Archive for the ‘inequality’ Category
hidden externalities: when failed states prioritize business over education
Much has been discussed in the media about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic; for example, to compensate for the absence of coordinated support, working mothers are carrying more caregiving responsibilities. However, the full range of externalities resulting from governmental and organizational decisions (or in the case of some governments, “non”-decisions which are decisions in practice) often are less visible during the pandemic. Some of these externalities – impacts on health and well-being, careers and earnings, educational attainment, etc. – won’t be apparent until much later. The most disadvantaged populations will likely bear the brunt of these; organizations charged with addressing equity issues, such as schools and universities, will grapple over how to respond to these in the years ahead.
In this blog post, I’ll discuss one under-discussed implication of what’s happening in NYC as an example, and how other organizations have had to adjust as a result. Mayor DeBlasio has discussed how NYC public schools will close if NYC’s positivity rate averages 3% over 7 days. At the same time, indoor dining, bars, and gyms have remained open, albeit in reduced capacity. People, especially parents and experts, including medical professionals, are questioning this prioritization of business establishments over schools across the US.
Since the start of the 2020 school year, NYC public schools has offered limited in-person instruction. A few informal conversations I’ve had with parents at NYC public schools revealed that they found the blended option an unviable one. Due to capacity and staffing issues, a public school’s blended learning schedules could vary over the weeks. For example, with a 1:2:2 schedule, a student has 1 day of in person school the first week, followed by 2 days in person the following week, then another 2 days in person the third week. Moreover, which days a student can attend in-person school may not be the same across the weeks. This might partially explain why only a quarter of families have elected these. Overall, both “options” of blended learning and online learning assume that families have flexibility and/or financial resources to pay for help.
What’s the cost of such arrangements? People have already acknowledged that parents, and in particular, mothers, bear the brunt of managing at-home schooling while working from home. But there is another hidden externality that several of my CUNY freshmen students who live with their families have shared with me. While their parents work to pay rent and other expenses, some undergraduates must support their younger siblings’ online learning. Other students are caregiving for relatives, such as a disabled parent, sometimes while recovering from illnesses themselves. Undergraduates must coordinate other household responsibilities in between managing their own online college classes and additional paid work. Without a physical university campus that they can go to for in-person classes (excluding labs and studio classes that are socially distanced) or as study spaces, students don’t have physical buffers that can insulate them against these unanticipated responsibilities and allow them to focus on their learning, interests, and connections.
Drawing on the financial resources available to them and shaping plans around “stabilizing gambits,” several elite universities and small liberal arts colleges have sustained quality education for their students with their in-person classes, frequent testing, and sharing of information among dorm-dwellers. But in the absence of any effective, coordinated federal response to the pandemic in the US, what can public university instructors do to ensure that their undergraduate students have a shot at quality learning experiences? So far, I’ve assigned newly published texts that guide readers through how to more critically analyze systems. I’ve turned to having students documenting their experiences, in the hopes of applying what they have learned to re-design systems that work for more diverse populations. I’ve tried to use synchronous classes as community-building sessions, coupled with feedback opportunities on how to channel our courses to meet their needs and interests. I’ve devoted parts of class sessions to explaining how to navigate the university, including how to select majors and classes and connect with instructors. I’ve connected research skills to interpreting the firehose of statistics and studies about pandemic, to help people ascertain risks so that they can make more informed decisions that protect themselves and their communities and educate others. I’ve attempted to shift expectations for what learning can look like in the absence of face-to-face contact. Since many of the relational dimensions that we took for granted in conventional face-to-face classes are now missing (i.e., visual cues, physical co-presence), I’ve encouraged people to be mutually supportive in other ways, like using the chat / comments function. In between grading and class prep, I’ve written letters of recommendation, usually on very short notice, so that CUNY students can tap needed emergency scholarships or pursue tenure-track jobs. In the meantime, our CUNY programs have tried to enhance outreach as households experience illness and job loss, with emergency funds and campus food pantries mapping where students reside and sending mobile vans to deliver groceries, in an effort to mitigate food insecurity.
Like other scholars, I’ve also revealed, in the virtual classroom, meetings, and conferences, how the gulf between work/family policies is an everyday, shared reality – something that should be acknowledged, rather than hidden away for performative reasons. Eagle-eyed viewers are likely to periodically spot my child sitting by my side in a zoom meeting, assisting me by taking class attendance, or even typing on documents in the background. My capacities to support undergraduate and graduate learning, as well as contribute to the academic commons by reviewing manuscripts and co-organizing academic conferences, have depended on my daughter attending her school in-person. Faculty and staff at her school have implemented herculean practices to make face-to-face learning happen, and families have followed agreements about reducing risks outside of school to maintain in-person learning. That said, given current policy decisions, it’s just a matter of time when I will join other working parents and my CUNY undergraduates making a daily, hour-by-hour complex calculus of what can be done when all-age learners are at home.
All of these adjustments and experimental practices are just baby steps circumnavigating collective issues. These liminal times can offer opportunities to rethink how we enact our supposed values in systems and institutions. For instance, do we allow certain organizations and unresponsive elected leaders to continue to transfer externalities to those who are least prepared to bear them? Do we charge individual organizations and dedicated members, with their disparate access to resources, to struggle with how to serve their populations’ needs? Or, do we more closely examine how can we redesign systems to recognize and support more persons?
“Talk with your family about [Medicare] Part D over Thanksgiving dinner”: How markets require bounded relationality
Question: What do the following three scenarios have in common?
Scenario A. Congrats, you’re turning 65 years old!
You’re turning 65 years old. In the US, if you have worked enough units, you are eligible for Medicare; you must select health insurance by choosing among traditional Medicare and HMO plans. You also need to choose insurance that will cover your current or anticipated prescription medications. Depending on where you live, this could involve comparing around 50 different plans.
You start by consulting the Medicare booklet and wading through the flood of mail from insurance providers. Despite this information, you’re having difficulties understanding the differences among plans and determining how much plans will charge for your medications. Moreover, you’re not quite sure which medications that you’ll need in the upcoming year. Each year after this, you’ll have an almost two-month-long window for making these decisions – a period that is happening now, ending Dec. 7.
If you have a long life, you’ll have plenty of practice working with this market. How do you select a plan appropriate to your needs right now and then in the future?
Scenario B. Congrats, you’re getting ready to enter high school!
You are a student at a NYC public middle school. Since students are not automatically assigned to public high schools, you and your family must choose from among 750 programs and rank order your choices. (If you are two years old or older, your parents must do the same for public pre-K and kindergarten school programs.) To learn about your options, you can look at a directory of descriptions of these programs and then research each school online. If possible, you and your family will also attend information fairs and schools’ open houses and tours, where you might be asked to fill out additional forms or leave your information.
Some schools have different criteria for what kinds of prospective students they prioritize, and most selective programs don’t provide rubrics for how they rank prospective students – information crucial for ascertaining your chances of acceptance. After you submit up to 12 rank-ordered choices, an algorithm, modelled after a medical residency matching program designed by a economist, will generate a match based on schools’ priorities and your listed options. And, btw, charter schools and private schools have their own admissions processes and admissions deadlines.
How do you choose and rank public high school programs? Should you try to maximize your choices by also applying to charter schools and, if you have the financial resources, private schools?
Scenario C. Congrats, you’re rich!
You have amassed enviable, immense wealth. But, your mattress is bursting, and you distrust regular banking. And, for whatever reason, you’re not fond of having the state taking a portion to support the common good, social insurance, military spending, etc. Thinking ahead, you worry about your family having unfettered access to your financial legacy; relatives might fritter away that wealth! Also, you have a few relationships that other family members don’t (yet) know about, and you want to make sure that those loved ones are also taken care of after your inevitable passing. So, what to do?
Answer: Most likely, you’ll need what I call “bounded relationality” to assist you with entering complex markets and making exchanges. To explain what bounded relationality is, I’ll preview excepts from my advance, online first article “Bounded relationality: how intermediary organizations encourage consumer exchanges with routinized relational work in a social insurance market.”
The bounded relationality concept combines two of my favorite theories: (1) economic sociology’s relational work by Viviana Zelizer, Fred Wherry, and Nina Bandjel* and (2) Herbert Simon’s theory about how organizations compensate for people’s bounded rationality, or difficulties with making decisions.
During several years of my research on organizations that support older adults, I observed workshops and meetings for organizational representatives and professionals, including social workers, on topics such as how to select Medicare insurance plans.
At one of these workshops, a representative from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, described officials’ hopes that families would discuss prescription plans at family get-togethers: ‘We tried to say, “Talk with your family about [Medicare] Part D over Thanksgiving dinner,” but we don’t know if people did.’ His comment revealed how much the market relies upon relational work, or connections formed and sustained with other persons (Zelizer 2012) and organizations.
Using observations of US governmental, advocacy, and human service organizations’ (GAHSOs) talks, I show how these intermediary organizations endorsed “bounded relationality” when teaching conventions for participating in the market of social insurance. Unlike conventional consumer goods and services markets, insurance options are difficult to evaluate and exchanges are challenging to switch. Decisions are also consequential, with suboptimal decisions impacting personal well-being and requiring support or intervention by family members, if they are available.
Read more about bounded relationality after the jump: Read the rest of this entry »
relational inequality theory (rit) and racialized organizations
Want some orgtheory about inequality? Check out the following podcasts and short articles, just in time for your upcoming holiday commutes:
Orgtheory guests Dustin Avent-Holt and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey have a socannex podcast on “Relational Inequality Theory” (RIT) (38 minutes) with Queens College, CUNY sociologist Joseph N. Cohen. The trio discuss more about RIT as a “theoretical toolkit” that allows researchers to translate concepts into empirical research. See the orgtheory blog entries that led to their socannex podcast here and here.
Victor Ray has a HBR article “Why So Many Organizations Stay White” where he advises that organizations move beyond symbolic gestures to really tackle entrenched discrimination and inequality:
At a minimum, leaders should stop thinking about discrimination and inequality as rare events and understand that racial processes often shape behavior in the absence of ill-intent. Conversations about organizational inequality need to refocus from a narrow concern with feelings and racial animus to the massive inequalities in material and psychological resources that organizations distribute between racial groups.
Ray also discusses racialized organizations in a B-side podcast (48:36). Learn how reading Joan Acker’s article about gendered organizations helped him think through about how to connect critical race theory and organizations.
“Organizations, Markets, & the State” course at the Graduate Center, CUNY, offered for this spring 2020
Are you a graduate student in the Inter-University Doctoral Consortium?* If so, please consider taking my “Organizations, Markets, & the State” class at the Graduate Center, CUNY. At student request, I am teaching this class on the sociology of organizations this spring 2020 on Wednesdays @11:45am-2:45pm. Our first class meets on Wed., Jan. 29, 2020.
