Everyday Sociology Blog

The Virtue of Not Buying

By Karen Sternheimer

When I get the Sunday paper, the first thing I like to look at are the ad circulars. I love looking at the electronic items I might want someday and getting a sense of how much these things cost. I love a bargain and feeling like I got the best price, even if it means buying something that is last year’s hot item.

This being the holiday season, there are tons of circulars with gift ideas to help us decide what to buy for others. I can’t help but notice that lots of these items are pretty junky, and are presumably things we would never buy for ourselves. These cheap cologne sets, kitchy plant holders, and old DVDs are meant for other people, and the ads highlight how little they cost—typically between $5-$10, if not less.

I once knew someone who felt like she needed to get every last friend and acquaintance a gift. Each year, she would get me one of these bargain items, since her budget was pretty tight. It made me ponder the greater sociological meaning of these items (yes, we sociologists can think about the sociological implications of just about anything).

On a personal level, I had to feign excitement about an item I had no use for. I was grateful for the thought, but as a casual acquaintance she hadn’t made my gift list and I felt a bit guilty to receive something without giving.

I also had no idea what to do with the new object I had received. I could never regift the items, since that would simply pass the problem along to someone else, and I hated to throw stuff away. (I later donated the items to charity. My guess is they threw them away.)

This example may seem like a simple and frankly minor inconvenience that people face; after all, we should all be so burdened to make someone’s holiday gift list, right? Journalist Ellen Ruppel Shell, author of Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, argues that super-low prices have serious economic and environmental costs that we might not think about when buying throwaway gifts for people on the nether regions of our gift lists.

For one, these cheap goods are typically imported from developing nations where people work in sweatshop conditions for virtually no money. These goods are often made in countries that have the most lax labor and environmental laws, frequently keep workers in extreme poverty, all while polluting the area. The items then have to be shipped halfway around the world, with significant environmental costs. Because this process is inexpensive for manufacturers, American workers’ wages remain low or jobs could be shipped overseas, all so we can have really cheap goods. Shell argues that in the end this cheap stuff costs us quite a bit. (Click here to watch Ellen Ruppel Shell speak about Cheap).

University of Pennsylvania Economist Joel Waldfogel suggests the whole shopping process itself is a waste of time and money. In Scroogenomics: Why We Shouldn't Buy Presents for the Holidays, Waldfogel compares what buyers spend with the value that receivers attribute to a gift and estimates that the difference is upwards of $13 billion. (Click here to watch Joel Waldfogel talk about Scroogenomics). He notes that cash and gift cards can be a much more efficient transfer of wealth, and yet as he told the Wall Street Journal, “cash is in general a stigmatized gift.” When we give cash or a gift card, the recipient knows exactly how much—or how little we spent. Buying an item makes us feel like we can mask the dollar amount we spent.

I’m guessing that some of you are reading this and thinking, hey, I like getting and giving gifts! I have friends who love to shop, no matter why, when, and where, so the holidays are really fun for them especially. As I have previously blogged, consumption can be enjoyable and it is almost impossible to avoid being a consumer in our post-industrial society. But as Ellen Ruppel Shell concludes, we can become more conscious consumers. We might think about where the items we buy came from and the conditions under which they were produced. We can also think about our own financial situations and assess what we can truly afford to spend…and think about giving in ways other than just buying something.

Understanding Why Crime Rates Fall

By Karen Sternheimer

A New York Times story earlier this year explored a counterintuitive trend: despite the recession, crime rates in New York have fallen. Los Angeles and other large American cities exhibit similar patterns. This challenges a commonly held belief that crime rates rise and fall in large part based on economic changes.

So why do crime rates fall?

Everyone seems to have their pet answer for this question. Besides the economy, some will point to a rise in the number of law enforcement officers, tougher sentencing laws, even the legalization of abortion (according to the authors of Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, anyway). I once had a student who was an ardent supporter of one political party and was convinced that crime rates rose when the other party was in power.

If only solving the crime mystery was so simple. Criminologists have been studying this issue and have come to a startling conclusion: we really don’t conclusively know why crime rates rise and fall.

Between 1990 and 2000, crime rates in the Unites States dropped precipitously. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, homicide fell 39 percent, rape rates fell 41 percent, and robbery fell 44 percent. Since that time, crime trends have leveled off for the most part.

