The Changing Society blog 2007-2010
For several years I tried to separate my blog posts into “academic philosophy” and “advocacy and social criticism”. This proved to be a difficult distinction to maintain, so in 2010 I included all posts in the Understanding Society blog. The posts you find here are the items that were published in Changing Society between 2007…
Truth and reconciliation
When does a society need a process of “truth and reconciliation” along the lines of such processes in South Africa, El Salvador, and Argentina? Here are some recent examples of truth and reconciliation processes: the fate of the “disappeared” in Argentina (link); Indian Residential Schools in Canada (link); Korean War civilian casualties (link); Liberian civil conflict (link);…
A Michigan job loss tsunami
The whole country knows that unemployment is very high in Michigan, and most people also know that the automotive manufacturing industry has taken a nose dive in the past five years. But the situation is even worse than most people imagine. Bureau of Labor statistics indicate several important facts. In 2000 the total private sector…
Improving schools
Finding ways to significantly and sustainably improve the effectiveness of public schools in high poverty areas is one of the most urgent problems facing us — particularly when we aim to reduce the inequalities that exist around race and poverty in our nation’s cities. New thinking about schools and curricula has given rise to some…
Obama and the cities
photo: Cabrini Green housing project, Chicago (now demolished) Is the Obama administration doing enough to address the problems of urban poverty and lack of opportunity for poor people in cities? The situation of poverty, inequality, and deprivation in most of America’s cities is severe. Wherever regional studies of health status have been carried out, inner…
Wealth inequality
When we talk about inequality in the United States, we usually have a couple of different things in mind. We think immediately of income inequality. Inequalities of important life outcomes come to mind (health, housing, education), and, of course, we think of the inequalities of opportunity that are created by a group’s social location (race,…
Twitter in Thailand
I’ve been following the twitter feed on #redshirt for a week now (since April 11, the day the red shirt demonstrators invaded the Pattaya resort hosting the ASEAN meeting). (See an earlier post on the civil unrest there.) It’s been truly fascinating in many ways. (It’s a big disadvantage, of course, not to be able…
What’s next?
We’ve seen several waves of hardship for working families in the past eight months in many parts of the U.S.: mortgage foreclosures, job losses, reduction of hours of work, and pressure by employers on health benefits. And state governments around the country are under huge fiscal pressure, leading them to attempt to cut support for…
Anti-NATO protests in Strasbourg
There are organized and escalating protests taking place against the NATO summit in Strasbourg this week (news; news; Aljazeera report). Calls for protest have come from anti-war and leftist organizations throughout Europe, and there is rising concern in the French and German press about the possibility of violence in the streets. These concerns are realistic,…
Unemployment in the US
There is a good interactive map of unemployment rates at the county level across the US in the March 29 New York Times. Here is a snapshot, but be sure to visit the Times site for the interactive version. The map is based on January 2009 data, and it represents a national rate of unemployment…
Impact of the crisis
We’re now months deep into a financial-economic-employment crisis across the country, and it’s especially severe in Michigan. What are some of the real impacts of this economic downturn on ordinary people? The most visible impacts are on jobs and homes. Michigan’s unemployment rate has increased sharply in the past three months, to a current national…
Social hate
This is a difficult posting to write. The impetus comes from an exhibit presented by the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University in Michigan (link). The curators have put together a set of artifacts that capture horrific attitudes towards African-Americans, Asians, gays, women, and other individuals and groups in American society,…
Mobile social mapping
Wouldn’t it be interesting if our GPS units gave us basic social data about the spaces we pass through, along with advice about where to find the closest fuel stop? This would function as a sort of “social reality meter” that would render more visible the social realities and human inequalities we traverse as we…
Wealth in the United States
So how is wealth distributed spatially across the United States? Here’s a quick effort at analyzing the Forbes list of the top 400 wealth holders in the U.S. Here is a snapshot of the graphic included on the page: It is logical enough that there is a great concentration of these wealth holders in a…
Fair prices?
