In political terms, who are the ‘middle class’?

Previously published in the Terre Haute Tribune-Star, 10/14/2012

TERRE HAUTE — Will the 2012 presidential election win a prize for how many times the candidates say they care about the “middle class?” Who is this “middle class” they talk about? In many ways, the candidates are really talking to anyone and no one at the same time.




“Middle class” is a bland term, one that is broadly inclusive in an uncontroversial way and helps the candidates obscure their policy paybacks to their political base. To the candidates, middle class status is simple: it’s a single dimension, an income range, with no stated bottom, but a ceiling of $250,000. This is the political equivalent of redefining the shrinking middle class to enlarge it. There is no serious discussion of poverty. Hence, the middle class is construed as expansive. In short, it’s America.



According to the Pew Research Center’s study of 2,508 U.S. adults during July of this year, 49 percent identified themselves as “middle class.” The middle class brand is for mass consumption. Self-identified middle class status varies little by race, age (except for 65 and above), or education. Forty-six percent of those who earn $100,000 or more, 65 percent who earn $50,000-$99,999, 51 percent who earn $30,000-$49,999, and 35 percent who earn less than $30,000 self-identify as middle class.



If middle class means middle income, Pew used Census data to estimate how many people fall into a range of middle incomes. They found the share of adults who self-identified as middle class in the survey was about equal to the share of adults living in households defined as middle income using Census data falling in a range of two-thirds to double the overall median size adjusted household income. Hence, Pew found that 51 percent of adults lived in households with incomes $33,331-$101,004. If President Obama and Gov. Romney think middle income is above $200,000, it would be interesting to hear them explain why.



It is to the politicians’ advantage to use an abstract concept of social class, one based only on income. This simplistic, non-relational, concept of social class helps to obscure real social class differences that might cause political difficulties for the economic elite in the United States.



Many reading this surely remember everyday terms that real people use to describe various social class groupings. One that was common just 20 years ago was “working class.” And working class people had influential non-governmental organizations to help represent their interests in the rough and tumble world of politics — labor unions. How about white collar and blue collar? Those terms reflect social class as a relation, not just a crude income category; they reflect social class in terms of one’s relationship to the economic institution. In short, how a person makes their living, which is not the same as one’s income.



People who earn their money by working for a paycheck are treated differently on a daily basis in their work and through public policy than those who earn their money by “renting” their wealth. Most employees are “at- will” employees and serve at the will of their employers. Losing their job means losing their income, their health insurance and a whole lot more.



Others can earn a middle class income through dividends, interest payments on large sums of money and buying and selling stores of wealth. Others earn their money directly off the labor of their employees. Some earn a salary by supervising and managing the labor of others who in turn make money for the enterprise’s owners.



Public policy treats sources of income differently. Income earned through work is, except at the very lowest levels, taxed higher than income earned through expending no effort other than lending money, buying municipal bonds, and renting assets. In short, those who can live off their wealth are in a different social class than those who live mainly or solely from what they can earn with their labor. A job can be easily expropriated, but wealth cannot. These people are in different classes even if their incomes are similar.



Reducing complex social relationships that create power differences between people into broad groupings of people based on income serves only to benefit those who govern the rest of us. The Washington gridlock and the political polarization isn’t serving the interests of the middle class. Whose interests does such a situation benefit? The poor?



The median household income in Vigo County in 2011 was $39,229. Twelve percent of households earn over $100,000 and 22.5 percent of families with minor children live in poverty. That means that virtually everyone, to listen to President Obama and Gov. Romney, are middle class in Terre Haute. Really?

Morning not just a time of day, it’s an emotion

Previously published in the Terre Haute Tribune Star, 16 September 2012

TERRE HAUTE — During church last Sunday, one of the hymns was “Morning Has Broken,” popularized by Cat Stevens in the early 1970s. As the organist played the first few bars and the congregation began to sing, I experienced one of those emotional waves that only music causes; that spine-tingling, goose-bump raising, overwhelming emotional rush. It surprised me and for the rest of the service I sat contemplating why had I reacted so strongly to this song? Nothing like church to prompt introspection.

I am a morning person, easily rising early daily, even when I don’t really want to, around 5-ish. Always been this way; scientists tell us that some are wired this way and others are not. I’m definitely wired that way, as I suspect my father was.

