Poverty and American Democracy

When we look around the world, the United States lags behind most of its peer nations—other industrial democracies—in many social indicators. The latest evidence of this concerns poverty and comes from a new report by the Economic Policy Institute http://bit.ly/LVRjx9

According to this report, the US poverty rate, using an international standard of the proportion of people living in households with income below half of a nation’s median household income, is 17.3%. This percentage is the highest among the world’s industrial democracies and almost twice as high as the average poverty rate for all these nations. Our neighbor to the north, Canada, has a poverty rate of only 12%, while the United Kingdom, where the Olympics are now being held, has a rate of 11%. Denmark and Iceland have the lowest rates, under 7%.

Using this same poverty standard, 23.1% of US children live in poor households, a rate more than twice higher than the average for all democracies and almost double Canada’s rate of 13.3%.

Compounding the problem of American poverty is the fact that the United States also spends much less than its peer nations to help its poor. As the EPI report explains, “peer countries are much more likely than the United States to step in where markets and labor policy fail in order to lift their most disadvantaged citizens out of poverty.”

Why does the United States do so little to help its poor? Social research shows that Americans tend to blame the poor for being poor. This belief lowers their support for government efforts to help the poor. Because there is no great desire to help the poor, they do not get helped.

The rest of the world’s democracies are wiser than the United States. Each of these nations recognizes that its society fares better when its poor fare better. In addition to the simple moral imperative of helping “the least among us,” there is less crime when we help the poor, there is less illness and disease and lower medical spending when we help the poor, and there is a healthier economy when we help the poor. From the world’s democracies, the United States has much to learn.

The Dark Knight Massacre

I write this as details are still emerging of the massacre in Colorado at a showing of The Dark Knight Rises. At least 12 are dead and some three dozen wounded.

This massacre highlights once again the issue of firearms in the United States. Do guns keep us safer, or do they make us less safe? Many studies try to answer this question, and they do not come up with a consistent answer, but they do point to one conclusion overall. Here is my take on what this conclusion is:

Guns do make some people safer, but overall they make people and our society as a whole much less safe than more safe. Households with guns suffer more gun injuries and gun deaths than households without guns, even after controlling for such factors as alcohol use and family conflict. States with more guns have more gun homicides than states with fewer guns. Perhaps people in dangerous states buy guns to protect themselves, thus accounting for this correlation, but it does seem that the presence of handguns is raising the homicide rate.

For me, the most persuasive evidence of the danger of firearms comes from international evidence. Among all industrial democracies, the US ranks above average for aggravated assault and robbery rates, but not at the very top. However, it ranks at the top for homicide rates, and its rate is far higher than whatever nation might be in second place in any given year. Because the major difference between an aggravated assault and a homicide is whether the victim dies, the inescapable conclusion is that the very high homicide rate in the US reflects its very high gun ownership rate. What would have been aggravated assaults in other nations become homicides here because a gun is used rather than a knife, club, or other non-firearm weapon.

As we think about the Dark Knight massacre, one more thing should be kept in mind. The shooter was a man. When it comes to violence in general and massacres like this in particular, gender matters. Most men certainly do not commit violence, let alone massacres, but men commit violence at far higher rates than women, and they also commit almost all massacres, and every massacre that I can think of right now. We must raise our boys differently so that they do not develop the potential to commit violence. And we must do what is possible within the constraints of Supreme Court interpretations of the Second Amendment to limit the lethality of firearms.

On Not Helping Single Mothers

Earlier this week the New York Times had a front-page article on single parenthood and social class (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/us/two-classes-in-america-divided-by-i-do.html?pagewanted=all). The article highlighted the budgetary and parenting problems that single mothers experience and emphasized the importance of marriage for providing the extra income and parenting potential that a husband brings.

Now Katha Pollitt of The Nation has provided an excellent critique of this article (http://www.thenation.com/blog/168932/new-york-times-misses-mark-inequality-marriage?rel=emailNation). She points out that boyfriends/fathers/husbands are often a crapshoot—you can end up with a good one, or you can end up with a bad one. And she also points out that single mothers in the United States lack the social supports that most other democracies routinely provide. As Pollitt puts it, “That’s a very American value right there: if you screw up in your early 20s, you—and your children—are on your own for life.”

This last point is crucial. As I emphasize in my new social problems textbook with Flat World Knowledge (http://catalog.flatworldknowledge.com/catalog/editions/5247), the United States sorely lags behind other democracies in providing all kinds of things that single parents and low-income married couples need: free or heavily subsidized child care and parental leave, various income provisions, and free or heavily subsidized health care. We blame Americans who haven’t “made it” for not making it, and we leave them to fend for themselves. Other democracies have decided that it’s important to do everything possible to help those in need so that their societies as a whole can flourish. As we think about single mothers and low-income families, we must recognize that their problems would be much less severe if our government helped them as much as other democratic governments help their counterparts.

