eastern Kentucky, and the abuses of the broad form deed by strip-mining. The CFA emerged in 1985 during a period of crisis in American agriculture to address the regionally specific agricultural problems of small farmers in Kentucky.

Reading this articles back to back in a short period of time, I was struck by the similar pattern that all three followed. Each of these grassroots organizations appeared as the result of intense concerns over clearly defined issues. Early members were strongly motivated by issues, and active in pursuing specific changes in laws and economic practices within their region.

Each of these organizations had at least one significant win early in their existence. Save Our Cumberland Mountains in its first decade successfully stopped one of the largest strip-mines every proposed (20,000 acres) by AMAX, Inc., which, had it gone forward would have dramatically increased the power of coal companies to circumvent water quality laws and destroyed water supplies for many in the area. SOCM may not have been successful at its overarching goal of ending strip-mining altogether, but the organization had a number of significant victories.

In its first decade, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth was successful in seeing an amendment to the Kentucky Constitution stopping the use by strip miners of broad form deeds to rob landowners of surface rights, pushed through legislation to give local control over decisions on hazardous waste incinerators, and stopped the exemption of wealthy mineral owners from property taxation.

The Community Farm Alliance was highly successful in getting issues specific to Kentucky farmers passed through Congress even though other farming issues did not fare as well in the 1986 farm policy legislation. Moreover, by 1990, the CFA was able to win a legislative victory in Kentucky for a new state lending program that would solve many of Kentucky farmers credit issues.

Despite substantial issue centered successes by all three organizations, each organization after its first decade shifted away from issue orientation to focus on community organizing and leadership training and education. Each of these three organizations, in order to continue to exist as organization turned their focus to recruitment, to building a funding base (from donations and grants), and to "empowerment" of their local constituencies.

The writers of the articles in Fighting Back all highlight this shift to community organizing and leadership development as a positive step in the evolution of more permanent grassroots organizations. Hal Hamilton and Ellen Ryan write (about the Community Farm Alliance) that:

"Community organizing is sometimes criticized as parochial because issue objectives are often achievable without fundamentally changing power relations. This criticism rings true if our view of social change is revolutionary or apocalyptic. Lasting change in power relations, however can occur incrementally. Probably the most important contribution of organizations like CFA is the nurturing of new leaders with experience, vision and commitment...an important group of people emerge from these campaigns with a vision of democracy that extends from local communities to the world economy."

But as I read these essays, and I reflect on the record of these organizations (through their websites and my own participation in KFTC), I find myself questioning the evaluation of the writers. I can see ways that conditions in the mountains have improved (e.g., levels of poverty in Appalachia are substantially lower today than they were 40 years ago which has far more to do with national economic change than grassroots organizing), but I can also see even more ways in which conditions targeted by some of these groups are many times worse than they were forty years ago. Strip-mining is an excellent example, although laws regarding reclamation are far stricter than they were, the sheer volume and destructiveness of strip-mining (via mountain top removal) are far greater, and federal and state controls over water quality impacts of strip-mining have gotten loser rather than tighter.

It does not appear to me that the last two decades of "leadership" training has had any real impact on the leadership in Appalachia. The experiences often do enhance the feelings of self-worth and confidence of the individuals involved, but those individuals have not, in any numbers moved into community, state or regional leadership positions. The political establishments in eastern Kentucky, Southwest Virginia, and Northeast Tennessee seem to be little effected by the efforts of these grassroots organizations.

As I re-examine the history of these organizations, I can see that by shifting their focus to community organizing and leadership development they have been able to attract funding from large foundations; donations that in all likelihood would be less likely to flow to more militant issue oriented organizations. These three organizations have been successful in surviving where many others have disappeared, and have had some small input into the decision-making processes in their state and local governments. But have they exchanged genuine power for the semblance of leadership?

norms on speaking up

2009-02-22T18:08:00.002-05:00

Friday was our monthly faculty meeting. Since we have five campuses spread over 100 miles, most of our meetings are held via Interactive Television (or compressed two way video). The faculty gather on each campus in a common room, and can view speakers (and the folks around them) on the other campuses. Unless a microphone is turned on, any conversation that happens on a campus cannot be heard elsewhere.

This Friday something happened that has happened many times before. A faculty member on another campus made a proposal that did not sit well at all with anyone in the room around me. An immediate buzz of complaints and criticism took over the room. Several people said, "someone should tell them" but no one made a move to touch one of the microphones and report their concerns. In the meantime, several other individuals (all male) from other campuses, did activate their microphones and speak on behalf of the proposal. The volume of complaint around me increased. While I personally had no problem with the proposal, I could see that it would not be successful with such a high level of negative feeling from my local colleagues. Finally, since none of the people around me with the complaints did anything, I punched my microphone and informed the chair that our campus was unanimous in opposing the proposal. A few other people, from other campuses, then chimed in with their doubts, and the proposal was withdrawn.

Many times over the years that we have conducted our meetings through Interactive Television, there have been issues and proposals that have raised the ire and criticism of the faculty on my campus. Not once in all those years has any one, aside from myself, ever pressed the microphone button and expressed their concerns. If the issue is not one I share or wish to ally with, then the opposition of faculty on my campus is not expressed. Instead, they continue to grumble to each other, but never speak up, never take an action to oppose something. Indeed, no one on my campus, willingly speaks in the meeting unless they have a specific committee assignment on which they are required to report. I am the only one who will simply ask questions or offer opinions. The faculty on other campuses, with the exception of three others (all men), are the same, only those with official roles to play (heads of programs, elected officers, deans, etc.) will speak, make comments and ask questions.

This particular Friday, several people thanked me for speaking up and expressing our view. But more often, the comments and questions by those few of us who do speak up, are resented rather than appreciated. Two of the three men who speak up frequently are considered annoying trouble makers. My guess is that I may well have developed that reputation as well.

I am left to wonder to what extent this norm against speaking up in meetings, and asking questions of the authority figures, is a function of regional subculture (central Appalachia) and to what extent is it a function of working class subculture (since nearly all of the community college faculty I work with are from working class families). Sociologists Sennett and Cobb in their seminal work The Hidden Injuries of Class recorded similar behavior among grade school students in working class Boston and Pennsylvania. But I did not see the same behavior in the working-class originating faculty of the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, when I taught there in the 1980's. Perhaps this is not an "either/or" situation, but a combination of both regional and social class subculture.

solving the fiscal crisis in Kentucky

2009-02-07T18:04:00.013-05:00

Kentucky, like 44 other states, is facing a fiscal crisis. Revenue coming from taxes and fees is not enough to cover budgeted expenditures. By law Kentucky cannot do what most people do when faced with this situation which is borrow money. While this is probably a good thing, it means that Kentucky’s legislators have only two choices: cut spending or increase revenue.

Not every penny spent by Kentucky's state government is essential. Governments are run by people, and people sometimes spend money on things we don’t absolutely need. When’s the last time you bought a candy bar or a soda? We all buy things we want that aren't really necessary -- sometimes things that are even bad for us. But state governments -- Kentucky's included -- like us, spends most of its money on essentials, and budget cuts would hurt the essentials.

One of those essentials is education which accounts for nearly forty percent of total Kentucky state spending. Kentucky lags behind much of the U.S. in many areas of education already. In 2004, while less than 15 percent of people over 25 in the country as a whole had not graduated from high school (or gotten a GED), more than 18 percent in Kentucky has failed to attain that important milestone. The gap in college attendance is even greater. In the U.S. as a whole about 28 percent received bachelors degrees or higher, while in Kentucky only 21 percent had done so. Education is clearly not an area that can tolerate cuts if Kentucky wants to compete with other states and other countries for businesses and jobs.

Another essential area is transportation that commands nine percent of the annual budget in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. This has to cover all aspects of transportation from road, bridge and airport construction to maintenance and repair and snow removal. Most people would certainly consider the criminal justice system -- law enforcement, courts, prisons and probation to be essential expenditures, another five percent of the total budget.

Most people are aware of the role of state governments in education, transportation and criminal justice, but they often unaware of other essential expenditures. Another kind of essential is the state funds given to communities for water and sewer, equipment and training for fire and rescue, flood control and stream improvement, water safety testing, and infectious disease control. If residents of Kentucky were to go to their local fiscal court, town or city council, and ask, I'm sure they'd learn that their local governments depend heavily on funds from Frankfort to provide services and infrastructure necessary for safety, security and health in local communities.

Most people often do not think about the fact that state funded licensing boards to insure the quality of service people we depend upon daily – doctors, nurses, dentists, counselors, barbers, hairdressers, pharmacists, engineers and many others. The news stories about salmonella in peanut butter illustrate what can go wrong when a state (in this case Georgia) does not spend enough on adequate safety testing and enforcement of food safety standards.

The real solution to the crisis is to raise revenues, by raising taxes. In the short run this probably means raising taxes on tobacco products. Kentucky under taxes cigarettes compared to most of the states surrounding it. The increased cost would not only raise revenue, but would encourage more people to quit. But it is a tax that hits low income people harder than others. In the long run the overall structure of taxes in Kentucky needs to be modernized. More tax money has to come from those with the ability to pay more, both in taxes on luxury and business services, reinstating the inheritance tax, and more progressive income tax that raises, slightly, the percentage paid by those with the highest incomes, such as proposed in both Kentucky HB 223 and HB 257.

Currently, Kentucky income tax is essentially a flat tax of 6 percent on all incomes over $8,000. HB223 proposes that individuals (NOT families) with incomes over $75,000 pay an extra 1% (7% instead of 6%) only on the proportion of income that exceeds $75,000 up to $90,000, and individuals with incomes in excess of $90,000 pay an extra 2% (8% instead of 6%) only on the portion of income that exceeds $90,000. In Kentucky all earners pay tax individually even if married -- married couples file separately but on the same tax form. This bill would NOT affect families with incomes of more than $75,000 as long as each individual person's income was less than $75,000. Indeed, families with two earners each making $74,000 (a family income of $150,000) would not be affected by this bill. An individual with an income of $100,000 would pay an extra 1% on the $15,000 between $75,000 and $90,000 (that's an extra $150 dollars), and an extra 2% on the $10,000 between $90,000 and $100,000 (that's an extra $200 for a total of $350 dollars more than they would be paying under the current tax system).

This does not seem like an unreasonable cost given all the benefits and services that we all gain from state government. When people think about who benefits from state spending they almost exclusively focus on the poor. But affluent people benefit as much or more from government spending. Affluent people travel more making more use of highways and especially airports, they make more use of libraries and parks, more likely to go boating on Kentucky lakes. Even if the affluent do not make direct use of public schools, colleges and universities (although a high percentage do), if they are business owners or managers their success in business depends upon subordinates and workers educated in public schools.

The irony is that even the benefits that people identify as "going" to poor people, actually go to middle class and affluent people. Take Medicaid. Poor people do benefit from having a medical card. They receive medical services and medicines that can save their life and keep them healthy. But the poor do not get any money from Medicaid -- the money goes to hospitals, doctors, home health companies, and pharmaceutical companies -- in other words to middle class, affluent and even to rich people (stockholders and executives in medical and pharmaceutical corporations). The majority of money spent on social services doesn't go to poor people, it goes to middle class social workers, therapists, psychologists and other people with graduate educations. It pays the fees, their salaries and their health insurance and pension payments of these middle class workers.

The more affluent you are the more your lifestyle and your economic position depends upon publicly funded resources. So what not pay a (very) small premium for those benefits?

smoking up the joint -- part 2

2009-02-05T15:08:00.003-05:00

Recently I had the opportunity to have lunch with the faculty of two of our allied health programs -- Respiratory Therapy and Radiography. I mentioned how nice it would be if we could find some one to provide funding for a "stop smoking" program for the students in these programs.

The faculty agreed that it would be desirable for students to quit, but that stop smoking programs had been made available in the past with no success. One program a few years ago, not only provided all the services for free, but also offered to pay the students a substantial stipend for completing the program (not for stopping smoking, but just for completing the entire program). Not one of the students to whom this opportunity was offered were willing to participate. As my husband likes to say "it reeked of effort," and they weren't willing to put forth the effort.

There was a news story this week about more than a 1,000 people standing in line to apply for 35 jobs as firefighters in the Miami, Florida area, included the interesting tidbit, that initial screening would weed out all applicants who did not have the minimum education (high school diploma), were not residents within the appropriate municipal area, and who were smokers -- only non-smokers would be considered for hiring. This is the wave of the future. Perhaps as tobacco becomes less and less important as a crop in Kentucky (the current trend is downward), fiscal conservatism will triumph and see smokers as the drain on employers that they are.

smoking up the joint - in Kentucky

2008-12-28T12:52:00.012-05:00

One day during this past fall term, I stepped into the elevator at work, and was nearly overcome by the stench of cigarette smoke. Since smoking is prohibited in all state buildings, including college buildings, I wondered if someone had been smoking in the parking garage (also not allowed, but not enforced on our campus), next to the elevator access door.

I mentioned the smell to one of our staff. He explained the source of the problem. The majority of the students in our respiratory care program smoke, and when they get their short breaks, they rush, en mass, from their third floor classroom, to the elevator and step outside the building, where they fire up their smokes for 10 minutes, and then at the last minute cram themselves back in the elevator carrying the putrid smell with them.

I have always found it disturbing that such a high percentage of our students smoke, and that every break between classes is a cigarette break. But as an asthma sufferer, I find it obscene that the majority of our respiratory care students are smokers. These are the people who hope to be entrusted with the care of people who suffer from breathing disorders.

Kentucky ranks number 1 in the percentage of adults who are smokers. More than 28 percent of Kentuckians smoke (2007 CDC report) . A study done in 1999-2000 found that 23 percent of pregnant women in Kentucky smoked. Though I have no hard data, I'm certain that both figures are higher in eastern Kentucky than in the urban portions of the state.

The political power of tobacco interests and smokers in Kentucky shows in the low cigarette taxes; only 30 cents per twenty-pack in 2008, lower by at least half compared to all but one of the state surrounding Kentucky. Other evidence of political power: the state of Kentucky has declared smokers a "protected class," and it is illegal to discriminate against smokers in employment and education (Cincinnati Enquirer October 22,2008), despite the well documented fact that smokers are more expensive employees than non-smokers. They are more likely to be absent, their medical costs are higher on average, and they always seem to be out taking a smoking break when you need them.

It seems more than reasonable to me that being a non-smoker should be a requirement for entry into certain fields of employment -- respiratory therapy being one of those. If nothing else, allied health programs (nursing, respiratory care, radiography, physical therapy assistant, and so forth) ought to put a high priority on developing "quit smoking" programs for their students. Many medical facilities, even in Kentucky, are creating smoke free campuses; that is they are eliminating smoking not only in all their buildings, but in all the outside areas between the buildings. Imagine being some one who smokes a pack or more a day, and discovering that in your job at a hospital or medical complex that you have to walk a block or more, and then stand on a busy public street in order to smoke. The Appalachian Regional Hospital (ARH) chain that serves eastern Kentucky has not yet moved in the direction of smokeless campuses, but not all graduates of allied health programs in eastern Kentucky will remain in the region.

Kentucky needs to consider raising cigarette taxes as well. It makes good health policy and would provided needed revenue.

Without all that troublesome knowledge

2008-12-11T22:32:00.006-05:00

It is the end of the semester, the final day, final deadline for all written work. One of my students, handed me an entire semesters worth of work -- six essays on topics from as long ago as August -- today. Unlike some faculty, I do accept late work, but I do penalize it, on the earliest essays she will lose at least 50 percent of the points as a late penalty. This isn't particularly unusual. Every semester I have a few students who do this, wait until the last few days of the semester and turn in a pile of essays.

This student's essays were well written, no problems with grammar, sentence structure, spelling or punctuation. They were neat (although hand written which is unusual in this day and age). They were original, no plagiarism -- for which I was deeply grateful. All too often the student who waits until the last day to turn in the semesters work, hopes to slide past you with egregiously plagiarized work, copied in large part (or in whole) from some Internet site. [Somehow they never seem to realize that if they could find the information, so can I]. What disturbed me about these essays, was something, unfortunately, not unique to this student -- there was no evidence in the essays that she had even opened, much less read, any of the assigned readings, or learned anything at all from the course materials. Instead she held forth on her personal opinions about American society, opinions that she'd held before she entered my classroom, and which were no more informed today, after 16 weeks by the facts and research, than they had been when she started the class.

One of the problems with our college students (and one that is fairly wide spread today) is that a larger and larger percentage of the students attending community and lower level state colleges do not actually want a college education (and are not prepared for it in any case). What they want is a good job that will pay a living wage. They have no interest in learning, no thirst for knowledge. In fact, many of them actively resist learning anything new, especially things that might challenge their most precious prejudices and preconceptions. But they have been told (over and over from many sources) that if they want to decent job they have to get a college degree.

So they do want credit for classes and they'd prefer A's over B's and B's over C's -- although they don't want to have to learn anything to get those grades, they want me to give them a grade for spouting back what they already knew when they walked into the classroom. [Note math teachers and sciences teachers do not have this particular problem, because students realize they don't know anything about math and science when they walk into the class -- the problem math and science teachers face is students who want good grades for "trying" regardless of whether or not they actually learn anything.

The source of the problem lies in our economic system which bit by bit has stripped away most of the jobs (manufacturing, basic materials fabrication) that used to exist that would provide a decent, living wage for someone with a high school diploma (or less). We've sent those jobs to other countries (where a living wage is a lot less, and therefore profits are higher), or we've replaced live workers altogether with robots and computerized, programmable technology.

My students are right; to get a decent job that will pay a living wage today, generally does require at least a two year degree, if not a bachelor's degree or more. They just want to get the degrees, as my husband likes to say "without all that troublesome knowledge."

roots of anti-intellectualism in recent years

2008-11-26T17:36:00.015-05:00

In the wake of this November's election of Barack Obama, dozens of media commentators have heralded this as a welcome respite in the anti-intellectualism that has dominated American society and American politics for the past thirty years.

One media pundit (sorry I can't remember who) has said that Obama, unlike other presidents of the last forty years is "openly intellectual." Sure Clinton was a scholar during his college years, but he down played his scholarly background behind a folksy southern persona, leading voters to think that he just might be a "red-neck." [By the way, if Jeff Foxworthy is right, I too just might be a red-neck, since the instructions on how to reach my house include "and then you turn off the paved road" and my house originally came with wheels].

It is tempting to say that the roots of anti-intellectualism in American politics come from the simple lack of brainpower of the common man (or woman). They aren't so smart so they mistrust anyone who is openly interested in the life of the mind and intellectual ideas. Given that Obama, "openly intellectual" as he is, garnered the largest percentage and larger number of the popular vote in recent history, suggests that such a simple explanation is not sufficient. Perhaps that is the motivation of a few individuals here and there, but it doesn't help to account for the way in which anti-intellectualism is structured into our society, especially into our educational system. Also it doesn't explain why Republicans candidates and voters are more likely to exude contempt of intellectual accomplishment even more than Democrats do.

The key to understanding anti-intellectualism is found in our economic system and its current troubles. It is clear, beyond doubt, that our economy depends upon people buying things. When consumer confidence goes down, and people cut back on their purchases, our economy tanks. Regardless of all the sanctimonious sermons about people spending more than they earn, and going into credit card debt, the reality is, that our economy has been built on people spending beyond their means.

In troubled times like these, the rational choice for individuals is to save their money and not spend it, but what makes sense for individuals is exactly opposite what is needed to recharge the economy. Certainly there are economic systems that do exist and have existed that do not rest on consumerism and credit, but ours is not one of them.

When the health of the economy depends upon ordinary people spending and consuming larger and larger quantities of material goods, society must provide incentives to make people desire to spend beyond their means. One important tool in doing this is to attach cultural and social values to material things. Advertising is one means of doing this. Through advertising values of family, success, achievement, sexiness, love, and many others, are attached to material products.

More than a hundred years ago, Thorsten Veblen coined the term "conspicuous consumption" to describe the role of consumption in establishing status. The only thing that has changed since Veblen's time is that the use of consumption of luxury goods has been pushed further and further down the income scale. As a result, even low income teenagers will pay $36-$46 dollars for an Abercrombie & Fitch logo t-shirt, rather than $4-$6 for a similar quality blank t-shirt at Walmart. Where the wealthy rely on their peers knowledge of designers style (if you couldn't recognize a Chanel suit, a Lily Pulitzer frock, or an Dior gown, on sight your opinion hardly mattered), lower middle class and working class young people rely on large graphics of "high class" names spread across their chests, backs and down their arms.

When consumption is the bedrock of the economy, and appeals to status are crucial to encouraging continual consumption, there is little room to tolerate alternative, non-consumption based sources of status. Intellectual, creative and artistic pursuits -- except to the degree that they represent monetary exchange -- need to be actively discouraged since they can distract people away from consumption.

Degrees are fine, especially if they come from expensive schools, its knowledge and thinking that are viewed as bothersome. About fourteen years ago, the commencement speaker at the public four year college where I was then employed was a politically appointed state bureaucrat in a Republican administration. He congratulated the graduates on receiving their degrees, and then offered himself as an example of someone who had managed to get a college degree "without letting college change" him, or his beliefs and opinions in any way. This young Republican bureaucrat was proud of the fact that he had come through four years of college unscared by any troublesome knowledge that would undermine in any way the prejudices and attitudes with which he had entered college.

Similarly, art that commands high sale prices is fine, but art for art's sake is not. Negative attitudes toward the National Endowment for the Arts, and the artists that it supports demonstrate this latter view. Conservatives consider the only good art is that which has commercial value. The only artistic value is the value of the market place.

