And yet it's so much more

Demographers and health researchers are noticing a dramatic drop in women's life expectancy is some areas of the United States:

The downward trend is evident in places in the Deep South, Appalachia, the lower Midwest and in one county in Maine. It is not limited to one race or ethnicity but it is more common in rural and low-income areas. The most dramatic change occurred in two areas in southwestern Virginia (Radford City and Pulaski County), where women's life expectancy has decreased by more than five years since 1983.

The trend appears to be driven by increases in death from diabetes, lung cancer, emphysema and kidney failure. It reflects the long-term consequences of smoking, a habit that women took up in large numbers decades after men did, and the slowing of the historic decline in heart disease deaths.

It may also represent the leading edge of the obesity epidemic. If so, women's life expectancy could decline broadly across the United States in coming years, ending a nearly unbroken rise that dates to the mid-1800s.

[...]

"This is a story about smoking, blood pressure and obesity," said Majid Ezzati, of the Harvard Initiative for Global Health, a co-author of the paper.

The drop in life expectancy is about those things, but it's about a helluva lot more too.

It's the story of a nation that has a dangerously broken for-profit insurance to provide health coverage for most of its citizens, while leaving some 47 million uninsured. The coverage that people do have isn't necessarily even adequate to actually obtain decent health care.

It's the story of a nation that doesn't have - has never had - any sort of cohesive public health policies.

It's a story about cheap, processed foods of marginal nutritional value and mass advertising.

It's a story about poverty, and the conditions which cause poverty.

Limiting the story to just smoking, blood pressure, and obesity limits the solutions to the problems which vex us when it comes to public health in this country. By focusing on these three items, the solutions come in the form of individual interventions, in a manner of speaking. Educate people to make good choices, the logic goes. It, of course, elides over the much more complicated, and in the long-run, more damaging, structural problems that underlie the proximate causes of the decline in life expectancy.

There needs to be a much more expansive conversation about public health in this country, and it's a conversation that should make some people feel very, very uncomfortable.

Iko Iko

To be sure, I had a fun time in New Orleans. Friday evening led to jazz on Bourbon Street (although the beer price there made DC prices look reasonable), and on Saturday I got to catch one of the Mardi Gras parades that will be snaking through the Quarter over the next few weeks - I got to watch it from a balcony, which was neat.

But all the fun in the Quarter was jarringly incongruous with everything else I saw and learned about the city during that time. To be blunt, I think that the post-Katrina recovery of New Orleans is the most important (and least talked about) political issue facing the United States. Within the recovery effort are distilled - in their entirety - the problems facing the nation. The privatization of public infrastructure (including - and most germane to my own work - the privatization of public education). Our relationship with the environment (coastal restoration, climate change). Racism. Poverty. Our capacity to deal with disaster and the inevitable dislocations that follow. The erosion of democratic institutions and accountability. All of these conundrums are being stared down, simultaneously and in fast-forward, in the NOLA recovery efforts. I wish I could say that this reckoning was leading towards a positive resolution, but right now, it's an uphill battle.

I wonder what the culture of New Orleans will look like in 20 years - will the vibrancy of the jazz scene, nurtured in the poor neighborhoods, remain so vital? What happens when a city's cultural flower is cut off from its roots, when the people who are vital to cultural reproduction have been displaced, the vast majority of them with no means to return - or indeed, nothing to which to return? Bourbon Street has always seemed a caricature of the culture of the rest of the city, with its neon lights, hawkers trying to cajole you into the nearest strip club, throngs of college kids stumbling down the streets with their slushee cocktails. Bourbon Street will always be there, a kind of adult Disneyland. But what about the little clubs in the quieter sections of the Quarter, or in the rest of the city, for that matter? Will the city be able to sustain the talent necessary to keep these out of the way havens viable?

The post-Katrina recovery has been notably absent from our election year discourse. To my knowledge, John Edwards has been the only candidate to make an issue of New Orleans' revival, but the impact of that effort has been negligible. But it needs to be talked about. The issues faced by New Orleans are our issues, waiting for a storm, literal or otherwise, to force them to the surface. How the Crescent City deals with these issues will serve as a template, for good of for ill (and right now, for the ill), on how we grapple with these issues on a national scale. It deserves to be at the forefront of our own thoughts and of our political discussions.

