Ryan and Debi Cragun’s Blog

So, my web hosting company I’ve used for the past two years suddenly decided they didn’t want my business anymore. I went to post a book review on my blog yesterday and my website was gone, replaced by an advertisement for their company (the host was siteflip.com, which I definitely don’t recommend after this fiasco). In a panic, I tried to contact them (they don’t have a phone number anywhere on their site). I submitted a help ticket only to have it closed with a note indicating I was abusing their system. According to the information they gave me, I was putting too much of a load on their server. Any readers I have are quite aware of the fact that I haven’t been posting but rarely these days. If I’m putting too much load on their server they should probably get a server that’s a little newer than, say, the 1970s (and, yes, I know there were no web servers in the 1970s).

So, booted from their service, I decided now was as good a time as any to go ahead and put up the new URL I had been considering for quite a while. genesoc.com has served me well for a long time, but we came up with it back when we imagined we would use the website mostly for work related stuff (i.e., genetics and sociology=genesoc). Since I had a personal blog on it, it didn’t make much sense. So, I’m keeping the URL for work related stuff in the future, but am moving all of our personal stuff to this new URL.

While I was at it, I figured I’d switch to a new theme, too, just for fun. If you regularly read the website using the RSS feed, you may want to update your feed reader with the new feed address (sorry for the trouble, but it should only take a minute of your time): http://www.ryananddebi.com/?feed=rss2

Author:

Stephanie Coontz

Publisher:

Basic Books

Date of Publication:

1992

ISBN:

0465090974

Rating:

10

Summary:

I picked this book up both because it looked very intriguing and because I was working on a project on changes in gender and sex roles in the U.S. since the 1950s. What a find! This book looks, in depth, at many of the myths surrounding changes in the families since the 1950s. If ever there was a sociological book designed to debunk widely held beliefs and myths about a social phenomenon, this book is it. It quite literally takes myth after myth and destroys them. Some of the myths covered in the book include:

