content analysis

slow news – May 21, 2008

The Giant Pool of Money

By Alex Bloomberg and Adam Davidson for This American Life

A can’t-be-missed, utterly fascinating examination of just how the housing finance crisis happened (put into baby words for the non-economists among us).  As always, TAL is able to put a human face on the issue.  One of the conclusions of the piece is the next few years are going to be a lot like the 1970s malaise era, but not quite the 1930s.  I fear this is optimistic.  After listening to this episode, I had the overwhelming feeling that the U.S. government is going to have to implement some kind of broad debt relief program.

What think you, readers?

In the movie and book, Fight Club, the main objective of the anti-hero, Tyler Durden, is to bomb the biggest finance buildings in an apparent bid to destroy the debt record – putting an end to a crucial aspect of the divide between the rich and, well, everybody else. Naturally, this is absurd notion because such records are backed up on computer systems globally. While I will not link to it, several people have proposed actions of collective computer hacking that could potentially wipe the debt record.

Given all the news in recent weeks about the looming recession and the millions of Americans struggling with debt and foreclosures (are we all aware of how bad things are right now?), I got to thinking about wiping out the debt records. If a national referendum were held on legislation to relieve all Americans of their debts, an incredible majority of people (mortgage-holders, credit card holders) would likely favor it, while a very powerful minority of business leaders and stockholders would oppose the idea with the vehemence of French Revolutionaries*. Of course, most banks would fail as would many businesses depending on those banks (apparently, many retailers are surviving only by taking on debt). In fact, the whole idea has economic disaster written all over it. Things might get much, much worse before they got better. But in the economy that resulted, banks would offer far less credit and people might be more reluctant to take on debt. Who knows? It’s too radical to reasonably picture.

On the other hand, as a democracy, we should ideally be responding to wishes of the majority and acting in the interests of the people, rather than the business community (I know I’m rehashing Domhoff, Mills, Chomsky, and others here). It’s undeniable at this point that our society needs a substantial financial re-organization to survive. What’s it going to be? Short of radically increasing wages, forgiving debts might be the only way to create a sustainable financial future for the majority of Americans. While I’m in no way advocating Tyler Durden scenarios, we really need a Manhattan Project for our collective financial future.

*According to Bill Domhoff, “In terms of types of financial wealth, the top one percent of households have 44.1% of all privately held stock, 58.0% of financial securities, and 57.3% of business equity. The top 10% have 85% to 90% of stock, bonds, trust funds, and business equity, and over 75% of non-home real estate.”

Eula Biss writes beautifully in the February issue of The Believer (which I am always slow to read despite subscribing) about fear and racism and being a so-called “pioneer” in a “bad neighborhood.”  She compares the experience of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Wilder’s “ambivalence” and “sense of loss” in displacing American Indians with Biss’s own experience as a pioneer in a racially and economically mixed neighborhood. In describing her initial experiences, Biss writes,

During my first weeks in Rogers Park, I was surprised by how often I heard the word pioneer. I heard it first from the white owner of an antiques shop with signs in the windows that read WARNING, YOU ARE BEING WATCHED AND RECORDED. When I stopped off in his shop, he welcomed me to the neighborhood warmly and delivered an introductory speech dense with code. This was a “pioneering neighborhood,” he told me, and it needed “more people like you.” He and other “people like us” were gradually “lifting it up.”

Understandably, Biss is frustrated with the word “pioneer,” and comments,

The word pioneer betrays a disturbing willingness to repeat the worst mistake of the pioneers of the American West—the mistake of considering an inhabited place uninhabited. To imagine oneself as a pioneer in a place as densely populated as Chicago is either to deny the existence of your neighbors or to cast them as natives who must be displaced. Either way, it is a hostile fantasy.

In catching up with my TV watching while sweating like a beast on the treadmill, I saw this highly disturbing segment from the TV version of the ever brilliant This American Life.

I realize that a tremendous amount of research has documented gentrification in American cities and many of its ugly consequences. But these two bits of media put the issue in particularly stark relief for me. I personally have had some experience with some of what Biss writes about in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where organic food coops and pricey boutique knick-knack stores slowly morph into un-ironic dollar stores and frequently held-up KFCs.

With young people returning to cities in recent years, we can only expect these unspoken tensions and sometimes open hostilities to expand. What to do about it is a very difficult question. Of course, city council members are all too eager to see neighborhoods “redeveloped.” And many of the so-called pioneers deserve some sympathy. Lot of them are college graduates who were promised that there would be professional jobs upon graduation, but have had to resort to living in a cheap apartment, working for a temp agency, and sheepishly borrowing money from their parents to pay bills. On the other hand, what are poor families to do? At one point, a young black boy on a bike shouts out to Biss, “Don’t be afraid of us!” How heartbreaking that young kid should have to grow up with the idea that he is by birth a person feared in his own neighborhood.

Last night, The Colbert Report did a special episode on the growing water crisis.  After pissing off the curator of the American Museum of Natural History’s special exhibition on Water, Colbert (in his guise as a conservative pundit as always) discussed how usable drinking water is disappearing.

The social inequalities on this issue are staggering.  According to experts, the minimum amount of water per day needed to survive (for drinking, cooking, and hygiene) is 5 gallons.  Most people in developing nations routinely live on less than 1.3 gallons.  The average American uses between 60 and 90 gallons daily!  Even Europeans use about half as much water per capita.  As guest Dean Kamen made clear, North Americans are able to consume so much water because we are not paying the full cost of replacing the water we use with other purified water.