We live in a society that embraces the market in a pretty broad way. We accept that virtually all goods and services are priced through the market at prices set competitively. We accept that sellers are looking to maximize profits through the prices, quantities, and quality of the goods and services that they sell us.…
China’s Charter 08
The New York Review of Books has published an English translation of an important emerging document calling for political and legal reform in China. The document is called Charter 08 (in analogy with Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77 in 1977). It is a citizen-based appeal for the creation of a secure system of laws and rights in…
Protest in China
Carrefour protest in Beijing China has witnessed a visible increase over the past ten years in the number of protests, demonstrations, and riots over a variety of issues. Areas of social problems that have stimulated collective protests include factory conditions, non-payment of wages, factory closures, environmental problems (both large and small), and land and property…
Paying for health
A person’s income determines his/her access to many things he wants and needs: food, clothing, transportation, housing, entertainment, and the internet, for example. And people who have higher income are able to consume more of all of these categories than people with lower income, if they choose to. More affluent people shop for food at…
Can America overcome racism?
The social and economic inequalities in America that are associated with race are staggering and persistent. Pick almost any category where you’d rather have more than less — income, health status, property and home ownership, likelihood of having health insurance, life expectancy, or likelihood of having a favorable outcome in the criminal justice system. In…
Poverty in the United States
There is a lot of poverty in the United States, and the regional patterns are striking. The map above represents 1998 data, and it tells a very sectional story about poverty in this country. (The map is presented by the Regional Development Institute of Northern Illinois University.) The largest concentration of poor counties is clearly…
Defeating extremist violence
The threat of major violence against innocent people by extremist groups is one that we’re nowhere close to solving. What are the solutions that might be considered? Here are the sorts of things that have been discussed for the past decade or so, when high-casualty terrorism became a part of the everyday landscape. These are…
Comparative life satisfaction
We tend to think of the past century as being a time of great progress when it comes to the quality of life — for ordinary people as well as the privileged. Advances in science, technology, and medicine have made life more secure, predictable, productive, educated, and healthy. But in what specific ways is ordinary…
Anxiety and crisis
It is interesting to consider the effect on consciousness of people living through a series of world and national crises. I’m thinking particularly of the ongoing crisis of terrorist attacks against innocent civilians, with the perennial possibility of even more stunning tactics in the future, and of the ongoing financial and economic crisis in the…
Mumbai
A progressive Indian friend from Kolkata shared a particular sorrow about the tragedy of Mumbai last week. It was the death of Hemant Karkare, chief of the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad, who was shot to death by the terrorists near the Cama Hospital in Mumbai as he and several other policemen attempted to confront them (CNN…
Education and careers
Secondary and post-secondary education plays a crucial role in the economic activity of any complex society. Kathleen Thelen provides a very fine description of the different talent regimes of Germany, Britain, Japan, and the United States in How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan. She highlights…
Segregation in France
The mix of race, poverty, and urban space has created intractable social issues in many American cities in the past sixty years. Residential segregation creates a terrible fabric of self-reproducing inequalities between the segregated group and the larger society — inequalities of education, health, employment, and culture. As intractable as this social system of segregation…
Adults to college?
A couple of things seem to be true in states like Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana. These states have each lost hundreds of thousands of industrial jobs in the past ten years — the jobs that provided middle-class livings to men and women with high school educations — and there are thousands more job losses to…
The multicultural university
It is now pretty universally recognized that universities need to be “multicultural”, in several separate senses. They need to be open and welcoming to students coming from many different cultures. They need to create an academic and social environment where students from many cultures can learn together in a harmonious way. And they need to…
Social justice?