Doing Nothing at Penn State

Edmund Burke, the 18^th-century British philosopher, famously wrote, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” There have been many examples of this truism throughout history, and perhaps we should change Burke’s “good men” to “good people” to avoid sexist language. This language issue aside, the sex abuse scandal at Penn State University is a very recent example of Burke’s wise saying and admonition.

As has now been thoroughly documented by an investigation initiated by Penn State trustees, the very top academic and athletic administrators at Penn State decided to not to alert legal authorities after becoming aware of Jerry Sandusky’s sexual abuse of children. These administrators were ostensibly “good men” who decided to do nothing. Their silence allowed Sandusky to have continued access to boys for more than a decade. His victims and their families will have to deal the rest of their lives with the untold damage of these men doing nothing. The good name of Penn State, one of the nation’s great universities, now lies in disgrace.

Because this is a sociology and criminology blog, perhaps I should talk about the sociological and/or criminological significance and implications of the Penn State scandal (although “scandal” is too benign a word for what occurred). But I will leave that to others. Let me say something instead about the moral significance of the scandal by returning to Burke’s famous words. Perhaps the most important lesson I learned as a teenager from the Southern civil rights movement and, especially, from the Vietnam antiwar movement (in which I became old enough to participate) was the need to speak out when governments and individuals were committing evil. There are many ways of speaking out, but speak out we must. If even one person at Penn State had decided not to “do nothing,” many boys would not have been sexually abused.

In the face of evil, either on the interpersonal level or on the societal level, we cannot afford do do nothing. That is the sad but essential lesson we should all take from what happened, and perhaps especially from what did not happen, at Penn State.

Obama and Same-Sex Marriage

A month ago I criticized President Obama’s decision against issuing an executive order banning discrimination by federal contractors against LGBT employees. Today I applaud his momentous statement in an interview with ABC in favor of same-sex marriage.

Same-sex marriage is a very contentious issue with people holding strongly felt views on both sides of the issue. However, the social science evidence does not support the arguments of opponents of same-sex marriages. There is simply no evidence that same-sex marriage weakens the institution of marriage or somehow causes divorce among heterosexual spouses. There is likewise no evidence that the children of same-sex couples are psychologically harmed by their parents’ sexual orientation. To the contrary, their psychological well-being is at least as high as that of the children of heterosexual parents.

Although some thirty states now have laws or constitutional amendments that ban same-sex marriages, the United States has been moving slowly but surely toward popular and legal acceptance of these marriages. Younger people are much more in favor than older people of same-sex marriage. Assuming this trend continues—and there is no reason to expect that it will not—public support for same-sex marriage should continue to rise in the coming years as older people pass away and are replaced by younger generations.

The president’s statement may have been late in coming for many same-sex marriage proponents, but the fact remains that he is the first sitting president to support same-sex marriage. How this support might affect his reelection will not be known for some time, but it is very likely that his support will help to further the prospect that same-sex couples will increasingly be allowed to marry. 

Racial Bias and the Death Penalty

A North Carolina judge has overturned a death penalty conviction after concluding from statistical research that the prosecution focused on removing African Americans from the pool of potential jurors. The New York Times reports on this important decision here: http://nyti.ms/HSQZNC

One of the many reasons for opposing the death penalty is racial bias in its implementation. From the research on this issue, the most pervasive form of racial bias appears to involve the race of the victim. Simply put, when whites are victims of homicides, prosecutors are more likely to seek the death penalty, and jurors are more likely to decide on a sentence of death, then when African Americans are victims. In effect, prosecutors and jurors are placing more importance on the life of a white person than on the life of a black person.

When hearing about this type of evidence, students sometimes wonder whether prosecutors and jurors are deliberately making their decisions on the basis of the victim’s race. We may never know the answer to this question, but much research shows that people often take someone’s race into account when making decisions without necessarily being aware of their racial biases.  Scholars refer to this bias as “implicit racism” or “unconscious racism.” Thus even though prosecutors and jurors may feel they are acting without racial bias, their racial prejudices may be unwittingly affecting their decisions in capital cases. The bottom line remains: the imposition of the death penalty is often racially discriminatory.

Sociology and Medical School Admissions

Today’s New York Times has an article on the importance of social science knowledge for medical students. http://nyti.ms/HLd5E2 

The medical school admissions test will now have several questions related to the social and behavioral sciences, apparently especially anthropology, psychology, and sociology. More premed students are predicted to take introductory courses in these areas. This new emphasis on the social and behavioral sciences recognizes that health and medicine are not just scientific issues and that sociology and the other social sciences are very relevant for attempts to improve the health our nation and the practice of medicine.