The ordinary individual who expresses distrust, fear and contempt for intellectualism or artistic creativity, is not thinking about promoting consumerism, but there are those in positions of leadership and influence, in government and the media, who are consciously undermining non-commercial sources of status and life satisfaction such as intellectual and artistic endeavor.

failure of the sociological imagination

2008-11-13T16:10:00.012-05:00

The topic in my social problems class today was drug abuse. We looked at the data, and tracked the trends, outlined the extent of the problem. Then we turned to the question of "why?" -- why so much more drug abuse in our region than in the past. [We live in the epicenter of the Oxycontin phenomenon.]

We looked at the issues of the availability of drugs, of the economic and social conditions, of the cultural attitudes encouraged by the media, the pharmaceutical industry, and the medical profession, that pills are a solution to most of life's problems (sexual problems - take Viagra, anxious in social situations - take Paxil, etc.).

One of the students in the class, Mary*, has worked on several local media projects and films about drug abuse in this region, and as a result has talked to a lot of people who have become entangled in abuse. Mary pointed out that the reason given by most of the people that she talked to was that they couldn't cope with the pressures and problems of their lives and took drugs to relieve the pressure, to be distracted, to forget about things for a while. Mary noted that this reason made her mad and disgusted. She didn't think it was a valid reason; that people were just weak and that should just learn to deal with things as she did. The other students in the class offered their agreement with Mary. They too viewed drug abuse as weakness and moral failing to which they were immune.

I asked the class to consider why it might be that more people today found themselves unable to cope with problems and pressure without drugs. I was hoping that they might think about ways in which the circumstances of living in the region had changed. I hoped they might think about how family situations and child rearing had changed (two working parents for example), how job opportunities had declined in the region, how out migration had reduced family networks, how political changes and budgetary cuts meant less in the way of social support, and finally how stagnating middle class and working class incomes and rising costs had eroded the standard of living.

Mary, however, suggested that circumstances had not changed that much, that it all boiled down to people being "weaker" today than they were in the past. People, she suggested weren't willing to "deal with" things as they were in the past (or as she implied as she was). The rest of the class vocally concurred with this view.

So I asked the class, if people were "weaker" today, how had that happened. What was it that had changed to make them weaker? This is the problem with us sociologists, we always think there is a reason for changes that they don't just come out of the air. Unfortunately Mary's response was, "it just happened. I don't don't want to call it evolved [we know from previous classes that Mary doesn't believe in biological evolution], it just happened." Mary suggested that people just naturally changed for the worse over time. Other students in the class offered agreement. There wasn't any reason for change, it just happened they all agreed. Society gets worse, people get worse. People today are weak -- except for us -- that's why they abuse drugs, was the unanimous opinion of my students.

We stopped the discussion at that point to see a short film made locally about Oxycontin abuse in the region. While I tinkered with the VCR, rewinding the film and cuing it up, I could hear Mary speaking quietly with the woman next to her. She was recounting her own history with the use of Paxil for the "terrible anxiety" she suffered after her baby was born, and how she "would not have been able to cope" without her doctor's help and the medication. I could tell by Mary's tone of voice that she did not consider her own inability to cope without medication to be a sign of weakness.

Despite my best efforts this is clearly a group of students who have not grasped the sociological imagination -- that ability to see connections between the biography of the individual and the broader social, economic, political and cultural trends that C. Wright Mills collectively called "history." Worse than that they seem to lack empathy for others, and the ability to see "there but for fortune go I."
____________
*names changed to protect identity.

reaping the whirlwind

2008-11-05T10:22:00.011-05:00

The 44th President of the United States gave an awesome, inspiring, uplifting speech last night. But Obama's was not the only fine speech of the evening. The real John McCain, the reasonable, thoughtful, American patriot, gave a moving speech in which he conceded the presidency to Barack Obama.

"I urge all Americans who supported me to join me in not just congratulating him, but offering our next president our good will and earnest effort to find ways to come together to find the necessary compromises to bridge our differences and help restore our prosperity, defend our security in a dangerous world, and leave our children and grandchildren a stronger, better country than we inherited.
Whatever our differences, we are fellow Americans. And please believe me when I say no association has ever meant more to me than that.
It is natural. It's natural, tonight, to feel some disappointment. But tomorrow, we must move beyond it and work together to get our country moving again."
-- John McCain, United States Senator

For the full text and video see CNN.

If Senator John McCain had conducted his entire campaign the way he conducted his concession speech, last night might have had a different outcome. Last night we saw the man of integrity, the man for whom "country first" is an abiding truth not a campaign slogan. It was painfully clear at several points during the speech (including the one captured in the photo below) that McCain is dismayed with the kind of vitriol that his campaign inspired in many of his supporters.
McCain's speech, the reaction of some of the crowd and McCain's discomfort with that reaction, reminds me of Hosea 8:4,7.

They have made kings,
But not with My sanction;
They have made officers,
But not of My choice.
Of their silver and gold
They have made themselves images,
To their own undoing.

They sow wind,
and they shall reap whirlwind---
Standing stalks devoid of ears
And yielding no flour.
If they do yield any,
Strangers shall devour it.

Photo credit: CNN/Art

Spreading the wealth $257 dollars at a time

2008-10-25T21:23:00.008-04:00

Salon.com has a wonderful, satirical piece, dripping with irony, by a mythical "Bob the Banker"

"The numbers don't lie. So here they are.*

So, as I said, I make $280,000 annually after business expenses. I'm married and filing jointly. Under Obama, my itemized deductions would actually increase slightly — I'd get $49,420 in itemized deductions, while under McCain I'd get $48,975. But my personal exemptions would increase slightly under McCain — he'd give me $6,911, whereas I'd only get $6,132 from Obama.

That leaves my taxable income at $213, 766 under Obama, $213,433 under McCain. Now we have to factor in the bracket cutoff, which for 2009 is $208,850. Anything below that figure for married couples filing jointly is taxed at the fourth tier, 28 percent. Any income above it, until you get up to near $400,000, is taxed at the fifth tier. And this is where the raving income-redistribution scheme of Barack Robespierre Obama kicks in.

As you can see, my taxable income is about $5,000 higher than the cutoff. McCain is going to tax that $5,000 at the current rate, which is 33 percent. But Obama's crazed plan calls for raising that rate to — get ready for it — 35 percent.

And here's what this means. Under McCain, my total tax bill would be $48,254. Under Obama, it would be $48,511.

That's a difference of $257. I'll say it again: Two hundred and fifty-seven dollars.

That's not two hundred and fifty-seven dollars I, or America, can afford.

Things are tough right now. Average working Americans like me are really struggling. They're angry. And when they see the effects of Obama's spread-the-wealth lunacy on an average angry struggling American like me, they'll be even more angry, average, and struggling.

Let me lay it out for you. Right now, I take home about $19,000 a month after the government skims off its share. And I don't have to tell you that $19,000 a month isn't what it used to be.

Take my Jaguar. Do you have any idea how much it costs just to have that thing tuned up? It's like a BMW repair bill on steroids. We're talking $500 just to open the hood.

The hard times are taking a toll on my family life, too. My wife has had to completely cut out having her colors done, and her personal shopper is threatening to walk if we keep cutting back on her hours. We're tightening our belts, but you can only tighten so far before there's no more room to pull.

Then there's food prices. All across America, families are angry and struggling as they try just to get by. We're in the same boat. It's getting harder and harder just to put food on the table. We're only eating filet mignon twice a week, and under Obama's crazed far-left regime, we may have to completely give up Maine lobster and Macanudo cigars.

And those are just a few examples. I could go on and on. The point is, under Obama Big Government is going to take $21.40 out of my pocket every month — money I could use to start another business, help the economy grow, or watch a couple of softcore porn movies on demand."

*All figures about the comparative tax bills under Obama and McCain come from an interview with Gerald Prante, an economist at the nonpartisan Tax Foundation.

Enough said.

Answering a students question

2008-10-09T16:51:00.013-04:00

Recently, one of my students asked what sociology might make of the current financial crisis. As I explained in the class, the current financial crisis is multidimensional, and has a number of different causes. The housing collapse of the housing market and the housing financing market is just one of several threads in the situation, but it helps illustrate some sociological principles of interest to us -- such as the distinction between use value and exchange value.

The use value of a house is that it protects its occupants from the elements, from cold or heat, rain or sleet. The use value includes the functionality of its bathrooms and kitchens. Its use value also includes the pleasure the owners get from privacy or from enjoying the way their house looks or feels. Moreover, ownership versus renting housing adds use value through the ability to make changes, alterations, and modifications to the home, the freedom to have pets, put up fences, and outbuildings that might be restricted by leases or rental agreements. The use value of a house can decline -- wiring and plumbing can break down, roofs can leak, paint can fade and crack, families can grow larger and the space may no longer be adequate, or undesirable "neighbors" can move in next door (like a strip mine)and lessen the pleasure or privacy derived from the home. But declines in use value tend to be slow and incremental. The decline in housing value over the past year or two has been a decline in exchange value, not use value; a decline in what one can sell one's home for (exchange it in the market place). The recent plunging market or exchange value of houses across the country has little to do with the use value of homes. Moreover, the rise in housing costs over the past two decades, had little to do with increases in the use value of housing. So why did housing prices rise so much, and why have they now crashed? How does the housing market and the financial market interconnect?

Let's begin with talking about the rising cost of housing. First, the facts on how the cost of housing has risen. In 1970 the median (mid-point) family income was $7,550 a year, and in 1965 the median (mid-point) price of a new home was $23,300. So the cost of the average, mid-point house was only 3.1 times the income of the average (mid-point) family's income. By the year 2000 the median (mid-point) new housing cost was $169,000, while the 2000 median (mid-point) family income was $41,990, making the average, mid-point house 4 times the average (mid-point) family's income. In other words it was a whole lot harder for the average family to afford the average house. Thing were even worse by 2007. In 2007, the median price of a new home had jumped to $247,900 while the median family income had only risen to $50,233, making the average, mid-point new house 4.9 (or almost 5) times the average, mid-point, family income.

Why did the cost of housing rise so much? For one thing, there was increased demand for housing, population grew. But even more important was that the age structure of the population changed. Beginning in 1965, a big "boom" of young people (the Baby Boomers who were born beginning in 1945) began to hit their 20's and begin looking to start families and buy houses. There was a huge flood of new home buyers moving into the market in the late 1960's and early 1970's. But these were mostly young people with young families, and they did not have large incomes, so even though there was a demand for new houses, the cost of those houses remained modest to meet the incomes of the young families that needed them. By 1990 and 2000, however, the number of young couples and young families looking for housing was fewer than the numbers of middle aged (40's and 50's) Baby Boomers looking to purchase housing (either to upgrade as they received promotions or to change due to their children growing up and leaving home). These middle aged Boomer house hunters had high incomes and were interested in more luxury in their homes. Luxury is to some extent related to use value; some of the greater cost of luxury items comes from them being longer lasting, more durable, more reliable, or just working better. But some luxury is purely a matter of exchange value (a result of supply and demand). The luxury good may not be more functional or useful, and is some times actually less so, depending upon the needs of the houses residents. For example, a synthetic Corian counter top will probably last longer, resist stains better, and require less maintenance than a marble slab counter top, but has a lower exchange value.

Home developers and builders were far more interested in providing homes for these more affluent buyers than they were in providing homes for the smaller number of young couples and young families with less money to spend. The reason is that there is more profit to be made from an expensive, high end house than there is from a smaller lower cost house. For example, if a developer can make a 20% profit (over costs) on a new house (a modest estimate just for arguments sake, profits are sometimes higher and sometimes lower), then the developer makes $20,000 on a $100,000 house, but $100,000 on a $500,000 house. The developer can only build so many houses, and the amount of time to build a house $100,000 house is not much less than to build a $500,000 house, so clearly the preference would be to build $500,000 houses, if you can find buyers for them.

Rising costs of housing were beginning to price a larger percentage of Americans out of home ownership in the 1980's and 1990's. Those lower income Americans wanted homes and had few choices at the low end of the price spectrum (since developers prefer to build higher cost houses). The percentage of families being home owners began to drop in the 1990's. What should have happened when home purchasing began to slide was that builders should have started to offer more lower cost housing. But they didn't do that, because developers and builders really wanted more buyers for their higher end houses. At the same time financial sector was looking for new opportunities for profit(in the interest they charged on loans). The interests of the building sector and the interests of the financial sector coincided, and focused on trying to find ways to expand credit to new customers, and make more people able to afford the rising cost of housing.

Between 1980 and 2007 the financial industry turned to the federal government to have the government remove some of the controls and regulation that limited lending practices. Lobbying by the banks and other financial institutions contributed to the repeal or overturn of several key laws that had existed to regulate the financial industry, giving banks and financial institutions more freedom to loan money to people who previously would not have qualified either because they were borrowing for risky projects (like "flipping" houses) or because their income or credit history was not suitable. Some of these changes made by Congress began in the 1980's but most took place between 1999 and 2004.

The financial sector, freed from controls over lending practices developed some new types of loans, such as new types of Adjustable Rate Mortgages that reset to much higher rates after a period of time, and "interest only" loans that require payment only of interest for an initial period before principle payments kick in. The lenders begin to target people who have been priced out of the housing market, with loans that looked affordable or at least the initial few years of payments look affordable, but which are actually well beyond the means of the consumer. As a result, people making the median income of $50,000 a year, were buying median houses of $200,000, because the banks and other lending institutions were making the first few years of payments something that was affordable. [A family with $50,000 income should not be purchasing a home worth more than $100,000, and even that's pushing it -- but the number of homes less than $100,000 are few and hard to find and often not large enough for young growing families].

So a housing industry (developers and builders) looking for more profits and a banking/finance industry looking for more profits (and allowed to make more risky loans by removal of regulation), offered loans to speculative borrowers and "subprime" (lower income) borrowers, loans that those borrowers could not really afford in the long run. Speculative borrowers are people who buy a house they can't really afford to pay for in the long run, in order fix it up and sell it for a higher price, and make a profit. Called "flipping" the buyer of the house is not planning on living in the house and can only afford to make a few months worth of payments. Their plan is to remodel the house and make it attractive to high end buyers, in homes of making $50,000 to $200,000 in profit in a couple months time.

The banking and finance industry had argued that it was okay to make loans that would have low payments initially and after some years would reset to higher payments because (so the argument went) people's salaries and earning went up as they got older, and the economy expanded over time and wages and salaries increase. The problem is that while it was true that salaries and wages had increased during the 1990's (from 1993 to 1999), the same was not true from 2000 to 2007. Wages and salaries stagnated, and did not keep up with inflation. In recent years, the increasing costs of petroleum and energy caused inflation to rise much faster than wages and salaries.

Of course, some of the blame has to go to the consumers who borrowed more money than they could really afford. They were sometimes pressured by banks and loaning institutions to do so, and were not always given all the information that they needed to make good decisions. But do hold some responsibility for taking on more debt that they could afford. Substantial responsibility lies on the banks and financial institutions that saw loaning to subprime and speculative borrowers as a way to make more money in the short run, because they should have and could have foreseen what would happen. Some responsibility lies on the builders and developers who were unwilling to construct more affordable housing and accept slightly lower profits. Everyone was short sighted, they went for the big bucks up front, and ignored the high likelihood of big losses down the road.

Why does a problem like this in the home building/ home financing area of our economy have so much spill over into other areas? One reason is that the home construction industry is a huge purchaser of goods from other industries -- from raw materials (lumber, steel, glass, plastic), to manufactured products (carpet, appliances, furnaces, doors, counter tops, etc.). Also new home owners also spend a great deal of money themselves on new furnishings (furniture, drapes, lamps, etc.). This has always been true about the housing industry. However, one very new thing, that makes the problem with the housing and finance industry in 2008 a more serious problem is changes in the rules governing financial institutions.

In 1933, the Glass-Steagall Banking Act was passed that said that banking (taking people's money in checking and savings deposits, and making home loans and small personal loans), and that neither banks nor insurance companies could do "investment" (using their own capital to invest in business as well as helping connect people with capital to invest with businesses looking for capital to fund their activities). Banking, is an activity that the government insures, so that people know that their money is safe, and "banks" are required to hold on to a certain percentage of the money deposited to have it on hand at all times to meet depositors needs. Investment businesses make no promises at all about customers money, they take the money and place it in investments, the money is not insured, and there is no requirement to keep cash on hand, and no promise that investors will get any of their money back; although most of the time investors get more money back than they put in, there is no guarantee that this will happen -- banks on the other hand guarantee that every penny you put in you will get back, and insurance companies guarantee that if you pay your premiums without fail and you have a qualifying disaster then you will get more than your money back.

So the 1933 Glass Steagall act, said these businesses, which have very different purposes and very different requirements in dealing with money should not be allowed to be merged together in a single company. In 1999, that law was repealed, and this allowed banks, insurance companies and investment companies to all merge together into large financial institutions. This allows problems in one area of finance to spill over into other areas of finance -- for housing loan problems to affect business investment and vice versa.

changing sexual norms and Twilight

2008-09-20T19:49:00.014-04:00

Fifty and even forty years ago fear of disease and pregnancy were fairly effective in getting most teenagers, at least teenage girls, to view sex before marriage as dangerous and risky.

I remember quite well the film that we were shown sophomore year of high school that was intended to discourage sex. A teenage boy and girl were shown getting into the back seat of a car, the car did some rocking, and the teenagers got out with rumpled clothes; fast forward a few weeks and you see the teenage girl with her doctor getting the news that she has some unnamed, loathsome disease that could render her sterile. While we were amused by the car rocking and rumpled clothes we believed in the disease risk.

But the real fear of sex in the 1950's and 1960's came from the risk of pregnancy. The pill was quite new and hard for teenagers to obtain; with the much higher dosages of the time the pill had more negative side effects; few if any alternatives to the pill were available to teen girls, and the attitudes of the time -- that condoms were only used with prostitutes -- meant that a "good" girl would be offended in the extremely unlikely case that her boyfriend suggested them. Abortion was of course illegal in the 60's, and while some girls found a way, there were often deadly consequences of illegal abortions. If you got pregnant in 1968, your world came to an end, or so it seemed to us at the time. Pregnant girls were thrown out of regular school; the girls who got pregnant and dropped out were the subjects of scandalized whispering campaigns.

Books written for teenage girls in the fifties and sixties, could and did realistically depict ordinary teenage girls, deeply in love with their ordinary boyfriends steadfastly resisting sex, and saving themselves for marriage. The tension and drama of those novels was generated by an accepted tension between fear (of pregnancy and disease) and desire. Few of us who consumed those novels thought this was ridiculous or silly or old fashioned, we found that tension reasonable and realistic, and romantic.

While today there are religious people, including religious teens, that consider sex before marriage sinful, or at the very least undesirable, the type of mortal fear of sex that existed in the 1950's and 1960's has disappeared from popular thought. Diseases like gonorrhea and syphilis are, rightly or wrongly, viewed as easily cured and inconsequential. Even AIDS, an incurable life shortening disease, doesn't work well as a scare tactic because, true or not, popular belief view AIDS as a disease that only affects homosexuals, needle using drug addicts, and poor black people.

It is extremely unlikely that teens would view pregnancy as the life ending event we did in the sixties, when they observe classmates who are pregnant, and know girls with babies going to college. In a time when a conservative, evangelical, Republican candidate for Vice President is open and accepting of her teenage daughter's pregnancy, the idea that pregnancy will ruin one's life and destroy one's reputation are viewed as nonsensical by today's teens.

In this world in which the old dangers of sex no longer hold water with young people, enters Stephenie Meyer and her Twilight series. On her website she writes:

I am also a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (or Mormon, as we are commonly called—for more info on what that means, see www.mormon.org ) and that has a huge influence on who I am and my perspective on the world, and therefore what I write (though I have been asked more than once, "What's a nice Mormon girl like you doing writing about vampires?").

I would argue that Stephenie Meyer writes about vampires because she is a Mormon.

Her religious tradition like most conservative, Christian traditions views sex outside of marriage as sinful, and preaches that young people (male and female) should preserve their virginity until marriage. There are many Christian novels written, published and in bookstores these days that tell stories of romance between young people who remain celibate and do not consummate their relationship until after the marriage vows are complete. None of those novels ever makes it on to the best seller lists -- but the Twilight series has had phenomenal commercial success.

The genius of the Twilight books, is that Stephenie Meyers (as the result of a vivid dream) has found a way to recapture the old fashioned romantic tension between danger and desire, without being viewed as out-dated or absurd. Instead of fear of sexual transmitted diseases or pregnancy, we have fear of the vampire lover who might lose control during sex and devour his partner. By evoking an iconic and well established fantasy creature -- the vampire -- Meyer can deliver her message of abstinence within a framework that seems exciting, dangerous and modern, rather than old fashioned.

cultural change and language change

2008-09-09T20:04:00.005-04:00

In our last two sessions, my SOC 101 class (the one in the classroom)and I have been focusing on the elements of culture, beginning with language, and talking about changes in culture. Last Thursday we were coming up with examples of words that have come to have different meanings -- both denotations (the direct, explicit, dictionary meaning) and connotations (implied or suggested meaning).

In light of this conversation with my students I find it interesting, that apparently the meaning (both denotation and connotation) of the noun "barracuda" has evidently undergone some changes. According to my Merriam-Webster Dictionary (copyright 2004) the second meaning of "barracuda" is a person who "uses aggressive, selfish, and sometimes unethical methods to obtain a goal, especially in business."