• Myth: Women and children in “traditional” two-parent families do not and did not experience poverty.
  Au contraire! From page 4, “Budget studies and medical records reveal that women and children in poor families of the past were far more likely to go without needed nutrients than were male heads of families. Poverty has always been feminized…”
• Myth: Divorced men are less likely to support their children today than they used to be.
  Au contraire! From page 4, “Modern statistics on child-support evasion are appalling, but prior to the 1920s, a divorced father did not even have a legal child-support obligation to evade. Until that time, children were considered assets of the family head, and his duty to support them ended if he was not in the home to receive the wages they could earn.”
• Myth: The disintegration of the modern family has resulted in an increase in child abuse.
  Au contraire! From page 4, “As for child abuse, it has far too long and brutal a history to be blamed on recent family innovations.”
• Myth: Children, today, just need to be put to work to stop them from engaging in delinquent behavior.
  Au contraire! From page 5, “While overpermissiveness may create problems among some modern youth, overwork was responsible for the prevalence of delinquency and runaways in the late nineteenth century. Today’s high school dropout rates are shocking, but as late as the 1940s, less than half the youths entering high school managed to finish, a figure much smaller than today’s.”
• Myth: The use and abuse of alcohol and drugs is more widespread today than it ever has been.
  Au contraire! From page 5, “Alcohol and drug abuse, similarly, were widespread well before modern rearrangements of gender roles and family life. In the 1820s, per capita consumption of alcohol was almost three times higher than it is today, and there was a major epidemic of opium and cocaine addiction in the late nineteenth century. On a per capita basis, narcotic abuse was certainly as bad and probably worse then as it is today. Many middle-class women were addicted to patent medicines that contained powerful drugs; pharmacists routinely dispatched young messenger boys to people’s homes with vials of morphine.”
• Myth: The nuclear family protects people from poverty and social disruption.
  Au contraire! From pages 5 and 6, “Although there are many things to draw on in our past, there is no one family form that has ever protected people from poverty or social disruption, and no traditional arrangement that provides a workable model for how we might organize family relations in the modern world.”
• Myth: There was a golden age of the family.
  Au contraire! From page 9, “Like most visions of a “golden age,” the “traditional family” my students describe evaporates on closer examination. It is an ahistorical amalgam of structures, values, and behaviors that never co-existed in the same time and place. The notion that traditional families fostered intense intimacy between husbands and wives while creating mothers who were totally available to their children, for example, is an idea that combines some characteristics of the white, middle-class family in the mid-nineteenth century and some of a rival family ideal first articulated in the 1920s. The first family revolved emotionally around the mother-child axis, leaving the husband-wife relationship stilted and formal. The second focused on an eroticized couple relationship, demanding that mothers curb emotional “overinvestment” in their children. The hybrid idea that a woman can be fully absorbed with her youngsters while simultaneously maintaining passionate sexual excitement with her husband was a 1950s invention that drove thousands of women to therapists, tranquilizers, or alcohol when they actually tried to live up to it.”
• Myth: Authoritarian, extended families result in better outcomes for children.
  Au contraire! This kind of depends on your notion of what “better outcomes” is, but here’s a quote from page 9 that addresses this myth, “Similarly, an extended family in which all members work together under the top-down authority of the household elder operates very differently from a nuclear family in which husband and wife are envisioned as friends who patiently devise ways to let the children learn by trial and error. Children who worked in family enterprises seldom had time for the extracurricular activities that Wally and the Beaver recounted to their parents over the dinner table; often, they did not even go to school full-time. Mothers who did home production generally relegated child care to older children or servants; they did not suspend work to savor a baby’s first steps or discuss with their husband how to facilitate a grade-schooler’s “self-esteem.” Such families emphasized formality, obedience to authority, and “the way it’s always been” in their childrearing.”
• Myth: Families in the past were extremely independent and autonomous.
  Au contraire! Families of all stripes have benefited from various and sundry government handouts, from homesteaders to farmers to railroad tycoons. Here’s one example of a particularly hypocritical Republican Senator, Phil Gramm, from page 69, “Sen. Phil Gramm, for example, co-author of the 1985 Gramm-Rudman-Hollings balanced budget amendment, is well known for his opposition to government handouts. However, his personal history is quite different from his political rhetoric. Born in Georgia in 1942, to a father who was living on a federal veterans disability pension, Gramm attended a publicly funded university on a grant paid for by the federal War Orphans Act. His graduate work was financed by a National Defense Education Act fellowship, and his first job was at Texas A&M University, a federal land-grant institution. Yet when Gramm finally struck out on his own, the first thing he did was set up a consulting business where he could be, in his own words, “an advocate of fiscal responsibility and free enterprise.” From there he moved on to Congress, where he has consistently attempted to slash federal assistance programs for low-income people.”
• Myth: Women did not work outside the home prior to the 1960s and 1970s.
  Au contraire! From pages 155 and 156, “The first point to make about the growing participation of women in the work force during the twentieth century is that their nineteenth-century separation from productive work was itself a new—and, it turns out, transitory—state of affairs. The factory system established a more rigid division of labor and location than had previously existed between household production and production for the market. Middle-class families adapted to this division by putting men on the market side of the line and women and children on the household one, while working-class families assigned only married women to the household side, sending men, unmarried women, and youngsters out of the household into paid work. The result was a decline in the number of women, especially married ones, who produced goods and services for circulation beyond the household… By 1870, women comprised only 16 percent of the labor force, and as late as 1900 a mere 5 percent to 9 percent of married women worked for wages. These figures underestimate the real contributions wives made to household income: Much paid work, such as taking in boarders or selling homemade items, was unreported; census calculations of the labor force did not then count, as they now do, persons who worked fifteen hours or more a week as unpaid laborers in a family business… every decade after 1880 saw an increase in women’s representation in the labor force…”
• Myth: Parents should bear the sole responsibility for raising their children.
  Au contraire! From page 210 and pages 287 and 288, “I will argue later that the rest of American culture should adopt standards of childrearing that do not confine responsibility to parents, and I will show that many modern discussions of maternal employment, day care, divorce, and single parenthood are distorted by the myth that parents can or should be solely responsible for how their children grow…” “…the historical evidence does suggest that families have been most successful wherever they have built meaningful, solid networks and commitments beyond their own boundaries. We may discover that the best thing we will ever do for our own families, however we define them, is to get involved in community or political action to help others.”
• Myth: The consumer expansion of the 1950s trickled down to all families.
  Au contraire! From pages 29 and 30, “A full 25 percent of Americans, forty to fifty million people, were poor in the mid-1950s, and in the absence of food stamps and housing programs, this poverty was searing. Even at the end of the 1950s, a third of American children were poor. Sixty percent of Americans over sixty-five had incomes below $1,000 in 1958, considerably below the $3,000 to $10,000 level considered to represent middle-class status. A majority of elders also lacked medical insurance. Only half the population had savings in 1959; one-quarter of the population had no liquid assets at all. Even when we consider only native-born, white families, one-third could not get by on the income of the household head.”
• Myth: Women turned willfully and happily to housewifery in the 1950s.
  Au contraire! From pages 31 and 32, “Women’s retreat to housewifery, for example, was in many cases not freely chosen. During the war, thousands of women had entered new jobs, gained new skills, joined unions, and fought against job discrimination. Although 95 percent of the new women employees had expected when they were first hired to quit work at the end of the war, by 1945 almost an equally overwhelming majority did not want to give up their independence, responsibility, and income, and expressed the desire to continue working. After the war, however… management went to extraordinary lengths to purge women workers from the auto plants, as well as from other high-paying and nontraditional jobs. As it turned out, in most cases women were not permanently expelled from the labor force but were merely downgraded to lower-paid, “female” jobs. Even at the end of the purge, there were more women working than before the war, and by 1952 there were two million more wives at work than at the peak of wartime production. The jobs available to these women, however, lacked the pay and the challenges that had made wartime work so satisfying, encouraging women to define themselves in terms of home and family even when they were working.”
• Myth: Women loved being housewives in the 1950s.
  Au contraire! From page 35, “Beneath the polished facades of many “ideal” families, suburban as well as urban, was violence, terror, or simply grinding misery that only occasionally came to light. Although Colorado researchers found 302 battered-child cases, including 33 deaths, in their state during one year alone, the major journal of American family sociology did not carry a single article on family violence between 1939 and 1969. Wife battering was not even considered a “real” crime by most people. Psychiatrists in the 1950s, following Helene Deutsch, “regarded the battered woman as a masochist who provoked her husband into beating her. Historian Elizabeth Pleck describes how one Family Service Association translated this psychological approach into patient counseling during the 1950s. Mrs. K came to the Association because her husband was an alcoholic who repeatedly abused her, both physically and sexually. The agency felt, however, that it was simplistic to blame the couple’s problems on his drinking. When counselors learned that Mrs. K refused her husband’s demands for sex after he came home from working the night shift, they decided that they had found a deeper difficulty: Mrs. K needed therapy to “bring out some of her anxiety about sex activities.””
• Myth: Giving teenage girls with children welfare checks acts like a reward and encourages the behavior.
  Au contraire! From pages 82 and 83, “The image of teenage girls having babies to receive welfare checks is an emotion-laden but fraudulent cliche. If the availability of welfare benefits causes teen pregnancy, why is it that other industrial countries, with far more generous support policies for women and children, have far lower rates of teen pregnancy? Welfare benefits do seem to increase the likelihood of unmarried teen mothers moving away from their parents’ households, hence increasing the visibility of these mothers, but they bear little or no relation to actual birth rates for unmarried women. Harvard economists David Ellwood and Mary Jo Bane compared unmarried women who would be eligible for welfare if they had an illegitimate child with unmarried women who would not be eligible: Even by confining their analysis to states that gave the most generous welfare benefits to single mothers, they found no difference in the rates of illegitimacy between the groups. Mississippi, with the lowest welfare and food stamp benefits for AFDC mothers in the entire country (only 46 percent of the federal poverty guidelines), has the second-highest percentage of out-of-wedlock births in the country; states with higher AFDC benefits than the national average tend to have lower rates of illegitimacy than the national average. Sociologist Mark Rank finds that “welfare recipients have a relatively low fertility rate” and that the longer a woman remains on welfare, whatever her age, the less likely she is to keep having babies. Mothers on AFDC have only one-fourth the number of births while they are on welfare as do mothers who are not on welfare.”
• Myth: Mother’s Day originated as a holiday to celebrate mothering.
  Au contraire! From page 152, “The fact is that Mother’s Day originated to celebrate the organized activities of women outside the home. It became trivialized and commercialized only after it became confined to “special” nuclear family relations. The people who inspired Mother’s Day had quite a different idea about what made mothers special. They believed that motherhood was a political force. They wished to celebrate mothers’ social roles as community organizers, honoring women who acted on behalf of the entire future generation rather than simply putting their own children first.”
• Myth: The media played a large role in the “decay” of the nuclear family.
  Au contraire! (Well, sort of…) From pages 174 and 175, “But the world view imparted by such television shows did not derive from the nontraditional or antifamily values of liberal writers and producers, as conservatives claim. Advertising departments in the mass media refer to the content of their various productions as the “wrapper” for the real product, the ads themselves. Once we understand that the primary driving force behind most editorial or programming decisions is what attracts advertisers, we can see why the eclipse of traditional family themes in the media during the 1970s and 1980s was pioneered by the same forces that first marketed such themes in the 1950s. The 1950s family, supposedly the peak of tradition, was in many ways’ simply the “wrapper” for an extension of commodity production to new areas of life, an extension that paved the way for the commercialization of love and sex so often blamed on the 1960s. The “wholesome” television serials that some people confuse in memory with actual 1950s life were early attempts to harness mass entertainment to sales of goods. With only three to five channels for viewers to choose from, a show that hoped to be competitive had to attract approximately 30 percent of all viewers. Consequently, advertisers favored shows that presented “universal themes” embodied in homogenized families without serious divisions of interest by age, gender, income, or ethnic group. The hope was that everyone could identify with these families and hence with the mass-produced appliances that were always shown in conjunction with the mass-produced sentiments: Ozzie and Harriet, for example, had some of their most heartwarming talks in front of the Hotpoint kitchen appliances that the show was supposed to help sell. Once the market for such big-ticket family items began to slow, the next growth area had to be the individual: a Hotpoint range for the family, but “A Sony of My Owny.” Radio pioneered “micromarketing,” but television soon got into the act, partitioning the mythical family of the 1950s into as many different varieties and subsets as possible. The modern media has not become antifamily, it has simply become more sophisticated in targeting distinct audience segments—preteens, yuppies, buppies, swinging singles, alienated youth, seniors, and working parents—and wooing their dollars by emphasizing the differences that require separate images and their own products.”