A major complaint that many people have had concerning the past eight years of the Bush administration is that it has had no interest in addressing issues of social justice in the United States. What are these issues? And what steps would a genuinely responsible government take to address them? Here are a few core…
Tom Joad
John Ford’s powerful film Grapes of Wrath (1940) comes to mind in these days of financial crisis that many people want to compare to the Great Depression. Both the film and the Steinbeck novel have the virtue of “speaking truth to power” — describing in a crystal-clear way how the decisions of the powerful have…
Playing for Change
Bill Moyers has a great interview with Mark Johnson, creator of the music project called “Playing for Change.” Johnson has spent ten years gathering the voices of musicians around the world into a beautifully produced music video representing hope and the power of human community. These are ordinary people in very poor communities, creating music…
Malaysian ethnic authoritarianism
Malaysia’s constitution and legal system give full preference to members of the Malay majority. Article 153 of the current Malaysian constitution reads: It shall be the responsibility of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong to safeguard the special position of the Malays and natives of any of the States of Sabah and Sarawak and the legitimate interests…
Spreading the wealth around?
So Joe the Plumber thinks Obama may be a socialist, and that he wants to spread the wealth around. And this all seems to come from Obama’s proposed tax policies — higher taxes for individuals and businesses with income more than $250,000 and lower taxes for everyone else. So why does that count as “spreading…
Changing urban high schools
Almost everyone interested in improving social justice and opportunity in America’s cities agrees that schooling is crucial. Urban high schools have high dropout rates and low levels of academic achievement, and the likelihood of an urban student’s continuing to college is much lower than his or her suburban counterpart. Is it possible for cities like…
What holds a country together?
When you consider the enormous differences that exist across regions and traditions in the United States, it raises an interesting question: what factors serve to knit this population together into a single polity? We don’t share a single set of cultural values, a single religion, or a single political tradition. So what helps this population…
Low income, strong community
We seem to work on the basis of a couple of basic assumptions about income, lifestyle, and community in this country that need to be questioned. One group of these clusters around the idea that a high quality of life requires high and rising income. High income is needed for high consumption, and high consumption…
Demogoguery and the politics of cultural despair
The language that the McCain-Palin pair are using in their attempts to whip up end-game support for their party is genuinely abhorrent and even down-right scary. It’s based on vilification of their rival, character assassination, and endless repetition of false or misleading allegations. But even worse, it’s pretty clearly founded on an attempt to whip…
Web resources on famine
One difference between today and 1943 (the Great Bengal famine) or 1973 (the Ethiopian famine) is the availability of real-time information about conditions in famine areas. Citizens throughout the world have an unprecedented ability to be informed about the depth of crisis and human suffering that are associated with hunger. Here are a few data…
Corruption in interior
What is the institutional culture that permits the senior management of a federal agency to engage in an extended practice of conflict of interest, exchange of gifts, drugs, and sex, and corrupt collusion with energy companies leading to the loss of millions of dollars of revenue for the Federal budget? These allegations are contained in…
Food security
“Food security” is a crucial aspect of life, both for a population and a household. It can be defined in a variety of ways, but most fundamentally, it amounts to this: the existence of a set of economic and social arrangements on the basis of which a population or household is assured of a sufficient…
Change?
The word of the day is “change” — the political conventions are blaring it out, and apparently the voting public is ready for it. It’s worth thinking about what “change” amounts to. Things change in many ways — by accident, by the inevitable workings of natural processes, or as a result of the actions of…
Cooperatives within markets
In a recent post I considered the question whether households in a rural community might be able to achieve energy self-sufficiency based on the cultivation of crops such as cattails and community production of ethanol. One question raised there is whether it is possible to estimate the land and labor that would be required for…
Sustainability and biofuel farming
James Gustave Speth has written a really important book on sustainability within a modern society. The book is called The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, and it’s an important contribution. One of the most fundamental conclusions that Speth arrives at is the idea that…
Rising income inequality in China
Allan Wheatley writes an important article in Reuters this week about the situation of rising income inequalities in China as part and parcel of the booming economic growth the country has witness for the past two decades. Several key facts emerge from the piece: While spectacular affluence is emerging at the top end of China’s…
Public versus hidden faces of organizations
Think of a range of complex organizations and institutions — police departments, zoning boards, corporations, security agencies, and so on indefinitely. These organizations all have missions, personnel, constituencies, and policies and practices. They all do various things — they affect individuals in society and they bring about significant social effects. And, in each case there…
Education choices and personal futures
Why do people pursue education — whether through secondary school or through post-secondary school? It seems like a very simple question with an obvious answer: education adds to one’s skills and productivity; these enhanced skills make one more attractive in the employment market; and therefore, pursuing education is a rational investment in future lifetime earnings.…
Trust and corruption
The recent collapse of a major skyscraper crane in New York City last month led to a surprising result: the arrest of the city’s chief crane inspector on charges of bribery. (See the New York Times story here.) (The story indicates that the facts surrounding the charges are unrelated to this particular crane collapse.) Several…
Is publicity an important source of power?