In addition to covering the classics of organizational research, the course includes cutting edge organizational research. The course also incorporates topics and assigned readings based on enrolled students’ interests. When I’ve taught this class in past semesters, guest speakers, including Nicole P. Marwell, Jeff Sallaz, Michel Anteby, Caroline W. Lee, Frederick Wherry, Pilar Opazo, and Elizabeth Popp Berman, have discussed their research projects. (And, Fabio Rojas joined us for a special get-together during a visit to NYC!)
One of the aims of the class, besides learning substantive content, is to develop a local community of emerging scholars whose relationships spanning local, US, and international boundaries. So, if you are an organizations researcher who is located or will happen to be in the NYC area during spring 2020, please email me about presenting your research! We’ve also learned about professional development with guests, as participants are eager to learn about different kinds of institutions and career paths.
Here is the spring 2020 course description:
Organizations, Markets, & the State, Spring 2020
Graduate Center
Prof. Katherine K. Chen
Course Description
How can people coordinate action across growing groups in creative versus conventional ways?
How can people organize in ways that widen versus reduce power differentials among members?
How do people and organizations hoard advantages for a select few versus ensuring more equal access to all?
How do organizations fend off versus embrace market ideology, and how do organizations encourage members to adopt these perspectives?
Organizations are crucial actors in contemporary society, and they are also sites where many of us expend significant efforts connecting with or coordinating collective action. Despite their central role in shaping our experiences from education to the workplace to governance, organizations are often overlooked or taken-for-granted among researchers and laypersons. When researchers do study organizations, they typically pay little critical attention to power dynamics and organizing possibilities.
Building upon more critical perspectives, participants will learn why organizations form, how they develop, and how they can exacerbate or alleviate inequalities. We will also discuss organizations’ relations with the state and markets, and how these relations affect action. We will cover a variety of organizational forms, from conventional bureaucracies to networked firms to democratic organizations, with a focus on participants’ organizational fields of interest. Theories studied incorporate the classics, as well as cutting edge synthetic work like Strategic Action Fields (SAFs), racialized organizations, and relational inequality theory (RIT)’s inequality-generating mechanisms. Methodological approaches covered include ethnography, interviews, and other qualitative methods, and quantitative analyses.
This course supports deepening participants’ substantive knowledge, including preparing for comprehensives, extending cross-over expertise in a substantive area (i.e. social movements, urban sociology, stratification, education, cultural sociology, etc.), and designing and carrying out research. In addition, this course aims to both promote professional development and forming a community of supportive scholars for emerging research.
*If you are a student at one of the below schools, you may be eligible, after filing paperwork by the GC and your institution’s deadlines, to take classes within the Consortium:
Columbia University, GSAS
Princeton University – The Graduate School
CUNY Graduate Center
Rutgers University
Fordham University, GSAS
Stony Brook University
Graduate Faculty, New School University
Teachers College, Columbia University
New York University, GSAS, Steinhardt
“don’t be afraid to push big, bold projects” and “be brave and patient”: Dustin Avent-Holt and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey on producing Relational Inequality Theory (RIT)
Dustin Avent-Holt and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, who collaboratively published their book Relational Inequalities: An Organizational Approach (Oxford University Press), graciously agreed to do a joint email interview with orgtheory! Here, we discuss their book and the process leading up to the production of the book. Readers who are thinking of how to apply relational inequality theory (RIT), join and bridge scholarly conversations, and/or handle collaborative projects, please take note.
First, I asked Dustin and Don substantive questions about RIT. Here, both authors describe how they used their workplaces in higher education as laboratories for refining their theory. Also, Don channeled his disappointment with the limits of Chuck Tilly’s Durable Inequalities into fueling this endeavor.
1. Katherine. How did you apply the insight of relational inequality in your own lives? For example, both of you are at public universities – how does knowing relational inequality affect your ways of interacting with other people and institutions?
Dustin. I think for me one of the ways I see this is becoming faculty during the process of writing the book and being in a transitioning institution. I was hired out of grad school to Augusta University when it had just merged with the Medical College of Georgia. With this merger, Augusta University moved from being a teaching-focused college to a comprehensive research university that includes both graduate and undergraduate programs and a mission focused on research. Experiencing this transition made me think through the daily lives of organizations in a much less structural way as I saw people negotiating and renegotiating the meaning of the institution, the practices and policies, creating new ways of fulfilling institutional roles, etc. I guess in that way it highlighted the work of Tim Hallet on inhabited institutionalism. As university faculty and staff, we didn’t just copy a bunch of templates from the environment, people were translating them and challenging them in the organization. And we still are, 7 years later, and I suspect we will be for a very long time. Organizations at that moment became enactments rather than structures for me, something to be relationally negotiated not simply imported. Don and my endeavor then to understand inequality in this context actually began to make more sense. And in fact during our weekly conversations about the book, I do remember often relating stories to Don of what was going on, and this certainly shaped how I thought about the processes we were thinking through.
I don’t know if that is what you were after in your question, but it is for me this experience shaped how I have come to think about organizations, and became central to how we think about organizations in the book.
Don. No fair, actually apply a theory in our own lives? Seriously though, I became pretty frustrated with the black hole explanations of local inequalities as reflecting “structure” or “history”. These can be analytically useful, but simultaneously disempowering. Yes, some students come to the University with cultural capital that matches some professors, but this does not make them better students, just relationally advantaged in those types of student-teacher interactions. At the same time the University exploits revenue athletes for its purposes while excluding many others from full participation. The struggles of first gen students and faculty are produced by relational inequalities.
As a department chair I was keenly aware of the university dance of claims making around status and revenue and that this had to be actively negotiated if our department was going to be able to claim and sequester resources. This sounds and to some extent is harsh, since success might mean taking resources indirectly from weaker or less strategic departments, although it can also feel insurgent if the resource appears to be granted or extracted from the Provost. But the truth is that university resources flow in a complex network of relationships among units, students, legislators and vendors (beware the new administrative software contract!).
The Dean will pretend this is about your unit’s “productivity”, it’s never that simple.* It’s also great to have allies, at UMass we have a great faculty union that works to level the playing field between departments and disrupt the administrative inequality dance.
* Katherine’s addition: Check out this satirical twitter feed about higher ed administration for laugh/cries.
the relational turn in the study of inequalities and organizations – guest post by Dustin Avent-Holt and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey
On behalf of Dustin Avent-Holt and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, I am posting their guest post, a must-read for researchers looking for intersections between organizations and stratification. In their post, they describe the shortcomings of stratification research’s in focusing on “individual” characteristics and how they build upon organizational theory to examine organizations as inequality-generating mechanisms. Their post ends with possible research AND policy agendas for a more sustainable and equitable future.
By the end of the 1990s we began to see a relational turn in sociology, perhaps expressed most clearly in Mustafa Emirbayer’s Relational Manifesto. The core claim is that the basic unit of analysis for sociology (or perhaps the social sciences writ large) should be, neither the individual nor macro-level institutions, but the social relations between actors.
This relational claim is, of course, not new. Classical sociologists –Simmel, Marx, Mead, Blumer, Goffman– treated relationality as fundamental. All of symbolic interactionism, the economic sociologies of Granovetter’s embeddedness paradigm and Zelizerian relational work, organizational field theory, and the strong growth in network science are all contemporary exemplars.
But relationality was blurred in the mid-20thcentury though by the growth in statistical techniques and computer software packages that enabled the analysis of surveys of individuals. Blau and Duncan’s pathbreaking American Occupational Structure became the state of the art for stratification research, but it had the side effect of obscuring – both theoretically and methodologically – the relationality that undergirds the generation of inequalities.
Simultaneously, organizational sociology had its own theoretical blinders. The move towards New Institutionalism obscured the older focus on stakeholders and dominant coalitions, refocusing on legitimating processes in the environment through which organizations isomorphically converged. Charles Tilly’s book Durable Inequalities critiqued the status attainment model partly by adopting this view of organizations, treating organizations as inequality machines mechanically matching internal and external categories.
understanding gender inequality through organizations
Looking for a handy overview about gender and inequality, using an organizational lens? Continuing an earlier conversation about the state of organizational studies, Elizabeth L. Gorman and Sarah Mosseri examine “Why should students and scholars who are interested in gender difference and inequality study organizations?”
“How organizational characteristics shape gender difference and inequality at work”
Abstract
Why should students and scholars who are interested in gender difference and inequality study organizations? In recent years, as research on organizations has migrated to business schools and become less connected to other subfields of the discipline, the value of organizational sociology has become less evident to many. Yet characteristics of organizations contribute in important ways to producing different experiences and outcomes for women and men, by constraining certain individual actions and enabling or bringing about others. In this essay, we trace the consequences of four categories of organizational characteristics—the formal structure of work, employment practices, informal structure and culture, and organizational networks and fields—for gender inequality in three areas: workplace experiences, work–family conflict, and career outcomes. We close with some brief reflections on future directions for research linking organizations and gender.
Download this article for free now from Sociology Compass’s Organizations and Work section, as the article is ungated until the end of this month, only!
in NYC spring 2018 semester? looking for a PhD-level course on “Change and Crisis in Universities?”
Are you a graduate student in the Inter-University Doctoral Consortium or a CUNY graduate student?* If so, please consider taking “Change & Crisis in Universities: Research, Education, and Equity in Uncertain Times” class at the Graduate Center, CUNY. This course is cross-listed in the Sociology, Urban Education and Interdisciplinary Studies programs.
Ruth Milkman and I are co-teaching this class together this spring on Tuesdays 4:15-6:15pm. Our course topics draw on research in organizations, labor, and inequality. This course starts on Tues., Jan. 30, 2018.
Here’s our course description:
This course examines recent trends affecting higher education, with special attention to how those trends exacerbate class, race/ethnicity, and gender inequalities. With the rising hegemony of a market logic, colleges and universities have been transformed into entrepreneurial institutions. Inequality has widened between elite private universities with vast resources and public institutions where students and faculty must “do more with less,” and austerity has fostered skyrocketing tuition and student debt. Tenure-track faculty lines have eroded as contingent academic employment balloons. The rise of on-line “learning” and expanding class sizes have raised concerns about the quality of higher education, student retention rates, and faculty workloads. Despite higher education’s professed commitment to diversity, disadvantaged racial and ethnic groups remain underrepresented, especially among faculty. Amid growing concerns about the impact of micro-aggressions, harassment, and even violence on college campuses, liberal academic traditions are under attack from the right. Drawing on social science research on inequality, organizations, occupations, and labor, this course will explore such developments, as well as recent efforts by students and faculty to reclaim higher education institutions.
We plan to read articles and books on the above topics, some of which have been covered by orgtheory posts and discussions such as epopp’s edited RSO volume, Armstrong and Hamilton’s Paying for the Party, and McMillan Cottom’s Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy. We’ll also be discussing readings by two of our guestbloggers as well, Ellen Berrey and Caroline W. Lee.