Now my 1941 Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, doesn't even have that meaning, it just defines barracuda as "voracious pike-like marine fish." So the application of the name to humans is one example of the changing nature of language.

Now, it would appear, that the Republicans either like the idea of Sarah Palin being labeled "aggressive, selfish, and sometimes unethical" or they think the word means something entirely different. Certainly the Heart song "Barracuda" that the Republicans have chosen (with out the group's permission) as Palin's theme song, does not use the term in a wholly complementary way --the person being called "barracuda" appears to be a preditory and lying person.

cultural values and social practices

2008-09-07T13:50:00.003-04:00

Cultural values often are disconnected from social practices. The values reflect ideals that are often disconnected with the realities of daily life.

I am suddenly reminded of a joke from my childhood, when the primary method of birth control used by Catholics was the rhythm method.

Old Joke:
"What do you call a couple who uses the rythm method?"
"Parents."

New joke:
"What do you call parents who teach abstinence-only to their teens?"
"Grandparents."

norms, the nomos and the antinomian

2008-09-01T16:46:00.013-04:00

Sociologists define norms as rules for behavior that are shared by a group of people. Those rules can vary in seriousness from things like "don't kill" or "don't steal" to "keep your elbows off the table" and "cover your mouth when you cough."

Our everyday life activity is governed by thousands of rules, most of which do not rise to the level of consciousness for us, unless some one violates them. While some norms are viewed as sufficiently serious to require coding into laws with formal sanctions (punishments) attached to them, most norms are enforced in ways that are less formal and less visible to us.

As humans we desire the company and approval of others and generally seek to avoid the criticism and lack of approval of people who are important to us (family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, teachers, bosses). It is not necessary for some one to actually criticize us for, say not keeping our lawn mown, as long as we are aware that the people we care about say negative things about others who do not mow their lawns. The less serious a norm is, the easier it is to violate it without significant disapproval by those who matter to us, or to pass over the occasional criticism as unimportant.

I've previously discussed how language is used to establish the acceptable order (nomos) and what is outside the acceptable order (antinomian). Norms are another important part of defining the nomos, and the violation of norms can be an indicator of what is antinomian. But people do not judge all violations of norms (regardless of level of seriousness) the same. Much depends upon who is violating the norms, when and where.

In graduate school one of my professors, Dwight Billings (still on the graduate faculty at the University of Kentucky) spoke of the concept of "deviance credits." The idea of deviance credits is that some types of people are given leeway for violating norms that others are not. For example, children and very old people are not held to quite the same standards of politeness and propriety that adults are; artists are often expected to be outrageous and dramatic in their behavior; doctors, police, fire fighters, and others intent on saving lives are excused some of the niceties of politeness.

However, the reverse is also true, some people are held to higher standards than others. This has long been the curse of ministers and their families. College presidents are often held to standards that are not applied to CEO's of corporations. Witness the recent resignation of Robert A. Paxton, president of Iowa Central Community College when a photo of him partying on a boat with his son's friends, was made public; none of the young people in the photo or one the boat were below drinking age, and none except his son were students at his college, however, the standard of behavior for college presidents is higher regarding some types of behavior than for other individuals.

The nomos or social order is often maintained by making an example of those who hold positions that are in the limelight, holding them to a higher level of adherence to norms than one might for one's family, friends or neighbors -- or even oneself. Politicians for high national office are among those individuals generally held to higher standards of norm following.

One of my students posted the following comment in our discussion on norms:

Over the weekend, my family and I attended the rodeo at I---. Toward the end of the show, 4 riders came out on horses, each holding a flag belonging to one of the four branches of the military. Those flags were followed by the American flag being held by a female rider. Though many people stood up out of respect for our flags, others did not. There were people in the crowd who didn't remove their hats either, even during the National Anthem. I thought it to be the norm, to always remove your hat, place your hand on your heart, and stand for our Anthem. I found the behavior of those who didn't to be very disappointing and disrespectful.

Obviously this student was disturbed by the breaking of this norm, but the larger point her story reveals is that many people in the audience did not follow this norm. Either because they do not hold the same understanding of the rules governing flag respect or because they view them as minor norms with no serious repercussions (sanctions) for violation of this norm. Recent public reactions to Obama merely standing in respect but not putting his hand over his heart during the National Anthem, support the contention that higher standards of norm following on this matter is applied to presidential candidates.

power, the individual and the community

2008-08-13T13:44:00.005-04:00

People often feel powerless in the face of changes in the economy and decisions by state and federal governments. However, when ordinary citizens come together on common issues, and especially when they work through their local government representatives (majors and town councils) they can have considerable influence on the course of broader events.

Chris McClure at Common Sense Agriculture, Conservation and Energy has an interesting post about a film Texas Coal Wars (see widget in side bar for link to film), that shows how Texas communities large and small came together in a coalition with other groups to oppose construction of new coal-fired electric plants.

political advertising and values

2008-08-10T21:40:00.008-04:00

Campaign advertising is an interesting art form. In just 30 to 60 seconds an advertisement wants to use images, sound, and a small amount of text to strike a chord in potential voters. Positive ads aim to provide images and words that will make viewers identify with a candidate, often by appeals to values (family, patriotism, smaller government, environmental protection, education, and so on). Negative ads aim to conjure adverse reactions to one's opposition with unpleasant images and phrases (like "higher taxes" or "soft on crime" or "liar").

Over the last week or so, I've found McCain's ad campaign curious and confusing. Never before have I seen the ads of one candidate (the ads actually "approved by" the candidate) feature positive and attractive images of his opponent so prominently, for such a large percentage of the ad time. Yet that is exactly what the McCain ads do. Yes, the big evil word "TAXES" is display prominently next to Obama's picture in one part of the ad, but for the most part the images of Obama are attractive, show him smiling, show people smiling at him. This is unprecedented in national campaign advertising, especially negative advertising where the few pictures of the candidate being slammed are generally chosen to be unflattering and appear only briefly. Which left me puzzled -- why would McCain promote these positive images of Obama?

This afternoon, while watching the Olympics my husband and I were talking about how Americans view athletes who immigrate from other countries to the U.S. and compete on our teams. My husband, a serious competitive runner, who spends a lot of time on-line on running discussion boards and blogs, has told me that many of the people on the boards have expressed negative feelings about Bernard Legat and Lopez Lomong, as "foreigners" who should have stayed where they belonged. We were watching women's gymnastics at the time, and the performance of Nastia Liukin a member of the U.S. women's team. Liukin is the daughter of a former USSR Olympic medalist in men's gymnastics; in other words she is an immigrant like Legat and Lomong. We were speculating whether attitudes about immigrants similar to those expressed in the running world were expressed in gymnastic circles about Liukin. We wondered if age made a difference. Then we wondered if race and ethnicity made a difference; do you get a pass if you are blonde and blue-eyed?

Suddenly I had a flash of an idea. What if the unspoken subliminal message of the McCain ads is "Look at this extraordinarily popular BLACK man -- he just might get to be president! Be afraid, be very afraid." What if, the McCain ads are aimed at the unspoken reservoir of racism that they know runs deeply under the surface of American life? What if the ads are just simply to visually underline the one thing that they are not allowed to actually say -- "oh, my God, this is a BLACK man."

I'd like to think it isn't true, but the more I think about it, the more I wonder. Let me be clear, I am most definitely not saying that McCain is a racist. Nor am I saying that the individuals who plan and produce McCain's ads are racists (I don't know who those people are and would not presume to attach that label to someone I didn't know well). What I am suggesting is that the people responsible for the content of the ads may be hoping to strike a chord with the racist values of some Americans, values that they know exist out there in America, and that if they can mobilize some voters around that particular value, McCain is likely to benefit. What do other people think?

restructuring the economy

2008-08-08T12:42:00.007-04:00

Current U.S. Department of Labor figures show that in July 2008, the number of involuntary part-time workers (in jobs formerly full-time but cut to part time due to "Slack work or business conditions") was 4,174,000 compared to only 2,693,000 one year ago (July 2007). While the change from 2007 to 2008 was unusually large, it is part of a longer historical trend to a greater reliance on part-time and temporary workers across the economy.

The trend to greater reliance on part-time workers is one for which high education has unfortunately been in the forefront. Universities, colleges and community colleges have shifted more and more of their teaching responsibilities to adjunct faculty, who teach part-time, have few if any benefits, who frequently are given no office space and who have little contact with students other than in the classroom. Community College's in particular have grown more and more dependent on part-time adjunct faculty. Research by Grace Banachowski shows the trend:

According to Lombardi (1992), part-time faculty constituted 38.5% of the instructors in 698 junior colleges in 1962. This number increased moderately to 40% in 1971, and three years later grew to nearly 50%. By 1980, nearly 60% of the faculty in two-year colleges were employed part-time, and 65% in 1993 (National Center for Education Statistics in American Association of Community Colleges, 1995).

As community colleges deal more and more often with under prepared students needed extensive developmental (or as they used to be called remedial) course work to be ready for college work, the trend towards relying on adjunct faculty is troubling.

Yesterday (August 7) was the annual first meeting of the Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS) Faculty Senate. Representatives from the 13 college districts around Kentucky gathered at the KCTCS offices in Versailles, Kentucky. At the end of the morning general sessions there was an unscheduled appearance by the KCTCS president Michael McCall. McCall offered general remarks of encouragement and optimism for the upcoming academic year, then opened the floor for questions.

The first question from the assembled faculty and academic deans dealt with the rising percentage of instruction being done at KCTCS college's by part-time adjunct instructors. The speaker raised concerns about the impact this was having on the quality of instruction. McCall's response was vague and general, full of platitudes about serving students and maintaining quality. McCall ended his response with a suggestion that individual colleges within the system would need to "examine" the balance between full-time and part-time instruction. [Notice this says nothing about changing the balance, or reversing the trends, only "examining" the balance.]

The next question Dr. McCall fielded was about on-line instruction and the new KCTCS Virtual Learning Initiative (VLI). The VLI is working to translate several KCTCS degree programs into a format in which all courses are offered in self-guided modules. Each course would be divided into smaller units, that could be taken in a week or two. Entry into modules would be 7 days a week, 365 days of the year, on demand from students. Because courses in the VLI program are detached from the traditional semester structure, and offered for fractional credit, all instruction for the program will be done by part-time instructors. Even full-time faculty who decide to participate as instructors will do so as overloads to their normal loads, but the plan is that most of the staffing will be done by new, part-time instructors, who will be paid on a per student per credit basis.

McCall's response to the question made it clear that he believes that this new model of on-demand education should replace all other forms of education in the KCTCS system. While he noted that we would have to wait to see how successful it the Virtual Learning Initiative was, he expressed the belief that it would be successful and that this model was preferable to the traditional model based on semesters.

Given McCall's response to this second question on the Virtual Learning Initiative, it is likely that when he said that KCTCS college's should "examine" the balance of full-time to part-time instruction, he really meant that they should be thinking in terms of moving entirely to part-time instruction!

Musing about the Future, Part II

2008-08-02T13:58:00.015-04:00

Rising fuel prices are bringing some reversals to globalization trends, and bringing some traditional forms of manufacturing back to the United States.

I would like to say "I told you so," but apparently I didn't. After careful perusal of my archives it appears that many of the thoughts I've had about the future of energy and global markets never made it to the electronic page. So far, only my husband, and my colleagues on the Technology Committee have had to listen to those ideas, which were prompted last summer by reading Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat

Today, the New York Times has a piece "Shipping Costs Start to Crimp Globalization" which documents that changes I was predicting for the future have already begun. Globalization, the dispersion of economic activities across the world is driven by the search for cheaper and cheaper labor, and considerations of monetary exchange rates, tax policies, and environmental restrictions. Globalization has been made possible by cheap transportation and the global spread of instantaneous digital communications. Friedman and others have viewed the globalization process as moving in one direction only, to greater and greater integration of all localities into one world-wide economic web.

Thomas Friedman's description of what happened to the world up through 2006 is excellent. However, as I read The World is Flat last summer, it occurred to me that Friedman's predictions for the future did not take into consideration what would happen when the cost of fuel made transportation a more important cost than labor. That was in July 2007, when the cost of oil was approximately $70 a barrel. The cost of oil yesterday, August 1, 2008, was $125 a barrel an increase of seventy-nine percent - and this is nearly $10 less than the all time weekly high of $134 a barrel last month (July 2008).

Since cutting costs is the driving force behind globalization, it seemed to me logical and reasonable, that as the cost of moving goods across oceans become more expensive this would offset other costs (such as labor, taxes, and environmental controls) and make production of goods closer to end consumers more appealing. Moreover, a rise in transportation costs seems inevitable given the finite nature of the primary transportation fuel - petroleum.

As much as oil prices have risen (and with expanding economies in Asia to blunt any declines in consumption from the U.S. and other advanced industrialized countries) traditional economic theory would predict rises in world oil production. Albeit that many oil producing nations (especially within OPEC) are not market economies, even state owned industries are not completely immune to the pull higher prices can have on production levels. However, the Energy Information Agency of the U.S. Department of Energy gives oil production figures that show only small increases in world production in recent years, and even small declines in early 2008.

Oil production from Saudi Arabia where oil is state owned rose from August 2007 to January 2008, and then declined slightly in the first quarter of 2008. In Russia, where major efforts have been made to privatize and modernize oil production, saw small but steady production declines from August 2007 through April 2008. The overall pattern of world oil production in this time of rising prices suggests that oil is becoming more difficult and more expensive to find and produce. The easing of oil prices (and the price of gasoline at the pump) in the last three weeks, does not signal a long term return to cheap fuel, but a short term adjustment to the downturn in demand in the U.S. The long term outlook is for fuel prices to continue to rise.

The NYTimes article provides some specific examples of industries that have already bucked to the globalization trend due to increased costs. One of particular interest to people in central Appalachia were I'm located is a return of furniture manufacturing to the region.

Until recently, standard practice in the furniture industry was to ship American timber from ports like Norfolk, Baltimore and Charleston to China, where oak and cherry would be milled into sofas, beds, tables, cabinets and chairs, which were then shipped back to the United States.
But with transport costs rising, more wood is now going to traditional domestic furniture-making centers in North Carolina and Virginia, where the industry had all but been wiped out. While the opening of the American Ikea plant, in Danville, Va., a traditional furniture-producing center hit hard by the outsourcing of production to Asia, is perhaps most emblematic of such changes, other manufacturers are also shifting some production back to the United States.
Among them is Craftmaster Furniture, a company founded in North Carolina but now Chinese-owned. And at an industry fair in April, La-Z-Boy announced a new line that will begin production in North Carolina this month.

The U.S. steel industry is another that has seen resurgence due to rising transportation costs, while steel imports from China have been steadily declining in recent years.

The assumption by Friedman (and others) that all industries would eventually move into "just-in --time" supply lines that span the globe, is likely to run afoul of rising transportation costs and greater uncertainty of fuel supplies. The NYTimes article gives a few specific examples of industries opting for local suppliers for components in their products, which hints at a future in which more localized neighborhood based integration of groups of producers and suppliers may reappear in the American landscape.

This does not mean that there will ever be a complete retreat from global trade. As Brian Fagan discusses in The Great Warming even during the unpredictable precipitation in the Sahara Desert during the "medieval warm period" camel caravans carrying a variety of goods continued to be regular feature of northern Africa's economy. However, it does mean that the future global economic landscape may not be as "flat" as it is today.

the process of science

2008-07-26T16:24:00.019-04:00

A few years back, Michael Crichton published State of Fear, which was far less a novel than an inept position paper. Possessed of a tortured and unbelievable plot, wooden characters, and many pages of highly selective scientific data (replete with charts and footnotes) and pseudo-scientific exposition, the book was only worth reading for insight into the minds of climate contrarians (or deniers depending on your preferred terminology). The book had two essential premises: 1) those who support the idea of anthropogenic global warming do so for reasons of personal, professional and organizational economic gain and aggrandizement, and that these people are therefore willing to go to any lengths, including the wholesale murder of entire populations through manufactured environmental catastrophes, to protect their interests and promote acceptance of anthropogenic global warming by the public and politicians; and 2) governments (that is the "state" in the title) require the maintenance of fear in order to exert control in the population, and in the absence of old enemies (communism), government has turned to an environmental bogeyman to exert control.

Let's deal with premise number two first. Governments have used fear as a mechanism of control, especially when bent on limiting civil liberties and political opposition, and expanding the power of office holders. This describes the Bush administration. However, the Bush administration spent seven of its eight years denying global warming, and doing its best to silence scientists in NASA, NOAA, the EPA and CDC and stifle data supportive of the anthropogenic global warming. The Bush administration favorite bogeyman is "Islamic terrorism" not global warming. Which leads us to premise number one. Certainly millions of dollars of research money, from both government and industry is at stake for scientists, their departments and their institutions. But under the Bush administration, large-scale government monies were not flowing to scientists studying climate change, and the industries (coal, electricity generation, oil, etc.) with the most money to spend on climate research are largely those whose stake is in undermining the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis.

Why spend so much time talking about a bad novel? Because those two key premises are widely believed by many people. Over and over, in blogs, in on-line discussions, on talk shows, on Fox News, and many other media outlets, the belief is expressed that those who support the idea of anthropogenic global warming are motivated by the exact same things -- greed and power -- that motivate those who oppose the idea.

Americans have become disenchanted with politics (many sociologists would call it alienation). Quite accurately, Americans are aware of the role of money in politics. They know that the pharmaceutical corporations spend millions in lobbying money and campaign contributions and public relations ads to insure that they will continue to make billions and billions in profits on drugs. They know that corporations like Halliburton and its subsidiaries have made millions in profits on no-bid contracts in Iraq while American soldiers and Iraqi civilians die -- sometimes as a direct result of the shoddy work done on those contracts, like the soldiers electrocuted by poor wiring jobs done by a Halliburton subsidiary. Americans also know that things that their government identifies as threats often turn out not to be supported by fact. Many Americans believe that Bush and Cheney knowingly lied about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, whipping-up fear to support a war that had far more to do with shoring up the dollar and protecting access to oil supplies, than it ever had to do with terrorism and military threat. So it is not surprising that many Americans also look at claims about the dangers of global warming with distrust.

They have come to expect people to act politically only out of self-interest in amassing wealth and power, and to expect that fear-mongering will play a major role in promoting that self-interest. The idea that scientists might operate on different, more disinterested principles, requiring rigorous testing, verification and review is beyond the comprehension of most people. This is not to say that scientists are not human and that they care nothing at all for career advancement, salaries, or grants; of course they are and they do.

Individual scientists fake data and lie about their results. However, they are usually caught at it and disgraced, because the scientific endeavor as a whole has built into it many mechanisms for feedback, review, oversight, and correction based on empirical evidence.

Most Americans do not understand that science is a process and a social process at that. Our educational system is at fault in this. The only exposure of most people to science is reading a few dry textbooks that present a list of terms, facts and numbers to be memorized and accepted by fiat. The social process of science in which the results of each individual scientists study are reviewed by many others, and tested repeatedly by others in other settings, has built into it corrections that tend to weed out that which is cannot be replicated and supported.

Science is not infallible. Scientists do sometimes go down the wrong alley, but this is always corrected by other scientists. Climate change science has been around a lot longer than the general public has been aware of it - and contrary to some media claims has been focused on global warming not cooling. Long before it became climate change became a political issue, the scientific process of review pruned away most of the false leads and blind alleys. There is still a great deal of uncertainty on specific mechanisms, specific consequences, and the specific patterns and timetables through which the general trend of anthropogenic global warming will play out.

Politicians and the political process may "squelch dissent," but science uses a process of peer review to sort between that which has the greatest empirical support and that which fails the tests of reviews and replication. This means that some people don't get their papers and their research published. This is not sinister, its how the scientific process works. Sometimes this means that good ideas and groundbreaking research doesn't get published. But if there's validity in it, other people will pick it up and work on it, providing more data, more corraboration, until ultimately it will get recognized.

childhood socialization and values

2008-07-07T08:06:00.019-04:00

Almost every introductory sociology textbook carries in it the obligatory discussion of "nature versus nurture," and while sociology acknowledges some role for genetic inheritance in human behavior, the essence of sociology is to focus on the nurture side or what we call socialization. [Anthropologists refer to the same process as enculturation -- a term that results in less student confusion.]

Sociologists explore the role of learning from others (socialization) on everything from eating and controlling bodily functions, to language, to following the rules of daily life (norms), to developing beliefs and values.

If you doubt the role of socialization (learning from others) in eating behavior, then you've never spent any time with a baby or small child. They will put anything in their mouths to taste, and I mean anything, so the only thing standing between a human child and eminent death by poisoning is socializing agents such as parents, grandparents, older siblings and other caretakers, who teach (socialize) the child to distinguish between proper "food" and other consumables. This of course also includes teaching the child that many things that non-poisonous and are acceptable as food in other cultures are off limits and "nasty" in our own -- such as insects, worms, and dirt.

Of greater interest to most sociologists are the learning processes (socialization) for acquiring cultural norms, beliefs and values -- the non-material aspects of human culture. Sociologists and anthropologists vary in their views of how much of our adult attitudes, believes and values are socialized (enculturated) in childhood, and how much continues to evolve throughout our life time. Like many sociologists I am most influenced by thinkers like George Herbert Mead who view socialization and the development of the self as life long processes. While key developments happen in early childhood, the self and the attitudes, beliefs and values of the self are an on-going process shaped by the continuing interaction with others.