This is just a sampling of the many myths Professor Coontz addresses in the book. Professor Coontz opens and closes the book with the same argument concerning families and family forms, “To say that no easy answers are to be found in the past is not to close off further discussion of family problems, but to open it up. To find effective answers to the dilemmas facing modern families, we must reject attempts to “recapture” family traditions that either never existed or existed in a totally different context. Only when we have a realistic idea of how families have and have not worked in the past can we make informed decisions about how to support families in the present or improve their future prospects.” (pp. 5-6).

Review:

The only criticism I have of this book is that it is often so detailed in its treatment of the different myths surrounding families and family structures of the past that it is occasionally hard to wade through all of the evidence debunking these myths. Other than this one, minor criticism, this book does an absolutely superb job of providing empirical evidence to indicate there was no “golden age” of the family.

This is already a rather lengthy review, but there are a few additional points the author makes that warrant mention. For instance, the author notes on page 21 that, “Although two-thirds of respondents to one national poll said they wanted “more traditional standards of family life,” the same percentage rejected the idea that “women should return to their traditional role.”” There really does seem to be a rather schizophrenic view of family values in the U.S.: Everyone seems to have “family values” but not want “traditional family values.” The “family values” people have seem to be: close-knit, happy families with low divorce rates, good sex, lots of money, happy kids, and a quiet little place in the suburbs. While that “ideal family” never existed, people also don’t seem to realize what came with the times when that “ideal family” seemed approximated: the oppression of women, racial prejudice, and distant fathers.

Professor Coontz hits another point quite hard, arguing that it is changes in the economic system of the U.S. that have played a large role in changing the family. For instance, she argues that the mass production of the industrial revolution resulted in increases in marketing, which resulted in the rampant consumer culture of the U.S. today. It’s an intriguing argument, “By the late nineteenth century, political economists realized that the ethic of hard work and self-restraint that helped to industrialize America had serious drawbacks now that most industries had the capacity for mass production. If everyone deferred gratification, who would buy the new products? Between 1870 and 1900, the volume of advertising multiplied more than tenfold. Giant department stores were built to showcase new consumer items for urban residents, while rural residents were exposed to the delights and temptations of mail-order catalogs. The word consumption increasingly lost its earlier connotations of destroying, wasting, or using up, and came instead to refer in a positive way to the satisfying of human needs and desires.” (pp. 169-170)

I also like Professor Coontz’s realistic understanding of parenting, “Parenting is both easier and harder than many researchers and self-styled family experts admit: easier because, as we will see, children are resilient enough to survive many of our mistakes, and even to benefit from them; harder because some forces affecting children are simply too complicated for parents to control.” (p. 225) There is no easy recipe for parenting, but, as luck would have it, children don’t need perfection – a good effort generally works.