My psychologist colleagues likely would point to some aspect of personality for both early rising and the emotional reaction to the song. I can shoe-horn myself into a psychological profile: I like beginnings better than endings (you can tell that by looking at my many started projects that never seem to get finished). I have a fairly short memory for bad things, each day is new, why hold onto yesterday’s crap (and frankly why hang on to the good stuff … today’s is new!). The nutritionist might point to the need for coffee. While I like coffee, I don’t drink enough anymore for a coffee jones to explain my “morningness” or my emotional response to that tune.

As a sociologist, I tend to lean toward explanations of behavior in terms of socialization, relationships, situations, and perhaps values, which include the entire range of motivators, economics, and other types of reward systems. Sociological explanations are not for individual persons but for the entire class of “morningphiles.”

As I contemplated through the morning prayer, I noted that I spent my childhood and youth waking early with my dad. He rose every day at 5:30 a.m. As he headed for the kitchen to make coffee, he would turn on my bedroom light. I’d pad out to the “Florida” room, exchange a few words with Dad, who was not much of a talker, as he settled into his morning routine, which included watching the sunrise, the animal action in our backyard, and girding himself for a day of work that he was not all that fond of.

I, by the time I was in school, had my own routine that included reading the newspaper, front page to the classifieds, and making myself breakfast. My mother, who was not an early riser, made me independent and self-reliant, qualities I hope my wife and daughters appreciate. This routine lasted until I left home for college and resumed anytime I was home.

I also spent many special mornings with my dad. He was an avid bass fisherman and we spent many a weekend fishing. Getting on the water before dawn was always a goal. He and I spent many mornings on Florida lakes and rivers.

While I appreciate the solitude that being the first one up provides (that and a hot shower), I also enjoy sharing morning with others. Because my wife works on a factory schedule (public school) and I do not, I dealt with our daughters, waking them, fixing them breakfast, getting them going. One daughter is a morningphile and one a morningphobe. They are now gone from the house, but I still have the dog. She and I have our own routine that includes barking at the dark and morning carrots.

Even on vacations, I rise early, and like to find a neat place to sit, sip coffee (check email and read the newspaper online now) and talk with other morning junkies. I enjoy the morning light, its coolness, its freshness, and as the song notes, “the sweetness of the wet garden.”

I always feel good in the morning, every morning. It is not too much a stretch to say, I go to bed at night looking forward to another morning.

I’m not sure this introspective discourse explains my emotional reaction Sunday. As I reflect on what I just wrote and think about how to end this essay, I can’t help but observe that I associate mornings with my most intimate relationships. Not sure that is why I reacted so to “Morning Has Broken,” but I know today is a good day because it is early afternoon and the light and feel of the day still has a morning quality to it.

Rep. Akin’s view has roots in pro-life movement

Previously published in the Terre Haute Tribune Star, 26 August 2012

TERRE HAUTE — “It seems to me first of all from what I understand from doctors that’s really rare [a pregnancy resulting from rape], if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”


— Missouri Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin in a local news interview on Aug. 19 in response to a question about abortion in the case of rape




To most this quotation sounds bizarre/offensive/obscene, so much so that leading conservatives have pleaded with Mr. Akin to step aside so that another candidate can be put on the Missouri ballot.



As the father of two daughters, Mr. Akin’s statement completely disqualifies him in my view. But he is not alone in those views, they have a history in the pro-life movement.



The extreme position of outlawing all abortions in all cases is not widely supported. Exceptions in the case of rape or threats to the health of the mother enjoy broad-based support and are currently constitutionally necessary in any law restricting abortion.



Kristen Luker, in “Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood” published in 1984, carefully described and analyzed the worldviews and strategies of both pro-choice and pro-life activists. Exceptions are unacceptable to the pure pro-life ideology. The fictive female biological response to “shut that whole thing down” was once a common response of pro-life activists to this moral/ethical dilemma. Luker writes: “Most of the pro-life people [activists] we interviewed said that women who are raped simply don’t become pregnant very often, and many of them said they thought this was because something biological happens to rape victims that precludes the possibility of pregnancy.”