But New York’s crime declines put these numbers to shame: 73 percent decline in homicide, 52 percent decline in rape, and 70 percent decline in rape—as well as an astonishing 78 percent drop in auto thefts. Analysts focused specifically on New York to see if any changes there could reveal clues about what causes crime to decline.

I lived in New York in the late 1980s as a college student at New York University, and it doesn’t take a sociologist to notice the drastic changes that have taken place in the city since then. Walking through Washington Square Park (at the center of the university’s main buildings) involved dodging rats and drug dealers at all hours of the day. There were many nearby neighborhoods students were warned not to venture into, especially at night.

I was one of the first to live in a new dorm that was just east of most other university property. Prostitutes regularly walked the streets around the new building, and a group of transients lived across the street in front of an abandoned building. My roommates and I casually watched one afternoon as New York Police officers barricaded our block and raided what we referred to as the crack house across the street. While moving in across the hall, one student had his clothes and other possessions stolen when his parents’ car was broken into. A block or two away stood the porn theater where Robert De Niro’s character Travis Bickle picks up Jodi Foster’s character (a child prostitute) in the classic 1976 movie, Taxi Driver.

New York City in the late 1980s

In one of the movie’s opening lines, Bickle describes New York as “an open sewer.” I wouldn’t have described life there in the late 80s in exactly the same way, but it was a different world when I returned years later. The “crack house” I once lived across the street from now features ground level shops like Ben & Jerry’s and small clothing boutiques. The gritty drug-infested neighborhoods we were warned away from are now upscale, gentrified neighborhoods with young families and sky-high rents. Even The Bowery, which was an open sewer of a street that reeked of urine and despair, has become a Mecca of new development, as seen in the new luxury high-rise building pictured below.

What reduced crime in New York?

Law professor Franklin E. Zimring explores this question in his book, The Great American Crime Decline. He suggests that there are many reasons for declines in New York and elsewhere in America.

It might seem like the most obvious reason for crime to decline in New York is the exploding rents and cost of real estate, pushing out low-income residents who might have more motivation to commit property crimes, for instance. Zimring notes that while this might make sense for Manhattan, New York City is comprised of five boroughs (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx), yet crime fell throughout the city.

As Bradley Wright blogged about, some attribute the crime decline to the aggressive policing tactics former police chief William J. Bratton employed during his tenure in New York from 1994-1996. Bratton’s strategy mirrored the broken windows theory, the idea that if you eliminate small, quality of life problems like vandalism then you send a message to criminals that larger crimes will also be aggressively prosecuted. And yet crime rates also fell in cities that hadn’t changed policing strategies. Zimring attributes some of the decline to policing (from 25 to 50 percent, in his estimation), but also considers the high population density and strict gun laws as other potential factors. He also suggests that because of the high level of crime in New York before the drop, it had further to fall. Once again, there is no singular explanation of why crime fell in New York or in any other city.

Zimring concludes his analysis with several lessons we can learn from the crime decline, one of which is that we need to do more to compare crime declines in the U.S. with declines in other countries like Canada, where similar drops were observed but even though there were no significant changes in policing or criminal justice. He suggests that crime rates can drop “without major changes in the social fabric” (p. 206). In other words, it doesn’t necessarily take huge social changes to bring down crime rates.

The fact that crime rates have fallen so much is great news. But the fact that there is no simple solution can make it difficult for lawmakers to communicate the importance of some policies to their constituents. We tend to like simple solutions, but in this case there are none.

Losing Confidence: Americans and Social Institutions

By Karen Sternheimer

Do you feel less confidence in the government? In corporations? In the press?

If so, your feelings reflect a general trend found in the most recent data from the General Social Survey, a nationally representative household survey taken every other year of American attitudes on a variety of issues. Since 1973 the survey has asked respondents how much confidence they have in a variety of American social institutions. Their 2008 survey results suggest that the public has less confidence in every major social institution (except the military) compared with 2006.

Looking at year-to-year trends might not tell us very much, but if we examine the more than 35 years of data we can see some interesting patterns and think about why Americans might have less faith in various institutions.

Our declining confidence in the news media is rather clear in the graph below. For the past fifteen years, the percentage of people having a great deal of confidence has hovered at or below just ten percent. There are likely many reasons for this, but I suspect that the blending of opinion with reporting—especially on cable news—is partly responsible. If “the news” seems to just be someone’s opinion, especially if it is constructed to influence our political views in one direction or other, we might be less likely to see the press as a reliable source of information. As I blogged about last year, journalism as an industry is in danger, and this loss of confidence is likely a big part of the reason.