One last thought before I wrap things up. Professor Coontz does talk at length about different cultures and their approaches to parenting. This story and its implications stood out the strongest to me, “If recent trends and research are not enough to demonstrate the danger of overemphasizing parents’ exclusive responsibility for their own children, it might be worth listening to the views of people with far older and quite different family traditions. When Jesuit missionaries from France first encountered the Montagnais-Naskapi Indians of North America in the sixteenth century, they were impressed by the lack of poverty, theft, greed, and violence but horrified by the childrearing methods and the egalitarian relations between husband and wife. The Jesuits set out to introduce “civilized” family norms to the New World. They tried to persuade Naskapi men to impose stricter sexual monogamy on the women of the group and to moderate their “excessive love” for children by punishing them more harshly. One missionary spent an entire winter in a Montagnais lodge, recording in his journal both his efforts to impart these principles and the unsatisfactory responses of the Indians. At one point, having been rebuffed on several occasions, the missionary obviously thought he had found an unanswerable argument for his side. If you do not impose tighter controls on women, he explained to one Naskapi man, you will never know for sure which of the children your wife bears actually belong to you. The man’s reply was telling: “Thou hast no sense,” said the Naskapi. “You French people love only your own children; but we love all the children of our tribe.” That may be the best single childrearing tip Americans have ever been offered. Unless we learn to care for “all the children of the tribe,” then no family, whatever its form, can be secure.” (pp. 230-231)

Let me conclude by, once again, quoting the author, as she summarizes her main point once again, “The problem is not to berate people for abandoning past family values, nor to exhort them to adopt better values in the future—the problem is to build the institutions and social support networks that allow people to act on their best values rather than on their worst ones. We need to get past abstract nostalgia for traditional family values and develop a clearer sense of how past families actually worked and what the different consequences of various family behaviors and values have been. Good history and responsible social policy should help people incorporate the full complexity and the tradeoffs of family change into their analyses and thus into action. Mythmaking does not accomplish this end.” (p. 22)

Author:

Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Publisher:

William Morrow

Date of Publication:

2006

ISBN:

0061234001

Rating:

8

Summary:

It was only a matter of time before I picked this book up. Sociologists don’t, generally, seem to be that enamored of our more famous cousins (there is a Nobel Prize in Economics but not in Sociology), but this book got a lot of press and even a lot of play in Sociological circles, so I figured I should read it. I’m glad I finally did as it is an intriguing book and it illustrates just how one might go about packaging social science in such a way that it makes it engaging reading for the general public.

So what does the book have to say about economics and social life? As the authors write, there is no general unifying theme except maybe to say that social issues can be addressed using empirical data, which is, in a nutshell, the unifying theme of the social sciences in general. Other than that general theme, the book jumps from idea to idea, bringing empirical data and social scientific analysis to bear on a number of issues. The authors present data and theories on all of the following:

• The drop in crime rates in the 1990s was due primarily to the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973 and not to: innovative policing, more extensive use of capital punishment, nor the economic boom of the 1990s (though more police and more prisons probably played a role). I was initially very skeptical of this claim, but I do think the authors muster enough evidence to indicate that it has to at least be taken seriously. The basic argument is that by legalizing abortion, women who would not have previously been able to get abortions – primarily the lower and working classes – are more likely to get abortions. As a result, these lower class and working class women are less likely to have offspring (or fewer offspring), and, because their offspring have a greater likelihood of committing crime (not for genetic reasons but for sociological reasons – class, stratification, disparity, poor parenting, lack of supervision, etc.), the potential pool of criminals actually began to shrink. Ergo, there were lower crime rates about 20 years after Roe v. Wade when the kids of these women would have been coming of age and beginning their turbulent, high crime years. I’m still a bit skeptical of this claim, but, after reading this, I think there may just be something to it. I think more international comparisons are needed to bolster this theory.
• The authors claim real estate agents do not have your best interest in mind when they are trying to sell your home. Given our recent home purchasing and selling attempts (which isn’t how social science is done, I know), I found this argument extremely compelling. According to the authors, real estate agents encourage their clients to take the first good offer that comes along rather than waiting for the best offer. When they are selling their own homes, however, they wait, on average, an additional 10 days and usually end up with better offers as a result. The reason: an extra couple of thousand dollars may mean a lot to the home buyer or seller, but given the percentages real estate agents earn, they don’t translate into substantial earnings (e.g., about $150 for a $10,000 increase in price). As a result, they would rather get the sale then wait to get a small increase in profit. There is a confounding factor here that the author doesn’t address that I think probably explains some of this disparity: I may be mistaken on this, but I’m guessing that real estate agents tend to upgrade homes within the same market rather than moving to new locations, which is what many of their clients are doing. Because they are upgrading they can afford to wait. People moving for a new job can rarely afford to wait to sell their home. Ergo, real estate agents don’t have to move right away and can therefore hold out for a good offer. Even so, I think the authors are generally right – real estate agents aren’t really looking out for their clients’ best interests, but their best interests (there are some notable exceptions to this, I’m sure).
• Another idea the authors address is the idea that money makes no difference in campaigns; some candidates are just liked while some are not liked. According to their analysis, it makes almost no difference how much money you spend on a campaign, other factors have greater appeal – charisma, looks, etc. Additionally, the authors note that about $1 billion is spent every year on campaigns in the U.S., which seems like a lot of money. However, that is the equivalent of what Americans spend every year on chewing gum, which kind of puts things in perspective. The authors also frame this as “the cost of democracy,” which seems a bit disingenuous, but a reasonable assertion at some level.
• The authors also ask some very intriguing questions that lead to engaging insights. For instance, “What do school teachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?” The answer: they both cheat. When schools engage in high stakes testing (high stakes being teachers’ positions and salaries are contingent on test scores, e.g., No Child Left Behind), teachers tend to cheat – around 5%, give students answers or corrects their tests. The authors used a large data set from the Chicago school districts along with some algorithms to detect cheating teachers. It’s actually a very fascinating analysis that is quite compelling. It is also a pretty damning argument as far as educational policy is concerned – high stakes testing leads to cheating, not better education. How, then, do sumo wrestlers cheat? It’s more collusion than anything, but basically it boils down to throwing matches when their opponent needs a win and they don’t (the argument is pretty complicated, but makes sense). A large percentage of the elite sumo wrestlers in Japan actually collude in throwing matches. Ergo, both school teachers and sumo wrestlers cheat.
• The authors also draw extensively on the research of other economists and even sociologists (hooray!) to illustrate economic principles. Some of this borrowed research focuses on life in gangs in Chicago and is absolutely fascinating. The author gained access to the financial log book of a gang via a sociologist who worked closely with a gang in Chicago and ran some analyses on the data. He found that the foot soldiers in the gang make less than minimum wage. Additionally, they have a 1 in 4 chance of dying over a 6 year period as a member of a gang (which is, technically, higher than the chance of dying if you are on death row, where fewer than 1 in 4 inmates are put to death in a 6 year period). If they make so little money and take such big risks, what’s the motivation? It turns out that the leaders of gangs make a lot of money. The immediate leader of the gang studied by this sociologist was bringing in close to $8,000 per month, which means he was making almost $100,000 per year. He also had a bachelor’s degree and ran the gang like a business. The leaders above him, who made up the elite of the elite, brought in close to $500,000 per year. Ergo, the chance of making a lot of money is one major motivation for joining a gang, despite the terrible initial pay and the substantial risks of violence, death, and imprisonment.
• The authors also look at educational and financial outcomes for children and find both some enlightening and disturbing things. There are a number of factors that don’t matter for child success in education, including: recently moving into a better neighborhood, the mother not working between birth and kindergarten, spanking, the child watching television, frequently taking the child to museums, and participation in Headstart. What, then, does correlate with better educational outcomes for children? Having your first child after thirty correlates with better educational outcomes, most likely because people who do this have spent some time preparing themselves both educationally and economically, which means they value those things and pass that on to their children. Educational attainment and socioeconomic status are both important and are transmitted to children. Having lots of books in one’s home is also a significant correlate, but reading to one’s children is not (the explanation here is complicated; if you want details, read the book). An idea discussed here that is undoubtedly one of the more controversial ones in the book is that adopted kids tend to do worse in school. The reason has less to do with the act of adoption than with genetics (which is where the controversy comes in). The parents of kids who are put up for adoption tend to come from lower social classes, have lower educational attainment, and there seems to be something of a genetic component to their level of intelligence. In contrast, parents who adopt tend to be more educated and have a higher socioeconomic class. The “success” of the adoptive parents can attenuate some of the genetic limitations of adopted children, but that attenuation is not seen early in life – adopted children still tend to not do as well in school. But by the end of their secondary education they end up having pretty good educational and economic outcomes, in large part thanks to the influence of their adoptive parents. One of the more intriguing points the authors make in relation to educational outcomes of children is that reading parenting books is basically useless. First, they often give contradictory advice that is almost never based on empirical research. But, more importantly, any advice they give is going to come too late – the factors that predict educational success are already set by the time you start reading the books. Ergo, the books will have a minuscule influence, at best.
• Finally, the authors talk about names and how they relate to status. The issue is a combination of both race and class differences – different names are popular among different races and classes. The classic argument is that there is later life discrimination based upon people’s names (and there is a substantial body of literature indicating this does happen). But the point the authors make is that those names reflect status differences in and of themselves. Using a massive data set from the state of California covering the last 40 or so years, an economist found that popular names change and vary by race and class (and gender, of course, but that almost goes without saying). Intriguingly, among whites, popular names start in the upper classes than filter down to the lower classes. Once a name becomes ubiquitous among the lower classes, the upper classes pick new names they like. For blacks, on the other hand, it is only in the last 15 to 20 years that there has been a push for very unique names that, some argue, reflect African heritage. The authors ultimately argue that, even though there may be some discrimination based on names later in life, the names themselves reflect status differences.