Powerful agencies in global society pursue their interests using the many forms of power available to them. Corporations, states, and powerful individuals exercise various kinds of power over ordinary people and groups. Coercion, deception, concealment, and intimidation rest in the portfolio of the powerful. What forms of self-defense are available to ordinary people against the…
Causes of the world food crisis
Today’s New York Times has a good story on some of the background of the current food crisis (story). The basic point is fundamental: donor nations and international development institutions have substantially disinvested in the great agricultural research institutes that were founded in the sixties and seventies to provide a scientific basis for increasing food…
The struggle for racial justice
The struggle for racial justice in America was in its sharpest form in the 1960s, from the Freedom Marches in the South in the early sixties to the militant and determined struggles in the North in the later sixties. Organizers, militants, activists, leaders, and volunteers gave their best energies, brains, and courage to this extended…
Higher education and social mobility
There is an appalling level of inequality in American society; and even more troubling, the multiple dimensions of inequality seem to reinforce each other, with the result that disadvantaged groups remain disadvantaged across multiple generations. We can ask two different kinds of sociological questions about these facts: What factors cause the reproduction of disadvantage over…
Retreat of the Elephants
Mark Elvin’s title, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China, is brilliantly chosen to epitomize his subject: the human causes of longterm environmental change in China over a four-thousand year period of history. How many of us would have guessed that elephants once ranged across almost all of China, as far to…
Consumption and environmental collapse
Today the Dalai Lama presented a lecture on global environmental sustainability at the University of Michigan. One of his central points had to do with personal consumption and personal happiness: the fact that the planet simply cannot sustain the level of material consumption characteristic of affluent countries, in support of the world’s population of over…
Knowing poverty
Poverty is an important social fact in virtually every society. What is involved in knowing about poverty — for the citizen, for the poor person, for the social scientist, the historian, and the novelist? To start, there is a set of descriptive and analytical features of poverty. How do we define the concept of being…
The world food system
Here is one very concrete way in which we live in a global world: the most basic need that we have — food — is satisfied on the basis of a system with global reach and global price and production interconnections. The planet’s 6+ billion people need a daily diet of grains, oils, and protein,…
China’s cultural revolution
What is involved in understanding China’s Cultural Revolution? The question comes to mind for several reasons — but most vividly because of a recent interview in France in the le nouvel Observateur with Song Yongyi. Song’s personal itinerary is historic — he was a “rebel Red Guard” in 1967, a political prisoner in China from…
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Today is a sad day of remembrance in America and the world. Forty years ago today Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in Memphis. And, followed by the murder of Robert Kennedy only a few months later, America’s heart and history were jolted. Dr. King’s life devotion to the cause of racial justice in…
The price of rice
The price of internationally traded rice has roughly doubled in the past several months. There are several independent factors that seem to be contributing causes for this sudden spike in prices (New York Times story, Toronto Globe and Mail story), but the bottom line is that this is very bad news for many developing countries…
Anonymity and civility
The topic of civility on the internet has gotten a lot of ink recently (posting, posting, posting). People flame each other online in ways they would never do in a public meeting. And this tendency is most extreme in anonymous postings on blogs and web sites. What is it about anonymity that sometimes brings out…
Race and American inequalities
Douglas Massey is a leading US social scientist who has worked on issues of inequality in America throughout his career. He is a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. His most recent book (Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System) is a huge contribution to our understanding of the mechanisms producing inequalities in…
William Gibson’s future