At the same time, bottled water waste is becoming a serious issue.  According to the director of the Container Recycling Institute, 40 million plastic water bottles head to landfills every day.  As of this morning, 30.1 billion (with a “b”) beverage containers had been sent to landfills so far in 2008.

What to do?  Well, Kamen is doing his part with a machine that can turn anything (even a barrel of human waste or, say, Doritos) into usable drinking water and, at the same time, works as a power generator.  It seems clear that we all need to do our part to cut down on water consumption and container waste.  I used a water consumption calculator and discovered I’m using 78 gallons daily.  So, I’m going to make a concerted effort to cut back on my indulgent showers and start using a reusable water bottle.

But thinking about this issue sociologically, little can be accomplish by isolated people making a decision to behave better.  We need to push for a Bottle Bill to create greater incentives to recycle and find systematic ways of promoting reusable containers.  New technologies like efficient toilets and shower heads can curb our overconsumption of water.  The most essential change is for consumers to start to pay the real cost of the water we use.  That may be a hard pill to swallow for millions of Americans already paying big water bills, but it’s perhaps the only way we can deal with this crisis.

As Kamen pointed out, the oil crisis pales in comparison to the water crisis.

I’ve been hearing a lot about Easter this year. It seems that everywhere I go people are wishing me a “Happy Easter” or asking about my Easter plans. Maybe it’s a life course issue or maybe I’ve just noticed it this year. But I’d like to propose a different reason: we’re a country badly in need of an Easter.

I don’t mean this in the religious sense, but let’s begin there. In the literal understanding of Christian faith, Easter is the day that J.C. rose from death (and, after making a couple of pit stops, joined his Dad in heaven). Numerous Biblical scholars and theologians have argued that Jesus’ message of social justice and peace was so powerful that, in the wake of his gruesome death, his followers wanted to believe that a) he wasn’t really dead (a la Elvis), and/or b) he would metaphorically live on through their work in spreading his message. In the latter case, some scholars have suggested that the metaphorical meaning was slowly turned literal over time as the story of Jesus’ life was retold in a grand game of “Telephone.” In any case, the primary focus of Easter for practicing Christians should be on the celebrating the life of a man who stood for equality, kindness, and peace (a bit like Martin Luther King Day).

However, there is a component to Easter that is more secular. Let’s see what we can learn from a quote from the Editor’s Letter in my local, small town, weekly newspaper (a publication hardly known for its cosmopolitanism):

Easter is a time of rebirth no matter what religion you are. It is the time of spring and life comes back to trees and flowers; birds come back from the South to their northern homes and the air takes on a fresh smell.

While I have not known this editor/writer to do very much (read: any) research, she hits the nail on the head here. In fact, the idea of spring renewal precedes the association of Jesus with the third weekend in March. According to the OED, the word Easter is derived from the Northumbrian Éastre, which was “the name of a goddess whose festival was celebrated at the vernal equinox,” an event that almost certainly had believers rejoicing in the new plant and animal life of spring. In modern times, we make a big deal of “spring cleaning,” a practice that ostensibly renews our living spaces.

It seems obvious to me that we are a country in desperate need of rebirth and renewal. With the economic crisis upon us and so many families struggling with crushing debt, with the environment so badly damaged and continuing to be threatened by human misjudgment, with a world so given to hate and intolerance, we could really use some peace, justice, and kindness.

At first, those Easter wishes that currently seem omnipresent annoyed me, with their imposition of someone else’s faith on me. But I have come to see them as a mixed statement of frustration with the world as it is with a note of hope as we look forward. If Easter means a chance at shaking things up and working toward a more peaceful and sustainable future, I’m all for it.

[DISCLAIMER: The following post in no way discourages the practice of social theory. In fact, we need more of it and it needs to be better. I teach social theory courses and much of my work is entirely theoretical. The following is strictly about the relationship between theory and empirical work.]

I’ll get right to the point here: sometimes social problems don’t need a theoretical framework. Sometimes it’s okay to simply conduct program/policy evaluation research and it need not require a discussion of an academic theoretical school of thought. And it should be published in sociology journals.

While sociology has a rich tradition of theorists, we also have a history of drawing social reformers and journalists into our ranks. These scholars were far more concerned with developing explanations for and solutions to contemporary social problems. The idea that an esoteric academic theory would have to be affixed to a straightforward study of inequality, for example, to legitimize it as sociology was non-existent. Today, we have an obsession with attaching theory to everything (although that almost always means mid-range theory). The term particularly in vogue is “sociological puzzle” — whatever that means.

To use a concrete example, I believe the question, “what were the consequences of the 1996 welfare reform for families and children?” is plainly sociological. It requires neither an explanation of why it is sociology nor does it need to be embedded in a larger theoretical discussion of the power of states. And yet, those very comments were recently directed at the paper of a student I know. Now, of course, it is essential to acknowledge prior research, but it need not be immensely theoretical stuff.

I suspect that some of these issues result from ongoing problem of calling empirical claims theory of the mid-range. Additionally, many journals oriented toward social problems seem to have an insecurity about being under-theorized. But those are different discussions.