Review:

Okay, that was a bit detailed. So, I’ll make my review relatively short. It was a little awkward having the book jump from topic to topic, but the insights themselves are intriguing and make for interesting reading. Additionally, the book is well-written and engaging. I already pointed out a few areas where I’m a bit skeptical, but most of the research discussed is outside my particular area of expertise, so I’m hesitant to be any more critical (I’ll happily leave that to the real experts on these issues).

One idea mentioned by the authors did, indirectly, relate to the research I do, so I have to discuss it. The authors stated that economics is the study of incentives, of how people get what they want. If that is true, then it won’t necessarily work for studying religion, as it isn’t always about what people want but rather what they are raised with (i.e., what they get). Of course, this criticism of economics (assuming the definition is accurate), is a general criticism as well. Whenever socialization plays a role in life outcomes, which it clearly does with things like religion, educational attainment, and even criminal behavior, economic models will not be able to explain all of the behavior. Let me give just a quick example from religion that illustrates this idea. A boy, Todd, is born into a highly religiously committed Mormon family and is socialized into the Mormon religion (Christian Smith’s recent book indicates the chances of Todd sharing his parents beliefs and values are higher than 80%, at least through about age 18). So, Todd adopts all of the leitmotifs of the religion and is a devout Mormon. Then, come about age 22 he marries and begins having kids. He didn’t work all that hard in school and is now stuck working in construction, where he makes about $30,000 per year. His religion tells him to have as many kids as he feels he can have and not to put them off. It also tells him that his wife shouldn’t work. So, he has four kids and his wife stays home to raise them. Given his income, he is living barely above the poverty level. What’s more, if he wants to remain a Mormon in good standing he has to give 10% of his income to the religion, usually calculated pre-taxes. That takes away an additional $3,000 of his income. With all of these stresses, he is barely making ends meet, and certainly not living a comfortable life. This isn’t the life he wants. Then he starts studying his religion and finds some things he doesn’t like (e.g., the exploits of the early leaders and different doctrines that seem questionable). As a result of these findings he decides he no longer believes. But Todd, now 30, is stuck. If he leaves the religion, his wife, who doesn’t share his new ideas, will leave him, taking the kids with her. In what sense can the question, “How does this reflect incentives or people getting what they want?” explain Todd’s situation? How do you quantify Todd’s devotion to his wife and family? How do you translate that into numbers? There probably is some intangible, subjective line of stress or suffering which, if crossed, will push Todd to leave the religion anyway, but how would an economist predict it? In short, life isn’t always about what we want. Often it’s about the hand of cards we are dealt from our parents (e.g., socialization). Certainly there are incentives involved in life, but they aren’t always quantifiable. This is particularly true in something like religion. (I apologize for the lengthy example, but this is something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and thought others might find it interesting.)