All Tomorrow’s Parties expressed a lot of it: William Gibson’s dark but somehow humane picture of what the modern world might be heading for. First the dark part — nation states that have fallen apart into NoCal and SoCal and the Kombinat states; whole communities of people living anarchically and precariously — but astonishingly, harmoniously…
Authoritarian “democracy” in Russia
Is authoritarianism gaining a new lease on life? Clifford Levy’s coverage of Russia’s politics in the New York Times makes the situation crystal-clear: Vladimir Putin and his party, United Russia, are determined to govern without opposition, and are fully prepared to use all the forms of intimidation and coercion that are necessary in order to…
Ethnic violence and political entrepreneurs
We’ve seen horrendous instances of murderous violence among groups in a given society in the past century, often along ethnic and religious lines. Most recently there is the example of Kenya (article, article, article). But in the past twenty years we’ve also witnessed Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, Sri Lanka, India, and Iraq. (This is deliberately not…
Turkey’s debate over the head scarf
There is a big debate going on in Turkey today over the governing party’s plan to relax restrictions of women’s use of the head scarf in public places such as schools and government buildings (article). Turkey declared itself as a secular state in the 1920’s. Restrictions on the wearing of the scarf are defended as…
Social progress in India?
How much social progress has India made since Independence sixty years ago? According to economist V. K. Ramachandran, not very much when it comes to life in the countryside. (Hear my interview with Ramachandran on iTunes and on my web page.) Ramachandran gives a profile of the social problems faced by India at the time…
Persistent urban inequality
Race, segregation, and inequality — these are the major issues that metropolitan America needs to address, and hasn’t so far. But there is some good analytical work being done to allow us to better understand these processes — and therefore, possibly to alter the course we are on. I heard an excellent talk a week…
Rights and violence in China
There is a pretty vibrant conversation going on internationally and in China about the role that individual rights should play in Chinese society. (There was an interesting conference on this subject at the University of Michigan early in February.) Some theorists object to the idea of formulating China’s issues of state-society relations in terms of…
Privilege and race
I’ve heard a couple of speakers recently who offered an unusual degree of honesty in addressing issues of race in our society. The most recent was a talk by Tim Wise at my university on “white privilege.” Tim is the author of several books, including White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son.…
Martin Luther King’s journey
Today we celebrate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is easy enough to be discouraged about the current state of racial inequality in this country. We have not made nearly the progress on economic inequalities and inequalities of opportunity that seemed possible in 1966. But Dr. King was an optimistic man and…
Inequalities based on prior inequality
Many people think that grossly unequal outcomes across a society with respect to the amount and quality of social goods each enjoys are profoundly unjust. (By social goods I am thinking of things like income, wealth, power, healthcare, and education.) Why should some members of society have such a lower level of access to the…
Voter decision-making
It is the night of the New Hampshire primary, and the pundits are at work. But what can we learn about American political choices based on what we see during this election season? What do voters care about when they decide which presidential candidate to support? Is it issues and positions; personality of the candidate…
Labor abuses in Chinese factories
Today’s New York Times has an important article about the conditions of workers in many of the factories in China devoted to manufacturing goods for export to the United States and other countries (In Chinese Factories, 1/5/08). The reportage is eye-opening but not surprising. Times reporters have documented excessive hours of work, pay that is…
Perspectives on us
My idea of a really gifted social inquirer is Studs Terkel. This isn’t because Studs is a methodologist with a research plan and a falsifiable hypothesis, a dependent variable to track and a research strategy on a bunch of independent variables. It is because he is a voracious listener — he is interested in people,…
The ethical consumer
As a rule, we know too little about the social and economic histories of the goods we consume. (Oddly enough, this is what Marx was referring to when he talked about the “fetishism of commodities”.) This is true of food — we consume coffee, tea, sugar, rice, or beef without thinking much about the conditions…
Is there a right to healthcare?