This view may not be as widespread as it once was because ardent holders of pro-life views today see the hand of God in pregnancies resulting from rape. Sharon Barnes, a Missouri GOP activist, is quoted in defending Mr. Akin, “If God has chosen to bless this person [the rape victim] with a life, you don’t kill it.” In short, pro-lifers have substituted a narrow religious interpretation for their former bad biology.



That pregnancies following rapes are rare is because of how rape victims are medically treated. Those rape victims that come forward and accept treatment are given powerful “morning after” drugs thus preventing pregnancies. Yet current efforts to define personhood beginning at conception would effectively outlaw those procedures. Such pregnancies would be justified as God’s will or “a blessing” as a matter of public policy. By such logic, a woman resisting a rapist could be resisting “God’s will.” Is that next?



In Indiana, current law provides that a rapist father can claim custody of his child (I believe this is the case in 30 other states). In Indiana, current efforts to change that law are running into opposition.



Before Mr. Akin uttered “legitimate rape” he framed well the moral conundrum, “Well you know, people always wanna try and make that one of those things, well, how do ya, how do ya, how do you slice this particularly tough sort of ethical question.” He followed with the sentence that caused the firestorm.



He is correct in part; it is a “tough sort of ethical question.” Yet, he and his fellow believers avoid the tough ethical question by inserting the active hand of God or myths concerning female biology.



These extreme positions are those of a relentless, relatively small, but politically well-organized and funded group, which is, in effect, forcing its extreme, religious views on America. There are many religions as well as religious individuals who do not share these views, including many Christians, Jews, Muslims, not to mention atheists. Indeed, the views of the extreme pro-life movement mirror closely Theravada Buddhism. I suspect that if the justifications for banning abortion were in terms of “karmic sin,” “karmic rebirth,” and thus “consciousness begins at conception,” that those views would not be acceptable as public policy, but perfectly acceptable as an individual’s way to decide these thorny ethical and moral dilemmas for themselves.



Women who are raped and perhaps become pregnant must actually wrestle with that tough ethical/moral question. Imagine that she and her husband are trying to get pregnant. Taking the morning after pill might end what they are trying to make.



It is individuals who eventually must decide and it is they and their families who bear the cost of those decisions. A public policy, albeit clean and simple (no abortions under any circumstances), takes that tough decision away from the people closest to the dilemma and inserts justifications that many, perhaps most people, do not believe in. It is imposing religion through public policy.



Let those who believe in “no abortions under any circumstances” follow that belief. Proselytize others into sharing that belief, if they must, but it is fundamentally anti-American to force religious views, through the State, down the throats of people who disagree. It violates religious freedom.

Mystique of 'guns' ensure control efforts fruitless

Previouisly published in the Terre Haute Tribune-Star, 29 July 2012

A simple Google search on “Batman shooting” produces about 376,000,000 hits. That number isn’t very meaningful until put in some context. “Barack Obama” produces about 280,000,000 hits; “Mitt Romney” about 21,000,000 hits.


Not to diminish the tragedy, but in the big picture, the upcoming presidential election is more important, yet its Google search just barely out-“hits” “Batman shooting” with 387,000,000 hits. Worldwide phenomena should produce more hits than the “Batman” shooting, so “2012 Olympics” produces about 2.4 trillion hits. It helps to put things into proper perspective.

As a sociologist I am usually more fascinated by people’s response to this kind of tragedy than to the event itself. In an age of round-the-clock media, to borrow from Roger Ebert’s review of the tragedy, “we’ve seen this movie before.” The responses are predictable: the NRA wastes no time in doing its version of a deranged Paul Revere shouting through the land, “gun control is coming, gun control is coming.” As if on cue the anti-gunners call for closing some obvious loopholes in our current gun laws which in turn has the NRA pointing with glee at evidence for the truth of their delusions.

Politicians eager to up their hits on Google issue ridiculous statements like Louie Gomert, R-Texas, suggesting that prayer in school would have prevented this problem. I’m sure Charles Whitman (the Austin, Texas, shooter from 1966 who killed 16 people) had plenty of school-led prayer growing up in Lake Worth, Fla. He had a brain tumor that likely explained his behavior. Who knows what we will find with James Holmes, the Batman shooter? There are those who blame media violence; those who blame the death penalty (both sides, too much and not enough). There are those who blame the victims for not being armed, stupidly relying on the “guvmint” to protect them.