Looking in the mirror

This piece (via Crooked Timber) sounds a lot like our life at present, especially the first few grafs (and as much a feminist as I might try to be, I'm still the male in our particular story). I don't have much to add, other than that the social system in the United States does not make it easy for folks to raise children.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics

Hey, did you know that being poor in the United States is totally awesome? It's true, according to economist Walter F. Williams, who somehow garnered a job at George Mason University spouting gibberish like this:

Poverty is not static for people willing to work. A University of Michigan study shows only 5 percent of those in the bottom fifth of the income distribution in 1975 remained there in 1991. What happened to them? They moved up to the top three-fifths of the income distribution — middle class or higher. Moreover, 3 in 10 of the lowest income earners in 1975 moved all the way into the top fifth of income earners by 1991. Those who were poor in 1975 had an inflation-adjusted average income gain of $27,745 by 1991. Those workers who were in the top fifth of income earners in 1975 were better off in 1991 by an average of only $4,354. The bottom line is: The richer are getting richer and the poor are getting richer.

To summarize:

• 95% of the bottom fifth of income earners in 1975 made into the top 60% of the income distribution by 1991.
• 30% of the "lowest income earners" (which he never defines, but I'll assume he means those in the bottom quintile) in 1975 made it into the top 20% of the income distribution by 1991
• The average income of the bottom quintile grew seven times as much as the top quintile from 1975 to 1991

Cute. Williams is actually right, as far as income goes, but relying on that measure omits aggregate measures of wealth. Income only measures what people bring home in a paycheck (does it also include income from rents?), but measures of wealth factor in the value of property, stock holdings, and - most importantly - debt, as well as income. Using those measures, the growth in wealth of the top quintile has far outpaced everyone else (and we won't even talk about the top 5 or 10%). In 2000 (see p. 8), the net worth of the top quintile of households increased by some $24,000 since 1998, while the net worth of the bottom quintile increased by $1300 (to $7300). The middle three quintiles showed much more modest gains as well. The median net worth of the top quintile is nearly 27 times that of the bottom quintile. I don't have comparable income measures from the 1998-2000 period, but the 1991 figures that Williams refers to (tables 5, 6, & 7 - good lord, how many people are spouting this shit?) show the median income of the top quintile to be less than twice that of the bottom quintile.

Where I'm from, having a net household worth of $7300 is not good. Sure, it's more assets than a huge chunk of the developing world has, but it's hardly the good times that Williams makes it out to be. Williams is an asshat (as I would expect a GMU economist to be) and is trading in on the statistical and economic ignorance of Americans in order to push the line that any sort of income redistribution program is completely unnecessary because, hey, the poor are getting richer faster than the rich! Which is bullshit. But what do I know - 97% of poor people have a color TV. Laissez les bons temps rouler!

Nothing's shocking

I just finished Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, and even though the story isn't new (for those of us familiar with the story of neoliberal development over the last 30 years), the book still has a lot to recommend for it besides Klein's engaging prose.

Reaching back some 60 years to the immediate aftermath of WWII, Klein describes how the Friedmanite free market ideology has been imposed on a global scale. While the details of the story are familiar, it's Klein's narrative that is eye-opening, telling the tale as a succession of shocks - catastrophic events (be it a military coup, a brutal invasion, or Mother Nature lashing out), structural readjustment and other policies designed to radically re-tool a nation's economic apparatus, and the literal shocks associated with torture, among other means to guarantee the compliance of a recalcitrant population.

Klein's real contribution involves her identification of disaster capitalism, a more sinister outgrowth of the military-industrial complex and monopoly capital that has dominated the latter half of the 20th Century in the U.S. While I'd balk at Klein's assertion that this is a new form or phase of capitalist development, there are certainly some novelties that are worth discussing. Capital, of course, is constantly in need of new markets. With economic globalization nearly a done deal, Western capitalists have instead begun to turn to devouring the state apparatuses that have for so long provided the support necessary to stay in business. Basic functions of the state (in particular, security services) have been outsourced to private contractors, available for hire (a means by which the state serves to redistribute public moneys to private citizens in the form of profit). With the basic functions of the state being privatized, indisputably resulting in rising levels of economic and social inequalities, and a shrinking tax base brought on by "small government" fundamentalism, these services will soon be only available to those who can afford them. The economic instability that neoliberalism has wrought increases the need for such security services, placing the system in a position where the is a perverse - indeed amoral - incentive to promote instability in order to maintain profitability. I'm by no means doing Klein's argument justice here.