*If you are a student at one of the below schools, you may be eligible, after filing paperwork by the GC and your institution’s deadlines, to take classes within the Consortium:
Columbia University, GSAS
Princeton University – The Graduate School
CUNY Graduate Center
Rutgers University
Fordham University, GSAS
Stony Brook University
Graduate Faculty, New School University
Teachers College, Columbia University
New York University, GSAS, Steinhardt
what problems do people think antitrust is going to solve?
Last week, I asked why antitrust is having a moment (it’s continued, on Planet Money and elsewhere), and why Democrats are using radical language to make fairly modest proposals. In this post, I’m going to ask what problems people think antitrust is going to solve, anyway.
Certainly a lot of the current concern about antitrust comes from a broad sense that corporations are too economically and politically powerful, that our economy has been restructured in ways that make ordinary people worse off, and that massive tech companies are able to use our data in ways that we have little control over. That’s political antitrust. And those are totally real issues.
But I want to explore some new questions being raised that are not exactly within the current scope of economic antitrust, but that are still kind of speaking its language—that are pushing to change the antitrust technocracy, not up-end it. To recap, as it has been construed for the last thirty-plus years, the purpose of antitrust is to promote consumer welfare, generally by trying to keep firms from being able to raise and keep prices above a competitive level. The focus is consumers, and prices.
Increasingly, though, people at least adjacent to the space of antitrust expertise are making claims about economic problems they think are being caused by lax antitrust enforcement, or that antitrust should be addressing. And those proposals are worth keeping an eye on, because as hard as it might be to change the expert consensus, it’s still more likely than a new anti-monopoly movement. (Though the two could certainly reinforce each other.) I see these new arguments as falling into basically three categories.
Market power has effects we didn’t realize
Market power is the ability to keep prices above a competitive level (i.e. above marginal cost). Once upon a time, people thought there was a fairly close relationship between how concentrated a market is—that is, how many companies control what share of the market—and how much market power firms have. Since the 1970s, there has been much less of a presumption that concentration, on its own, indicates market power. That means that there’s been less concern about whether we’ve got four airlines controlling 70% of the U.S. market, or that four carriers control 99% of the U.S. wireless market.
Increasingly, though, people are raising flags about other problems that might result from market power. One of these is labor monopsony—the idea that firms have market power, but as purchasers of labor, not sellers of products, and that this is driving wages down. The Council of Economic Advisers put out a report last fall suggesting this might be happening, and Democrats’ mention of “bargaining power for workers” implies this is part of what they’re trying to address. There are related arguments about market power in supply chains and the emergence of “winner take most” industries that also suggest links between concentration or market power and wages.
In theory, monopsony can be handled within the current legal framework, though it is rarely addressed in practice. So developing arguments about the effects of market power on workers, and a legal framework for addressing that within antitrust, is one conceivable new direction for antitrust.
Others are arguing that market power can lead firms to attach undesirable conditions to products that make them lower quality, even as price remains the same. In particular, some scholars, including Nobel Laureate Joe Stiglitz, have framed privacy as an antitrust issue: the product may be free, but consumers have no choice about how their data is used (and in the case of platforms like Facebook, no equivalent competitors). Privacy is hard to address within a framework focused purely on price. But in Europe, competition policy is increasingly tackling privacy issues, and Germany is currently investigating whether Facebook’s dominant position is forcing consumers to give up their privacy without having an alternative choice.
Market power has causes we didn’t realize
The Atlantic just featured a story with the dramatic title, “Are Index Funds Evil?” The article discusses the rise of large institutional investors—index funds, though not only index funds—and what it means that, increasingly, big chunks of competitors in a specific market are actually owned by the same few corporations. It goes on to discuss work by José Azar, Martin Schmalz, and Isabel Tecu that finds that this common ownership enhances market power, and that airline ticket prices are 3-7% higher than they would be under separate ownership.
In this story, index funds were the hook, but it just as easily could have been framed around antitrust. In a way, common ownership was the original antitrust question: the big trusts of the late 19th century were not single-firm monopolies, but competitors that had turned over ownership to a group of trustees that made unified governance decisions. And while research in this area is still new and findings tentative, legal scholars are already making the case that antitrust law can cover the anticompetitive effects of these horizontal shareholdings. If this work continues to hold up, this seems potentially transformative.
Technological change is creating new threats to competition
Finally, a fair bit of the recent chatter is basically arguing, “it’s the technology, stupid.” The dynamics of competition change as more of the economy shifts to online platforms. Because of network effects, companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon are hard to compete with—much of their value comes from their existing user base. And because they aren’t just selling products to consumers, but connecting consumers with producers, they aren’t acquiring market power in the traditional sense. Facebook and Google are free products, after all.
But the power of network effects means that they have a tendency towards monopoly. And the fact that the four largest companies by market capitalization are platforms suggests how central platforms have become to our economy.
So we have these new companies that have become very large, and that appear monopolistic, though they also create great value for consumers. From an antitrust perspective, they don’t really appear to be a problem, because they aren’t raising prices. And the history of rapid technological change over the past 25 years, including the rise and fall of a number of once-dominant platforms, raises the question of whether even platforms behaving in anticompetitive ways pose much of a long-term threat.
Recent scholarship, though, argues that monopolistic platforms are in fact anticompetitive, that it is a problem, and that current law is poorly equipped to handle. Lina Khan’s much-circulated note in the Yale Law Journal, for example, argues that 1) platforms encourage predatory pricing—generally seen as irrational (and thus not an issue) within antitrust law—because network effects encourage pursuit of growth over profit, and 2) platforms collect data on rivals that give them an unfair competitive advantage. These sorts of issues clearly fit within the broad scope of “protecting competition,” but don’t fit easily with a consumer welfare, market power conception of antitrust.
Changing that would be a significant project, but if we have an economy that is dominated by firms whose potentially anticompetitive activity is essentially beyond the scope of antitrust, there’s not much left to antitrust. And again, the massive fine the E.U. just levied on Google—for favoring its own shopping service, consisting of companies that pay Google to be on it, over competitors in search results—suggests what this could look like. So far, the U.S. has not demonstrated much enthusiasm about expanding antitrust in this direction. But it’s not inconceivable that it could happen, and it could be done within a framework that was focused solely on competition, if not only on consumer welfare.
Again, all these challenges to the current antitrust framework are at least in the ballpark of its conversation, even if they would require pushing the law in new directions or advancing the acceptance of new economic theories. And they are not the only arguments that are in play here. For example, the question of whether inequality is facilitated by concentration or market power, or whether it has become such a central economic problem that antitrust should try to address it, have prompted enough discussion that two leading antitrust scholars have felt the need to argue that antitrust should leave inequality alone.
Unlike political antitrust, which would probably require a social movement to move it forward, these antitrust arguments have the potential to gain traction without necessarily requiring legislation or a revolution against the current antitrust regime. The 1970s shift toward Chicago-style antitrust happened, to a considerable extent, because the old economic framework seemed increasingly inadequate for explaining the world people found themselves in. As the current framework comes to seem similarly dated, this could be another moment when such change is possible.
we should thank malcolm gladwell and send him flowers
What if I told you that a popular writer recently published a book that neatly summarizes modern inequality research for the masses and depicts sociology in a very positive light? You’d be happy, right? And you might want to know who that person is, right?
Well, I just spent some time rereading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, his summary of the social science research on high achievement. The public discussion of the book focused way too much on one chapter that discusses the “10,000 hour rule” (experts usually need about four years of full time immersion in a topic to get really good at it). But if you read the book, the message is much more expansive than that and it completely draws on a lot of standard sociology.
For example, Gladwell has a chapter dedicated to Lareau’s theory of class and culture as a factor in status attainment. He talks about how working class people often have an oppositional view of institutions and he directly talks about Lareau. In multiple chapters on family and achievement, he cites sociological studies that trace how families transmit specific knowledge and skills to their children, which allow for social mobility. He is also a fan of ecological theories of success (being in a city where business is booming – New York in the 1910s) and cohort theories of success (being part of the computer revolution in the 1980s). In discussing cultural differences, he offers a fairly conventional Swidler/Weber approach. He argues that work skills that are advantageous in Asian agriculture are also advantageous in Western industrial economies.
So why don’t we pay more attention to Outliers as a great “public sociology” book? The ASA did give Gladwell an outreach award, but the profession seems to have moved on. I think it may have to do with the 10,000 hours chapter. The chapter is a little bit sloppy and slides into exuberant rhetoric. A lot of people focused on it and tried to tear it down. For example, he does actually write that “10,000 hours is the magic number,” which mistakenly gives the impression that anyone can win an Olympic medal if they just practice enough.
This is a false impression if you actually read the entire chapter (and book) and approach the claim with a charitable mind. For example, at multiple points, he openly admits that people have “talent” and that you need that for the coaching and practice to get you to a world class level. The other chapters all suggest that contextual factors matter a great deal as well. Also, many of the critics committed their own errors. For example, they would often point to studies of elite athletes that show that extra practice doesn’t explain success. Yes, but by selecting only elite athletes, you are looking at a group where everyone has already done their “10,000” hours. That is selection bias!
In regards to sloppy writing, what I think Gladwell was trying to say was that yes, people have talent, but you also need to add in other structural factors, such as deep immersion in the field. No one is “born” a genius. High achievement is the result of social structure and individual gifts. If I were Gladwell, I would also add that deep practice would improve almost anyone in absolute terms and make you an “expert” but it wouldn’t erase relative differences between people who have invested the time in practice. For example, if I studied basketball for 10,000 with a pro-level coach, I bet my lay-ups would be amazing – if I did them by myself!! If I had to plow through other taller players on defense, I probably wouldn’t do as well. My innate traits don’t disappear completely and neither do relative difference. But I would still be massively better compared to a person with no training and I would still possess “expert level” knowledge and execution of skills. In my view, Gladwell should have focused a little more on the difference between absolute improvements and relative performance.
Is Outliers perfect? No, but it is a very fair summary of how sociologists think about status attainment and I think it would be a great way to teach undergrads. If you need a nice popular book for an intro course or stratification, this is a good one.
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the 80th percentile isn’t the problem
Okay, so I know three days is like a thousand years in internet time. But this Sunday Times op-ed, “Stop Pretending You’re Not Rich,” is still bugging me. The title is perfect guilty liberal upper-middle-class New-York-Times-reader clickbait. And sure enough, it was all over my social media feed.
But I think the piece gets things wrong in a particularly pernicious way.
The thrust of the op-ed, and presumably the book it’s promoting, is that upper-middle-class Americans—the top 20% by income—are the real problem, not the top 1%. They are capturing most of the income gains, hoarding opportunities, and they don’t even acknowledge their luck in being there.
A lot of the specific points, particularly about policies that benefit the moderately well-off at the expense of others, are easy to agree with. Exclusionary zoning is bad. 529 plans benefit the well-to-do almost entirely. The mortgage interest deduction is terrible policy.