Another part of the sociological debate over socialization concerns the relative importance of various agents of socialization: parents, siblings, relatives, teachers, peers (friends, schoolmates), ministers and Sunday school teachers, and in the modern world media (books, magazines, television, music, movies, video games, etc.). Few sociologists question the primacy of parents or other primary caregivers in infancy; and much research has been done that establishes that television (especially televised violence) has an impact on childhood socialization. During the 1970's a great deal of research explored the role of children's books in shaping children's perceptions and attitudes about gender and gender roles.

In that spirit a new book, Little House, Long Shadow: Laura Ingalls Wilder's Impact on American Culture (University of Missouri Press) by Anita Clair Fellman, now chair of the women's-studies department at Old Dominion University, investigates the impact of this popular series of books on the political values and attitudes of recent generations of Americans. As reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education "Note Bene" July 11, 2008 [sorry, this is a subscription only article]:

She [Fellman] found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that Wilder's own staunch individualism had informed the tenor of the novels. "Distraught by New Deal policies that created an expanded role for government," Wilder had, in her books, expressly depicted government as "nothing but rules and bureaucracies destructive to the enterprising individual," sometimes manipulating the facts of her youth — on which the books are based — to achieve this effect. The Little House books instead champion the self-reliance, isolationism, and "buoyancy of spirit" Wilder felt had made America great.

Fellman carefully notes, "Looking at the Little House books in this way would be only a case study for my starting proposition that sources other than overtly political thinking and rhetoric might have contributed to a continued appreciation for individualist ideas." Yet, she continues, "there are not many people who are aware of the formative influence of what they read in childhood on their core political views."

As a sociologist, I am suspicious of this sort of purely textual analysis. Until research actually links the reading of these books in childhood, to the development of conservative, individualistic values in adulthood in specific individuals, Fellman's work remains highly speculative. Moreover, one would have to explore the interaction of exposure to books like this with the political values expressed within the family.

My own experience causes me to question the value of Fellman's conclusions. No one I knew growing up spent more time reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's books than I did. I read the entire series several times before the age of 18, and the last four books (dealing with Laura's adolescence and early adulthood) in the series more than a dozen times during the same period, and have probably read it another 5 or 6 time since that. Many of the girls I knew never read it at all, and none of the boys -- including my two brothers -- I knew read it or had it read to them. Despite my fondness for the series, and my admiration for the pioneer spirit expressed within it, my own political values were far more influenced by my parents, who were (and still are) staunch liberals. The fact that my father gave me The Communist Manifesto to read at age 11, and encouraged me to read his union paper every week, were far more influential on my political values than the Wilder series, no matter how beloved.

Moreover, my family experience suggests that adult experience is also influential on political values. One of my brothers, who read neither the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, nor The Communist Manifesto as a child, but was exposed to the same liberal political rants at the dinner table, grew up to be a Reagan (and Bush) conservative. I strongly suspect that his adult political values have a lot more to do with his economic self interest (he's been much more affluent than myself by 400 to 600 percent for the past 3 decades) in low taxes and policies that benefit investors than with any childhood influences. My own adult experiences both as a knowledge worker at the lowest end of the scale for my occupation, and as a faculty advisor and friend to many women struggling with the welfare system also continued to mold me into a liberal.

A current candidate for president also made an excellent argument, though much maligned, for the role of adult experiences on shaping political values. Although, as a sociologist I would suggest that the words "disaffected" or "alienated" would be more accurate than "bitter," his assessement of the impact of frustration on political attitudes reflects what I have observed in the working class and lower middle class communities where I have lived and taught.

My general sense, contrary to Fellman's argument, is that the swell of conservatism that brought Reagan to office had more to do with those who read little or nothing in childhood and whose only contact with the Wilder story was through the Michael Landon TV series, than it had to do with the influence of a series of children's books. But the only way the question could be answered would be to actually measure the political attitudes of individuals and compare that to their childhood reading experiences.

social construction of the nomos and antinomos

2008-07-04T15:33:00.021-04:00

Language is what separates humans for the other animals. Language isn't just communication. Lots of animals communicate. My dog sends greetings to other dogs in the neighborhood. She loudly announces that there is a suspicious vehicle in the neighborhood that requires our attention. She voices her approval and encouragement to the neighbors' dog Mr. Tuggles as he harasses one of the neighborhood cats. But my dog can't communicate about things that happened yesterday, things that happen outside the range of her sight, smell or hearing, or things that might possibly happen tomorrow. Only humans with our symbolic language can do those things.

One of many the ways that humans use language is to define what is part of the acceptable order (nomos) and what is outside the acceptable order (antinomian). In this day and age, we have the technological capacity to disseminate our attempts at defining the nomos and antinomos to thousands of people in a short period of time through the Internet. Many e-mails are sent everyday designed to convince readers to view the world in particular ways, to define somethings as within the order of the nomos, and other things as antinomian.

This week I received such an e-mail, from one of those acquaintances who rarely sends personal messages, but has decided, without a by-your-leave, to include their entire address book in mass mailings; a behavior which, by the way I consider rude in the extreme (why I make an issue of this will become apparent below). This particular e-mail, like many was designed to call attention to antinomian action, and thus galvanize its readers into action to support and protect the nomos. What that action might be, other than forwarding the message on to everyone in one's own address book, is left suitably vague. The subject of the e-mail? A woman, an ordinary citizen with a good singing voice, was invited to perform The Star Spangled Banner at her local (Denver) city council meeting. In a move that was ill-advised but hardly sinister, the woman substituted the song Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing by James Weldon Johnson. Both songs speak of liberty, freedom, God and love of country. [Click here if you are unfamiliar with Johnson's song,and click here if you can't remember The Star Spangled Banner -- as many Americans cannot.]

The incident was discussed on local radio, where the Governor of Colorado defined the woman's actions as "actions were 'wrong' and 'outside the bounds.'" In other words the governor labeled the actions antinomian -- against the nomos. Local papers picked up the story, pointing out that the song Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing "is also known as the 'black national anthem.'" This is technically incorrect; the NAACP adopted the song as "The Negro National Anthem" in 1919, and it was entered into the Congressional Record in 1990 as "African American National Hymn." Unlike the phrases "Negro National Anthem" and "African American National Hymn" the phrase "Black National Anthem" conjures in some people's minds the wraith of "Black nationalism," a separatist movement that arose in the late 19th century, and which has been associated with militant movements in the twentieth century. There is, of course, no connection what so ever between this song and that movement.

The e-mail I received strongly suggested that the actions of the singer were seditious (although the vocabulary of the e-mail was far cruder), an attempt to subvert the legitimate government, through a plot to replace one national allegiance with a foreign - non-American - allegiance. Curious, I did some Googling, found the original story (which included the lyrics). I wondered if the people who sent the e-mail, who seemed so incensed about this anti-American action, were at all familiar with the words. So I hit "reply all" and mailed the lyrics back to them (and everyone on the list of course).

This morning I received a reply from my acquaintance. She acknowledged that "It is a beautiful song but when someone is asked to sing a specific song and they agree, they should not change the song without asking those who extended the original invitation. All politics aside, it is just rude."

My response to her: Yes. I agree, it is rude and it is inappropriate when you are asked to provide a specific service to substitute another service (regardless of quality) without first asking. She should not have done it without asking first. [Just as people should ask the folks in their e-mail address book whether they wan to receive mass mailings.] But if my acquaintance (who lives no where near Denver), or the governor of Colorado, or Fox news, or anyone else who has promoted and forwarded this story, thought that the problem was "rudeness," then there would never have been a story. Because I guarantee that rude behavior happens at city council and town council meetings nation-wide on a regular and recurring basis, and never gets further than the local media -- if that. Rudeness is annoying but it doesn't warrant a nation-wide flurry of communications to warn folks of attacks upon the nomos.

Here's my bet -- if this woman had substituted Amazing Grace for The Star Spangled Banner how upset would these same people be? Would it have made a national news story? Or if a white woman had sung these exact same words, with no one mentioning the phrase "black national anthem" wouldn't these same people be defending her against the ACLU for bringing God (mentioned 4 times in Lift Ev'ry Voice and only 1 time in The Star Spangled Banner) into a political arena?

understanding the nomos

2008-07-02T17:27:00.006-04:00

Sociologist Peter Berger defined the "nomos" as "a meaningful order" which makes the "antinomian" the opposite of meaningful order. One who is antinomian deliberately stands against existing norms and laws.

It is a long established principle in anthropology and sociology that it is difficult for people to recognize and articulate what is normal or normative, because the nomos to truly work in providing meaningful order it must be taken-for-granted. The nomos must be accepted as natural, unquestioned, and therefore to some extent unconscious. It is only when confronting the antinomian, that individuals within a society are able to articulate the nomos, and then only in part, because the nature of the nomos is that it must be taken-for-granted to be effective.

Emile Durkheim demonstrated in his research and theory that the existence of deviance in a society is functional (beneficial) because the existence of deviance and the sanctioning of deviance serves by comparison to define and reinforce adherence to the norms of society (nomos).

Consequently, for more than one hundred and fifty years, anthropologists and sociologists (not to mention psychologists) have used the examination of antinomians and deviants as the best means through which to access the unquestioned, unexamined nomos of society.

Recently David Edmunds a Family Foundation policy analyst asked in a Louisville Courier Journal op-ed piece, how the research of Professor Kaila Story of the University of Louisville on "how the black male-bodied Drag Queen's presence within queer "subcultures' disrupts mainstream notions of what is considered natural and fixed signifiers of black femininity and/or womanhood" moves Kentucky forward. The answer, as any anthropologist, sociologist or psychologist could tell him, is that it is only by examining the deviant and antinomian, that we can understand "what is considered natural and fixed signifiers of black femininity and/or womanhood."

who/what defines a terrorist?

2008-07-02T11:24:00.006-04:00

Tuesday July 1, President Bush signed into law H.R. 5690, which "authorizes the Departments of State and Homeland Security to determine that provisions in the Immigration and Nationality Act that render aliens inadmissible due to terrorist or criminal activities would not apply with respect to activities undertaken in association with the African National Congress in opposition to apartheid rule in South Africa." In doing so, Bush removes Nelson Mandela, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize from the United States terror watch list.

Does this mean that Mandela and the ANC didn't engage in acts of violence in their fight against apartheid -- of course not. The U.S. government has finally decided to bow to public opinion that view these acts of violence as the acts of "freedom fighters." It doesn't hurt that the ANC is now the ruling party in a country in which many U.S. citizens and businesses have significant economic interests.

Many of us, myself included, never considered Mandela and the ANC terrorists, but our government did. Just as there are some Americans today who do not consider Hamas to be terrorists, but view them also as freedom fighters. The point here is that the label of "terrorist" is not based on some objective measure of the level of violence employed, or the number of deaths and injuries incurred. It is a political label based on prevailing attitudes and sentiments, and it can change when the circumstances and attitudes change.

As sociologists point out over and over again, political, economic and social reality is socially constructed. It is constructed through the process of attaching meaning to things. We humans construct those meanings, and determine how things, people, and events will be defined; because our world is socially constructed, it can be reconstructed and redefined. Power and powerlessness often determine whose sets of meanings will get the backing of governments and military might. When the lines of power shift, things are often redefined to reflect those changes in power.

LeapFrog gone wrong

2008-06-28T13:49:00.000-04:00

This should be filed under "did they really do that?" category. I'm not sure what bothers me most about LeapFrog's latest television advertisement for their TAG reading system: the ad itself or the possibility that there are actually parents out there who would be swayed by the commercial.

The commercial shows an adult standing next to a child sized table with two books and a line of children waiting to have access to one of the books. The adult attempts to interest the first child in line, a boy, about 7 years old in one of the books, a beautifully illustrated book on nature. The most prominent illustration is a gorgeous, realistic, detailed painting of a frog. The book is clearly a book about nature and animals. The child contemptuously turns his back on that book, in preference for the second book, illustrated with the crude, primary colored Sponge Bob characters because this book comes with the "magic" TAG stylus that will read the words in the book out loud to the child. The thrust of the advertisement is to convince parents to buy the "magic" book and stylus (the TAG system) for their kids.

I find this commercial disturbing. First, I am disturbed that anyone would wish to encourage children to prefer a simplistic book with crude illustrations of a commercial cartoon characters over a beautiful, artistic, realistically illustrated and scientifically informative book. Second, the more I think about what the TAG system does, the more I suspect that it discourages learning to read on ones own.

I don't doubt that the TAG system and other technology like it helps children with word recognition. The child can see the word and hear it pronounced. There are also interactive games in many of the books, in which an adult voice asks the child to touch a specific word, and thus promote word recognition. But the development of reading skill is involves far more than word recognition.

The TAG system is marketed for the age range from 4 years to 8 years. While perhaps appropriate for 4 year old, the TAG system seems woefully out of touch with what 8 year old should be doing with reading -- devouring entire books on their own. The television commercial features children at the upper end of this age range, rather than the lower end of the range.

I think about how I became interested in reading and developed proficiency. My parents, especially my mother, selected books from the library to read out loud. Some of the books I remember her choosing include Beverly Cleary's Henry, Ramona and Beezus stories, Travers' Mary Poppins series, Heinlein's Red Planet, Baum's Oz books (our favorites were the less familiar books, like Ozma of Oz), and many others. My mother would read only one or two chapters each night. While this was fine when I was 4 or 5, as I got older, I became impatient to know more. My mother neither blocked nor encouraged me, but simply had the books available in the house, where I could find them on my own during the daytime, to read ahead. By the time I was 8 years old, I was consuming entire books on my own, regardless of whether they were "age appropriate" or not. For example, I read the entirety of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women the summer between second and third grade, when I was 8 years old. This was followed in short order by The Five Little Peppers and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm as well as other young people's classics.

The parent who reads to the child a book that is interesting, but just at the upper edge of the child's reading ability, encourages a curiosity and models the skill of reading. By failing to satisfy fully the child's desire to hear more of the story, and being unavailable to read out loud every time the child is interested, parents create a situation in which children must must stretch themselves to satisfy their craving for more story.

So I wonder what happens, when the child can satisfy that desire to hear more of the story read to them at any time? If they don't have to wait for mom or dad to sit down and read to them, but can use their TAG stylus, what impetus is there for them to read on their own. Moreover, the library of books developed for use with TAG are, at this point, focused on popular cartoon characters with simplistic vocabulary and stories. Books that feature Sponge Bob, Disney's Little Mermaid, the Cars from the animated feature film, Kung Fu and Diego from TV dominate the book line up. There is one classic story (the Little Engine Who Could). I must admit that Walter the Farting dog is quite entertaining, and what child (or adult) could resist being able to produce fart noises from a book! But none of these picture books provide the challenge to stretch and learn for an eight year old.

Most of my community college students can read a sentence, or a short paragraph, and they can look for answers to question that are specific, factual, and phrased in exactly the same vocabulary as the text. But few can generalize or summarize from readings longer than a page or two, and are likely to give you a blank stare if you ask them "what is the book about?" I can't help but fear that technologies like LeapFrog's TAG will produce more rather than fewer poor readers.

bravo!

2008-06-27T18:48:00.004-04:00

I applaud a stalwart colleague, Jess Rivas, at Somerset Community College in Somerset, Kentucky. He presents a first rate argument in today's Lexington Herald-Leader that President Chavez of Venezuela is not "anti-American" and that another, closer to home fit that description far better.

In case you some how miss who Rivas is referring to, check out the complete text of the Articles of Impeachment against George W. Bush entered into the Congressional Record by Rep. Dennis Kucinich.

alone together

2008-06-22T18:28:00.005-04:00

Alone Together: How Marriage in America is Changing by Paul R. Amato, Alan Booth, David R. Johnson, and Stacy J. Rogers, might not be a book that most people would read for pleasure. It is however, a sociologist's delight. Amato, Booth, Johnson and Rogers are sociologists at Pennsylvania State University, an institution well known in the discipline for large scale quantitative research. This book is the result of two major surveys done twenty years apart (1980 and 2000) which asked the exact same questions of a representative sample of married Americans under 55 years old. Their primary research question was "how is marriage in American changing?" What they found was that there were many changes, but that one could not make simple generalizations. Their data suggests that neither the folks who say that marriage is in decline, nor those that consider marriage to be changing but in fine health, are entirely correct. Their research suggests that marriage is a multi-faceted relationship, the quality of which varies on more than one dimension, and not always in the same direction.

Amato, Booth, Johnson and Rogers identified five dimensions of marital quality (all based on the reports of subjects): marital happiness, marital interaction, marital conflict, marital problems, and "divorce proneness" (meaning how often the individual thought about getting a divorce, talked to others -- including spouse -- about possibility of divorce, etc.). Over the twenty years between the two studies, the researchers found: 1) that reported levels of marital happiness and “divorce proneness” did not change; 2) that (on the positive side) reported levels of marital conflict and marital problems declined moderately; and 3) that overall levels of marital interaction declined. So on two of the five measures marital quality stayed the same for 20 years, on two marital quality improved, and on one, “interaction,” there was a decline (although I know some husbands and some wives who consider less interaction with their spouse to be a blessing at times).

Each of these dimensions also has multiple factors, which sometimes vary in the same way, but not always. For example, the dimension of “marital happiness” is one in which the factors vary in contradictory ways. The factors the researchers included in “marital happiness” were “agreement” with spouse, assessment of “strength of love,” evaluation of “sex life,” and whether or not they view their marriage as “better than most.” Between 1980 and 2000 “agreement” and “strength of love” increased (improved), while “sex life,” and “marriage better than most,” declined. [One could argue that a decline in assessing one’s marriage “better than most, does not represent a decline in one’s own marital quality but rather an upward assessment of the general state of marriage, or just simply greater realism]. On the other hand, the factor of marital interaction is one in which all four factors (eating main meal together, going out of leisure together, visiting friends together, and working around the home together) all declined from 1980 to 2000.

The authors’ overall conclusion: that reports of the decline and death of marriage are premature, but that all is not perfect in matrimonial land.

The research reported is sound, and provides fascinating insight into the ways that marriage has changed. I have one complaint. The authors refer throughout the book to “rise of individualism” as the cause of many of the changes that they observe, but they have not operationalized nor measured this variable in any way. They depend upon other people’s writing on the topic of individualism (none of which appears to be based on systematic empirical research). Occasionally, the authors use one of their own outcome measures as an indicator of “individualism,” but that involves fallacious circular reasoning. If one argues that an increase in individualism causes marital partners to spend more time alone, one cannot then turn around and say that spending time alone is a measure of increased individualism. That’s like saying that a job is highly paid because it is important, and we know it is important because it is highly paid.

2008-06-19T19:08:00.004-04:00

The other day I saw journalist Lara Logan on Jon Stewart's Daily Show, and was very impressed. I had not seen any of her actual reports previously, so I was delighted when I ran across the piece below on another blogger's site:

This is very powerful and worth viewing.

Ice Watching Redux

2008-06-11T15:19:00.004-04:00

Anyone who is interested can observe the day to day measurements of sea ice in the Arctic on the National Snow and Ice Data Center's page Arctic Sea Ice News and Analysis.

One week ago (June 4) I posted on this topic at Blue Island Almanack. But things have changed slightly since then. This is today's updated graphic. The gray line at the top is the average extent (1979 to 2000 the period for which we have satellite imaging) of ice for each date, the dotted green line is the actual extent of sea ice on each date in 2007 (the minimum extent recorded so far). The blue line is this year's (2008) current measurements. As you can see, as of yesterday, this year's ice extent has now dropped just below last year (2007). This does not bode well.

Many scientists expect that because a much larger extent of the sea ice is thinner one year ice (because of the previous years minimum extent), that melting will accelerate and drop well below the 2007 minimum.

The $2.99 gas boondoggle

2008-06-11T14:53:00.001-04:00

Recent Chrysler adds encourage car buyers to purchase certain new Chrysler/Dodge vehicles and receive three years of gasoline at $2.99 guaranteed. Given that gasoline prices are currently a dollar higher than this, hovering around $4 a gallon across the nation, this may seem to some like a good deal. But is it?

The official rules for the Chrysler program are rather complex. First of all, you must have a VISA or MasterCard credit card account to participate. Chrysler then provides the buyer with a special card (see graphic) to be used only for gasoline purchases that is tied into that credit card account. This special card provided by Voyager Fleet Systems, which is honored at many types of stations, but not all. So the purchaser will need to know which stations will honor the card and which will not. In my region, a large number of the gas stations on the major north south route have been bought out by the Valero chain; a chain that does not honor the Voyager Fleet Systems card.

If you are one of those people who pay off his/her entire credit card balance each month, then this will have little effect on the cost. But for those who carry balances, using credit cards means adding to balance upon which interest is calculated. Since many people have credit cards with interest rates of 18% or higher, this raises the actual cost of gasoline at least a few cents per gallon (3 to 4 cents) each month above the $2.99.

Secondly, Chrysler has established in advance the amount of gallons it will cover at $2.99 for each type of vehicle, based on average estimates of vehicle fuel efficiency and on the 12,000 miles per year driven by the average American. For example, Chrysler has estimated that the Dodge Durango SUV will get 15 miles per gallon fuel efficiency. Using 12,000 miles per year, Chrysler calculates total gasoline consumption for a year as 800 gallons, and allots for the three years 2400 gallons of gasoline. If the purchaser drives more than 12,000 miles in a year, or gets less than 15 miles per gallon on average, he/she will have to pay full price (using some other method of payment) for any gasoline purchased above the allotted 800 gallons per year. Consumer Reports has tables to show many of Chrysler's estimates of gas mileage efficiency are above those found by their own testing teams.