That's not to say that there's some teleological principle at work here, but once a market has been created, actors within that sphere are nothing if not vigorous in defending the turf they've staked out. In many ways, it seems like the tide is ebbing away from the neoliberal highwater mark. That said, the marked change in the dynamics of capitalist development following 9/11 are definitely worthy of our attention, and Klein's book is a welcome addition to the story for a non-academic audience.

Damaged

I'll be the first to admit that I've taken some pot shots at Britney Spears - she did hire dwarves for her then-husbands birthday, a little fact which deserved to be ridiculed. And I'll even cop to being more than a little amused at her immediate post K-Fed party antics. But after awhile, it stopped being funny and began to become very painful to watch. Today, I came across this:

And multiple sources confirm Spears’ exhibitionist streak: “She’ll strip down in front of staff, nannies, whomever,” says one. “She’ll ask, ‘Do I look sexy? Do I look pretty?’ She’s extremely insecure.”

This is not an "exhibitionist streak," and it's a helluva lot more than being extremely insecure.

The narrative around Britney's spectacular meltdown is becoming one of self-destruction, the typical "I guess she can't handle the fame" shrugging of the shoulders that accompanies such public flame outs. When I look at it, especially that aforementioned quote, I see the inevitable effects of being turned into a sexualized object before the age of 17. Will we see any record executive, any PR flack, any manager, or her parents take some responsibility for letting her be some codger's schoolgirl fantasy? Will anyone step up and admit that putting her in a position where leering old men in the seedier corners of the internets were counting the days until she was legal may have been damaging to her young psyche? Did anyone think twice about making a buck off of pimping out a pretty but not-too-bright hayseed from Louisiana?

I'm not holding my breath for any mea culpas, but let it be said, the entertainment industry eats its young.

George Leef is an idiot

But most of you knew that about this right-wing kook. His gaffe today, however, is particularly egregious:

A key finding [of a Mackinac Center (a conservative think-tank) policy paper]: although Michigan, over the period 1980-2000, spent significantly more per capita on higher ed than did other large midwestern states (Ohio and Illinois, specifically), its rate of economic growth lagged behind.

To many people, this conclusion will seem strange.

Actually, it doesn't seem strange to anyone who factors in deindustrialization and the precipitous decline of the auto industry in Michigan, which neither Leef nor the report's authors do.

Why I got out

There were a great many things that motivated me to move on from graduate school sans the terminal degree. This book review is redolent of one of those reasons.

And when it's actually drowned?

The WaPo does its homework and begins to connect the dots between the series of institutional failures that led to the Virginia Tech shootings.

I've had a hard time knowing exactly what to say to people who believe in Small Government as some sort of Good unto Itself. You tell them about the homeless gathering for morning coffee in the park, or the family living in the pick-up camper behind the church downtown, or the senior citizen spanging at the University. You tell of the relative with a disability who wants to work (well... kind of) but the social agency responsible for placing her is underfunded and not staffed by the most competent people in the world. But those who want to drown government in the bathtub either never see it, floating from one sanitized conclave to the next, or don't think it's their problem. Why should their tax dollars be spent on "someone else?" Someone else who probably doesn't even have a job!

Or maybe someone else is a disturbed college student...

That's not to say a well-funded system of social services, staffed by talented, committed, and respected professionals would have identified and managed someone like Cho before he completely cracked. It may not have. But the events in Blacksburg are only an extreme example of the thousands of catastrophes that happen everyday because the social safety net has been slashed beyond all recognition, and the private charities that conservatives thought would move to fill the gap are completely overwhelmed and unable to respond to the needs presented.