As a sociologist, I’ve long thought that health professionals would benefit from an understanding of some of the emphases of sociology: racial, gender, and social class inequality; social interaction; social institutions; and so forth. I’ve also thought that issues of health and health care reflect and illustrate these emphases, and that students who take sociology classes benefit sociologically from learning about health and health care issues.

The introduction to sociology text I’ve authored for Flat World Knowledge has a chapter on health and health care, as does the social problems text I am now finishing up for Flat World. These are among my favorite chapters in these books because issues of poverty, racial and ethnic inequality, and gender inequality manifest themselves so often and so clearly in the study of health and health care. By reading about health and health care in these books, then, students will learn a lot about larger problems in American society. And by knowing more about these problems, they will be in a better position someday to perhaps help to resolve them. 

Obama's Wrong Decision on LGBT Job Discrimination

The White House indicated on Wednesday that President Obama would not be issuing an executive order banning discrimination by federal contractors against gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender employees. This decision received rather minimal attention in the national press (only on p. A17 of the New York Times and p. A4 of the Washington Post), and that is a shame. LGBT activists are angry with the White House, and rightly so.

It is perfectly legal under federal law for employers to refuse to hire or to fire employees who are openly LGBT or who are perceived as being LGBT. Less than half the states have laws that prohibit job discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Although the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) has been proposed in Congress to end such discrimination, it is not close to passing.

Election-year politics almost certainly explain the White House’s failure to issue the executive order. That may be so, but the fact remains that the public in national surveys overwhelmingly agrees that gays and lesbians should have the same job opportunities as heterosexuals. The fact also remains that about 90% of the Fortune 500 prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation, and that about half prohibit discrimination based on gender identity. The issue of job discrimination against the LGBT community may be less volatile than the White House fears. It is also a matter of right versus wrong, and on this issue the White House is wrong.

Ann Romney, Working Women, and Wealth or Lack of It

There’s an uproar in the news today over a comment by a Democratic strategist that Ann Romney, the wife of Mitt Romney, has “never worked a day in her life.” This wording was clumsy, to say the least. When the contemporary women’s movement began in the late 1960s, one of its key emphases was that women should have the choice as well as the opportunity to live their lives as they want to. If they want to work outside the home, fine; if they want to stay at home and raise kids, fine also. Back then women did not have the opportunity to work outside the home, especially in the jobs that were male-dominated, that they do today. If Ann Romney chose to stay at home and raise her five sons, that was her choice, and no one should think worse of her for it.

But the larger message that the strategist was attempting to make has gotten lost in the uproar. And this message is that women who can afford to stay at home because of their family’s wealth—in this case, great wealth—do not begin to face the everyday problems of time, money (actually lack of money), and energy that the average (i.e., non-wealthy) woman faces, whether or not she works outside the home. And they do not begin to experience the stress and worry that the average woman faces, again whether or not she works outside the home. Ann Romney no doubt is a fine person who has accomplished a lot in her life and who is now facing a debilitating disease. But during her adult life she has not suffered for a lack of money, and she has never had to wonder how she will be able to find the money to pay her family’s medical bills, feed and clothe her children, repair a car, and any number of things that the average woman would have trouble paying.  

Older Prisoners

An article in today’s New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/health/dealing-with-dementia-among-aging-criminals.html?hp) on dementia in older prisoners underscores the foolishness of housing so many older inmates in the nation’s prisons. Some 70,000 state and federal prisoners, equal to about 5% of all prisoners, are age 55 or older. This number is about 11 times higher than the number at the beginning of the 1980s, thanks to the the rising number of prisoners in general, the use of “three-strikes” laws and other measures mandating long sentences, and the decreased use of parole. Yet the increased number of older prisoners is costing much money without keeping the public any safer.

Older prisoners are much more likely than younger prisoners to have significant physical and/or mental health problems. Because of older prisoners’ health care needs, their incarceration costs the state and federal governments much more on average than does the incarceration of younger prisoners: more than $70,000 annually for an older prisoner compared to about half that for a younger prisoner. The cost of housing older prisoners thus amounts to about $5 billion annually. Ironically, many and perhaps most of these older prisoners have reached the age where they are only a minimal threat to public safety and perhaps no threat at all. Without endagnering public safety, older inmates convicted of nonviolent offenses could be released, and nonprison alternatives could be found for other older inmates with significant physical and/or mental health problems. These measures would save tens of millions of dollars annually that could be put to much better use than keeping these frail inmates behind bars.