Third and perhaps most importantly, one can purchase vehicles with greater fuel efficiency, that will cost less to operate even over the first three years, and certainly cost less over the longer life of the vehicle (unless one plans to buy a new more efficient vehicle at the end of 3 years). Simple comparison: purchase a 2008 Dodge Durango SUV that gets on average 15 miles per gallon at an estimated Kelly Blue Book Price range between $25,211 and $33,110 (depending upon trim, options, etc.) or purchase a 2008 Ford Escape Hybrid SUV which gets an average 32 miles per gallon (more than twice as much) for an estimated Kelly Blue Book Price Range between $27,577 and $29,312. At 15 mpg for 2400 gallons over three years, and $2.99 a gallon the Dodge Durango will cost the buyer $7,176 for gasoline. At 32 mpg for 1125 gallons (more fuel efficient), and let's say an average of $6.00 a gallon (let's hope not, but who knows), the Ford Escape purchaser will pay only $6,750 in the same three years.

So in the first three years, while the $2.99 gas program is in place, the Dodge Durango purchaser will actually pay more for gasoline than the purchaser of the more fuel efficient Ford Escape Hybrid. The initial cost of the two vehicles is very similar. So who got the better deal? The real kicker of course comes in that fourth year, when the $2.99 gas is all gone, and now the 15 mpg Durango owner will be paying the going rate for gasoline ($6+ ??), and be hit by a much larger fuel bill than the Escape owner who still has a vehicle that gets 32 mpg. Consumer Reports has made several such comparisons on the relative costs of owning various Chrysler/Dodge vehicles versus more fuel efficient equivalent vehicles. Unfortunately, unlike my own comparisons, Consumer Reports uses only the price of fuel at the time the article was published (in May 2008) which was about $3.68, and does not take into consideration increasing cost of gasoline (as my own comparison above does).

Of course, the really prudent vehicle purchaser might opt for the Toyota Yaris, a conventional gasoline powered subcompact, that also gets 32 mpg, but costs between $12,856 and $15,007. Thousands of dollars saved up front, and years of lower gasoline costs.

So, putting completely aside for the moment, any discussion of environmental issues, the $2.99 promotion by Chrysler does not make good personal economic sense for the individual consumer.

gag me with a coal shovel

2008-06-10T14:09:00.008-04:00

Perhaps you've seen it the Clean Coal: AmericasPower.org ads in their cool greens and blues that run on television frequently. The folks in those ads "believe" that we "can do it." The "it" is carbon capture technology, which of course does not yet exist in any form applicable to large scale power generation.

As my husband is all to aware, my reaction to these commercials is to make very loud, rude noises.

I've said it before, and before that, and I'll say it again there is no such thing as "clean coal" and there never will be.

Even if -- and that's a big if given the huge costs involved -- large scale carbon capture technology is developed, that does not make coal "clean." Because the more coal we extract the "dirtier" and more environmentally devastating coal mining becomes; says she who lives in the midst of Kentucky's coal fields.

Think about this -- what benefit is there to sequestering the carbon produced by burning the coal, if the process of mining the coal removes vast acres of forest cover reducing the natural carbon sinks?

I see dozens of so-called-reclaimed strip mines every week (as I drive around my area on the way to work and shopping), some more than 15 years after the actual mining. None have trees on them. Sparse grass is what most sport for years. A few shrubs perhaps after a decade. Few are usable for any purpose. Strip-mining is seriously depleting the watershed and environmental sink values of Appalachian forests.

playing with numbers 2

2008-06-07T17:24:00.005-04:00

The UK College of Agriculture source that provided me with monthly average temperatures for Kentucky, also included data on each month's deviation for "normal."

I thought "hey -- let's look for patterns of change over the past decade!" So I collected the deviation data for 2001 to 2008. What I found was that from January 2001 through May 2008, the average deviation from normal temperatures was +1.5 degrees. Looking at each year independently, all but one year had higher than normal deviations (ranging from +.979 to +1.94) and only one year had a lower than normal deviation, and it was only -.18. This strongly suggested that the current decade was substantially warmer than "normal."

Of course it matters what is used as "normal" to make the comparisons. I looked in vain for someplace on the UK College of Agriculture website for their definition of normal. Ultimately I found a link to a NOAA page that defined terms, which said that normal was based on a thirty year average, currently (by NOAA) 1971 to 2000.

But I'm not one to just accept numbers. I decided to go back to the original pages where the data was and see if I could find those places where the actual monthly "normal" temperature was listed, and not just the "deviation from normal." What I discovered was a tremendous lack of consistency in the UK data. In some years the average monthly temperature for January was given as 33.1 degrees F, and in others it was given as 31.3 degrees F. I don't know if they were calculating normal based on a different set of years each time, or whether they were just sloppy in recording the data.

Now I'm looking for better data sets. NOAA has monthly average temperature data sets for each individual reporting stations across the U.S., and one can find very localized data. These data sets vary considerably in their detail, reliability, and the time periods that they cover. The one closest to me only goes back to 1981. So far, however, I haven't found anything to provide average monthly data for slightly larger geographic units.

If anyone out there knows of publicly accessible, reliable, data sets on monthly average temperatures for anything less than the whole U.S. but more than individual reporting stations, I'd like to know about it.

Like I said previously, I actually like doing this sort of thing!

playing with numbers

2008-06-07T16:56:00.008-04:00

I teach statistics. I'm a sociologist, but I'm also sort of a math geek -- always have been. That's not what people expect when they think about social scientists.

The other day when I was trying to find something to do to avoid working on fixing all the dates in my on-line class (the most truly boring aspect of teaching on-line), I thought of something I've been meaning to do for years: getting data on electricity use and temperature for my classes to learn about the difference between an association between two variables and a correlation between them.

What I wanted was a spreadsheet with a column for how many kilowatt hours we have used every month for the past few years and a column for the average temperature for our region for each month for the same period. The kilowatt hours used is easy -- the utility company prints the last 12 months of actual kilowatt usage on each bill. So I just had to locate the bills for January in the past several years. Getting the average monthly temperature was a little trickier. But the College of Agriculture at the University of Kentucky has growing season data that provides monthly averages. Some months the information is more detailed and actually breaks down the data by climate zone, but since that was only available half the time (and because I saw little difference between the overall averages for Kentucky and this region) I went with the mean temperature for the state of Kentucky.

I actually took two days to gather the temperature data, since I had to read through separate narrative descriptions for each year and each month to ferret out the relevant data. Once I had all data for the past three years, I created a scatter plot of the points. It didn't look right. There was slight, about r = -.40 linear relationship between the two data sets, where there should have been a strong curvilinear relationship. Then, duh, it hit me. The temperatures were for the correct month, but the electricity usage was off by one month -- one gets the bill for May usage in June not May. So I moved the entire column of figures up by one month, and viola! Here's what the scatter plot looks like:

Exactly as one would expect. Because we don't have whole house air conditioning (only in two rooms, and we only use fans at night) the upturn for warmer months is much less than one would expect in a home with a heat pump.

Now I have great data for my statistics class to play with -- only trouble no one is enrolled for statistics this fall. Enrollments in all our classes are way down, probably due to issues with the economy. Gas prices are up here as elsewhere, as are food prices, and tuition prices are up, too; but unlike elsewhere in the nation, employment in the coal industry is up. Coal companies are hiring, therefore so are other types of businesses in the region. Young people faced with rising costs and better employment opportunities. They choose work over school, and the wives of working husbands, stay home from school to reduce gas costs. Bad news for community colleges.

ice watching

2008-06-03T19:40:00.004-04:00

Anyone who is interested can observe the day to day measurements of sea ice in the Arctic on the National Snow and Ice Data Center's page Arctic Sea Ice News and Analysis. This is today's updated graphic. The gray line at the top is the average (1979 to 2000)extent of ice for each date, the dotted green line is the actual extent of sea ice on each date in 2007 (the minimum extent recorded so far), and the blue line is this year's (2008) current measurements. As you can see, this year has, until recently exceeded the 2007 minimum, but fallen below the twenty year average.

Many scientists, however, expect that because a much larger extent of the sea ice is thinner one year ice (because of the previous years minimum extent), that melting will accelerate and drop below even the 2007 minimum.

Blogger punkinsmom on Idle Musings noted today, that the "the temperature of the water in the Oslo Fjord was rapidly rising. It's often still below 10C (50F) in early June, but Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) reported water temperatures at some Oslo-area beaches of 18C (nearly 70F) on Tuesday morning."

Greater warming in the Arctic and its environs than in temperate and tropical regions has both been measured to date, and projected for the future. The Met Office Hadley Centre, British Antarctic Survey and UK Government have harnessed Google Earth technology to present you with an interactive animation showing how climate change and global temperature rises could affect our world over the next 100 years. (You can download Google Earth for free to run the animation -- it's really worth having!).

Imagining a future for eastern Kentucky

2008-06-01T17:32:00.008-04:00

The earth's atmosphere is changing. Whether it is the result of human activity or not, the earth is becoming something different than that to which we in modern industrial societies have become accustomed.

The overall average temperature of the earth’s surface is warming. According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate change page:

There is a high level of confidence that the global average temperature during the last few decades was warmer than any comparable period during the last 400 years.

Present evidence suggests that temperatures at many, but not all, individual locations were higher during the past 25 years than any period of comparable length since A.D. 900.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) summarizes climate change to date:

On the global average, the surface air temperature of the Earth has increased by about 1.0 ± 0.4°F (0.6 ± 0.2°C) since the late 19th century.
The decade of the 1990s was very likely the warmest decade in the instrumental record, which dates back to 1861.
On average, between 1950 and 1993, nighttime daily minimum air temperatures over land increased by about 0.2°C per decade. This has lengthened the freeze-free season in many mid- and high latitude regions.
It is very likely that precipitation has increased by 0.5 to 1.0% per decade in the 20th century over most mid- and high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere continents, and it is likely that rainfall has increased by 0.2 to 0.3% per decade over the tropical land areas. It is also likely that rainfall has decreased over much of the Northern Hemisphere subtropical (10°N to 30°N) lands areas during the 20th century by about 0.3% per decade.
Global sea level has risen by between 4 and 8 inches (0.1 and 0.2 meters) over the past 100 years, and much of the increase is thought to be related to the rising global average temperature.

So warming already has occurred and more is likely to occur in the future. How much additional warming will occur, depends at least in part upon the extent to which today’s societies take steps to reduce green house gas emissions such as carbon dioxide and methane. A warmer climate will likely mean: more extreme weather events, more floods and more droughts, weather patterns that are different from the past (and thus less predictable); changes in the timing of seasons, with impacts on crop yields, growing seasons, the types of crops that can be grown and where they can be grown; warmer temperatures will affect upon species migrations and distributions, including pests populations; rising sea levels with changing coast lines, coastal flooding; and many other impacts.

However, climate change is not the only environmental change affecting modern societies. The modern industrial societies, especially in the past 100 years, are heavily dependent upon petroleum as a resource for both energy and for materials. Petroleum is a finite resource, a fixed quantity that is not increasing. Various estimates have been made for the point in time when the production of petroleum will begin to decline (because supplies are declining and becoming more expensive to extract). The most optimistic projections suggest we have 30 years until production of petroleum peaks and then begins to decline. Other estimates suggest that the peak of production has already happened, or is occurring now. Examining the data from the Energy Information Administration of the U.S. government, world petroleum output has held fairly steady since January 2005 moving slightly up and down between 84,000,000 barrels per day and 86,000,000 barrels per day despite increasing world demand for oil; suggesting at the very least a slowing down of production, if not yet a leveling off or decline.

Change will come to the world and eastern Kentucky in particular, in one form or another. The question is what kind of change and how much control the residents will have over that change. What quality of life will result from those changes? Will eastern Kentucky become a barren “Marscape” wrecked by strip-mining and mountain top removal gone mad? Will the political leadership of Kentucky continue to chase the chimera of coal-to-liquid fuels; ignoring the impact that will have on both world wide atmospheric carbon dioxide, global temperatures and the local destruction of forests and streams in eastern Kentucky and the water supply for urban Kentucky? Will eastern Kentucky communities continued to be a land of poor roads, high poverty, low education, high obesity, diabetes and asthma?

I have a fantasy about what life in eastern Kentucky could be like within the next decade, if steps are taken immediately to turn away from our current path of destructive strip-mining, coal generated electricity, and obstinate clinging to gas guzzling SUV’s and pickup trucks. I see the possibility for positive change that will create beautiful, livable communities in rural eastern Kentucky.

My fantasy begins with a total ban on surface coal mining. The existing, ugly, barren mountain tops and hillsides of recent strip mine activity would become the location for large wind turbines. Additional wind turbines would be located at the top of forested mountain ridges that have been saved from the disruption of strip-mining. Unlike strip-mining, wind turbines could be located with little disruption of the surface, and their operation would be consistent with maintaining forest habitat for wild animals, and human activities of hunting, hiking, etc. Although not as consistently windy as some areas of the U.S., there is sufficient wind, especially on the tops of ridges, like Pine Mountain, to generate substantially more electricity over a far longer time frame, than any coal that might be minded from the same ridges and mountain tops.

In my fantasy future, all older homes will be improved with insulation and weather sealing, and new homes will be built with higher levels of insulation than currently is recommended. All new homes will be sited for both passive and active solar, and fitted with new solar films on their rooftops. Both older homes and new homes will all have solar water heating installed. Between wind turbines and dispersed solar thermal and electric power, nearly all the power needs of eastern Kentucky homes will be provided through renewable resources rather than coal fired generation as they are now.

With coal mining halted, and coal trucks no longer dominating Kentucky’s roads, roads can be better adapted for walking and bicycling paths for localized travel. Most residents will do their primary travel by public/mass transportation. The existing electricity distribution poles and lines, which for the most part already follow the course of the roads, will be fitted with electric lines above the roads, to provide power to fleet of electric trolley/buses to provide mass transportation. Electric motor trolley buses, with conventional wheels and tires to not require rails, can use existing roadways, obtaining electric power from overhead electric lines. Trolley routes will follow all the main roads through the rural counties.

Where the shorter roads up into hollers connect to the main road, there will be business/community centers that will provide safe covered place to wait for trolleys, covered storage for bicycles ridden by commuters from their homes to the trolley stop, mail services, convenience store type shopping, and space for seating, eating, and visiting for community members. From April through October, several days a week, community members with room for gardens can sell their produce at this central gather area. Some enterprising local residents may using solar and wind energy to warm greenhouses that would provide tomatoes and other fresh vegetables during the winter months as well.

Groups of neighbors or family members will go in together on shared autos and pickups that will be plug-in hybrids that will depend almost entirely on electricity generated from renewable resources for local travel, and have high mileage adjustable cylinder/adjustable power (just recently developed and available to consumers on some vehicles such as trucks). Private vehicles will be used rarely; public transportation will be used for routine commutes to work, school and shopping. When private autos/trucks are used, they will generally be used by groups – carpools, group shopping expeditions.

The cooperative community spirit already exists in eastern Kentucky. I believe that this spirit can and will be applied to solving the new challenges we face. However, at the state and federal level, our government decision-makers need to stop propping up coal mining and coal produced electricity, with huge tax breaks, lack of enforcement of safety and environmental regulations, and subsidies for speculative projects like Peabody’s coal-to-liquid fuels plant. If coal mining and coal burning electricity generation had to pay their way just like any other industry, and if genuine enforcement of existing laws (like coal truck weight limits) occurred, coal would not seem so “cheap” and alternatives like wind and solar would become genuinely competitive.

2008-06-01T09:15:00.007-04:00

The following 1994 video clip, tells us that V. P. Cheney knew what would happen in Iraq. So what happened in the next 9 years to cause him to decide that the "price" would be worth it -- at least to him?

One theory advanced by William Clark is that Saddam Hussein "sealed his fate when he announced in September 2000 that Iraq was no longer going to accept dollars for oil being sold under the UN’s Oil-for-Food program, and decided to switch to the euro as Iraq’s oil export currency." It is worth noting that, by June 2003, Iraq oil transactions had been switched back to U. S. dollars despite the dollars' falling value.

Ideas worth spreading

2008-05-25T11:20:00.004-04:00

Thanks to a post by John Hodgman, I was introduced yesterday to TED.com. TED (which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an organization that focuses on finding new, inspiring, cutting edge ideas in science, business, the arts and the global issues facing our world, as well as technology, entertainment and design and once found spreading those ideas freely as widely as possible. So there are many videos on this site, that are free for download. This is a great resource for educators.

Specific ideas for change

2008-05-22T14:38:00.003-04:00

Lester R. Brown's Plan B 3.0 lives up to its name; it is a detailed plan (complete with budgets) on how to transform our world's economies and societies so that they will be both environmentally and socially sustainable. The genius of the plan developed by Brown and the scientists at the Earth Policy Institute is that it relies solely on what is already technologically possible today and what is economically feasible. Brown argues that the changes proposed in Plan B 3.0 are necessary to slow (and reverse) population growth, end poverty and hunger, and protect the resources and ecosystems on which modern, civilization depends. He acknowledges that Plan B is not necessary what is politically acceptable.

Trained as an economist, Brown realistically assess how much each of the proposals would cost, and how those costs can be covered. Most proposals pay for themselves over time (e.g., energy savings), can be paid for by reducing subsidies on destructive behaviors (like existing subsidies for virgin timber, coal production, and oil production), or are equivalent in cost to more destructive investments that they would replace (e.g., wind power for coal fired electricity generation, especially when direct and indirect costs of coal mining are taking into consideration).

Two chapters of particular interest to readers of Blue Island Almanack are Chapter 11 Raising Energy Efficiency and Chapter 12 Turning to Renewable Energy. The entire chapters are available on-line, and down loadable in pdf format. Excel files with links to all the major data sources for the chapters is also available for those who like to play with the numbers themselves.

In Chapter 11, Brown argues that it is technically possible and economically feasible to completely offset increases in energy demand between now and 2020 with improvements in energy efficiency. He lays out the major areas -- lighting, appliances, buildings (both new and renovated), transportation, manufacturing and re-manufacturing, materials use, and lifestyles -- in which energy efficiency can be improved given existing technology and knowledge. Everything he proposes is something that is already in use somewhere in the world, and has already demonstrated the capacity to reduce energy use. Brown provides dozens of specific examples from countries, cities, and corporations around the world who are already using these techniques and technologies for energy and cost savings.

In Chapter 12, makes a compelling case that we are technologically capable of increasing the contribution of renewables (wind, rooftop solar, solar electric plants, solar thermal, geothermal, biomass, and hydro-power) by nearly 600 percent between now and 2020. Combined with efficiency gains (outlined in Chapter 11), continued use of nuclear power (at the same level as presently -- about 15 percent of the world's power), Brown argues that the use of hydrocarbons (coal, oil and gas) could be nearly eliminated. Brown acknowledges that

"The Plan B goals for developing renewable sources of energy by 2020 that are laid out in this chapter are based not on what is conventionally believed to be politically feasible, but on what we think is needed to prevent irreversible climate change."

Moreover, Brown demonstrates that these proposals are technically possible, by providing example after example of specific existing, successful projects around the world. For example, already in China 40 million rooftop solar water heaters have been installed, and there are 2,000 Chinese companies manufacturing solar rooftop units, at a purchase cost of the equivalent of $200 installed. Many remote villages in China that still do not have electricity, now have hot water readily available. The city of Beijing along, already has plans to increase its 124 million square meters of rooftop solar collectors to 300 million by 2020.

Brown makes an excellent case that transforming out energy economy away from hydrocarbons through energy efficiency and sustainable, renewable power sources is technologically possible. The only question is whether or not we have the political will to do so. There in lies the rub.

Politics in Kentucky demonstrate how difficult the political battle can be. Just yesterday (Wed. May 21, 2008), the Lexington Herald-Leader commented ("State Can't Afford Coal Propaganda") upon the decision by Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear to divert "$400,000 from tax coffers into public education efforts by Kentucky coal industry groups." This comes at a time when sharp cuts are being made in the vast state programs, including higher education, and the state is failing to fully fund retirement programs and other future commitments. The coal-education money is going to foundations run by the Kentucky Coal Association and two smaller coal associations in Eastern and Western Kentucky. The editorial view of the Lexington Herald Leader: "some of the information the associations have put out -- including gushing, unequivocal praise for mountaintop-removal mining -- is more propaganda than objective fact."

Let's face it, coal is still King in Kentucky, and it will take strong external political clout -- such as national legislation banning new coal-fired plant construction, and serious carbon taxes -- to bring sanity and renewable energy to Kentucky.

Open Letter to Barack Obama

2008-05-21T10:12:00.036-04:00

Please do not write off eastern Kentucky and the rest of central Appalachia. There have been two excellent pieces in the last few days, by West Virginian dawnt on the daily kos and by Dee Davis of Whitesburg, KY on Salon.com about the need for Obama to include central Appalachia in any campaign for the presidency. Both writers explain why it is a huge mistake to write off this region of the nation. Appalachians can be won over. We just have to be asked -- in person -- for our support.

Appalachians are the last American ethnic group that it is socially acceptable to negatively stereotype. While I'm not suggesting that no basis exists for some of the stereotypes, the stereotypes blind people (inside and outside the region) to the reality of the rich human tapestry here.

Folks living here in Appalachian include affluent business owners, educated professionals, solid middle class white collar workers, technical and health care workers, hard working skilled blue collar workers, dedicated factory workers, minimum wage workers who scramble to make ends meet for their families, retired folks on social security, and poor folks on SSI and temporarily on welfare. Yes, the percentage of elderly, disabled, and poor are higher here than suburban America, but they are not the majority.