By contrast, far more people reported a great deal of confidence in the press in the mid-1970s, in the years following the Watergate scandal and the subsequent resignation of President Richard Nixon. Investigative journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein broke the story of what seemed like a minor burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters and continued to pursue the story, revealing a major cover-up.

Not surprisingly, these revelations led to a sharp decline in those who felt a great deal of confidence in the executive branch of the federal government, from 29 percent in 1973 to 14 percent in 1974, as you can see in the graph below. Unlike confidence in the press, confidence in the executive branch of government—which mostly refers to the president—has had many peaks and valleys in the last few decades. Confidence can rise and fall rather quickly.

Most recently, we can see that close to 28 percent felt a great deal of confidence in 2002, just following the terrorist attacks in 2001. But that number fell to 11 percent in 2008, as President George W. Bush’s approval ratings sunk and the economy fell into recession.

Not surprisingly, with news of the collapse of the financial and automotive industries, confidence in major companies fell to the lowest point in General Social Survey history: from a high of 32 percent in 1974, 1984, and 1987 to 16 percent in 2008.

This is a meaningful decline. President Calvin Coolidge famously said that “the business of America is business”. For the past several decades American confidence in business largely reflected this sentiment, that major companies would lead us towards prosperity and opportunity. Scandals in recent years, such as Enron’s massive fraud in the energy market, led to declines in confidence after the financial boom of the 1990s.

These are just a few institutions with declining American confidence, according to the General Social Survey. Medicine, science, and religion are some of the many other institutions that Americans feel less confident about. What does this loss of confidence mean in the grand scheme of things?

It’s possible that mistrust of several major institutions can impact the way we view other institutions, even if there has been no significant reason to doubt them. For instance, despite the advice of public health officials, a large proportion of the population reports that they don't want to be vaccinated for the H1N1 virus. Some just aren’t interested, but others don't trust government officials; some even view calls to get vaccinated as a government conspiracy for control or profit.

When major institutions lose their legitimacy with a large proportion of the public, people are likely to disengage from these institutions, and maybe even ignore important information they provide. What sociological theories do you think might explain why Americans seem to trust social institutions less?

Everyday Sociology Talk: A Minute at a Sociology Conference

Ever wonder what a sociology conference is really like? Karen Sternheimer narrates a one minute tour from the 2009 American Sociological Association (ASA) meeting in San Francisco. To learn more about sociology conferences, click here or visit the following sites to learn more about upcoming meetings.

Eastern Sociological Society

Mid-South Sociological Association

Midwest Sociological Society

New England Sociological Association

North Central Sociological Association

Pacific Sociological Association

Southern Sociological Society

Southwestern Social Science Association

Canadian Sociological Association

International Sociology Association

Postmodern Theory and the Balloon Boy Hoax

By Karen Sternheimer

By now you have probably heard that the runaway balloon supposedly containing a six-year-old boy was a hoax, according to his mother's admission. The story received hours of “breaking news” coverage on October 15, and has since consumed countless hours of news coverage about the scam perpetrated on the news networks and concerned viewers.

If French sociologist Jean Baudrillard were still alive, I dare say he would not be surprised that a father would allegedly cook up such a scheme, or that he contacted the local news, the police, or the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). He might even say he’s surprised it took so long for something like this to happen.

As I recently blogged, Baudrillard described our contemporary mediated age as one where the boundary between image and reality has blurred to the point where they can no longer be neatly separated. Where once we might have had clearer distinctions between entertainment and reality, the two have fused, and the 24-hour news cycles and the Internet have helped them come together.

It has never been easier to enter into what was once a rarified space of celebrity: with YouTube and “reality” television, fame is increasingly based on promoting one’s private life rather than on professional achievements. It’s not that there weren’t people who were “famous for being famous” in the past, but we have so many more avenues to achieve instant celebrity now. There are more celebrities and they get famous faster. We likely forget about them more quickly now too.

Cable news is a big part of this equation. In competing for viewers of “fictional” programming and the myriad of other entertainment choices we have now, the news has morphed into infotainment: a hybrid that is a perfect example of Baudrillard’s idea of hyperreality.