It is worth unpacking, first, why healthcare is so crucial to everyone’s life. Everyone faces illness and accident in life. Maintaining and restoring health and function are crucial to our quality of life and our ability to live fully, freely, and independently. So access to healthcare is one of those core needs that are so…
The rule of law and the national security state
The current US state has fundamentally changed the relationship that has existed between citizen and state for a long time in this country. They have posed the choice in impossible terms: would you rather be safe from terrorist attack with a reduction in legal and constitutional protections, or would you rather permit enemies of the…
Inequalities in China
China’s Communist Revolution was founded upon the idea of equality. It was a basic principle of the early Communist Party that inequalities ought to be eradicated and the power and privilege of elite groups should be dismantled. Today in China the situation is very different. Farmers and rural people no longer have the support of…
Gradient of justice
Given that there is significant injustice in our society, and granted that we are a long ways from a society that establishes what Rawls called the circumstances of justice — can we at least have the confidence that we are moving in the right direction? Some people would argue that our society is doing just…
A sense of justice
What does it take to get people truly engaged in a common purpose, joined with others in pursuit of a common cause? I suppose there are numerous answers to this question — fear of impending danger (global warming), a sense of empathy at the suffering of others (Katrina, the Indonesian tsunami), a rational desire to…
Progressive politics
There are many ways of distinguishing different kinds of political values: liberal-conservative, environment-growth, radical-reactionary, left-right, Democrat-Republican, social democrat-christian democrat, libertarian-statist. But consider this fundamental divide: between those political programs dedicated to progress for the poor and powerless, versus those focused on conserving the power and privilege of existing elites. One is a party of progress…
A good society?
What sort of society should a progressive politics aim to achieve? Here is one clear vision. It is a society based on equality and dignity for all citizens. It embodies the idea of social responsibility — the conviction that society has some meaningful obligations to all its members. It embodies institutions that somehow effectively assure…
Community-based activism
Many of the problems that we face are global issues that perhaps appear to demand global solutions. Government action is needed to address global warming. So how useful is the slogan, “Think globally, act locally”? How much real progress can we achieve through community-based activism? The answer is, quite a bit. There is great power…
“Too much” inequality? Yes!
How much inequality is too much? The range of income and wealth inequalities in the US has increased sharply in the past 20 years. The share of income flowing to the top 10% and 1% has increased significantly. And the level of income for the bottom 40% has slightly declined during these years. But to…
What is the value of “democracy”?
What is involved in the value of democracy? Why is this an important social value? And why should we think that democracy is a good thing for poor people? Consider first the fundamentals. Why is there a role for democracy in any circumstances? Democracy is a type of political institution — a form of group…
Why affirmative action?
Since the Supreme Court’s Bakke decision in 1978, universities that practice affirmative action in admissions have premised their case on the educational benefits that accrue to all students from a diverse student body. This is the heart of the successful University of Michigan defense of affirmative action in the Supreme Court in 2003. What has…
Real equality of opportunity?
Let’s say that our basic moral commitment is the idea that every human being ought to have real equality of opportunity as he/she pursues a life plan. What does this mean, in detail, and what implications does it have for social justice? Equality of opportunity can be construed in broader or more narrow ways. Narrowly,…
Why isn’t there a progressive majority in the US?
Progressive politics center on a few core commitments — the value of some kinds of equality (equality of opportunity, equality of access to some central social goods like education and healthcare), a concern for the pattern of rising inequality in income and wealth in the United States since 1980, a commitment to the idea of…
A future for critical politics?
Our society — both in the US and in the world — is changing fast and regressively. Inequalities are increasing, people’s sense of control over their lives is diminishing, and the power of large social institutions — government, private individual data aggregators, corporations, drug companies, lobbying firms — seems to be increasing much faster than…
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