One other thing I have to point out that is more humorous than insightful is that, in the discussion of baby names, three names came up that I had heard about from a relative. My brother-in-law’s wife (does that, technically, make her my sister-in-law, or not?), in a name-down with Debi, threw out a couple of names that were absolutely hilarious. Now, don’t take this the wrong way; I’m not trying to make fun of anyone’s name. But, at some level, you just have to admit that some names are over-the-top ridiculous and funny. Debi mentioned she met someone with the name Yomajesty (as in, Your Majesty). My sister-in-law said she had heard two names that were unbeatable: Lemonjello and Orangejello. Yes, that is “lemon jello” and “orange jello,” but they are pronounced a little differently than you might think. Here’s my phonetic spelling, “le mahn ghello” and “or ahn ghello.” These are, in fact, names discovered in the baby name database from California, which also happens to be where my sister-in-law currently lives. So, she may, in fact, have run into these two kids. But, she may also have heard the names from someone who read this book. The name to beat all names, though, is this one, “Shithead.” I kid you not, that is a name someone gave to their child. Of course, they pronounced it a little differently as well, “shi teed,” but still – someone’s a total ass for giving their kid that name. Anyway, I just thought this was funny – I heard these names before reading the book from a source that didn’t mention the book. And when they mentioned them in the book I cracked up, again…

Overall, Freakonomics is a good little read. It isn’t a primer on economics, but it does make the subject intriguing, and hopefully will give the lay reader a little more insight on what social scientists do. It is worth reading if you get a chance, but don’t expect any thematic coherency in the topics addressed and be prepared to be a little shocked.

Author:

Barak Obama

Publisher:

RH Audio

Date of Publication:

2006

ISBN:

0739334085

Rating:

7

Summary:

In the interest of informing myself about the current political candidates, I picked up this book by Democratic front runner, Barak Obama. I’d heard a lot about him but wanted to get to know his views a little better. I think this book does a pretty good job of introducing him as a candidate.

The book covers a variety of things. First, it talks about how he got into politics. Senator Obama started out as a community organizer in the Chicago area before going to law school. He met his wife during an internship during law school. He eventually ended up teaching law at the University of Chicago before he went full time into politics. He began as a state representative then turned to the national political scene. All of that is detailed in the book.

Additionally, Senator Obama talks about his political views and his political vision for the future. It’s kind of challenging to corner Mr. Obama on his political views, but if I had to give a two word summation it would be “moderate progressive.” He recognizes the need for compromise (he’s not a fundamentalist in any sense of the word), but wants some progressive changes, including: universal health care, access to jobs and welfare reforms, stronger unions, fiscal responsibility for the government, and better international diplomacy. In all of that, he recognizes that you must compromise in politics, or you’ll never get anything done. Perhaps the most compelling message of the book is that Senator Obama sees his political adversaries as people who have reasoned arguments for their positions, just like he does. If you dismiss the opposition as crazy, you’re never going to get anywhere. Recognizing their wants and desires will get you a lot further than dismissing them.

Review:

I have to admit up front I find Senator Obama’s arguments compelling and I think he is a charismatic individual who is qualified to lead this country. That doesn’t mean I’ll vote for him; a lot has to happen before that is even an issue. But there were a few problems in the book that I think warrant discussion.

First, I think he overstates the strength of evangelicals in the U.S. Certainly evangelical Christians are a forced to be reckoned with, with a good 15% to 25% of the vote. But evangelical Christians also don’t necessarily vote as a bloc, I believe their strength is ebbing, and I think their numbers are slowly declining. So, while he does a little pandering to the evangelicals, I think his time would be better spent focusing on progressives and moderates, people with whom he has the most in common.

While I’m discussing religion I also want to mention his discussion of his own religious views. He talks about his religious conversion so euphemistically and vaguely that it almost seemed to me like nothing actually happened. He probably did formally join a Christian religion at some point, but I’m inclined to believe it was predominantly for political reasons. I don’t know that I should doubt his sincerity outright, but he comes across more as a closet agnostic than anything else – he doesn’t talk about his faith as though he “absolutely believes it all to be true” but rather in the sense that it might be true and would be good if it was, but he is also very tolerant of secular positions and even seems to embrace them. I probably shouldn’t criticize him on this front; if he really is a closet agnostic, he has more of my interests in mind than those of openly religious individuals. And, considering open agnosticism or atheism is a one way ticket out of politics, this is probably as close as seculars are going to get in this day and age to having political representation at the national level. So, he seems a little disingenuous, but I’m okay with that.

Another point related to religion that I found less than compelling in this book was Senator Obama’s belief that young people have a desperate desire for a sense of purpose. I think most people like to have a sense of purpose, but I don’t see any real evidence indicating a wholesale return to religion among young people. Sure, adolescents are about as religious as their parents are (see Smith and Denton’s 2004 book), but after adolescents, parental religion isn’t even correlated with adult religion. Children leave religion in droves after about 18. Are they looking for a sense of purpose? I’m not inclined to think so, though many probably will eventually try to find one. So, using this as the basis of some of his arguments just doesn’t seem founded in the empirical literature.

Another sociological faux pas is Senator Obama’s comparison of families today with families of the 1950s. He pushes this idea particularly hard for blacks, claiming the ideal black family was the black family from the 1950s. As Stephanie Coontz illustrated in her amazing book, The Way We Never Were, the 1950s family was both an anomaly and a facade. Thanks to a variety of changes – major wars, economic and technological advances, migration, marketing, etc. - the family of the 1950s was just weird. Today, nuclear families – a husband, wife, and two kids – are a minority, not the majority. Nuclear families never were an overwhelming majority. And, even when they were common in the 1950s they were not a panacea – many women were oppressed, depressed, and angry and fathers actually spent less time with their kids. I understand the attraction of make believe nostalgia, but I’m not a fan of propaganda techniques in politics. There was no “heyday” of the nuclear family. The family is ever changing and malleable; there is no hard and fast form that is the ideal, and that is what makes the concept so lasting. (He does, however, get the reason behind women working outside the home in increasing numbers partially right – economic pressures, not some “decline” in family values and not even feminism.)