I predict that, as with Ted Bundy, eventually someone will get an interview with him, and he will explain his own behavior. Bundy basically agreed with the theory that pornography made him do it. The psych-pundits are saying paranoid schizophrenia. Stay tuned.

I don’t think we can prevent incidents like this. We could possibly reduce the opportunities for them to happen, but in the present cultural and political climate, any attempt to control guns isn’t going to happen. The gun control lobby doesn’t seem to understand gun owners and especially the very vocal and organized (and perhaps big in numbers) “gun fetishists.”

Some disclaimers: I own guns. I grew up with guns and learned to safely handle guns very early in life — before I could drive, before I could pilot a powered watercraft, before I could go to a movie by myself. I’ve enjoyed guns for recreation; I’ve never felt the need to protect myself or my “castle” with one. I knew three people who died from gunshots (one murdered, one suicide, and one accidental), more than I knew who died in car accidents. According to the CDC, more than 30,000 people die from gunshots each year, just a few thousand less than who die in car accidents each year. Injuries are much higher. Indeed, the price of freedom is very high.

Just as cars are more than just a means of transportation, guns are more than their designed function: recreation, protection, and a means to kill others (all protected by the Second Amendment).

People add much more to them than their designed functions. For instance, an armed populace represents the ultimate bulwark against tyranny. (Please don’t try to argue whether this is possible or not, it is part of gun mystique.) Guns represent “power.” It is the ultimate way to say no or to force someone else to say yes. With our hyper-emphasis on “individualism,” guns represent freedom, independence and self-reliance every bit as much as cars do. And when we add “gun culture” to the many fears that people have of “they” (as in “they are taking away our freedom; they are taking away our way of life; they are coming for our guns”) a gun provides a sense of security and safety that our society does not provide to everyone.

And yes, as the number of guns increases and the number of “yahoos” with guns increases, more gun tragedies are going to occur with increased handgun sales and applications for concealed carry permits following each tragedy. DIY.

As long as people perceive that guns provide more solutions to their problems than does “gun control,” effective gun control is a dead-end.

As Americans, we're still far too wasteful

Previously published in the Terre Haute Tribune-Star, 8 July 2012

When did traditional American values change from thriftiness and frugality to “shop ‘till you drop,” buy now—pay later, and waste, waste, waste?

This isn’t an essay on the political mess in Washington, DC, this is about American households and “policies” that have put us on an unsustainable path (on so many levels) that a different future is inevitable.

The change in these values was not an accident. Henry Ford populated his early assembly lines with European immigrants and confronted his workers’ thriftiness and frugality with the Sociological Department who pushed the workers to spend their incomes on consumable durables instead of saving, saving, saving.

In the 70s and early 80s, tax policy gave a tax deduction for credit card interest.

How long has advertising been a business deduction? Indeed, television is practically completely paid for through advertising and television’s influence (and its advertising) on American culture is undeniable.

Mortgage interest deduction encourages home ownership and all the “stuff” that comes with it. And houses are huge compared to what they were just 30 years ago and those big houses need lots of stuff to put in it. I have a 25 year old refrigerator, dryer, and washer. I dread the day they need repair because repairs are hard to obtain. Instead, the push is to “just replace it.” My repair people scavenge parts from old machines because getting parts is difficult since they are no longer made.

We have so much “stuff” that each of us throws away 4 to 5 lbs a day, even when as much as 70 percent of it is recyclable. The amount of food Americans waste is astonishing. After paper and paperboard, food is what we throw away the most of. A University of Arizona researcher, with USDA funding, estimated that 40 to 50 percent of the food in the US is wasted. And our waist lines keep growing, nevertheless.

This was not always the way. My parents grew up during the Great Depression and they had different values, many which stuck with me. My parents didn’t throw anything away (it seemed), especially food. My dad always thought there was something he could do with cigar boxes, wrapping paper (yup, we reused it over and over again), plastic bottles and lots of other stuff. Wastefulness was not permitted! We shut lights off when we left a room, we didn’t take 45 minute showers, we didn’t waste things, even stuff that was cheap. Today, wastefulness is the default lifestyle.