We may live in "hollers," and the red-lining practices of banks may make manufactured housing ("trailers") easier to obtain than "built" houses, but folks here lavish care on their homes as much (or maybe more) than folks anywhere. [All photos are of homes in my "holler" in Hemphill].

People in Appalachia care about the same issues as other Americans: Health care, the economy (jobs and prices), the war in Iraq, the environment. In fact, I would argue that each of these issues is even more important to us here, since there are fewer jobs that provide health insurance, lower median incomes mean that economic uncertainties hit harder, a higher percentage of our young people are likely to enlist, and the nasty consequences of strip mining have immediate impacts on us here.

One of the most damaging stereotypes that has been brought up in this election is of Appalachians as racist. Sure there are racist folks here, as there are in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Washington, D.C., Eugene, Oregon, etc. But there are also African Americans who live and work peacefully along side whites in Appalachia. There may not be many African Americans in eastern Kentucky, but there also aren't any ghettos in eastern Kentucky. In Letcher County, there are black teachers, administrators, sanitation workers, surgeons, ministers, housewives, coal miners, secretaries, and many other occupations.

Moreover, being a lower income region, a very higher percentage of the physicians in this region are from the middle east and the Indian subcontinent (and many of whom are Muslim and Hindu). A brief perusal of the physicians listed in this region includes names like Ahmed, Alam, Alchureiqi, Ali, Ambalavanan, Appakondu, Bajwa, Chandarana, Chandrasheker, Chaturvedi, Garimella, Guindi, Gutti, Ghazal, Khater, Khouzam, Mehrpouyan, Mohmand, Narola, Pampati, Paliwal, Podapati, Quddus-Roopani, Rahman, Sahay, Singh, Abubakar Tidal, Valavalkar, Yalamanchi. These are highly respected members of the professional community. For example, folks around these parts swear by Dr. Tidal. I can't even begin to count the number of times in the past 12 years, that one of my students has said started a sentence with "Dr. Tidal says..." Until I did this little search for this post, I had no idea that Dr. Tidal wasn't an native born American of European descent.

I believe that most folks in Appalachia would welcome Barack Obama if he'd just take the time and come and visit with us face-to-face. We like to judge people as individuals, on their character, but we're folks who want to make those judgments in person. We need to see and talk to folks to decide whether or not we trust them. We don't like to depend on media images or stereotypes.

language, grammar and meaning

2008-05-14T18:13:00.013-04:00

My husband, John (also a sociologist), was quite disturbed recently when he heard several conservative commentators/politicians use the phrase "Democrat Party." He thought that the speakers were merely ignorant of proper grammar. "Democrat" is a noun, and should not be used to modify another noun "party" - nouns are modified by adjectives such as "Democratic."

I explained to him that, while the phrase might be grammatically incorrect, that the speakers were making the statement not out of ignorance but rather from a deliberate decision to denigrate the Democratic Party. I don't think he quite believed me, until I found the Wikipedia entry on "Democrat Party(phrase)." However, even I was surprised to discover how long a political history the phrase has. The first recorded use goes back to 1890, but it became a commonly used epithet by Republicans in the 1930's and 1940's. Harold Stassen made the derogatory nature of the label clear in a 1940 statement in which he argued that because of the prevalence of political machines in larger urban areas such as Chicago and New Jersey, the party no longer deserved to be called "democratic."

Grammar, like vocabulary, is not static, but evolves over time, to meet the needs of a living culture. The use of phrases like "Democrat Party" serve a political purpose, and in using them, people contribute to changes in the language as well as subtly affecting perceptions of their listeners.

A different example of changing grammatical usage, the phrase "well paying job." Today one finds that references "well paying jobs" and "well-paying jobs" (226,000 Google entries) some what outnumber references to "good paying jobs" (169,000 entries). Thirty to forty years ago, the reverse was true, and "good paying" was more likely to be heard.

Searching the Internet one finds that arguments for the grammatical correctness of both phrases. The arguments vary. "Good" is an adjective, while in some instances "well" is an adjective also, "well" is more often an adverb. The word paying is a "present participle," a word that can act either as a verb (he is paying her a salary) or as an adjective (a paying job as opposed to one without pay).

Grammar books say that adjectives modify nouns only, while adverbs modify adjectives, adverbs, and verbs. That would suggest that "well paying" is more grammatically correct than "good paying." However, there some that argue that both "good" and "paying" modify "job" (as in "good job" and "paying job" and so both should be adjectives.

There seems to be little difference in the types of websites that use these phrases, both are found on University websites, both are found in newspapers and magazine articles, both are found on websites of organizations and government agencies.

Microsoft, in the Word grammar checker has taken a neutral position: "well-paying," "well paying," "good-paying," and "good paying" are pass inspection by the grammar checker. But that may not be saying much. The grammar checker did not flag "This is a good paid job. " Although it did flag "This job is paid good" as ungrammatical.

The point, there appears to be no agreed upon, clear grammatical reason for choosing "well paying" versus "good paying," but current social conventions appear to slightly prefer "well paying," while the phrase "good paying" was more commonly used in the past.

Language and its grammar is a living, breathing, changing entity.

unintended consequences

2008-05-06T20:59:00.005-04:00

I've started by summer vacation off by reading Lester R. Brown's Plan B 3.0: Mobilization to Save Civilization. [This book is available free on-line in its entirety, with the bonus of Excel data tables at http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/PB3/ I've read the earlier edition (Plan B 2.0). I think this is a must read for anyone who wants to think seriously about how societies must change to deal with the scourges of over-population, poverty and environmental degradation world wide. Having read only three chapters today, I can already see many things worth comment and discussion in this blog and Blue Island Almanack.

Tonight, I want use a quote from the book to point to a common problem with any kind of social change -- unintended consequences. Social systems, especially when one gets to the level of nations and world civilizations, are very complex. Even very small changes in one part of a social system can have significant consequences throughout the entire system; not all of which can be anticipated. Even when they can be anticipated by some, calls for caution are not always heeded.

Brown writes about the very real problem of over-population. The human population of earth, now more than 6 billion, and growing, has by many calculations already exceeded the carrying capacity of the earth's biosphere. (See Meadows, Randers and Meadows Limits to Growth 2004 and Mathis Wackernagel 2002 study published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences). Bringing population growth under control is certainly necessary for preserving civilization.

Brown writes about an intrinsic benefit of rapid reduction in birth rate:

…[help] countries that want to slow their population growth to do so quickly. This brings with it what economists call the demographic bonus. When countries move quickly to smaller families, growth in the number of young dependents—those who need nurturing and educating—declines relative to the number of working adults. In this situation, productivity surges, savings and investment climb, and economic growth accelerates.

Japan, which cut its population growth in half between 1951 and 1958, was one of the first countries to benefit from the demographic bonus….This effect lasts for only a few decades, but it is usually enough to launch a country into the modern era.
(http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/PB3/pb3ch7.pdf pages 149-150)

While the "demographic bonus" is real, and has the consequences described above, it is disingenuous not to also acknowledge the unintended consequences and problems produced by rapid reduction of birthrate 50 years later.

Japan is one of the best examples of the unintended consequences. Japan epitomizes the future problems that will be faced by all nations that make this demographic shift, especially those that make it quickly. This is the problem of a rapidly aging population, where those over 65 are becoming a larger and larger percentage of the Japanese population. The burden of caring for and paying for the needs of an aging population is becoming apparent throughout the developed nations, but it is particular acute in Japan, because that nation's demographic transition was so sudden, so abrupt. The flip side of having a smaller number of young dependents compared to the working adult population, in the decades immediately following the demographic transition, is inexorably followed fifty years later by having a much larger number of elderly dependents compared to the working population.

One could argue that a rapid decline in birthrates and demographic shift provides the potential for 50 years of economic growth that will make dealing with a large elderly population easier. But it is necessary for people invoking the need for a decline in birth rates to acknowledge the future consequences of these changes. Nation's making significant demographic transitions need to have full knowledge of the long term consequences and begin planning for those now.

How should sociology be taught?

2008-04-09T19:12:00.007-04:00

I feel as if I have spent the last few days being battered from all sides by the "nattering nabobs of negativity" (credit to William Safire for the quote -- uttered publicly by Spiro T. Agnew).

I don't really have any idea what a nabob is. N.A.B.O.B. is the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters; another definition I found on-line is "nabob -- a wealthy man (especially one who made his fortune in the Orient)." Certainly ole Spiro T. didn't mean either of these; if memory serves he was complaining about the "liberal" media who was criticizing the Nixon administration.

Actually I can't really say that the folks nattering negatively at me these last few days are "nabobs" in any sense -- what they are is sociologists, and as sociologists they have valid concerns about plans by the Kentucky Community and Technical College system to carve up Introductory Sociology into "bite sized" modules of academic content.

David Nickell, sociologist at West Kentucky Community and Technical College, said:

"as a teacher who has spent years trying to get students to think in terms of larger social systems and structures, I’m very concerned about trying to treat the subject matter as a collection of discrete and isolatable [sic] parts. For instance, how can you really get at the concepts of stratification, inequality, deviance—or any of those core components—without first having an understanding of the role culture plays in shaping our social landscape? How can you cover culture without addressing socialization? Or socialization without stratification, inequality and deviance?
So, my question is how the fractionalization can be handled without losing the sense that the fractions are components within a larger whole. How do you take pieces from a hermeneutic system and not lose their essence?"

Leon Lane Jr., sociologist at Bluegrass Community and Technical College, followed up David's comment with the following:

"Introduction to Sociology is about helping students see the connections between social institutions and how this impacts their life. As such it should be taught as a single unit so they can see that human social life is about individuals, living in societies consisting of interrelated social institutions, made possible and governed by culture they learned through the process of socialization. If you separate it out into components then you lose the most important learning outcome of this class."

While I share David and Leon's view that sociology is at it's heart about the inter-connectivity of all social life, about the hermeneutic between individual, social group and society; I think those are principles that can be learned (or taught) in small pieces, as well as large chunks. David and Leon talk about the necessity of a "whole" course in Introductory Sociology to make the point of these interconnections. But what is a "whole" introductory sociology course?

I don't know any two sociologists who include all the same topics in their introductory course, or include them in the same order, or with the same emphasis. I have a whole unit on "the family," my husband John, also a sociologist does not (of course he talks about the family in other ways). Some sociologists have a special unit on deviance and crime, I don't; although deviance and crime are important themes in several other topics that I do cover (such as culture, socialization, and inequality). I always devote a day or two just to the topic of poverty; for other sociologist, this is a minor topic within the discussion of inequality in general. Some sociologists devote entire units to religion, medicine, and sport, others leave integrate some elements of those topics into others, or leave them out entirely.

There is no authority in sociology that dictates absolutely what must go into an introductory sociology class. Sociology lacks a single unifying paradigm, but is rather a multi-paradigmatic discipline. And those that teach sociology are quite adamant that they do not want some one else telling them what should and should not be included in their introductory sociology course.

And what's so magical about a 15 week (or 16 or 14 week) semester in teaching introductory sociology? I know at least one 4 year liberal arts college (Oberlin) where for many years "introduction to sociology" was a two credit course for half a semester, paired with a second two credit course of the student's choosing on one of the areas of specialization within sociology. On the other hand, the Virginia Community College system considers "introduction to sociology" to be two 3-credit courses that cover two semesters. As sociologists we should recognize that the semester and the "introductory sociology" course that we are accustomed to teaching are cultural products of a particular moment/place in human history, cultural products which apparently have become reified, or some might say "calcified."

Taking a traditional semester long sociology course, and breaking it into smaller learning units, does not automatically undermine the goals of helping students understand "the complex and perspectival nature of human situatedness." [That's my husband John's favorite quote from some post-modern theorist in religious studies.]

One of the very best introductory sociology "texts," that does everything an introductory course in sociology ought to, was a tiny little book (5" X 8" and only 160 pages) called The Forest For the Trees by Allan Johnson. Unfortunately it has long been out of print (because it didn't have the big profit margin that 500 page glossy textbooks do). I have yet to find any other source, of any length that did as good a job of getting across the "holism" and "connectedness" of sociology. It was a book that students could read in one week, and really grasp what sociology was truly about. It didn't cover everything in sociology, but it got key points across, far better than any traditional textbook. If one 160 page small paperback book can do all that, why can't two or three week units of sociology do the same thing -- if they are crafted with care and understanding?

You see, I am stuck with the task of creating a modular version of introductory sociology. It's not a task I asked for, it's not a task I particularly relish. I didn't sign a contract, but I agreed to do it and I think a person's word ought to mean something. I agreed to do it as a favor to my college's president, and because I care deeply about the same issues that David and Leon care about. I want to make sure that any sociology course offered by Kentucky Community and Technical Colleges provides students with a quality opportunity to learn about sociology.

Earth Hour, tonight Saturday March 29

2008-03-29T15:35:00.001-04:00

The second annual observance of Earth Hour, is scheduled world wide for 8 to 9 PM tonight (local time, not simultaneously), Saturday March 29. Cities, communities, corporations, and individuals around to globe are being asked to voluntarily turn off all the lights, TV, stereos, computers, microwaves, and other electricity consuming accouterments of modern life for one hour.

The idea is for each city/community to cut the power at their own time zone's 8:00 PM, so that there is an effect of rolling darkness following the setting sun.

The first Earth Hour in 2007 was a project of the World Wide Fund for Nature Australia and the Sydney Morning Herald. More information is available at the Earth Hour - North America web page and The Daily Kos (where there are some nice comments about thing people might do instead). .

Socialization and Drinking Behavior

2008-03-26T14:50:00.004-04:00

A very interesting NYT article Can Sips at Home Prevent Binges? by wine and dining writer Eric Asimov eplores the question as to whether parents can teach responsible wine drinking to teenagers through introducing them to wine as part of meals and celebrations while condemning drunkenness. Asimov cites some solid research that suggests that

“If you are taught to drink in a ceremonial way with food, then the purpose of alcohol is taste and celebration, not inebriation,” he [Dr. George E. Vaillant, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard University] added. “If you are forbidden to use it until college then you drink to get drunk.”

I would maintain, based on experience, that not only can parents teach responsible wine drinking, but that young people who have learned such behavior at home can teach it to peers in college.

I grew up in a teetotaling home, where no alcohol was present. At 18 I left home to go to college 2500 miles away, where there was little adult supervision and alcohol was readily available. However, the young people who made up my friendship circles from freshman year on, were all raised in upper middle class homes where the drinking of wine had been integrated into family meals and celebrations, while drunkenness had been highly discouraged. Consequently, their college drinking behavior, although unsupervised by adults (and underage) was responsible and did not lead to drunkenness or excess. As part of these social groups, I learned to view wine drinking as an appropriate part of a fine meal, not as a path to getting "blitzed."

Time Travel with Tonka Trucks

2008-03-19T11:21:00.004-04:00

I've always thought that the folks at Tonka had a good product development department -- they produce toys that are sturdy, long lasting, and fun. But it would appear that they have also got some theoretical physicists who have developed time travel as well. Last night I saw a television commercial for Tonka's “wheel drivers scoot and scoop” that made me believe I was back in 1960. This little commercial informed me that "boys are built different" and that Tonka toys are built for boys. My husband (the humorist) immediately remarked that must mean that the toys had "wee-wee holes" in them so that boys delicate equipment wouldn't get smashed or squashed during play.

After doing a bit of Googling this morning, I discover that my outrage is a bit behind the times. This particular commercial first aired in October 2007 during the big toy push prior to Christmas. Many other people have blogged on this advertisement. An article in Salon by Catherine Price does a very nice job of talking about the advertisement and the issues.

If I go by my own students and their comments about child raising, there are many parents today to whom this type of advertising definitely appeals. Parents who have substantial anxieties about gender and sexuality, and are conservative in their construction of those roles. However, there is also evidence out there in the blogosphere of many parents who find these rigid gender roles, and gendered toy advertising offensive and disturbing. A great blog post on this advertisement, with responses from 22 parents can be found on Table For Five.

As a sociologist, the question that I find most intriguing (and for which I do not as yet have an answer) is: Are advertisers (and toy makers) simply responding to the gender preferences of parents, or are they actively attempting to shape those preferences? There is certainly research evidence to support the contention that advertising has been used in the past (specifically research on advertising campaigns in the decade after World War II) to attempt to shape gender roles, in a way that would encourage women back out of the work place and into the home.

P.S. If you haven't see the ad, go to http://www.hasbro.com/tonka/ Under the product pictures – click the “watch video link” while the “wheel drivers scoot and scoop” image is showing.

plague of plagiarism

2008-03-04T12:23:00.006-05:00

I just put an 8 week on-line sociology class to rest; entered the grades and said farewell. I was, up until the very last moment, about to have an all time record for on-line classes. For the first time since I began teaching on-line classes in 2000, I was about to have a class in which everyone who had not officially withdrawn actually completed the entire course with a passing grade. Some of those grades were going to be D's, but they were still going to pass. Normally there are several students who neither complete the course nor take the time to formally withdraw and thus end up with failing grades -- an "E" in our system.

Unfortunately, when I got to the very last student (both alphabetically and because she had waited until the last day of class to turn all her papers for the whole eight weeks), all the work she turned in was plagiarized. Some were papers taken in their entirety from one of the free on-line paper mills, other she apparantly did the work of hunting down paragraphs to copy from the internet herself. Plagiarism is always upsetting and disruptive, but this coming as it did at the last minute to ruin what would otherwise have been a class for the record book, was crushing.

I have less plagiarism in my classes since I got seriously tough on it, and created ways of getting the message across to students at the beginning of the class (borrowed some great "For Better For Worse" cartoon strips from Lynn Johnston -- with references of course) that drive home the point. But even with all the warnings, students still do it. I don't remember have these problems when I first began teaching 30 years ago.

As a sociologist I have to wonder, is plagiarism more common today or is it just easier for teachers to check for it? If it is more common (which I suspect but cannot prove) why is it?

For a time I thought that what I perceived as an increased incidence of plagiarism was only because the types of students that I taught had changed. I began teaching at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, and then moved on to the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, now I teach at a community college, in a poor, rural area. Was the increase plagiarism due to my students having poorer preparation and poorer college skills? Since discovering the Rate Your Students blog, I realize that the problem of plagiarism goes well beyond my little corner of academia.

So if, as I believe (but cannot prove), plagiarism has increased, the question is why? I know lots of people who would jump to "declining values" as their first response. That answer reminds me of a quote from sociologist Abraham Kaplan "We do not explain why there is a lion in the garden by pointing out that in fact there are two of them in there." If values have changed what caused them to change? Values are a cultural phenomenon, they are the result of social processes, and do not float down from the ether. For there to have been widespread changes in values, there have to be widespread changes in society that produce those value changes.

What has changed? One thing that has changed is opportunity. The technology of computers and the Internet has certainly made plagiarism far easier than it was in my college days. I would liken it to changing the channel on the TV -- from the time I was 5 until I was 34, when I wanted to change the channel on the TV I got up, walked across the room and turned a nob to change the channel. I didn't change channels often, and used the TV Guide to look up what I might watch before changing channels. Then I got a remote control, and overnight I became a channel surfer, and changed my viewing habits just like that. My values and attitudes about television viewing changed after the fact, as a result of access to a new technology.

Something else that has changed is that a much higher percentage of high school students (and the population in general) are going to college, than did when I went to college. While the increased access to college has benefited many people who want to go to college who might have been left out forty or fifty years ago, it has also meant that many people who aren't really interested in what colleges offer (academic learning) are nonetheless attending college. They are attending college because that is what the job market demands. As a society we have lost alternative career paths -- even though there are shortages in fields that don't really need college (electricians, plumbers, construction, repair work). When economic necessity is forcing you to get a diploma, but you don't care for the activities that are required to get that diploma, short cuts become appealing.

These are just two ideas I've had about the sources of plagiarism. I think that there are more things, and I'd like to hear other people's thoughts.

Blue Island Almanack

2008-02-08T14:53:00.000-05:00

If you have found Sociological Stew of interest you might want to check out the new group blog Blue Island Almanack to which I contribute. Blue Island Almanack was the brainchild of blogger e.r. dunhill, and is a group effort involving e.r. dunhill, myself, and bloggers Progressive and Panhandle Poet.

As the name Blue Island Almanack suggests, the one thing all four of the contributors share is a concern about this blue ball in space that is our home. The blog description is:

Humans share a great and contentious resource in our collective home, this blue island in space. This blog is a place for authors and readers to explore the collective connection of economy, education, environment, and ethics through articles, essays, and debates.

The bloggers in our little crew are politically diverse, from conservative to centrist to liberal, although none of us are too comfortable with labels. We've started out as we hope to continue, with lively -- but respectful -- debate. All too often, especially in the blogosphere we only read and listen to those with whom we agree. Blue Island Almanack hopes to remedy that in the months to come.

How tech savvy are today's college students?

2008-01-21T16:53:00.000-05:00

When I go to pedagogically oriented conferences or workshops, or participate in some of my community college system's work groups I frequently hear claims that today's young people are technologically savvy, and that it is necessary for us (teachers) to engage them through technology or lose their attention. I read (in on-line sources) how today's college students spend all their time developing their "Face Book" or "My Space" pages and instant message with friends, and play computer games.