But the real problem with the U.S. economic system isn’t the self-interested behavior of those in the top 20% of the income distribution. It’s that 1% of the population holds 40% of the wealth, and that GDP increases aren’t translating into higher incomes for most of the population.
The op-ed misdirects our attention away from these factors in multiple ways. First, it paints a misleading picture of this person in the top 20%.
Most obviously, it says that the average income of this group is $200,000, which I admit does sound pretty high. But using the average income to describe this fifth of the population is a problem, given the shape of the income distribution.
The median, which would be the 90th percentile, is $162,000. The 80th percentile is $117,000. (Here’s a quick calculator based on CPS data.) Very healthy, but not $200,000. The anecdotal illustration—the author’s friends who pay $30,000 a year for their kid’s high school tuition—also seems to point to someone with an income on the high end of this range.
Second, while the second decile is doing reasonably well, both its wealth and income are quite proportionate with its actual numbers. This paper is now slightly dated, but it does break out that decile—to show that in 2007 at least, it held 12% of total net worth, and made 14% of total income (see Table 2). You’d have to be pretty damn egalitarian to think that was unreasonably high for the next-to-top 10%.
Finally, yeah, the top 20% has seen more income gains than the rest. But the issue is less that they’re gradually getting better off, than that wages in general aren’t keeping up with either GDP growth or productivity. If you look at pre-tax income of the top 20%, exclusive of the top 1%, it’s increased by 65% since 1979 (see Table 1). Sounds like a lot—until you realize that real GDP per capita increased almost 80% during the same period.
So sure, the top 20% is unquestionably well-off, and indeed rich in global terms. And doubtless people in this group could show a little more self-awareness of their relative good fortune. And it would be nice if the mortgage interest deduction wasn’t the third rail of tax policy.
But the problem isn’t that the top 20% is doing reasonably well. It’s that the rest of the population should be doing that well, too. Ultimately, pointing a finger at the fortunate fifth is a sleight-of-hand that keeps our attention away from where it should be: on a much richer, more rarified group, and the broken system that allows it to capture the bulk of the gains that we as a society produce.
commentary on “an austrian approach to class structure” by jayme s. lemke
I saw a link to an article called “An Austrian Approach to Class Structure.” It attracted my interest since it is rare for economists to delve into theories of social class. In this article, Lemke offers a theory of social class based on Austrian economics. It is an interesting choice given that Austrians are committed methodological individualists, and class analysis (usually) relies on holism.
So what does the paper offer? The core of the paper is an attempt to rebuild social in terms of methodological individualism. Class (page 179) emerges when:
- Rules and norms apply to some people and not others.
- Group membership is sticky.
- Some people hold authority over people in other groups.
There are a few things happening in this definition. First, it doesn’t match up terribly well with traditional notions of social class, which are usually economic. For example, an ethnic group is a “class” in this definition. However, an ethnic group is usually not considered a class in the Marxian or Weberian sense of the word (“position in the mode of production” or “market position”). I think in Lemke’s definition is closer to Weber’s notion of status group, but adds the idea that that rules are not uniformly applied in society. It’s a bit closer to Shils’ notion of deference or DuBois’ analysis of Black/White inequality, which focused on the forms of privilege that White people enjoy.
Second, the definition is especially suited to the issues that Austrian might care about, such as how states grant benefits to specific people and not others. Sadly, the traditional sociological literature on class and status more generally treats this as an after thought. Lemke’s definition works well, for example, if you want to talk about people in the state, or those who enjoy favors (special interest groups, lobbyists). This does come up in neo-Marxist political economy, but I don’t think it has much of an impact in the broader world of sociology.
Interesting read for anyone interested in the contact point between sociology and heterodox economics.
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putting limits on the academic workday
Today, among the various administrative tasks of scheduling meetings with students and other responsibilities, I decided to RSVP yes for an upcoming evening talk. I didn’t make this decision lightly, as it involved coordinating schedules with another party (i.e., fellow dual career parent).
With the use of technology such as email, increasing job precarity, and belief in facetime as signalling productivity and commitment, the workday in the US has elongated, blurring boundaries to the point that work can crowd out other responsibilities to family, community, hobbies, and self-care. However, one Ivy institution is exhorting its members to rethink making evening events and meetings the norm.
In this nuanced statement issued to department chairs, Brown University’s provost outlines the stakes and consequences of an elongated workday:
This burden [of juggling work and family commitments] may disproportionately affect female faculty members. Although data on Brown’s faculty is not available, national statistics indicate that male faculty members (of every rank) are more likely than female faculty members (of every rank) to have a spouse or partner whose comparably flexible work schedule allows that spouse or partner to handle the bulk of evening-time household responsibilities. Put differently, male faculty members are more likely than female faculty members to have the household support to attend campus events after 5:30. We must be attuned to issues of gender equity when we think about program scheduling. We must also take into consideration the particular challenges faced by single parents on the faculty when required to attend events outside the regular hours of childcare.
the three student loan crises
Among higher ed policy folks, there’s a counter-conventional wisdom that there is no student loan crisis. For the most part (the story goes), student loans are a good investment that will increase future wages, and students could borrow quite a bit more before the value of the debt might be called into question. Indeed, some have argued that many students are too reluctant to borrow, and should take on more debt.
Just this month, two new pieces came out that reiterate this counter-narrative: a book by Urban Institute economist Sandy Baum, and a report by the Council of Economic Advisers. Yes, everyone agrees the system’s not perfect, and tweaks need to be made. (Susan Dynarski, for example, argues that repayment periods need to be longer.) Fundamentally, though, the system is sound. Or so goes the story.
What can we make of this disconnect between the conventional wisdom—that we are in the throes of a student loan crisis—and this counter-conventional story?
To understand it, it’s worth thinking about three different student loan crises. Or “crises”, depending on your sympathies.
First, there’s the student who has accrued six figures of debt for an undergraduate degree. Ideally, for media purposes, this is a degree in women’s studies, art history, or some other easily-dismissible field. The New York Times specialized in these for a while.
Since student loan debt is not bankruptable, these people really are kind of screwed, although income-based-repayment options have improved their options somewhat. And they make for a dramatic story—as well as lots of moralizing in the comments.
Second, there’s the student who took on debt but didn’t finish a degree. These people often struggle, because their income doesn’t go up much, if at all. In fact, the highest default rates are among those who left school with the smallest debts (< $5000), presumably because they didn’t graduate.
These folks disproportionately attend for-profit institutions, whose degrees have less payoff anyhow, but even more importantly, have abysmal graduation rates. (Community colleges have low graduation rates too, but they’re a lot cheaper.) The debt-but-no-degree people are also kind of screwed, although again, income-based repayment plans can help them a lot, as would a bankruptcy option.
So we’ve got the crisis of people who borrow too much for a four-year degree, and the crisis of people who borrow a little, but don’t complete the degree, often because they’re attending a school whose entire business model is to sign up new students for the purpose of taking their loan money.
These are both problems—even “crises”—but they are solvable. For the first, cap federal loans (including PLUS access) for undergraduate degrees, and make all loans bankruptable, so private lenders are leerier of loaning large amounts to students.
For the second—well, I’d probably be comfortable eliminating aid to for-profits, but let’s say that’s beyond the political pale. Certainly we could place a lot more limitations on which institutions are eligible for federal aid, whether that’s tied to graduation rates, default rates, or some other measure. And, again, making student loans bankruptable would help people who really needed to get a fresh start.
Wait, so what’s the third crisis?
The thing is, these two “crises” may be devastating to individuals, but in societal terms aren’t that big. The six-figure-debt one really drives policy wonks crazy, because every student debt story in the last ten years has led with this person, but the percentage of students who finish four-year degrees with this many loans is very small. Like maybe a couple of percent of borrowers small.*
Proponents of the Counter-Conventional Wisdom (C-CW) take the second group—those who borrow but don’t finish a degree—more seriously. This group is often really hurting, despite having smaller loan balances. But they only make up perhaps 20% of borrowers, and since their balances are relatively low, an even smaller fraction of that $1.4 trillion student loan figure we hear so much about.**
The real question—the one that determines whether you think there’s a third crisis—is how you react to the other 75-80% of borrowers. The C-CW crowd looks at them and says, eh, no crisis. These folks come out with four-year degrees, $20 or $30,000 of government-issued student loan debt, will pay $300 a month or so for ten years, and then move on with their lives. We could argue about how much of a burden this is for them, but it’s clearly not a crisis in the same way it is for the NYU grad with $150k in loans, or for the Capella University dropout trying to pay back $7500 on $10 an hour.
This C-CW is based on the premise that 1) college is a human capital investment that is worth taking on debt for up to the expected economic payoff, 2) individual borrowing is a reasonable and appropriate way to finance this investment—indeed, more sensible than paying for the costs collectively—and 3) as long as debt is kept to a “manageable” level (as indicated by students not going into default and having access to forbearance when their income is low), then there’s no crisis.
Why this understates the problem
I take issue with this position, though, on at least three fronts.
1. “Typical” student debt is increasing .
Individual borrowing levels are still rising rapidly, and there’s no reason to think we’ve neared a max. A recent Washington Post editorial cited the CEA report as saying that “[t]he average undergraduate loan burden in 2015 was $17,900.” But that’s not what the average graduate holds. That’s what the average loan-holder holds, including those who have already been paying for a number of years. Estimates for the average 2016 graduate, by contrast, are considerably higher—in the $29,000 to $37,000 range—and growing. The fraction of all students who borrow also continues to increase.
College costs keep rising. State budgets are still under pressure. The penalties for not completing college keep increasing. We can only expect loan sizes to continue to go up. At what point does “reasonable borrowing” become “unreasonable burden”? And tweaks like expanding income-based repayment or extending the standard repayment period won’t bend the curve (to borrow from another debate)—if anything it will enable the further expansion of lending.
2. We are all Capella now.
These debates often overlook the effects of federal aid policy on colleges as organizations, something I’ve written about elsewhere. (The exception is the attention given to the Bennett hypothesis, which suggests that colleges will simply turn federal aid into higher tuition prices.)
But that doesn’t mean organizational effects don’t exist. Continuing to shift the cost burden to individual students is going to accelerate the already intense pressure on public colleges in particular to recruit and retain students, because with students come tuition dollars.
The drive to attract students is already undermining a lot of traditional values in higher education. It encourages schools to spend money on marketing and branding, rather than education. It promotes a consumerist mindset among students who quite reasonably feel that they have become customers. It encourages schools to develop low-value degree programs simply to generate revenue, and recruit students into them regardless of whether the students will benefit.
The values that limit colleges from doing kind of thing are what separates nonprofits from for-profits in the first place. If they go away, we all become Capella. And allowing “reasonable” lending to keep expanding moves us straight in that direction.