Wastefulness used to be a vice (gluttony is a sin), now it is virtue. It is almost cliché to say we are “addicted to oil”, especially “cheap” oil. We have grown so used to wasting oil and other fossil fuels, from ridiculous SUVs, to monster houses, to 80 inch TVs, to moving goods from long distances, that we are now trapped by it. You can see the trap in the anemic recovery that now looks even more anemic. Despite an uptick in jobs, despite interest rates that are nil, despite the lowest taxes in 50 years, as soon as the recovery began to show some legs, oil prices began to tick up, gas prices began steadily rising, and because our society is so dependent on oil (for everything from the obvious, transportation to growing our food, to the myriad plastics that make life so cool, to pharmaceuticals) that it sucked the life out of any recovery.

We have the ingenuity to solve some of these problems. Oil is far too valuable (even if it is “cheap”) to burn up in our gas pipes. Oil is necessary if we hope to feed 9 billion people by 2050. It is too valuable to throw away in landfills in the form of one-time use plastic utensils, plastic water and soda bottles, and plastic bags.

At the very least recycle it, but even that still wastes this precious substance. We must demand greater efficiencies, eye with skepticism how much energy “convenience” actually costs, and develop alternative and renewable energy sources, including a return to human energy (that will help reduce our “waste” lines (pun intended)).

These aren’t brilliant insights nor an original viewpoint, but it’s a viewpoint that few of us and even fewer of our “leaders” are willing to address head-on. We don’t have to wait for government to begin change in our households. Recycling is getting more convenient locally even if the economics on it are upside down. But that is a start.

Top 1 Percent Holds More Than Third of Wealth

Previously published in the Terre Haute Tribune-Star 10June 2012

My last essay focused on growing income inequality and its demonstrated relationship with a range of social ills. This month I want to focus on wealth inequality. All statistics are taken from the work of Edward Wolff.

Income (conventionally defined) is money received in the form of wages, salaries, tips, alimony, welfare, interest and some dividends. For the most part, income is derived from employment —work. And for a brief period last fall, the press and the political bloviators discussed the graph showing the increasing concentration of income among the top 1 percent compared to the 99 percent.

Wealth is one’s (or one household’s) net worth, the sum total of cash on hand, the value of real estate, assets, stocks, bonds, and ownership of private business(es) minus debt. For the vast majority of people, the 90 percent, one’s home is their primary financial asset.

Whatever people think or believe about the state of income inequality, wealth inequality is far more striking. Wealth, since the 1970s, has become increasingly concentrated at the top. The most recent data on the distribution of wealth is from 2007 (new data should come out in 2013) and it shows that the top 1 percent owns 34.6 percent of the total wealth (it was in the 20s in the early 1970s). In contrast, the share of the top 1 percent of income earners was “just” 21.3 percent in 2007.

“Millionaire” still retains high status in the U.S. Despite popular views that millionaires are common, according to IRS figures for tax returns filed in 2009, only 0.1 percent of tax returns filed (among 235 million) had incomes of at least one million dollars. It is one thing to earn a million a year, another to have total assets of at least one million, and in 2007 just over 6 percent of households had net worth that high. Indeed, when we examine the bottom 40 percent of households, their mean net worth is just $2,200.

Wealth differs from income in terms of the social power it confers. Wealth is transferable. A job/career is not. If I inherit a business, I can hire my relatives, including my children, to work the business and can eventually pass the business on to them, but not my job. As I have written in these pages before, the employment relationship is a significant one and it is asymmetrical with respect to social power.

Many argue that taxes on wealth should be reduced, if not eliminated. The argument goes that those who obtain money through their wealth (by investing in stocks, businesses, etc.) are risking their property and deserve to reap the rewards and should not be punished with a high tax rate. Hence, the 15 percent tax rate on capital gains (the selling of an asset and making money on it). Too bad I can’t auction off my job to the highest bidder when I decide to vacate it. My income is taxed at 28 percent. If I could sell my job, it would be taxed at 15 percent.