Yet when I get in the classroom, I find that many of my students (even the young ones) sit blankly in front of the computer, unable to negotiate key government websites (Census Bureau, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Bureau of Labor Statistics) to find the answers to relatively simple factual questions. When I deal with my on-line students, I find that many of them have no clue (even with detailed instructions) how to navigate through the course, and move from one activity to another. [My classes have been repeatedly vetted for clarity of instructions and navigation, even netting me a statewide award for excellence in on-line instruction].

Most of my students have heard of "Face Book" but have never used it, and prefer their cell phones to instant messaging, being far more comfortable with verbal over written communication. All the cute abbreviations of instant messaging and texting seem to bewilder many of them; when some of them post to discussion boards their writing degenerates into broken English, not computer speak. When using the computer for class work, they prefer to learn the bare minimum necessary to use the computer as a tool, and have no interest in exploring short cuts and new techniques. When they run into new situations or problems they give up rather than problem solve. Teach them to use one version of a piece of software, and then give them a slightly newer version, and many of them freeze up.

So today's Chronicle of Higher Education had a blog entry The Myth of the Techno-Wizard Freshman really caught my eye. I thought perhaps some one had finally documented my experience. The article, while interesting, dealt with something different than technological savvy -- it dealt with information processing skills. The research is very interesting [follow the links in the article above] demonstrating that a high percentage of today's college freshman do not know how to evaluate the quality of information, determine the relevance of information, or how to define or narrow a search for information. These are indeed important skills that they should have, but they are not really "tech" skills, but rather old fashioned intellectual skills. Yes the computer is the tool being used, but the same skills were necessary when I was in college looking for information in magazines, newspapers, books, and journals, using printed indexes and reference sources.

I'd really like to see some one do a real survey of technical skills, to find out if our college freshman really are as technically savvy as pundits believe, and to see if such skills exhibit the social class divide that I strongly suspect given my experiences at a community college.

Social engineering before geoengineering

2007-12-20T18:30:00.000-05:00

The scientists at RealClimate have some very interesting reports from the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting. I haven't had time to read through all of them, but one in particular caught my attention (#7 posted by Ray Pierrehumbert ). Pierrehumbert attended a session on geoengineering as a response to global warming.

The specific geoengineering activity the session focused upon was injecting chemicals into the stratosphere that would form sulfate aerosols to block some of the sun's radiation and effect cooling. This is "analogous to the natural effects of volcanoes" as discussed in an earlier RealClimate post "Geo-engineering in vogue...". Several of the papers from the AGU session discussed by Pierrehumbert evaluate the potential effects of such geoengineering, raising a number of scientific concerns, among them:

that geoengineered cooling would not be distributed around the earth in the same way that the CO2 warming is distributed (thus while average earth termperatures might be reduced, it the cooling effects would be greatest in the tropics and smallest in the Artic and would not save Artic sea ice, the polar bear, or even the Greenland ice sheet).

that a geoengineered atmosphere would be a drier atmosphere, and there would be less rainfall.

Other entries on RealClimate discuss geoengineering, and raise substantial scientific concerns about the effectiveness of geo-engineering as as a primary response to anthropogenic climate change (CO2 climate forcings). Ray Pierrehumbert's conclusion about geo-engineering:

"I continue to think that geoengineering is a big and unfortunate distraction,
but since the cat is out of the bag, it is good that some people are doing the
work to head off rosy and over-optimistic projections of sulfate geoengineering
as a magic bullet that could substitute for the hard but necessary work of
mitigation of CO2 emissions." (Dispatch #7)

I am not able to judge the scientific arguments surrounding geoengineering, which is why I rely on the expertise of acknowledged climate scientists like those who contribute to RealClimate. However, as a sociologist, I am competent to make judgments about the cultural, social, political and economic ramifications of geoengineering. My professional sociological opinion is that discussions of geoengineering [regardless of their grounding in research] distract us from focusing on necessary social changes.

As serious as the climate change issue is (and it is very serious), it is only one of a myriad environmental and economic justice issues that need to be addressed through social, economic and political changes.

I could (if I had endless time, and no need to write 10 more lectures for an on-line course before January 7) discuss dozens of examples of areas that while connected to global warming have many other reasons why change is needed. I will just give a couple of examples, and refer you to several terrific books -- Meadows, Randers, Meadows The Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update, Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 2004 and Lester Brown Plan B 2.0 Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble, W. W. Norton, 2006.

Example # 1 -- electricity generated by burning coal. As a resident of eastern Kentucky coalfields, I can tell you unequivocally that even if some one were to scientifically demonstrate beyond a doubt tomorrow (ain't going to happen) that CO2 has absolutely nothing to do with global warming, we should still move as quickly as possible to drastically cut our use of coal to generate electricity. Coal mining is an exceptionally destructive extractive activity. It destroys not only "the environment," it destroys people, their lives, health, homes, and families as well.

I have nothing but the greatest respect for coal miners. I live next door to them, I teach their children, and when they become disabled and go to college to find a new way of earning a living I teach former coal miners also. In the twenty-first century, human beings should not have to put themselves in path of life and health endangering work, simply because there is no other alternative for a decent wage in their communities. Underground coal mining is by far the most dangerous occupation in America. As for surface mining, nothing is so destructive to the face of the earth, dislocating all kinds of plant and animal species -- including the human species -- from their homes.

Each time that I have to drive over the pass from Kentucky to Virginia and back again, I look out (in either direction) at what was once uninterrupted forested hills, into what is quickly becoming a nightmare Mars-scape. This is not happening "out there" some where in some isolated wilderness (not that I want it to happen there either). It is happening within feet of people's homes, churches, stores, and businesses. It's causing some water sources to dry up, and others to become raging floods at the slightest rain.

Then there are all the environmental and health consequence of the burning of coal, totally aside from the issue of CO2. There is the acid rain (from the sulfate aerosols) that turns lakes sterile, destroys forests, and eats away at human buildings and vehicles. There's the mercury that enters the atmosphere with every ton of coal burned, to land in water and soil, creating a hazardous legacy for our children and children's children.

The fact that on top of all these other reasons for reducing coal use, there is global warming and all the best science says that humanly produced CO2 (with coal burning be #1 culprit) is responsible for a significant portion of the climate forcing, makes it all the more imperative to reduce reliance on coal for electricity. We need to dramatically reduce our use of energy -- more efficiency, smaller homes, less gadgets. This is technically easy -- far easier than ramping up the use of wind, solar, geo-thermal or wave power to generate electricity -- but socially and economically very hard.

Sure changing light bulbs to energy efficient compact fluorescent bulbs will help, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. All the life style habits that we have developed over the last fifty years need to be reversed. We need lives that are simpler and less energy intensive. We need to remove ourselves from the thrall of advertising and consumption. This is not a simple matter of will power. Entire communities, regions, industries depend upon our consumption of electrical energy and the products that use electrical energy. Nonetheless, individuals and families would benefit hugely, in reduced costs and reduced stress (financial and psychological), from making these changes.

Example #2 -- oil in the form of gasoline for powering private vehicular transportation. Again, utterly aside from the roll that burning gasoline plays in producing CO2 and global warming, there are substantial reasons to dramatically rethink and redesign our transportation system.

Let's begin with the finite nature of the supply of oil. Whether the "peak" of oil production has already occurred, is occurring, will occur in the next 10 years, the next 30 years, or even the next 40 years (the most optimistic prediction I've seen comes from the USGS, and it calls for about 30 years), the fact of the matter is that in less than two generations oil production will decline, but unless there are drastic changes in the U.S., China, and many other nations the demand for oil will continue to climb higher and higher.

When supply decreases and demand increases, prices go through the roof (even without considering the geo-political issues like war). I've already discussed the outrageous costs of using private automotive transportation today. These costs will only increase, becoming more and more onerous especially in rural areas like where I currently live, where there are no public transportation alternatives. We have to create those alternatives. It is the only decent thing to do for those who care about people, about the conditions under which they live and work, and the quality of life that they have.

Then there are the geo-political issues about WHERE oil is. I don't care how much posturing our politicians (of whatever party) make about national security, terrorism, democracy, or weapons of mass destruction. We are embroiled in Iraq because it has oil, and some people (who should be struck dumb for this) are talking about attacking Iran -- because it has oil. We've made alliance with Saudi Arabia (one of the most politically repressive nations) because it has oil. Oil may not be the only cause of war and violence, but it is sure one of the big ones. Support the troops, give less money to supporters of terrorism -- use less oil!

Then there are the environmental issues of oil apart from the whole global warming issue -- the ozone and smog produced by millions of gasoline engines charging over urban freeways; the spills from pipelines, tankers, drilling platforms and refineries that pollute water, and kill wildlife.

While there are technical challenges to overcome in transportation, the even bigger obstacles are cultural attitudes, social habits, and economic and political institutions that are all built around the private auto. We have enshrined the auto in this country. The old "Mr. Goodwrench" commercial said "It's not just your car, it's your freedom," and we've bought this nonsense hook-line and sinker.

The level of transformation required involves the location of places of work and shopping, the organization of streets and homes, patterns of residence, education, entertainment, and many, many more. These changes will not only deal with environmental issues, they will deal with human issues. Making public transportation supported by taxes and fares available to all, creating safe ways for walking and biking, and redesigning communities around foot and bike traffic will not only benefit "the environment," they will benefit the health and well-being of people. Road rage will be replaced by cardiovascular fitness.

In sum, discussions of geoengineering to reduce global temperature, even if these plans are not fraught with technical and environmental problems, distract us from focusing on changing the way we live, so that we can all have decent lives, in a healthier, more efficient society.

Costs of Owning a Car?

2007-12-02T08:00:00.001-05:00

A regular reader and astute commenter, e.r. dunhill, on Sociological Stew posted a series of responses to the "Politics of the damned?" that I've decided require a follow-up post.

We were discussing what kind of changes might be needed to allow modern societies to survive up-coming climatic shifts, and create modern, livable, sustainable societies. erd sited several writers who "advocate a shift toward producers providing services, not selling products. From a design and material-cycling standpoint, this makes excellent sense. But, it means that the end-consumer does not enjoy the economic benefit of ownership; the consumer simply pays ad infinitum."

I questioning the "economic benefit of ownership," using the automobile as an example, suggesting that owners of automobiles still pay "ad infinitum.," and that the value of the automobile was a use value not an economic value. By this I mean that private auto ownership gives an individual control over their movement and schedule and provides a sense of freedom, but does not provide an economic asset. Nonetheless, erd countered that "economic benefit of owner ship is that the first costs ultimately provide the owner with an asset. At the end of making car payments, the owner still enjoys the benefit of using the car. Moreover, the owner may ultimately recover some portion of that first cost by selling the vehicle."

This got me to thinking, and as often happens when I start thinking I do some research. What does it really cost to own a car? I took my research and made a few simplifying assumptions to come up with the following.

Suppose a man, let’s call him Charlie, bought a 2004 model year Toyota Camry LE 4 door sedan in December 2003, with payments to begin January 1, 2004. The Camry is one of the most popular cars made in the last 20 years so that’s a reasonable choice to make. It’s a reliable car, with decent gas mileage – EPA estimate of 30 miles per gallon.

The manufacturers suggested retail price on Camry in 2004 was between $15,900 and $28,500. So let’s take the median between those two prices, and assume a fairly well “loaded” vehicle at $22,200 original price. Let’s say Charlie put $2,000 down, and financed $20,200 at 6 percent over 60 months – this would be a monthly payment of $405. The total amount Charlie would have paid out on this purchase as of December 1, 2007 would be $2,000 plus $19,440.00 = $ 21,440.00. [Click here to see my spreadsheet for interest calculations and payments].

We’re going to assume that Charlie is a normal driver and averages 1,000 miles a month, or 12,000 miles a year, and 48,000 miles for the four years between Jan 2004 and December 2007. Based on data from the U.S. Department of Energy, the exact average price of regular gasoline for all the months between January 1, 2004 and December 1, 2007 is $2.32 per gallon. [You can calculate it yourself from the DOE's Excel spreadsheet -data series 1]. We’re going to use the EPA estimated miles per gallon of 30 mpg (even though this is probably a significant underestimation because most car owners do not drive their cars at the optimum speeds for the highest gas mileage performance). So the cost of gasoline for the four years from January 2004 through December 2007 is $3,712.00.

Charlie is a good car owner has his car serviced every 3,000 miles. The cost of regular service varies around the country, so I’ve made a simplifying assumption that service every 3,000 miles or 3 months, will cost $30. That’s higher than where I live, but much less than urban areas where most people live – Charlie lives in the greater Boston Metropolitan area [yes, gentle readers "Boston Charlie"]. And, I did not include any higher charges as might be made for the 30,000 mile check. So I’ve allowed $450 for regular servicing over the four year period.

Of course there is also insurance to pay on the automobile. Here I’m going to have to do a little guessing (because I can’t get the Progressive site to work for me, and it would only give me the cost right now). We own a 2005 Chevy Cavalier (a substantially less expensive, and less popular car than the Toyota Camry) and pay $78 a month for full coverage insurance. Since we live in an area that has high insurance rates, I’m going to be very cautious and allot $80 a month of insurance coverage for Charlie’s Camry. That’s $3,840.00 for four years of car insurance.

So the total expenditures of our car owner, after four years of ownership are:

Down payment and payments	$21,440.00
Gasoline	$ 3,712.00
Maintenance/Service	$ 450.00
Insurance	$ 3,840.00
Total:	$29,442.00

Notice, that I have not even bothered to include other important costs of car ownership, such as property taxes, registration and licensing costs, which vary considerably from place to place. Then there are also the costs of bridge and road tolls. So this exercise underestimates the true total cost of car ownership.

Suppose Charlie wishes to sell his car right now (December 2007). He has put $29,442 into the car, and still owes, $3,754.00 on the principle of the loan. The current Blue Book value of the 2004 Toyota Camry LE sedan modestly loaded with 48,000 miles – for sales between two private parties (the best deal) is $12,625 on a 2004 Toyota Camry fairly well “loaded” in good condition. If Charlie is successful in getting the full $12,625, and pays off the remaining loan of $3,754, he will have a “profit” of $8,871 to deduct from the $29,442 that they have paid into the car. The net COST of the car to our owner over the period of four years was: $20,571.

As we said earlier our Charlie lives in the greater Boston area -- let's say the town of Lexington (I choose this because I actually have a friend named Charlie who lives in Lexington, MA), and has access to a well developed public transportation system (one of my personal favorites) -- two bus routes #62 and #76 connect Lexington with the MBTA. The MBTA offers monthly bus passes in a range of prices depending upon location. Although I suspect that our Charlie, in Lexington, could suffice with one of the less expensive passes, for the sake of argument let's say he needs the most expensive pass -- the Outer Express Bus, which costs $129/month, and provides "unlimited travel on Outer Express Bus PLUS all Inner Express Bus, Local Bus, Subway, Inner Harbor Ferry, and Commuter Rail Zone 1A." If Charlie purchased the Outer Express Bus pass, and used it for the majority of his work and pleasure travel, over the course of the same four years he would pay $6,192.

Compare $6,192 to the net COST of car owning of $20,571 for the same period, and you can see that Charlie could easily have afforded to rent a car for a weekend or a week, several times, for vacations, weekend trips, etc. He might even have purchased a "share" in a cooperatively owned vehicle by several individuals that would cost less than the occasional car rental.

It might be that Charlie does not live alone (my actual friend Charlie has a wife and two teenage children). While we would need to consider the costs of public transportation passes for all the members of the family, we also have to recognize that nearly all middle class families have more than one vehicle, with teenagers, perhaps three or more vehicles. I recently saw a statistic (sorry can't remember where) that said for every 100 Americans of driving age there were 102 private vehicles on the road. From a strictly economic standpoint, given the figures discussed here, a family of four would save money, by having one automobile, and several public transportation passes.

erd is probably thinking about now, that I didn't address one of his major points -- that one does finally pay off the car loan, and then has an "asset." In my example, I stopped short of paying off the loan (largely because it was easier to get reliable data on 2004 models). The cost of paying off the loan would be another $ 3,853.90 (plus maintenance, insurance and gasoline for another year). Once the loan is paid off, there is still monthly costs of insurance, gasoline and maintenance. The cost of gasoline is now averaging $3.07 and rising, and not the 2.32 average of the past four years, so that will be a increasing cost. The costs of maintenance will rise as more and more things need to be replaced and repaired. The costs of insurance will likely decline. But all-in-all given the costs we've been discussing the monthly upkeep costs of the automobile will continue to be greater than the costs of the monthly public transportation costs. At the same time, the Blue Book value of that car, an the amount of money Charlie could recoup by selling it, will be declining. The Camry keeps its value better than most cars, but even that will decline in value over time.

"Not every one's from Boston, John" [nod to "1776"], and most Americans do not have such well developed public transportation systems available to them. Given the costs of owning a vehicle, from an economic stand point, most Americans would gain financially if they could exchange the ownership of one family vehicle for higher taxes to support comprehensive public transportation in their area. There is nonetheless a very high resistance to public transportation (and to taxes to support it). My primary point here, is that such resistance is based on psychological, emotional and cultural reasons, not economic reasons. If we were all rational economic actors as most economists mistakenly take us to be, then it would be easy for us to exchange our automobiles for comprehensive, public transportation systems. We do not want cars because they make us economically better off. We want cars because we have been culturally conditioned to equate them with adulthood, freedom, independence, convenience and other emotionally laden concepts. There was a some years ago a series of "Mr. Goodwrench" advertisements on TV, that had a very catchy tune, the refrain to which declared "it's not just a car it's your freedom."

The calvary is coming...

2007-11-18T17:47:00.000-05:00

...so declares a new sign by the outpost of the striking Kentucky Nurses Association (KNA) in front of the Whitesburg hospital of Appalachian Regional Healthcare system .

I didn't get to stop and ask who the calvary might be, but this week's article in the Lexington Herald-Leader suggests that the calvary might be "a federal mediator and state officials" who have been instrumental in restarting negotiations between ARH and the KNA.

Six weeks ago when the strike began, ARH took a hardline stand, refusing to continue negotiations and announcing that they would begin immediately to hire permanent replacements for the striking nurses.

This week's article provides another hint about why ARH might be willing to temper their hardline stand and resume the negotiations. The precise numbers are in dispute (depending upon whether you are reading the KNA site, the ARH site, or the Herald-Leader), but approximately 750 registered nurses are involved in the dispute, of which about 600 have refused to cross the picket line. Some 150 to 175 union nurses have violated the picket line and continued to work. ARH has permanently replaced another 125 striking nurse positions.

It's not hard to see that this leaves ARH with at least 450 registered nurse positions that are unfilled. One wonders how ARH ever imagined that they could replace the striking nurses in today's employment market. They acted as if they had not heard there was a nursing shortage. Or perhaps they merely hoped that time, cold, lack of income, and the threat of replacement would soften the KNA resolve.

The real jobs for the twenty-first century!

2007-11-18T12:02:00.000-05:00

On Monday this week, my Kentucky Community and Technical College System newsletter carried a story from Inside Higher Education entitled "University Training in the Skilled Trades" by Elizabeth Redden.

West Virginia University recognizing from their own difficulties in hiring skill trades workers (including carpenters, electricians, heating, ventilation and air conditioning mechanics, and plumbers) decided to create their own four year "apprenticeship program [that] pairs each apprentice with a mentor, and includes 1,600 hours of on-the-job training per-year and 145 annual hours of classroom training (to be conducted through a combination of classes at a local technical college, distance education and instruction from West Virginia staff)." Redden points out that West Virginia is hardly alone in this, "the University of Virginia...just celebrated its 25th anniversary for its apprenticeship program in July [2007]."

Many colleges across the country are facing difficulties in recruiting and hiring skilled trades workers, a situation, likely to increase as large numbers of skill workers move into retirement in the next decade.

The key element of the programs that Redden discusses is the apprenticeship. The lack of apprenticeship opportunities is one of the major stumbling bottlenecks in the development of a new generation of skilled workers, as there must be employers willing to employ apprentices and provide appropriate supervision for them over a period of several years.

While most Kentucky Community and Technical Colleges provide training for electricians, plumbers, carpenters, and HVAC workers, only one college in the system -- Jefferson CTC -- has apprenticeship programs and only in carpentry and millwright work. Other KCTCS programs appear to stop short of apprenticeship, providing at most preparation for the journeyman examinations such as in plumbing.

Skilled trades jobs will never be outsourced to India or China. They require workers to be physically present. There will always be a need for carpenters, millwrights, plumbers, electricians, masons and bricklayers, gardeners and landscape specialists, and auto repair workers in the American economy. Yet Kentucky community and technical colleges seem to be more interested in producing exactly the kind of worker whose job will be outsourced -- the digital worker. Certainly every 21st century worker, including or even perhaps especially those in the skilled trades, needs to be technologically savvy and have strong computer skills. But it is a serious mistake to focus on the kinds of technology (e.g., programming) and office (e.g., medical transcript) jobs that are already being outsourced to India.

The allied health professions are a focus of Kentucky community and technical colleges, and appropriately so. Nursing, radiography (unlike radiology), and respiratory therapy cannot be outsourced. These health care workers have to be physically present with the patient, wherever that patient may be.

The skilled trades do not hold the allure and status of allied health professions, but they do promise as good or better job opportunities, and should not be overlooked. More energy needs to be invested in developing business partnerships and apprenticeship opportunities in the skilled trades. Why let universities (like West Virginia and Virginia) take over the historical mission of community and technical colleges? Community colleges in other states (such as Michigan and Wisconsin) have far more extensive apprenticeship programs. KCTCS wants to be the very best community college system in the nation, here's an opportunity!

Politics of the damned?