We've been held hostage by the Small Government theocrats in charge for the last ten or so years. It's time we start assertively pushing that they are responsible for failure after failure, Virginia Tech after Katrina, and that these failures are a intrinsic to and completely foreseeable consequence of their philosophy of government. And the goal is not to do Small Government better than they do, it's to try a different way altogether. Maybe instead of drowning it, we can take government to the lake and teach it how to swim.

What octane gasoline is Camille Paglia huffing?

Why, Salon, why? Why are you subjecting us to four pages of Camille Paglia's idiotic ramblings every month? Must we be subjected to someone who really believes this?

Of course, any Salon readers who still follow the mainstream media out of numbed habit will never have heard Hillary's most extreme flights of faux gemutlichkeit. All that Sunday, network radio news, for example, betrayed its liberal bias by running clips of only her noblest phrases. Heaven help any Republican who had made so lurid a gaffe! Fortunately, alternative media now exist: On his radio show that night, Matt Drudge ran huge, hilarious swatches of prophesyin' Hillary camping it up.

Paglia obviously missed the cable news network yuck-a-thon (documented here by Bob Somerby) that followed Clinton's statements. And are we to take her seriously when she holds out Matt Drudge as an example of a credible alternative media source, rather than as the right-wing shill that he is? The "liberal media" canard is sooooo mid-90s, Camille - but I suppose I should forgive you for wanting to wallow in the myths of the era when you somewhat approached relevance.

Why I continued reading after that gaffe is beyond me, but I did:

Hence my unhappy surprise when Edwards, who has an attractively comprehensive social policy and strong oratorical skills, was the first to pull out of the scheduled August debate moderated by Fox News. What is this morbid obsession that liberals have with Fox? It's as if Democrats, pampered and spoiled by so many decades of the mainstream media trumpeting the liberal agenda, are so shaky in their convictions that they cannot risk an encounter with opposing views. Democrats have ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, the New York Times, Newsweek, Time and 98 percent of American humanities professors to do their bidding. But no, that's not enough -- every spark of dissent has to be extinguished with buckets of bile.

Sigh. Here Paglia is either being contrarian (which is just obnoxious) or is completely oblivious to the fact that Fox News is a de facto PR department for the Republican Party, attacking Dems at every opportunity and passing on unfiltered RNC talking points as news. If the latter is the case, Paglia should probably dispense with the "I'm an intellectual giant" and "I'm a Democrat" schtick. Because really, if you can't see that it's not a good idea to grant legitimacy to a network that regularly labels members of your party as "traitors," I'm a little dubious of your ability to suss out the "deeper meaning" of popular cultural.

It is one of the many gifts of capitalism that are invisible to academic leftists, who nevertheless expect the light switch to work, their cars to start, and the grocery store to be constantly stocked with fresh milk, orange juice and produce.

[...]

Capitalism, which spawned modern individualism as well as the emancipated woman who can support herself, is essentially Darwinian. It expands any society's sum total of wealth and radically raises the standard of living, but it leaves the poor and weak without a safety net. Capitalism needs the ethical counter-voice of leftism to keep it honest. But leftists must be honest in turn about what we owe to capitalism -- without which Western women would have no professional jobs to go to but would be stuck doing laundry by hand and stooping over pots on the hearth fire all day long.

Jeebus! Paglia, of course, doesn't cite any of these "academic leftists" who refuse to recognize the many, many gifts of capitalism, but by way of rebuttal, it should be noted that the patron saint of academic leftists, Karl Marx, was very lavish in his praise of capitalism as the social force which helped liberate Europe from feudalism and built the greatest productive engines the world had seen. So let's stop with the very old, very tired "academics hate capitalism but want to revel in its riches" meme. No one fails to recognize what capitalism accomplished, but voices which point out the many flaws inherent in the current social structure are dismissed by blowhards like Paglia on the basis of a narrative that was stale ten years ago. And don't get me started on the teleological assertion that the liberation of Western women could only have happened in a capitalist political-economy.

Digging deeper (or, Wallowing in the pig sty of statistics)

A little digging on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website, and my wish was granted. Here's a linky-loo to today's BLS press release, chock full of all sorts of information to geek out over.