3. It gives up on actual public education.
Ultimately, though, the biggest problem I have with this position is that it concedes the possibility, or even the value, of real public higher education entirely. It doesn’t matter whether that’s because the C-CW sees it as a pipe dream, or because it sees it as an irrational use of public funds, since individuals benefit personally from their education in the long run.
This post is already too long, so I won’t go into a detailed defense of public higher ed here. But I do want to point out that if you accept the premise of the C-CW—that student loan debt will only become a crisis if it increases individual costs beyond the returns to a college degree—you’ve already given up on public higher education. I’m not ready to do that.
And it looks like I’m not the only one.
* This number is actually surprisingly difficult to find. In 2008, it was only 0.2% of undergrad completers, but average debt for new graduates has increased about 40% since then, so the six-figure camp has undoubtedly grown.
** Again, exact numbers hard to pin down. 15% of beginning students who borrowed from the government in 2003-04 had not completed a degree six years later, nor were they still enrolled. This figure has doubtless increased as nontraditional borrowers—who are less likely to finish—have become a bigger fraction of the total pool of borrowers, hence my 20% guesstimate.
tenure and promotion experiences among women of color
After completing a Ph.D., how to get a tenure-track position, secure tenure, and advance to full and beyond are not clear, particularly since multiple layers of bureaucracy (committees, department, division, school, and university board) have a say over candidates’ cases. Despite written policies specifying criteria and process for tenure and promotion, universities can interpret these policies in ways that advance or push out qualified candidates. Over at feministwire, Vilna Bashi Treitler shares her experiences with the tenure process at one university, where unofficial teaching evaluations were apparently used to justify a tenure vote:
In my case, I was unable to defend myself when someone at my tenure hearing read verbatim from RateMyProfessor.com, a popular website where anyone can write anything about any professor in the country. The review reported me for “abandoning” my class. My colleagues discussed my case without reference to the medical emergency that pulled me from class: I lay, pregnant and bleeding, on doctor’s ordered bed rest, trying to save my baby. My colleagues failed to consider the testimonies of graduate students who taught the four class sessions that remained in the semester – at my own expense – or the fact that my website showed evidence that classes continued (with the aid of graduate students) and I distributed handouts online, despite my forced absence.
Perhaps most frustrating, it did not appear to matter to my colleagues that I had several peer-reviewed articles published in top journals, a book already published with a top-tier university press, a grant from the National Science Foundation for a new project, and mostly good reviews from students up until that time. This happened 10 years ago, and despite the opposition, I survived and succeeded in the academy. However, I never stopped facing challenges from white students who – despite signing up for my course, which at no time was ever a requirement – resist what I have to teach them, and in some cases, treat me with open disrespect.
Having served with Vilna on a committee overseeing dissertation proposals at the Graduate Center, CUNY and spending time with her discussing pedagogy, I can attest that she is very invested in students’ learning, no matter how difficult the topic. In sociology and related disciplines, we teach and discuss complex topics – inequality, discrimination, and the various –isms – that can challenge or even threaten people’s worldviews. The individualistic emphasis in the US makes it especially difficult to convey alternative ways of thinking.
Vilna’s post includes several recommendations for the academy. In particular, she urges colleagues who have power to act on behalf of those who do not:
We must stand behind the promises we made to young faculty when we hired them: if you produce high quality scholarship, we will award you the tenure you need to continue conducting cutting edge research. Any scholar who makes the grade with notable and widely accepted peer-reviewed scholarship should not have their fates sealed in closed-door processes with little transparency or overt accountability where the complaints of a relatively tiny number of students – of course, students have never published research or taught courses themselves – are given undue weight. (Of course, bad teaching should not be rewarded, but we have other ways to assess teaching, including examining syllabi, having faculty regularly observed by peer scholars, and creating and encouraging the use of teaching centers where new scholar-teachers can seek aid in improving their classroom skills.)
Faculty who serve on committees that make these decisions know when injustice is being committed, and the time is now to take a stand. Standing up to proceedings that negate principles of both academic freedom and honor among colleagues and that allow racism and sexism to decide who is a quality scholar is risky and requires courage, but is nevertheless necessary. It is difficult to ask questions aloud about what’s not happening when a colleague looks like they’re being railroaded. If you stand up, you effectively become a whistleblower, for which there might be retaliation – but if you’re tenured, that’s exactly what tenure is for: protection from punishment for following through on ideas that may be unpopular. So when the tide turns against a junior colleague in your department or university, the difficult but morally right thing to do would be to take a bold step to stand up and at minimum question why.
And standing up takes many forms. When the conversation turns towards student complaints about a professor, inform your colleagues that student evaluations have gender and race biases (see here, and here, too). Find out if the professor has good evaluations that are being ignored or downplayed. Ask whether colleagues are overlooking other evidence of good teaching, like positive peer observations, or syllabi chock full of information about assignments, how grades are determined, and classroom policies. Professors who stand up must ask about the rest of the scholarly record: are we talking about the teaching of a highly productive scholar who has a publishing record and is a good departmental and college/university citizen? Maybe you should ask whether those things should matter more than evaluations – especially if you know this is what junior faculty are told when informed of the requirements for tenure.
Standing up also looks like administrators who overturn or challenge insufficiently explained tenure denials for stellar candidate records, being mindful of institutional commitments to inclusion and diversity. In addition, professors who become aware that injustice is occurring should reach out to administrators and encourage them to do the right thing.
Vilna’s insightful post includes links to several other scholars’ tenure denial experiences in the academy, as well as additional recommendations on working with students.
forum on data analytics and inclusivity, part 2
This post is the second part of our forum on data analytics and inclusivity. The forum was inspired by an essay written by Michael Wilbon about African Americans and analytics. I’ve asked several people who work in analytics to comment on the problems with and opportunities for inclusivity in data analytics, especially as it relates to sports analytics. The first set of essays can be found here.
Today’s essays are written by three contributors who have direct experience in data analytics and sports. The essays all deal with, in some way, root causes of a racial gap in analytics. Michael Lopez is a statistician at Skidmore College who has written extensively about sports analytics at places like Sports Illustrated and Fivethirtyeight. Jerry Kim is an economic sociologist, who has been at Columbia University since 2006 and will soon join the business school at Rutgers University. His research focuses on the consequences of status for evaluation and he has written about about the effects of status bias on umpires’ decision-making in the MLB (a paper that I can say with zero bias is amazing). Our final contributor is Trey Causey, a computational social scientist who has done considerable work as a data analyst and consultant for the NFL and who is now a data scientist at ChefSteps.
I know that this won’t be nor should it be the last word on this topic. Going forward we need more discussions of this type, especially as analytics becomes increasingly central to how business and sports operate.
on getting into harvard, yet again
I’m pretty sure that Atlantic-NYT-New Yorker-etc. readers have a near-bottomless appetite for articles on the elite college admissions process. I kind of do too, although I always feel a little gross afterwards, like I had one too many pieces of my kids’ Halloween candy. Not that I would ever eat their Halloween candy.
Anyway, the latest offering in this genre is a three-part series in the Atlantic (part one, part two, part three) by Alia Wong. Mostly it’s about how the process became so competitive, and what elite colleges are doing to try to make it less insane — in particular, how to stop incentivizing a certain kind of self-obsessed self-discipline among the the young demographic aiming at these schools.
The piece is well-researched, although a lot of this ground has already been covered exhaustively. But I did think the article overlooked a couple of key things.
First: Although the article is clear at the outset that this is a problem of “the 3%”, as Derek Thompson put it, it folds broader college-admissions developments in with elite college-admissions developments in ways that don’t always work. In particular, both parts point to enrollment management as a factor driving change in the elite admissions process.
I think enrollment management — the emergence of rationalized practices for selecting and aiding students to achieve some institutional objectives (financial, rankings, whatever) — is incredibly important in understanding changes in higher ed as a whole. But I suspect it doesn’t explain much of what’s changed in elite admissions in particular.
Enrollment management started as a financial tool for mid-level private colleges that were having trouble making ends meet (gated link). Elites have never embraced it quite so much, though they have adopted some of its practices. Where enrollment management matters is in understanding the rise of merit aid at less-elite colleges, for example, or in explaining the shift toward out-of-state students at public universities.
Second: So far, at least, the article overlooks the extent to which the elite-admissions-frenzy is driven by an increasingly winner-take-all society. If the returns to being in the 1% are increasing, then the returns to an Ivy degree are likely increasing as well. Conversely, as the middle class is hollowed out, to upper-middle-class parents, the costs of not getting one’s kids on the academic fast track look like dooming them to lifelong economic instability, as opposed to pointing them toward a nondescript but perfectly pleasant middle-class life.
Finally: There’s a simple solution to this problem: a lottery. Set some baseline GPA and SAT criteria, then admit people at random. Tweak the criteria to ensure racial and socioeconomic diversity, if you like. Even favor alums, if you absolutely must. But ditch the whole magical individualized selection process.
Of course, that’s pretty much a nonstarter. The whole point of Harvard admissions is, as Karabel suggests, to get to choose the next generation of elites. A lottery would undermine the very purpose.
[Edited to add link to part three, which doesn’t really affect my overall take. If anything, it further conflates general commercialization of higher ed with the elite admissions frenzy in an unhelpful way. Both important, but not closely related.
Also, ’cause I haven’t done nearly enough promoting — though still planning to — see Craig Tutterow and James Evans’ piece modeling how rankings might drive the development of enrollment management here in our new volume of RSO on “The University Under Pressure“. (Links gated, email me for copies.)]
inequality perpetuated via organizations – a view from cultural sociology
Sociologists are increasingly recognizing how organizations facilitate and perpetuate inequality. Check out the recently published Socio-Economic Review paper, “What is Missing? Cultural Processes and Causal Pathways to Inequality” by Michèle Lamont, Stefan Beljean, and Matthew Clair.
Building on Weber’s concept of rationalization, the authors argue that organizations’ propensity for standardization and evaluation (along with other processes) contribute to inequalities. Standardization flattens inputs and outputs, subjecting these to comparisons along narrow dimensions. In addition, those that conform to standards can receive needed resources, leaving outliers to scrap for the remainders:
Standardization is the process by which individuals, groups and institutions construct ‘uniformities across time and space’ through ‘the generation of agreed-upon rules’ (Timmermans and Epstein, 2010, p. 71). While the process implies intention (‘agreed-upon rules’) on the part of social actors, standardization as a process in everyday life frequently has unintended consequences. The construction of uniformities becomes habitual and taken for granted once the agreed-upon rules are set in place and codified into institutional and inter-subjective scripts (often formal, albeit sometimes also informal). In its industrial and post-industrial manifestations, the process of standardization is part and parcel of the rationalization and bureaucratization of society (Carruthers and Espeland, 1991; Olshan, 1993; Brunsson and Jacobsson, 2000; Timmermans and Epstein, 2010).