2007-11-17T18:26:00.000-05:00

When I moved to Kentucky the first time (in 1975) I was given a postcard with a humorous poem about life in Kentucky. The final line of the poem is "the politics are the damnedest in Kentucky." During every one of the nearly 19 years that I've lived in this state, I've seen lots of supporting evidence for that statement, but the performance of state representative Jim Gooch (Democrat from Providence, KY) tops the list. In his capacity as chair of the Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee (!!) Gooch organized a hearing to dispute the idea that the Earth is warming.

Chairman Jim Gooch, D-Providence, a longtime ally of the coal industry, said
he purposefully did not invite anyone who believes in global warming to
testify.
"You can only hear that the sky is falling so many times," said
Gooch, whose post makes him the House Democrats' chief environmental strategist.
"We hear it every day from the news media, from the colleges, from
Hollywood." (Lexington Herald-Leader Thurs. Nov. 15, 2007 )

Neither of the two speakers invited were scientists because Rep. Gooch said "It really wasn't my intention to get into so much science today."

I spotted this story in the Herald-Leader while waiting for my car to be serviced. (Thank you, AutoWorks of Whitesburg for always having a current newspaper in the waiting area!). When I got to work, I searched the article out on-line. The most interesting aspect of reading the article on line was perusing the comments posted by readers.

My favorite comment, by Tom Burns was "I believe the large vacant cavity that is
Jim Gooch's skull is a prime location for trapping carbon dioxide."

The sad thing about the comments is that a significant minority of posters applauded Gooch, and echoed the speakers sentiments that the only thing "only thing man made about global warming is the hysteria." A line used in several variations by many of the posters in agreement with Gooch and his invited speakers.

Musing about the Future, Part I

2007-10-23T12:48:00.000-04:00

I have been doing a lot of thinking and writing about the future. Between lectures for my on-line environmental sociology class, and comments to various blogs (including my own) I've been developing some thoughts about where we are heading, and what we might do about it.

I got started down this road by a post by "Progressive" Forwardly Thinking: New Progressive Politics got me to thinking about the future. The essence of the Forward Thinking post and the document "The Death of Environmentalism" by Shellenberger and Nordhaus, that it links to, is that the political techniques and strategies that produced the environmental legislation of the past in the U.S. are not working, and will not work, to deal with the environmental crisis of global warming. This is a very thoughtful document and provides a good overview of environmental politics for the last 50 years, and some good thoughts on why the political techniques that were so successful in the 1960's and 1970's fail when confronted by climate change issues. ideas presented for future political action are well thought out, and have potential. Shellenberger and Nordhaus argue that environmentalists have to stop being a "special interest" and "start framing our proposals around core American values and start seeing our own values as central to what motivates and guides our politics."
It is hard not to agree with everything Shellenberger and Nordhaus have to say. Environmentalists do need to do some visioning for the future. We do need to clarify our values, and work consistently from those values, tying our political efforts to those values. We do need to have a proactive approach, talking about the positives (what are the new industries and new jobs that will be created), rather than the negatives (what jobs and industries will decline). However, even if environmentalists were successful in doing all these things, we would not have the same kinds of success that conservative "values" voters have, for one very simple reason. The value issues of conservatives (pro-family--traditional two parent, husband headed families, anti-abortion, anti-homosexual, prayer in school, Ten Commandments in the Courthouse, smaller government, lower taxes agendas) either have no impact or a positive impact on the profit margin of corporations. These values and the policies they spawn either are irrelevant the operation of a capitalist economy or they support the accumulation of capital. While there are some economic activities that would benefit from an environmental values agenda, environmental values (and other liberal values such as national health care) run strongly counter to the profit interests of the vast majority of existing capitalist businesses that currently exist in this country. One can argue all one wishes that new investment and profit making opportunities will be created (which of course they will be), but those don't exist yet. Those opportunities haven't made anyone any money yet, and the things that are making people money now, are threatened by the changes for which environmentalists are asking. One can also argue that failure to change will cost business more later on than change now will cost, but as I will discuss below that is not convincing argument.

It is too late to prevent climate change. Climate change has already happened, and because the effect of human additions to the atmosphere are cumulative even if we were able to make immediate changes climate change would continue to occur as the result of our past activities. Several experts in the field of climatology have argued that we have about a ten year window (see interview with James Hansen) during which we could limit how much change, and therefore how much damage, occurs, but making significant changes in human affects on the atmosphere. While there is certainly debate over the correctness of this ten year estimate, there is little question that the time to make changes is fairly short. Moreover the changes required are large -- significant reductions in our CO2, methane and nitrous oxide emissions. Reductions of this magnitude will require: significant changes in the way we do business, live, work, and travel; political action to change laws and government policies; organizational change; and change in attitudes and values of ordinary people.

Compared to other industrialized nations, the economy of the United States falls to the most extreme end of the capitalist continuum, with the greatest amount of private ownership. Capitalist considerations of profit dominate all sectors of the American economy, including transportation, electricity generation, and other energy areas, while in Europe many of these key sectors have substantial government ownership.

The U. S. political system also differs substantially for other democracies. Most other world democracies have parliamentary systems. G. William Domhoff in his classic Who Rules America? has made a cogent argument for why the American "winner take all" electoral process creates large brokerage political parties that must attempt to appeal to the broadest segment of the population. It is this structure, Domhoff argues that makes the "special interest" process flourish through lobbying and campaign contributions, and makes it difficult (but not impossible as the religious right has demonstrated, see "The Death of Environmentalism" referenced above) for broader values agendas for change to take root.

Parliamentary systems, compared to the U.S. system, are less dependent upon financial contributions to elections, and are less susceptible to the influence of lobbying. In the U. S. monetary contributions are a huge consideration in elections, and even more important in funding permanent lobbying activities. The entrenched power of the businesses, industries and groups with a lot of money at stake: they are willing to spend a lot to avoid change. Groups opposing the concept of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) are often funded heavily by energy industries (oil, coal) and transportation industry (automotive).

Profit motive is a major cause of opposition to the idea of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). major industries, as energy, transportation, chemical industries benefit from existing arrangements – there is a lot of profit to be made from continuing business as usual. Costs of
change are very high in some industries and businesses. Some would have to disappear entirely or be scaled back dramatically (e.g. coal mining). Workers in these industries, and their unions when the exist, also join in the opposition to making changes to combat global warming. Proponents for significant change to address AGW correctly point out that many new industries
and new jobs will be created in "green" industries. However, our national experience with
transformation of our economy from industrial sector to service sector over the past 35 years has shown us that any kind of significant change in the economy always result in economic hardship for some and economic opportunity for others. Thus change is understandably feared by many whose livelihood depends upon carbon intensive activities.

Taking the sociological approach which looks at issues of the environment and society holistically, leads us to the awareness that our entire culture and patterns of social life, have been shaped by an economy dependent upon growth and consumption. Our communities, our homes, how we connect to school, work, home, recreation and worship are all shaped to some extent by our capitalistic industrial economy. Moreover the existing structure of inequality and economic opportunity makes it more difficult for some people to change. The location of work places in relationship to housing that working and middle class people can afford, and the lack of public transportation system often leave these classes with few options to reduce the use of private vehicles. Among affluent upper middle class families who could afford $300,000 and up urban condos near their places of work, considerations of the present conditions in central city school systems often inhibit them from moving their families out of the suburbs.

To simply label those who resist dramatic and potentially painful changes in their life style as lazy or ignorant is overly simplistic. To prevent the most extreme climate change, requires changes that are likely to have far reaching, disruptive effects on citizens and businesses of our advanced capitalist countries. Resistance to such change is to be expected. However, if "business as usual" continues, the long term disruptive effects of unabated climate change will be far greater,with more suffering. Getting this message across is hampered by several things.

First, the most devastating effects of climate change will not occur for another 50 to 100 years. Human beings as a species are not long term planners. We do fairly well in planning a year in advance (save those seeds for next spring's planting, put aside those skins for next winter's cold weather). Certainly we have evidence in existing buildings and archaeological finds that shows planning for construction projects that last a lifetime (from pyramids to Gothic cathedrals). There have been many individuals with long range vision, but collectively, human societies have not done well with long range planning. Those human societies that manage to continue to exist for thousands of years in balance with their environment (foragers and horticulturalists) do not engage in long run planning, but rather focus on yearly cycles in ways that have long run benefits.

Our modern society is not organized around long term planning. Capitalist businesses are geared towards the profit of the current or next quarter. Most business plans one year ahead. While farsighted individuals and companies do exist they are not the norm. This is not a failure of individuals, but a failure of structure. Businesses must be concerned about investors. Investors who are constantly making decisions about buying and selling based on current levels of profit and near term returns, not what might be promised for twenty or thirty years down the road.

Political decision-makers also, have a short horizon. Most are geared towards winning the next election. Again, this is not a failure of individuals so much as a structural defect in the political process. Even when a given negative future outcome is well established and relative near term (the disappearance of the social security surplus by 2035) legislators find it difficult to make decisions that will benefit people 30 years in the future, but will cost people in the next year -- especially that will cost people who might well vote against them for the decision.

Second, the uncertainty of predictions for specific consequences in specific places(where will there be more rain and where will there be less rain) have made it easier for people to resist acting. Moreover, there is no question that some regions and some countries may benefit from global warming. During September when the extent of Arctic ice was at its all time measured minimum, the fabled "northwest passage" or water way along the northern coast of Canada was ice free and readily navigable. Both the Canadian government and the Russian government see potential gain in a permanent reduction of Arctic Sea ice. It opens up the possibility of cheaper ocean transport that is far shorter than a trip through the Panama Canal, and it opens up the Arctic Ocean to oil and gas exploitation. Russian submarines have taken advantage of the declining and thinning ice to plant a Russian "flag" beneath the ice at the North Pole, hoping to stake a claim to the rich energy resources that lie beneath the ocean surface. Lack of certainty about who will suffer and who will benefit increases resistance to change.

Third climate change is an international problem. All nations must participate. While the United States is currently the largest producer of greenhouse gases, developing nations like China and India are increasing their emissions contribution at a much faster rate and will soon over take the U.S. in absolute terms. Cooperation between nations is required. Developed nations need to help underdeveloped nations jump to cleaner technologies .Developing nations need to protect forests and they need financial assistance to find economic alternatives. So far international cooperation has been negligible.

This does not mean that we should give up and wash our hands of the whole affair. As I will discuss in another post, another day, even small changes can be important for our future.

Please see Forwardly Thinking for a very thoughtful response to this essay!

What is at stake

2007-10-20T13:57:00.000-04:00

The folks at Blogger have compiled a list of exceptional environmental blogs in the wake of the Blog Action Day on the environment. You can see the full list at one of the named blogs The Conscious Earth. Many on the list were already familiar to me, but one that was new to me was Earth Meanders a blog by Dr. Glen Barry a conservation biologist and political ecologist who is eloquent and passionate on the environmental disasters that modern society is creating.

I agree with Barry's assessment of the dire environmental consequences of modern civilizations current economic and social choices. We are indeed going to ecological-hell-in-a-handbasket and taking uncountable species down with us. But is the "earth" dying as a result of our actions, as Barry claims? I think not. Oh, I think we humans are capable of destroying "the earth" -- we have enough nuclear weapons stockpiled, which if strategically placed and detonated all at once might create forces capable of causing the earth to break up and become a new asteroid belt, or destabilize earth's orbit and send us out careening into the sun, or spinning out in to the cold blackness (yeah, I did love Space 1999). But to accomplish that would require a level of international organization and cooperation that humans have never shown any indication we possess.

Let me clarify. The planet Earth and life (any kind of life) on planet earth, is extraordinarily resilient, and has withstood destructive forces far greater than those currently commanded by human societies. The natural destructive forces of the earth are such that no trace exists of the original earth's surface from four and a half billion years ago. The oldest rock identified on the surface of the earth is just under four billion years old, some grains of zircon have been discovered that have been dated to 4.2 to 4.3 billion years ago. Since that time the planet's surface has been made and remade, abducted and subducted, and moved about over and over again. There have been periods of time vastly warmer than our man-made global warming is likely to create in the next few hundred years, and periods of time colder than the last ice age during which humans evolved.

The first evidence of life on earth dates to three and a half to possibly 3.8 billion years ago -- meaning that planet earth existed for nearly billion years before there was life. There may have been life before that, but we have no evidence because no trace of the earth's surface older than 3.9 million years ago exists. The oldest fossils are 3.5 billion years old.

This three and a half billion year record of fossils tells us a story of change and extinction, new species, growth, change and new extinctions. During this incomprehensibly long period of time, continents rose and crashed into each other and were torn apart, by unfathomable tectonic forces. To quote from one of my favorite books (J. D. MacDougall A Short History of Planet Earth, John Wiley and Sons, 1996):

"Throughout the earth's history species and families have arisen, prevailed for a time, and then disappeared. But at times, for reasons not wholly understood, rapid and wholesale destruction of large fractions of the plant and animal kingdoms has occurred. Usually, after these crises, there was a rapid proliferation of new and sometimes quite different species. Such abrupt changes in floral and faunal assemblages are reflected in the fossil record. It is only quite recently that geologists have begun to examine these mass extinctions in terms of periodic catastrophes such as the collision of comets or asteroids with the earth, or dramatic changes in the global climate."

Let us be honest. Planet earth, and life on planet earth are not at stake. Earth is not dying, life will not cease to exist as the result of human action.

What is at stake is human life and human civilization, and the life of species of plant and animal that sustain human ecosystem ecosystems. We can't destroy the earth, and we can't destroy life on earth, but we sure as hell can destroy ourselves and most of the species we rely upon for our lives. Moreover, anthropogenic climate change, pollution and all the other environmental problems spawned by modern society, will first and foremost kill societies long before impacting the presence of the human race. I'm a Jew, so the New Testament is not one of my religious books, but I've been thinking quite a bit about Jesus' Sermon on the Mount in which he say "blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth." It occurs to me that this might end up being literally true -- if one defines "meek" as those simple societies where people live in small bands or tribal groups subsisting by foraging or horticulture (farming with hand tools).

Talking about killing Earth, is not only hyperbole, it is counter productive. What we want is to change human behavior, especially the behavior of those who are rich enough and powerful enough to determine the direction of business and industry, and national policy. At a secondary level we want to change the behavior of millions of consumers in affluent, industrial nations. Most people, including those whose behavior need to change, operate most of the time out of self-interest. Talking to them about a dying earth isn't going to change their behavior. Appealing to their altruism for other species is not going to change their behavior. Making poster children of polar bears is not going to change their behavior. But possibly change will occur if we can get the message through to the rich and powerful that the complex society on which their profits depend is at risk (notice that at least some of the oil companies have figured out that the future of profit is in renewables); and the message to the average consumer that the food and beer will disappear from their local grocery shelves, and the gas for their ATV's will be gone, and the nice cushy life they value is endangered.

Urban Water Supplies and Mountain Top Removal

2007-10-14T14:00:00.001-04:00

Monday October 15, 2007 is Blog Action Day on the Environment. Bloggers all over the world are all writing and posting today on one issue - the environment. That's a pretty big, and varied topic.

One environmental issue on the minds of millions of people in the U.S. southeast is water. The drought monitor report released Thursday October 11, by NOAA, shows that 59 percent of the contiguous U.S. (the "lower 48") has some degree of drought. Three and a half percent of the contiguous U.S. suffers from "exceptional drought" meaning that the rainfall deficit is greater than ever recorded. The area of exceptional drought spread from my own region of eastern Kentucky southward through most of Tennessee, parts of North Carolina, northern Georgia, and most of Alabama. These exceptional drought conditions are creating severe water shortages for many municipalities within the region, including major metropolitan areas like Atlanta, Georgia and Lexington, Kentucky.

Lexington, Kentucky a city of a quarter-million, sits at the center of a five county Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) includes Bourbon, Clark, Fayette, Jessamine, Scott, and Woodford counties that has a population of nearly a half million. Municipal water for Lexington is drawn from the dammed pools on the Kentucky River, rather than from reservoirs. So Lexington is utterly dependent on the flow of water from Eastern Kentucky where the Kentucky river originates.

The exceptional drought has affected that flow of water in the Kentucky river. The drought owes its existence to a confluence of global climate factors, including global warming, and the La Nina event in the southern Pacific. But something else, closer at hand, and which we have more control over also impacts the flow of water into the Kentucky River -- strip-mining, and especially mountain top removal mining.

Friday October 12 Lexington Herald-Leader had an interesting juxtaposition of two articles on page B6-- one on the water restrictions imposed in Lexington, the other just below it about protests against the valley fills that inevitably accompany mountain top removal mining. I'd like to think that someone in the Lexington-Herald Leader composing room knew what they were doing, and put these stories together on purpose, because they certainly are connected.

Mountain top removal strip-mining, which does exactly what it sounds like, can only occur because of exemptions given to existing laws designed to protect water flows. The twenty year old rules restrict mining near streams, but exemptions have been made to allow "valley fills" of rubble taken off mountain top mine sites that affect seasonal and ephemeral streams. According to the Office of Surface Mining (OSM) surface mining permits from October 2001 to June 2005 affected 367 miles of streams in the Appalachian coalfields.

Mountain top removal strip-mining and "valley fills" affect the amount and flow of water in rivers like the Kentucky and the availability availability of urban water supplies in two ways.

First, mountain top removal like all strip-mining denudes the mountainsides of trees and shrubbery. Even when reclamation is done (often many years after the initial removal of vegetation) the site is compacted and covered with grass, not trees. The loss of forest has dramatic consequences for the flow of water. Forests moderate the effect of heavy rains, acting like sponges that absorb the brunt of the rain, and then slowly release the water over days and even weeks, preventing local flooding and providing long term rises in downstream river flow. Rain flows instantly off the treeless mountainsides and swells creeks and streams creating first flash flooding in the mountains, and then huge "slugs" of water that move downstream all at one time. Only a small portion of such slugs can be captured by dams and urban water systems, the rest passes on downstream.

Second, the "valley fills" of mountain top removal cover existing stream beds and water courses. When rain comes, water rushing off the bald mountain sides finds new channels, which may not lead to the streams that feed the Kentucky River. Rain runoff that should be going to feeding the creeks that feed the streams that feed the river, that supplies the drinking water downstream, end up going off in new directions and creating flooding conditions locally.

Now the U. S. Office of Surface Mining is proposing a permanent change to the rules that would relax the rules regarding mining near bodies of water. The new regulations would allow mining that alters stream flows. Special exemptions would no longer have to be sought.

The Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement will be holding hearings on the rule change October 24, in Hazard, Kentucky, Charleston, West Virginia, Knoxville, Tennessee, and Washington, Pennsylvania. There is the tendency for urban folk to considerr issues like mountain top removal of little relevance to themselves. They don't have to watch the hills around their homes be destroyed, be rocked by daily blasting, or live with the noise and dust of the mining. (Photo shows the mountain top removal strip mine that is within 2500 feet of my home). It is time that residents of the cities downstream from the coalfields, like Lexington, recognize that what happens in the mountains is of crucial importance to them. The future of their water supply is at risk.

For more information about Mountain Top Removal in my area, and links to action sites visit: Mountain Top Removal Page

The Deniers Step Up the Campaign

2007-10-11T14:21:00.000-04:00

Got a fascinating piece of mail at work today, inviting me to sign a petition urging "the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan." The petition card further went on to say that "There is no convincing evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, int he foreseeable future , cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate." There's more but I think that's enough for you to get the picture.

The most interesting thing about the petition card, that one is suppose to sign and return if one agrees with the sentiment [which of course I do not], is that it specifically requests the signer to indicated whether they have a B.S., M.S. or Ph.D. degree, and in what field. They are obviously not picky about what field, since the envelop was addressed erroneously to me in the "Communications/Humanities/Fine Arts Division" (I'm in the Social Sciences Division). So they presumably don't care whether their signers are scientists or not.

The thickly stuffed envelop has a cryptic return address of GWPP (which is not explained anywhere in the materials), at a Post Office box in La Jolla, California. In addition to the petition card, the envelop contains a brief note from Frederick Seitz a past president of the National Academy of Sciences. The note appeals to me as a "citizen" who has "the training necessary to evaluate the relevant data and offer sound advice." Remember the senders thought I was faculty in Communications/Humanities/Fine Arts! I am also invited to request more petition cards to share with my colleagues.

More interesting than the note, is the copy of The Wall Street Journal article from 2000 by Arthur B. Robinson and Noah E. Robinson, (Chemists at the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine), and the 12 page, glossy, three-three color reprint of an article from the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, 2007 by both Robinsons and a Willie Soon, replete with many, many charts and graphs.

Like many such pieces there is a certain amount of schizophrenia -- the first chart, of the surface temperature of the Sargasso sea going back to 1000 BCE, purports to demonstrate that there really isn't any global warming. The temperature for 2006 is show as being right at the 3000 year average, with many warmer periods (including the "Medieval Climate Optimum" about 1100 CE). This is right next to a chart that shows that there is global warming in the Arctic, but purports to show that the warming follows the pattern of solar activity and not the pattern of hydrocarbon use (primary source of atmospheric carbon dioxide). [The solar activity hypothesis has recently been undermined by research] The rest of the article progressing the same way jumping between "it's not really warming" claims, to "it is warming, but we're not doing it." I saw nothing in this piece that is not satisfactorily dealt with by global warming science -- see the wonderful summary of arguments and counter arguments at: The Gristmill.

For more about this mailing see: "Oregon Institute of Science and Malarkey" at RealClimate Blog.