I want to return, briefly, to the point I made above, that Senator Obama appears to be a moderate who is willing to compromise and able to empathize. He makes a number of great points about conservatives, in general, and the Bush administration, in particular. Specifically, he addresses the claim that both of these groups are fascists. While I’m no fan of either conservatives or the Bush administration, I think Senator Obama is right on this point – we are a far cry from Naziistic fascism. Let’s just hope we stop traveling down that road soon. Another attractive characteristic of the Senator is that he admits he doesn’t have all the answers. This ties into the same point as he realizes that government should not be monopolistic in favor of the ruling party. Republicans are, yes, people too (gasp!), and their perspectives are needed as they represent the beliefs of a large segment of the population. Even if we think they are crazy, we need to try to understand their views so we can work with them.

Overall, I thought this was a generally insightful and engaging read. It does a good job of introducing the Senator and his views. It also has a certain appeal for those of us wondering just how we can bring the two ends of the culture war spectrum together to enact meaningful change. Compromise is essential. Those unwilling to do so (fundamentalists), can’t actually be tolerated for the safety, security, and sanity of the rest of us. (I know that sounds bad, but it is what it is.)

Author:

John Perkins

Publisher:

Plume

Date of Publication:

2005

ISBN:

0452287081

Rating:

3

Summary:

I picked this up (as an audio book) after hearing an interview with the author on NPR. I was really excited about the book as I believed it was going to go into depth about how large corporations, in conjunction with the federal government of the United States, use loans and development packages to manipulate and control foreign governments. I also thought it was going to be full of amazing stories about the “hits” of the author. I was partially right on the first count, less so on the second.

The book begins with the author, John Perkins, describing how he ended up getting involved in international economic forecasting. He got a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Boston College in the 1960s (or 1970s, I don’t remember the exact dates), then spent a few years in the Peace Corps working in South America, where he picked up Spanish. After that, via some connections through his spouse at the time and the NSA, he was recruited by an “engineering” firm in Boston, Chas T. Main, that is similar to Halliburton in that it often bid for contracts with foreign governments.

Perkins then explains that his job at the company was to develop relatively fictitious economic forecasts for these countries so as to support the contracts and loans the countries wanted from different development banks, including the World Bank. The contracts were extremely lucrative for Perkins, his company, and the U.S. Government, which, Perkins claims, basically used the ridiculously large loans to bludgeon the governments of these countries into step with American interests.

The basic premise is that Perkins was specifically trained (cloak and dagger style) to do whatever was necessary to make the loans possible. The idea being, once the loan was in place to the foreign government wouldn’t be able to pay back the loan. And, of course, the loans were always contingent upon the foreign governments hiring U.S. contractors to do almost all of the work, keeping the money in the hands of U.S. corporations, who bribed the federal government to sponsor all of this. Once the foreign government defaulted on the loan, it would become beholden to the U.S. government and would essentially have to do its bidding – whether that meant cheaper imports to the U.S. or voting in accordance with the U.S.’s demands at the UN, the idea was basically “empire building” through economic warfare rather than traditional warfare.

Of course, Perkins also claims that economic warfare was just the first assault – if that failed, there were two additional options – CIA assassinations (he calls them “the jackals”) or traditional war. He cites numerous instances when leaders of countries “mysteriously” died in helicopter and plane crashes after refusing to cooperate with the U.S. on these loans, as well as the invasion of Panama to bolster his claims.

Ultimately, Perkins decides that his role in this enormous conspiracy to make the U.S. an empire is unethical, so he leaves. He went on to start his own energy and consulting company and write a number of books on New Age religion, shamanism, and pop-psychology. Eventually he decided he was distanced enough from his former role that he felt he could write this book, describing his role in burdening several countries with unbearable debt, including: Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Ecuador, and Panama.

Review:

I really was excited to read this book as the interview I heard with him made it seem as though this was an insider who decided to rat out a corrupt and unethical system. But as I listened to the book, I became increasingly disappointed. There are a lot of problems…

First and foremost, many of the stories the author tells seem so far-fetched as to be not quite believable. Don’t get me wrong, I think there probably is a lot of unethical finagling of loans and debts to bring countries in line. That basic claim probably has some merit. I don’t know how much, and reading this book didn’t give me a good sense of how much, but it probably happens. We know, in fact, there is corruption in international contracts, as seen in Iraq with the no bid contracts of contracting companies like Halliburton. So, there is reason to believe this kind of thing happens. But the way John Perkins describes things makes me skeptical of at least some of his claims.

Interestingly, this is actually a two-fold criticism of the book. When the book does seem believable (e.g., meeting with foreign leaders, talking with other business people, etc.), what he describes seems utterly believable and, in fact, very quotidian. It’s basically like he is describing a boring business meeting – no high drama cloak and dagger at all. About ¼ of the book describes these kinds of boring meetings. When he does start describing cloak and dagger type stuff (e.g., secret meetings with dissidents and revolutionaries, secret training from other hit men, etc.), it just doesn’t seem believable. I don’t want to claim that Mr. Perkins is a liar, but an exaggerator? Probably. For instance, he tells one story about a puppet show he attended in Indonesia where the puppeteer depicted Richard Nixon as devouring countries, including Indonesia, with the intention of controlling them. It was as though this puppeteer had all of the insights of John Perkins as he performed the puppet show, which is awfully convenient if you are trying to make a point about the mistreatment of people in developing countries by the federal government of the U.S.

Additionally, the author depicts himself as having a nagging conscience about what he is doing from day one. His depiction of his own activities is generally positive, as though he was the one moral character afloat in a sea of immoral, greedy assassins. I don’t buy it. I think he is depicting his past in a way that corresponds better with how he thinks about himself today, a tendency we all have. By the end of the book I was utterly disappointed; I couldn’t tell what was true and what was not. (As a help to readers, check out this short entry in Wikipedia on the book, which describes the book as classic “conspiracy theory”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man).