….Moreover, the effects of standardization on inequality are often unintended or indeterminate. Indeed, standards are often implemented with the intent of developing a common benchmark of success or competence and are frequently motivated by positive purposes (e.g. in the case of the adoption of pollution standards or teaching standards). Yet, once institutionalized, standards are often mobilized in the distribution of resources. In this process, in some cases, those who started out with standard relevant resources may be advantaged (Buchmann et al., 2010). In this sense, the consequences of standardization for inequality can be unintentional, indirect and open-ended, as it can exacerbate or abate inequality.Whether they are is an empirical issue to be assessed on a case-by-case basis.
One example of this interaction between standardization and social inequality is the use of standards in education as documented by Neckerman (2007). Among other things, her work analyses the rise of standardized and IQ testing in the 1920s in American education and local Chicago education policy. It shows how standardized test scores came to be used to determine admission to Chicago’s best vocational schools, with the goal of imposing more universalist practices. Yet, in reality, the reform resulted in diminished access to the best schooling for the city’s low-income African-American population…. (591-592).
Similarly, evaluation facilitates and legitimates differential treatment of individual persons:
Evaluation is a cultural process that—broadly defined—concerns the negotiation, definition and stabilization of value in social life (Beckert and Musselin, 2013). According to Lamont (2012, p. 206), this process involves several important sub-processes, most importantly categorization (‘determining in which group the entity [. . .] under consideration belongs’) and legitimation (‘recognition by oneself and others of the value of an entity’).
In the empirical literature, we find several examples of how evaluation as a cultural process can contribute to inequality, many of which are drawn from sociological research on hiring, recruiting and promotion in labour markets. The bulk of these studies concern how evaluation practices of organizations favour or discriminate against certain groups of employees (see, e.g. Castilla and Benard, 2010) or applicants (see, e.g. Rivera, 2012). Yet, some scholars also examine evaluation processes in labour markets from a broader perspective, locating evaluation not only in hiring or promotion but also in entire occupational fields.
For instance, Beljean (2013b) studied standards of evaluation in the cultural industry
of stand-up comedy. Drawing on interviews with comedians and their employers as well as ethnographic fieldwork, he finds that even though the work of stand-up comedians is highly uniform in that they all try to make people laugh, there is considerable variation in how comedians are evaluated across different levels of stratification of the comedy industry. Thus, for example, newcomer comedians and star performers are judged against different standards: while the former must be highly adaptable to the taste of different audiences and owners of comedy clubs, the latter are primarily judged by their ability to nurture their fan-base and to sell out shows. Even though this difference does not necessarily translate into more inequality among comedians, it tends to have negative effects on the career prospects of newcomer comedians. Due to mechanisms of cumulative advantage, and because both audiences and bookers tend to be conservative in their judgement, it is easier for more established comedians to maintain their status than for newcomers to build up a reputation. As a result, a few star comedians get to enjoy a disproportionally large share of fame and monetary rewards, while a large majority of comedians remain anonymous and marginalized. (593)
Those looking for ways to curb inequality will not find immediate answers in this article. The authors do not offer remedies for how organizations can combat such unintended consequences, or even, have its members become more self-aware of these tendencies. Yet, we know from other research that organizations have attempted different measures to minimize bias. For example, during the 1970s and 1980s, orchestras turned to “blind” auditions to reduce gender bias when considering musicians for hire. Some have even muffled the floor to prevent judges from hearing the click of heels that might give away the gender of those auditioning.
An example of a blind audition, courtesy of Colorado Springs Philharmonic.
In any case, have a look at the article’s accompanying discussion forum, where fellow scholars Douglas S. Massey, Leslie McCall, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Dustin Avent-Holt, Philippe Monin, Bernard Forgues, and Tao Wang weigh in with their own essays.
how the acid rain program killed northeasterners
Remember acid rain? For me, it’s one of those vague menaces of childhood, slightly scarier than the gypsy moths that were eating their way across western Pennsylvania but not as bad as the nuclear bombs I expected to fall from the sky at any moment. The 1980s were a great time to be a kid.
The gypsy moths are under control now, and I don’t think my own kids have ever given two thoughts to the possibility of imminent nuclear holocaust. And you don’t hear much about acid rain these days, either.
In the case of acid rain, that’s because we actually fixed it. That’s right, a complex and challenging environmental problem that we got together and came up with a way to solve. And the Acid Rain Program, passed as part of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, has long been the shining example of how to use emissions trading to successfully and efficiently reduce pollution, and served as an international model for how such programs might be structured.
The idea behind emissions trading is that some regulatory body decides the total emissions level that is acceptable, finds a way to allocate polluters rights to emit some fraction of that total acceptable level, and then allows them to trade those rights with one another. Polluters for whom it is costly to reduce emissions will buy permits from those who can reduce emissions more cheaply. This meets the required emissions level more efficiently than if everyone were simply required to cut emissions to some specified level.
While there have clearly been highly successful examples of such cap-and-trade systems, they have also had their critics. Some of these focus on political viability. The European Emissions Trading System, meant to limit CO2 emissions, issued too many permits—always politically tempting—which has made the system fairly worthless for forcing reductions in emissions.
Others emphasize distributional effects. The whole point of trading is to reduce emissions in places where it is cheap to do so rather than in those where it’s more expensive. But given similar technological costs, a firm may prefer to clean up pollutants in a well-off area with significant political voice rather than a poor, disenfranchised minority neighborhood. Geography has the potential to make the efficient solution particularly inequitable.
These distributional critiques frequently come from outside economics, particularly (though not only) from the environmental justice movement. But in the case of the Acid Rain program, until now no one has shown strong distributional effects. This study found that SO2 was not being concentrated in poor or minority neighborhoods, and this one (h/t Neal Caren) actually found less emissions in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, though more in poorly educated ones.
A recent NBER paper, however, challenges the distributional neutrality of the Acid Raid Program (h/t Dan Hirschman)—but here, it is residents of the Northeast who bear the brunt, rather than poor or minority neighborhoods. It is cheaper, it turns out, to reduce SO2 emissions in the sparsely populated western United States than the densely populated east. So, as intended, more reductions were made in the West, and less in the East.
The problem is that the population is a lot denser in the Northeastern U.S. So while national emissions decreased, more people were exposed to relatively high levels of SO2 and therefore more people died prematurely than would have been the case with the inefficient solution of just mandating an equivalent across-the-board reduction in SO2 levels.
To state it more sharply, while the trading built into the Acid Rain Program saved money, it also killed people, because improvements were mostly made in low-population areas.
This is fairly disappointing news. It also points to what I see as the biggest issue in the cap-and-trade vs. pollution tax debate—that so much depends on precisely how such markets are structured, and if you don’t get the details exactly right (and really, when are the details ever exactly right?), you may either fail to solve the problem you intended to, or create a new one worse than the one you fixed.
Of course pollution taxes are not exempt from political difficulties or unintended consequences either. And as Carl Gershenson pointed out on Twitter, a global, not local, pollutant like CO2 wouldn’t have quite the same set of issues as SO2. And the need to reduce carbon emissions is so serious that honestly I’d get behind any politically viable effort to cut them. But this does seem like one more thumb on the “carbon tax, not cap-and-trade” side of the scale.
class and life chances
To help my students understand the impact of race and class upon life chances, I show excerpts from the People Like Us documentary. Of the clips that I usually show, the one that has grabbed my students’ attention the most is the story of Tammy Crabtree and her two sons living in Ohio. Viewers of the documentary may remember that Tammy walked several miles to reach her workplace, a minimum wage job at Burger King, and that her teenage son Matt voiced both shame about his family’s trailer-home poverty and his high hopes about his future.
Today, when answering an email inquiry by a school teacher about how to teach difficult issues to his students, I stumbled upon a recent update to Tammy and her family’s story. Tammy is still working at Burger King, although she has a shorter commute than before – a 20 minute walk from her house. Matt did not finish high school or attend college, contrary to what he had envisioned for himself, so that he could work to support his own child. Now, he exhibits greater compassion about his mother’s circumstances, showing a degree of introspection that most may not realize until very late in life. Both he and his brother emphasize family as a priority, as does Tammy.
Have a look at the family back in the late 1990s and now:
victor tan chen’s “all hollowed out” in the atlantic
How to disseminate research, so that it reaches a wider audience, is one stage of research that receives less attention.* In a past post, I wrote about what researchers can do to engage potential audiences.
Orgtheory guest blogger Victor Tan Chen has an exemplar article drawing on his research, published in the Atlantic, no less! Have a look at his article “All Hollowed Out: The lonely poverty of America’s white working class.” Here’s a teaser excerpt:
In Stayin’ Alive, his powerful history of the “last days” of the working class, the historian Jefferson Cowie describes how the proud blue-collar identity of previous generations disintegrated during the ’70s. “Liberty has largely been reduced to an ideology that promises economic and cultural refuge from the long arm of the state,” he writes, “while seemingly lost to history is the logic that culminated under the New Deal: that genuine freedom could only happen within a context of economic security.” As working-class solidarity receded, an identity built on racial tribalism often swept in.
With that in mind, it’s interesting that Americans tout the importance of getting an education—an inherently individualistic strategy—as the pathway to success. This view was the ideological backbone of the Clinton administration policies put forth in the ’90s, with their individual training accounts and lifetime-learning credits. To this day, the supreme value of education remains one of the few things that Americans of all persuasions (presidential candidates included) can agree on. But this sort of zeal can lead to the view that those who have less education—the working class—are truly to blame for their dire straits. While many of them will go on to obtain more education, many others will not—because they can’t afford it, aren’t good students, or just (as some of my workers said) prefer working with their hands. But if they don’t collect the educational degrees needed for today’s good jobs, they are made to feel that they have failed in a fundamental way.
* Exceptions exist, of course; see epopp’s recent post on the media’s circulation of questionable studies. In a related vein, check out these past posts by fabio on public sociology: maybe public sociology was better in the 50s and did research grants kill public sociology?
social security in the case-deaton era
There is something about the Thanksgiving season that drives me to post things that are a bit random and more or less out of my wheelhouse. Maybe it’s anticipation of the turkey coma to come.
Anyhow, in that spirit, there’s something about the Case-Deaton paper on how middle-aged white people are dying at increasing rates that has been niggling at the back of my mind all month.
The paper, of course, got a lot of attention in the media and blogosphere (including a nice catch by Philip Cohen on how much of the finding is accounted for by changing age composition of 45–54-year-olds). But it’s really the less-educated whose mortality is increasing, not the whole white population.* And the general finding that inequality in life expectancy between rich and poor is increasing in the U.S. is not particularly new, although the finding of actual declines in life span for some groups is relatively recent.
Obviously, the fact that people in the top income quintile are now expected to get a dozen or so more years of life than those in the bottom — a gap that was a third of that three decades ago — has all sorts of policy implications. But it made me think about Social Security in particular.