The amazing thing about risking one’s capital in business is that it gets others working for you. In the private sector, a job is not a gift or something miraculous that rich folks provide when they are happy, as the current rhetoric of “job creator” practically suggests. Business owners don’t create jobs to be civic-minded. Rather, businesses create jobs as a way to make money. Anyone who works in the private sector makes money for the company or provides some kind of valuable service or their job disappears. Unless a business owner has poor business skills, they are only going to create a job when there is a chance to make money for the business.

In 2007, the top 1 percent owned 49.3 percent of all stocks and mutual funds, 60.6 percent of all financial securities, 38.9 percent of all trusts, 62.4 percent of all business equity, and 28.3 percent of all non-home real estate. In short, they owned 49.7 percent of the productive assets in the United States.

Work in the private sector and it’s a 50-50 chance your job helps enrich someone in the top 1 percent.

Politics suppresses issue of income inequality

previously pubished in the Terre Haute Tribune Star, 4/29/2012

It’s looking like a major theme of this year’s presidential election will be “fairness,” with a focus on income inequality. Of course, no serious discussion/debate about income inequality is going to occur as that will be swept aside in the theater of presidential politics.

Unfortunately, Democrats are framing the “debate” in terms of who has money and who doesn’t and increasing taxes on the haves while Republicans will counter with charges of class warfare, class envy and spending and tax cuts.

I’ve spent 25 years studying economic inequality. It’s too bad the topic isn’t discussed like a public health issue; don’t politicize the condition, politicize the solutions to it.

Yes, high income inequality negatively affects everyone, not just those on the low end of the income scale. Like pollution it negatively affects everyone, not just poor people (although it may affect them more).

Below, I am going to refer to data from The Equality Trust (www.equalitytrust.org.uk). “The Equality Trust is an independent, evidence based campaign working to reduce income inequality in order to improve the quality of life in the UK.” They use international comparisons of mostly western-industrial democracies (Japan and Singapore are included) to make much of their case. For most of the comparisons, they measure income inequality as a ratio of the proportion of total income received by the top 20 percent of households to the bottom 20 percent of households. The data they present are graphical and easy to understand. Basically they are correlations between income inequality and incidences or rates of other things.

Income inequality is associated with negative physical and mental health. Singapore shows the highest level of income inequality with the U.S. close by in second, but the U.S. has the highest infant mortality among the compared countries (by a wide margin). As income inequality increases, so does obesity.

People like to chant that the U.S. is No. 1. Here are things the data show the U.S. is No. 1 in: obesity rates; drug abuse; prisoners per 100,000 population; murder rate (more than 50 percent higher than our closest competitor). The U.S. also has the highest rate of mental illness.

All these disparate “No. 1s” have one thing in common, our high level of income inequality. And it is not that we have really, really poor people, it is that our rich are so much richer than everyone else. The distance is astounding, creating very separate societies and realities.

No doubt many are thinking, “well, I’m not obese, I don’t know anyone who has been murdered, no one I know is in prison, I don’t use drugs and I am not mentally ill and don’t know anyone who is.” I’m not finished.

The graph for high school dropout rates and inequality shows data for the U.S. 50 states. And sure enough, the states with lower levels of income inequality have lower rates of high school drop-outs while those with higher drop-out rates also have higher rates of income inequality. Indiana is in the bottom quarter of drop-out rates and in the bottom quarter of income inequality. I wish they had a graph of the 50 states with the other international states.

Births to teens is easily the highest in the U.S. and we have very high income inequality. None of your family may be having babies while teens, but it is willful blindness to deny high teen birth rates don’t affect us all. And no doubt related to teen births is the association between income inequality and the UNICEF index of child well being. We lose our No. 1 rating there. Israel, New Zealand and the U.K. rate worse.

If these examples are not enough to convince you that income inequality negatively affects us all, then how about this: The more unequal a society is, the less likely people believe others can be trusted, so even if you trust others, others don’t trust you. Much of the experienced degradation of community and social life in the U.S. can be linked to increasing levels of income inequality.

I urge anyone interested in income inequality to visit The Equality Trust. There is more explanation of the observed associations as well as proposed remedies. Doing so won’t make you a liberal or want to vote Democratic, if you are worried about such things. Indeed, income inequality and its correlated “pathologies” are factual. It is the remedies we should be arguing over, not politicizing whether to acknowledge the problem.