Strangely, while I think he exaggerates much of what he claims happened, he also doesn’t ever talk about the results of his machinations. He says he set up Indonesia, Ecuador, Panama, and even Saudi Arabia to be controlled by the U.S., but he never says what happened. Why? I understand he was writing to describe his (alleged) role in setting up the loans, but why not describe what resulted from his efforts. Oh, and get this: Perkins only worked at Chas T. Main for about seven years in the 1970s. He left the company at the beginning of the 1980s and basically got out of the “hit man” game. Apparently seven years in a field is all the time you need to know how everything works. He published this memoir about 25 years later; I wonder just how good his memory is…

In addition to the big criticism of just not knowing what was and was not true, there are a lot of other problems. For instance, there is a lot of preaching in this book. I’d say at least half of the book is Mr. Perkins going on and on about what he thinks is right and wrong (his system is based on the convenience moral philosophy of, “whatever I do and did is right, whatever I didn’t do or don’t do is wrong). This, in turn, means that probably less than half the book actually describes his exploits as an economic hit man. Since I didn’t read the book to be preached to, I wasn’t all that impressed with this part of the book. Add the ½ preaching to ¼ boring stories about quotidian business life, and what you are left with is ¼ of a book made up of cloak and dagger stories that are of questionable accuracy and authenticity. Disappointment indeed.

So what is all his preaching about? Well, he’s definitely anti-corporations. I recognize this is a tricky issue, especially for me, a sociologist, to consider. Many liberals and progressives in the U.S. today are very anti-corporatism. I can understand the reasons and I empathize with some of these ideas. Corporations, according to this line of thinking, are: greedy, with their own interests at heart; they are inconsiderate of people’s wants and needs; they are corrupting; they destroy culture and traditions; they exploit and manipulate; they are too powerful. I think it is accurate to say there are corporations that have done each of the above, and that is, in my opinion, not a good thing. But I also have to recognize the enormous benefits that stem from large corporations. I’m typing this on a laptop built by Acer, a multi-national corporation with offices and manufacturing centers all around the world. No matter how hard you try to get around it, the only groups with the resources to build a laptop are large corporations. The only groups with the resources to manufacture and produce much of what we use to criticize corporations are multi-national corporations. Without them, we would not have many of the conveniences and even necessities of modern life. Mom and pop stores don’t have the resources to make LCD screens, laptops, solar cells, etc. That takes corporations. Are they perfect? No. Max Weber and Karl Marx saw the imperfections over 100 years ago. But are they necessary? Unless we all want to go back to living like undeveloped aboriginal groups, then yes, they are necessary. The only other option at present is communism, but what is that if not a corrupted variation of corporatism? (I am, of course, referring to the various forms of communism that have actually been implemented, not to Karl Marx’s understanding of communism that did not include an elite ruling class). So, Mr. Perkins, who actually ran a large corporation of his own, has jumped on the anti-corporatism bandwagon.

He also attacks education. Well, it’s not so much an attack as it is a dismissal. As I mentioned in the summary, Mr. Perkins has a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration. At one point in the book he goes off on one of his many diatribes, this one talking about how he knows far more about economics than almost any PhD ever will because he lived and participated in the manipulation of macro economics. Ergo, a PhD is basically worthless because all you deal with is theories, not the reality of macro economics. The irony in this, of course, is that he continuously harps about how he does have a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, as though that makes him qualified to do what he did. I again got the sense that whatever Mr. Perkins had or did was basically the best and ideal thing. Whatever he didn’t have or didn’t do was not a good thing. Ergo, if you have a BA in Business, you’ve gone as far as you need. Any thing more than a BA, according to Mr. Perkins, and all you’re good for is doing the bidding of the people with BAs. Seems a little short-sighted and naïve to me, but then, I have a PhD. He’s biased; I’m biased…

As if his BA in Business Administration wasn’t enough to qualify him to write this book (along with his experience as an economic hit man, of course), he also seems to think that his previous pop-psychology and New Age books about Shamanism make him qualified to write a book about macro economics. In my opinion, they go far beyond making him qualified; they reveal his tendencies and proclivities – Mr. Perkins writes these books not to educate people but to make money. And how are you going to sell copies of a (supposedly) non-fiction book about macro-economics? Why, how else but to embellish it and turn it into a diatribe against multi-national corporations. His previous “experience” writing books like “The World is As You Dream It” don’t increase my confidence in him as an author. If anything, they have the opposite effect. The world isn’t as you dream it; life doesn’t magically adjust to what we want. Anyone who claims it does is probably selling you something, like a book filled with preaching and exaggerations…

The book wraps up with an epilogue filled with platitudes and recommendations for the future. Mr. Perkins is full of ideas of what people should do. “Do as I say, not as I do” comes to mind here. This is especially ironic given the fact that Perkins made hundreds of thousands of dollars (if you can believe him) fiddling around as an economic hit man. He got his, now he doesn’t want anyone else to do it. Hmmm…. Does that seem hypocritical to anyone else? His ideas are pretty lame and the epilogue would have been better spent talking about what resulted in the countries where he worked.

Lest people come away from the book thinking it is completely awful, I want to point out one idea I thought was actually kind of insightful, in a weird way. Mr. Perkins talks about how he sees the business people of today as a new kind of army – they travel around the world doing the bidding of multi-national corporations and think of themselves as upstanding citizens. In fact, and this is a fact of corporations regardless of your view toward corporations, what those people are doing is spreading economic exploitation. I don’t know that there is any way around that exploitation, but what makes this idea kind of intriguing is the point Mr. Perkins makes about these individuals being viewed as upstanding, moral individuals, even though they are spreading exploitation and doing the bidding of their corporate overlords. Like I said, this is probably inevitable and I don’t have a good alternative, but it is a little disturbing when you think about it this way: the exploiters are the moral ones…

Overall, I don’t recommend this book. I think it is apparent enough from a close reading of the news that corporations and governments collude to benefit each other. Mr. Perkins doesn’t really add much to that understanding, not even great cloak and dagger stories. Add to that his preaching, New Age and pop-psychology platitudes and anti-education and anti-corporatism attitudes and this just isn’t worth the time or money. It’s an interesting idea, but ineptly excuted.

(Note: I listened to this book as an MP3.)