Social Security is, on the one hand, a political success because it’s a (near-) universal entitlement program. On the other, there have long been complaints the Social Security is itself regressive, since no Social Security tax is paid on income over $118,500. Of course, Social Security also replaces a larger portion of pre-retirement income for lower-income Americans than it does for higher-income Americans. It’s actually surprisingly difficult to figure out whether, on balance, it’s progressive or not.
What is clear, though, is that if low-income folks are losing years of life while high-income folks are gaining them, the system is losing progressivity (or gaining regressivity). I thought I’d play around with some basic numbers to try to examine this question. But it turns out I don’t need to. The National Academies of Science came out with a big study looking at this only a couple of months ago — a study which, so far as I can tell, got nothing like the media coverage that the much simpler Case-Deaton study received.
So what’s the scoop?
Well, as usual with social policy, a lot depends on the assumptions you make. But making some fairly reasonable assumptions, the NAS report finds that yes, the growing mortality gap is also increasing the gap in Social Security benefits received between low- and high-income groups. Lifetime benefits to the lowest income quintile remain about the same for men born in 1960 as for those born in 1930, and for women they decrease nearly 20%. For the top quintile, though, they increase: about 13% for women, and nearly 30% for men, a huge jump.
FIGURE 4-5 Average lifetime Social Security benefits for males (in thousands of dollars).
FIGURE 4-6 Average lifetime Social Security benefits for females (in thousands of dollars).
So what does this mean? Well, if you see this decrease in progressivity as a problem, it suggests you pay attention to the distributional consequences of various proposed Social Security reforms — which are often not taken into account in discussions of their effects. And it’s not always obvious which reforms will have which effects on progressivity. Raising the early retirement age from 62 to 64 makes the system less progressive, which makes sense. But raising the normal retirement age to 70, though it reduces benefits overall, actually (and unexpectedly) makes things more progressive. And reducing Social Security payouts to those with higher incomes accomplishes this even more directly.
More generally, though, this is a reminder that the growing impact of inequality — an impact that results not only in differential material well-being, but in large gaps in actual years to live — has implications far beyond the obvious ones. The growing gap between rich and poor has the potential to undermine the intent of public policies in a whole variety of ways. We ignore this at our peril.
* Caveat: Just as the population of 45–54-year-olds is not the same in 2013 as 1999, neither is the population of adults with a high school degree or less, the population Case and Deaton identify as having the big mortality increase; this group has become smaller over time and relatively more disadvantaged compared to the population as a whole.
traveling with task segregation
Now that Thanksgiving is right around the corner, Americans are girding themselves to visit family and friends. For some, this will mean getting screened by the Transportation Security Agency (TSA). Just in time for this, check out Curtis K. Chan and Michel Anteby‘s forthcoming ASQ article “Task Segregation as a Mechanism for Within-Job Inequality: Women and Men of the Transportation Security Administration.” (Bonus: ungated/free PDF!)
Here’s the abstract:
Abstract
In this article, we examine a case of task segregation—when a group of workers is disproportionately allocated, relative to other groups, to spend more time on specific tasks in a given job—and argue that such segregation is a potential mechanism for generating within-job inequality in the quality of a job. When performing those tasks is undesirable, this allocation has unfavorable implications for that group’s experienced job quality. We articulate the processes by which task segregation can lead to workplace inequality in job quality through an inductive, interview-based case study of airport security-screening workers in a unit of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) at a large urban airport. Female workers were disproportionately allocated to the pat-down task, the manual screening of travelers for prohibited items. Our findings suggest that this segregation led to overall poorer job quality outcomes for women. Task segregation overexposed female workers to processes of physical exertion, emotional labor, and relational strain, giving rise to work intensity, emotional exhaustion, and lack of coping resources. Task segregation also seemed to disproportionately expose female workers to managerial sanctions for taking recuperative time off and a narrowing of their skill set that may have contributed to worse promotion chances, pay, satisfaction, and turnover rates for women. We conclude with a theoretical model of how task segregation can act as a mechanism for generating within-job inequality in job quality.
Chan and Anteby reveal how because of understaffing, female TSA officers are more frequently assigned to the physically and emotionally-intensive tasks of physically patting down female passengers, whereas male TSA officiers are more evenly assigned to a mixture of tasks (i.e., x-ray screening and exit monitoring) that are less physically and emotionally-demanding.
Here’s a snippet of TSA officers’ (TSOs) thoughts on undertaking work that some airline passengers view as illegitimate and invasive:
Because female TSOs spent a disproportionate amount of time doing patdowns, women were disproportionately exposed to the emotional labor of this task. One female TSO said, ‘‘I think a lot of people take their anger out on us directly because we’re the person they see. We’re in the uniform. . . . So we get a lot of that confrontation for [doing pat-downs] probably’’ (108_TSO-F). Likewise, a male TSO recognized the difficulty that female TSOs face due to the emotional challenges of the pat-down task: ‘‘Females are in very short supply because the work they do is very difficult, embarrassing, demeaning . . . ‘Okay, now you’re going to go up to the lady and feel every private part of her body, and then, you know, smile’’’ (226_TSO-M).
A source of potential support, fellow co-workers, erodes under the strain of understaffing:
Female TSOs reported that being segregated to the pat-down task made them resent male coworkers who appeared to be doing comparatively less work. One woman captured this frequent relational strain: ‘‘At a small checkpoint with twelve people to run it, and there’s only one female. What are you [female TSOs] doing all day? You’re patting down females. . . . We [female TSOs] feel it a lot more, because there’s twelve of them [male TSOs]. They’re not doing
anything . . . so we’re doing everything. That’s how it feels (109_TSO-F). A quote from another female TSO supports this notion. After describing her physical exhaustion of ‘‘running around’’ doing pat-downs, she said, ‘‘And the guys are just standing there, like twiddling their fingers, making jokes, doing nothing’’ (310_TSO-F).
Those of us who are in the academy will recognize how these workers’ experiences mirror concerns over the quality of life and advancement of women and underrepresented minorities. Chan and Anteby explain how their concept translates to such settings, but they do not mention how fellow faculty could (1) help push back on particularistic service demands or (2) help with other forms of service that run the department/program/university:
Task segregation also has the potential for naturalistic generalization, in which readers might see affinities between the concept and their own or others’ experiences (Stake, 1995: 85). Evidence suggests, for example, that female faculty advance more slowly, are paid less, and are tenured at lower rates than men, across a variety of fields (Valian, 1999). One mechanism that could explain some of these differences would be task segregation of female academics to committee service (Menges and Exum, 1983). Such an example illustrates how a theory of task segregation might be useful and how our modeled processes and conditions may be used as ‘‘sensitizing concepts’’ (Blumer, 1969) to elucidate what may be happening in other cases.
Applying our theorized conditions of task segregation as sensitizing concepts, we see committee service as discrete from other tasks like conducting research or teaching. The urgings of administrators may disproportionately allocate female faculty to, say, diversity committees. Administrators might draw on a rationalized justification for such a disproportionate allocation. They might argue that female faculty are uniquely qualified to serve on diversity committees and should be matched to them. Administrators might also further point to the insufficient number of women in the department and thus the need for a given female faculty member to be allocated to the task of committee service.
If female faculty are indeed task-segregated in this regard, our theory might also provide sensitizing concepts for processes through which they are disadvantaged. Serving on diversity committees may not be physically exhausting in the same way that pat-downs are, but knowledge work can be surprisingly draining (Michel, 2011). Also, emotional labor may result from feeling torn between personally held principles and pragmatic needs to concede over potentially sensitive issues of diversity. Cohesion with coworkers could become strained if committee members experience resentment of other faculty unburdened by this duty. Furthermore, task-segregated faculty members might find their skill set narrowed, as their time spent on committees gives them less time to hone research skills. Ultimately, task segregation might then help explain adverse distal outcomes of promotion, pay, satisfaction, and turnover for women. Although these hypotheses ought to be empirically tested, our model provides sensitizing concepts for future inquiry of contexts like academia, and we encourage scholars to consider other settings in which our model might have naturalistic generality.
To be more specific – certain committees, especially hiring committees, may require diversity to be documented by completing a form that includes information about which racial/ethnic groups and genders are represented among themselves. If a hiring committee is not deemed diverse enough by administrators, the committee may be “recalled” and a job search suspended until the committee can be reconstituted and approved. While having a diverse committee may tamp down the tendency towards what Kanter calls homophily (when people hire or support those who are like themselves), this may also mean that an individual faculty member, particularly in smaller or more homogeneous departments, will be called to serve on such committees more often than others.
Happy and safe travels, folks!
Bonus tip for traveling families: Recommended reading for flying with babies.
free college vs. cost-benefit thinking
Last month, Howard Aldrich made—as he often does—a good point in the comments:
There’s been an interesting subtle shift in the rhetoric regarding whose responsibility it is to pay for an individual’s post-secondary education. My impression is that there was a strong consensus across the nation 50 years ago, and certainly into the late 1960s, that governments had a responsibility to educate their students that extended up through college. However, I perceive that consensus has been under attack from both the left and the right….Liberals argue that much of the public subsidy goes to the wealthier high income students whose parents don’t really deserve the subsidy. Conservatives argue that as students benefit substantially from their college education, they should pay most of the cost.
This month, I’ve been writing about the history of cost-benefit analysis. (Why yes, I do know how to have a good time.) On the surface, it has nothing to do with universities. But there are important links to be made.
One of the arguments I’m playing with is that economic thinking—here just meaning a rational, cost-benefit, systematic-weighing-of-alternative-choices sort of thinking—has been particularly constraining for the political left. On the right, when people’s values disagree with economic reasoning, they ignore the economics and forge ahead. On the left, while some will do the same, the “reasonable” position tends to be much more technocratic. Think Brookings versus Heritage. Over time, one thing that has pulled “the left” to the right has been the influence of a technocratic, cost-benefit strain of thought.
Yes, I know these are sweeping generalizations. But stay with me for a minute.
There are a couple of big economic arguments for asking individuals, not the public, to pay for higher education. Howard’s comment gets at both of them.
One is that while there is some public benefit in educating people, individuals capture most of the returns to higher education. If that is the case, it makes sense that they should pay for it, with the state perhaps making financing available for those who lack the means. Milton Friedman made this argument sixty years ago, and since then, it has become ever more popular.
The other is that providing free higher education is basically regressive. The wealthier you are, the more likely you are to attend college (check out this NYT interactive chart), and relatively few who are poor benefit. Milton Friedman made this argument, too, but it is particularly associated with a 1969 paper by Lee Hansen and Burton Weisbrod, and continues to be made by commentators across the political spectrum.
Both of these arguments have become economic common sense (even though support for the latter is actually pretty weak). Of course it’s fair for individuals to have to pay for the education that they benefit so much from. And of course it doesn’t make sense to pay for the education of the upper-middle class while the working poor who never make it to college get nothing.