One of the first things to catch my eye was the roughly 10:1 fullee/fairee ratio (15.4 million union members, 1.5 million workers represented by unions but not members). This number is actually kind of a head scratcher for me. First, that 10:1 ratio seems remarkably high to me (and maybe I'm really misinterpreting the number, which is probably why I didn't pursue quantitative analysis very vigorously). My first guess was that there would be wild variations between occupational and industrial categories, but the ratio remained remarkably stable across categories. It does vary across states, however, unsurprisingly correlating with "right-to-work" laws. I suppose if there's anything to be gleaned from these numbers, it's that when workplaces become organized, the density of membership within those bargaining units seems to be fairly high.

To get the official word on a little car-ride trivia with lexdexter and Chicago Nick:

The largest numbers of union members lived in California (2.3 million) and New York (2.0 million). Just under half (7.5 million) of the 15.4 million union members in the U.S. lived in six states (California, 2.3 million; New York, 2.0 million; Illinois, 0.9 million; Michigan, 0.8 million; New Jersey, 0.8 million; and Pennsylvania, 0.7 million), though these states accounted for about one-third of wage and salary employment nationally.

Does anyone want to explain Alaska's third-highest union density rate? Government employees and petroleum workers? We know it's not fishing.

Looking at our own little neck of the woods, Oregon lost roughly 2000 union members and 6000 union jobs over the last year (no breakdown as to which job categories these were). I'm wondering how much of this loss was attributable to busting weak unions as opposed to more structural explanations.

The wage data is again unsurprising, showing that union workers across the board out-earn their non-union counterparts, in some sectors by as much as 30%.

I'm sure there's more to play with here, but the printout I have is very tiny and it hurts my eyes. I s'pose I should reward you for indulging my nerdy stats side. Here's a cute puppy:

Now wasn't that worth it?

Baby boom

When ms. wobs was pregnant with the pre-wobs back in 2004, we noticed what we thought were a lot of pregnant women and new babies, not just in Eugene, but also during the month of September that we spent in New York. Babies and preggers everywhere. At the time, we chalked it up to an increased sensitivity to the "expectant new parent" demographic; that is, we wanted to see new parents, and to connect our crazy-ass experience with theirs and realize we were all normal.

Turns out, according to the recently released Statistical Abstract of the United States, there really was a baby boom in 2004:

More Americans were born in 2004 than in any years except 1960 and 1990.

I'm going to indulge my inner social scientist and gore myself on the Census data later, and then we can have all sorts of fun with a nerdy meta-statistics post.

Eat the rich

via the General

Us lefties are often charged with hating the rich and fomenting class warfare. Sometimes the accusation is accurate:

what are acceptable handouts from parents
Posted By: cashmoney on 10-25-2006 6:21 pm
gifts? education? do you draw your line at maintenance?

RE: what are acceptable handouts from parents
Posted By: taxman on 10-25-2006 6:23 pm
Someone should receive absolutely no more than 30 k/yr and car payments from parents. If you’re above that, you really have problems. Girls may be entitled to a bit more than that with shopping and everything, but I feel like 30k is pretty reasonable.

Meet the heirs of the ruling class. Domhoff must be having a blast.

It's chilly tonight

Around midnight, I saw two men hunkering down in front of the Labor Ready. One, at least, had a sleeping bag. The other sat with his back against the wall, head cushioned by the hood of a white, puffy jacket.

It looked miserable, and I wrestle with the fact that even at the lowest points in my life, I was never there.

_________________________


My advisor for the first two years of grad school was gracious enough to really act as a great mentor for me - despite the fact that I had only a fleeting interest in quantitative analysis and general non-chalance about being a student. He brought me in on a paper looking at the growth of temporary labor agencies (I think my initial response was "labor sharks?" - yeah, labor sharks.). His thesis was - if I were to paraphrase it in a manner far removed from the language of hypotheses that he'd use - certain social and organizational relationships exist in certain environments for certain reasons. A parasite and a partner will both occupy any hospitable niches made available to them. Labor sharks are hungry for those who are desperate for work. And fortunately for them, our current configuration of social relationships offers them a very hospitable environment.

But apparently, not for their prey, trying to sleep on the cold pavement.