Indeed, these arguments have been potent enough that it has become hard to argue for free higher education without sounding extreme and maybe economically illiterate. Really, it kind of amazes me that free college is even being talked about seriously these days by President Obama and Bernie Sanders.
But even the argument for free college now depends heavily on claims about economic payoff. The Obama proposal headlines “Return on Investment,” arguing that “every dollar invested in community college by federal, state and local governments means more than $25 [ed: !] in return.” The Sanders statement starts, “In a highly competitive global economy, we need the best-educated workforce in the world.” The candidate who is a self-described socialist relies on a utilitarian, economic argument to justify free higher education.
So what’s the problem with thinking about college in terms of economic costs and benefits? After all, it’s an expensive enterprise, and getting more so. Surely it doesn’t make sense to just wantonly spend without giving any thought to what you’re getting in return.
The problem is, if the argument you really want to make is that college is a government responsibility—that is, a right—starting with cost-benefit framing leads you down a slippery slope. Benefits are harder to measure than costs, and some benefits can’t be measured at all. All sorts of public spending becomes much harder to justify.
Now, this might be fine if you generally think that small government is good, or that the economic benefits of college are pretty much the ones that matter. But if you think it’s worth promoting college because it might help people become better citizens, or increases their quality of life in some difficult-to-measure way, or you just want to live in a society that provides broad access to education, well, too bad. You’ve already written that out of the equation.
If you really believe there are social benefits to making public higher education freely available, then cost-benefit arguments will always betray you. But rights, on the other hand, aren’t subject to cost-benefit tests. Only a moral argument that defends higher education as a right—as something to value because it improves the social fabric in literally immeasurable ways—can really work to defend real public higher education.
Seem too unrealistic? Think about high school. There’s no real reason that free college should be subject to a cost-benefit test when free high school is not. Individuals reap economic benefits—lots of them—from attending high school, too. And high school is at least as regressive as college: the well-off kids who attend the good public schools reap many more benefits than the low-income kids who attend the crummy ones. It only makes sense, then, that families should pay for high school themselves, right? Perhaps with government loans, if you’re too poor to afford it.
And yet no one is making this argument. Because we all still agree—at least for now—that children have the right to a free primary and secondary education. We may argue about how much to spend on it, or how to make it better, but the basic premise—governments have a responsibility to educate students, in Howard’s words—still holds.
So I support the free college movement. But I’d like to see its champions stop saying it’s because we need to be globally competitive, or because it’s got a huge ROI.
Instead, say it’s because our society will be stronger when more of us are better educated. Say that knowing higher education is an option, and an option you don’t have to mortgage your future for, will improve our quality of life. Say that colleges themselves will be better when they return to seeing students as students, and not as revenue streams.
Say it’s because it’s the right thing to do.
current data on income inequality and mortality
From the Washington Post:
Wealthy and middle-class baby boomers can expect to live substantially longer than their parents’ generation. Meanwhile, life expectancy for the poor hasn’t increased and may even be declining, according to a report published Thursday by several leading economists.
Call it a growing inequality of death — and it means that the poor ultimately may collect less in money from some of the government’s safety net programs than the rich.
As of 2010, the average, upper-income 50-year-old man was expected to live to 89. But the same man, if he’s lower income, would live to just 76, according to the report.
The inequality itself isn’t surprising. What is more surprising is the stagnation in the lowest portions of the income distribution. I would like to see how cause of death varies across the income spectrum, to see exactly what might be at work here.
50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz ($2!!!!)/From Black Power/Party in the Street
gender inequality and simple rules: the case of ellen pao and reddit
One of my arguments about inequality is that we should focus on simple rules that have an immediate positive effect. Granted, these are hard to find. When we do find them, they should command our attention. For example, many scholars of gender and work have found that women often lose out when negotiating. The solution? Ban salary negotiations. In other words, people should compete for jobs, but the jobs are relatively stable in terms of compensation. We shouldn’t allow our possibly unconscious (or even conscious!) views towards others to allow some people to get more for doing the same work.
Turns out that one CEO is following the “simple rules against inequality” philosophy – Ellen Pao of Reddit. From a recent Yahoo article:
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published Monday, Pao says she decided to rewrite the rules of hiring at Reddit. In addition to hiring workplace diversity consultant Freada Kapor Klein, the company no longer allows new hires to negotiate their salaries. Pao defended her move based on studies that have shown that when women negotiate, they don’t fare as well as their male counterparts.
“We’ve got a lot of diversity on our team,” she told Yahoo’s Katie Couric in a separate interview. “We could use more, but we’re very excited to make sure we have different perspectives that represent the people we have using the site.”
Although Pao doesn’t name specific research, there have been plenty of studies to back up her claims. One 2006 study led by Carnegie Mellon University professor Linda Babcock revealed that when women negotiate, both men and women are less likely to want to work with them. Men, on the other hand, are much more respected for their negotiation skills. For women, it’s generally a lose-lose situation. In another study published in 2014, researchers found that female negotiators are perceived as more easily misled than male negotiators and are more likely than men to be lied to in negotiations.
One can easily imagine similar rules implemented in other workplaces. For example, if universities are worried that female scientists aren’t being promoted at similar rates, they could require automatic review instead of allowing promotion reviews to be optional or initiated by faculty.
50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz ($2!!!!)/From Black Power/Party in the Street
can powerful, elite-led organizations lessen inequality?
Hi all, I’m Ellen Berrey. I’ll be guest blogging over the next few weeks about inequality, culture, race, organizations, law, and multi-case ethnography. Thanks for the invite, Katherine, and the warm welcomes! Here’s what I’m all about: I’m an assistant professor of sociology at the University at Buffalo-SUNY and an affiliated scholar of the American Bar Foundation. I received my PhD from Northwestern in 2008. This fall, I jet off from the Midwest to join the faculty of the University of Denver (well, I’m actually going to drive the fading 2003 Toyota I inherited from my mom).
As a critical cultural sociologist, I study organizational, political, and legal efforts to address inequality. My new book, The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice (University of Chicago Press), is officially out next Monday (yay!). I’ll dive into that in future posts, for sure. I’m writing up another book on employment discrimination litigation with Robert Nelson and Laura Beth Nielsen, Rights on Trial: Employment Civil Rights in Work and in Court. These and my articles and other projects explore organizational symbolic politics, affirmative action in college admissions (also here and here), affirmative action activism (and here), corporate diversity management, fairness in discrimination litigation, discrimination law and inequality (and here), gentrification politics, and benefit corporations.
I’ll kick off today with some thoughts about a theme that I’ve been exploring for many years:
How can powerful, elite-led organizations advance broad progressive causes like social justice or environmental protection? I’m not just referring to self-identified activists but also corporations, universities, community agencies, foundations, churches, and the like. Various arms of the state, too, are supposed to forward social causes by, say, ending discrimination at work or alleviating poverty. To what extent can organizational decision-makers create positive social change through discrete initiatives and policies—or do they mostly just create the appearance of effective action? Time and again, perhaps inevitably, top-down efforts to address social problems end up creating new problems for those they supposedly serve.
To the point: Have you come across great research that examines how organizations can bring about greater equality and engages organizational theory?
I think this topic is especially important for those of us who study organizations and inequality. We typically focus on the harms that organizations cause. We know, for example, that employers perpetuate racial, class, and gender hierarchies within their own ranks through their hiring and promotion strategies. I believe we could move the field forward if we also could point to effective, even inspiring ways in which organizations mitigate inequities. I have in mind here research that goes beyond applied evaluations and that resists the Polly Anna-ish temptation to sing the praises of corporations. Critical research sometimes asks these questions, but it often seems to primarily look for (and find) wrongdoing. Simplistically, I think of this imperative in terms of looking, at once, at the good and bad of what organizations are achieving. Alexandra Kalev, Frank Dobbin, and Erin Kelly’s much-cited American Sociological Review article on diversity management programs is one exemplar. There is room for other approaches, as well, including those that foreground power and meaning making. Together with the relational turn in the study of organizational inequality, this is a promising frontier to explore.
More soon. Looking forward to the conversation.
moving to opportunity and neighborhood effects: why the attention now?
So yesterday I offered some pointers to the neighborhood effects literature, which is relevant to the new research on social mobility that is receiving extensive coverage in the NYT and elsewhere. Commenter Robert Park (it’s good to know that earthly departure does not preclude keeping up with orgtheory) mentioned additional work worth highlighting (links added by me):
On the efficacy of residential mobility programs, I’d note the work of Rosenbaum and Rubinowitz “Crossing the Class and Color Lines” which studies the Gautreaux program, on which MTO was based, and more recently, “Climbing Mt. Laurel” by Doug Massey and colleagues and the work of Stefanie Deluca.
I know I have not mentioned many significant scholars, which I hope will be read not as a slight but as a reflection of how deep and rich this literature is in sociology.
But today I want to add a few comments on the question of why Chetty and Hendren’s work is getting so much attention when related work in sociology has not.
moving to opportunity and neighborhood effects: some sociological background
The New York Times posted a big feature yesterday on a couple of new papers by Harvard economists Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence Katz. The papers, like much of Chetty’s other work, use deidentified individual-level tax data to get at factors affecting income over time. In this case, they are interested in getting at neighborhood effects—in one paper, county-level effects on intergenerational income change, and in the other, the effects of the Moving to Opportunity experiment, which in the 1990s provided housing vouchers through a lottery system, on the same.
The big findings are that moving to a better neighborhood improves children’s income as adults, with the effects being cumulative. The experimental MTO data shows that each additional year of residence in the new neighborhood contributes linearly to an increase in adult income. However, the effects of a move zero out around age 13, after which they may be negative. The quasi-experimental data on non-MTO moves, which cleverly compares different-age siblings to get at length of exposure to the new neighborhood, points to substantial variation in mobility across counties for children at various income levels. The NYT visualization of this latter data, which is personalized by your location, is really terrific.
It’s some impressive work. But sociologists, of course, have been studying neighborhood effects for a long time. And while there is a lot of interest in the study, there is also a not-totally-unjustified sense of annoyance:
Big News: Economists discover a thing sociologists have been studying in detail for about a century. https://t.co/AxVkIfqsyw
— Mervyn Horgan (@simmelian) May 4, 2015
I’m fascinated both by the studies, sociologists’ reaction to them, and how the research is picked up and interpreted by the media. I tried to put all those things into one post, but it was getting way too long. So I’m going to break my reactions into a couple of chunks. Today, I’ll highlight some of the excellent existing work by sociologists in this area. Tomorrow, I’ll comment on why Chetty and Hendren’s work is getting so much more attention than related work in sociology. And later this week I’ll address how this kind of research gets covered in the media and is likely to be translated into policy conversations.
So for starters, some pointers to the sociology literature.
orgtheory.net 