Baudrillard suggests that hypperreality creates a uniquely entertaining experience, what he called the “thrill of the real.” This thrill is something we might experience when that “Breaking News” banner unfurls on the screen. But the thrill constantly weakens and extinguishes itself unless something even newer happens. So news becomes more about live action excitement than analysis and investigation.

Perhaps that’s why the same networks that pre-empted their regular programming to cover this story for hours later turned on the family by trotting out angry commentators condemning the family and talking with legal analysts about the charges they should face. The news networks sent reporters to dig up dirt on the family and reported that they couldn’t find evidence that the parents worked steadily, and interviewed neighbors and other acquaintances on camera to malign the father’s character.

Let’s face it, the news networks that covered this event got Punk'd (another example of postmodernity where celebrities thought they were living their private lives but were in fact part of a television show) but seem reluctant to admit it. Maybe behind the scenes news directors will see this as a wake-up call about the folly of chasing shiny objects—literally in this case—during a time when they could be covering other more meaningful stories in greater depth. I’d like to think that the next time a story like this “breaks”—and you know there will be a next time—news directors will think carefully about how much attention it really deserves.

Yes, the Heene parents deserve the bulk of blame for breaking the law, and for using their children to fulfill their own dreams of fame. They took advantage of our fascination with the real, the private, and the exciting. While they might not reap the financial rewards for diving into the fishbowl for the rest of us to watch, many clearly have (I believe their names are Jon and Kate).

All of this recalls the 1998 movie, The Truman Show, where Jim Carrey’s character finds out that his entire life is actually a television show, and that everyone in his life has been cast by the producers. Truman is devastated to find out that his whole world is a set.

Fast forward a decade later, and many people clamor to turn their lives into a television set, to convert their friends and family members into cast mates. Yes, money and attention are huge motivators. Baudrillard might add that the “real world” and the “television set” can no longer be distinguished from one another. It could be that many of us feel like life might be more thrilling if someone was watching, and that to matter in the twenty-first century is to be observed by others, a character in our own Truman Show. What other sociological theories do you think might help explain this phenomenon?

Sex: It's Not What it Used to be

By Karen Sternheimer

As Sally Raskoff recently blogged about, the news of Roman Polanski’s arrest has sparked a conversation about how we think about rape and sexual assault of children. If Polanski loses his extradition fight and returns to the United States, he will return to a very different country than the one he fled. In 1978, the year he became a fugitive, the Rams still played in Los Angeles, Jimmy Carter was president, and the average price of a gallon of gas was 61 cents.

And as the New York Times recently noted, Polanski would also return to an America that has decidedly different mores about sex than we did during the 1970s. While in some ways we might have more liberal attitudes about sex, we are much more likely to condemn sexual assault today than we were in the 1970s, especially if children are involved.

Much of the sexual openness we attribute to the 1960s actually took place in the following decade, after birth control became more widely available. Oral contraceptives only became legal for unmarried women in all 50 states after the 1972 Supreme Court decision Eisenstadt v. Baird, which effectively legalized sex between unmarried men and women. Sex outside of marriage was technically illegal in many states, although these laws were not enforced often, but they remained on the books in some states until the Supreme Court ruling struck them down.

By the 1980s, sex was no longer viewed as an expression of freedom—with the discovery of AIDS, it was potentially dangerous. Ideas about recreational sex began to shift during the late 1980s and early 1990s as the disease spread and teen pregnancy rates rose.

Adults’ attitudes about teen sex are less lenient today too. In 1986 the General Social Survey, a nationally representative household survey, first asked respondents about their attitudes about teen sex (defined in the survey as sex between fourteen- to sixteen-year-olds). That year 67 percent of respondents answered that it was “always wrong,” compared with 73 percent in 2006, the most recent year for which we have data.

Just as concerns about consensual sex began to rise, legal responses to rape became more serious in the 1980s. For example, spousal rape was often considered an oxymoron, and it wasn’t until 1993 that all 50 states recognized it as a crime.

Acquaintance rape, or sexual assault committed by someone one knows, (and frequently called “date rape”) had barely entered everyday language in the 1970s, and states only began passing rape-shield laws – which made a victim’s sexual history and physical appearance inadmissible in court – in the 1970s. Michigan was the first state to pass a statute in 1974, with most states passing their own by the early 1980s.

Awareness about sexual violence had been increasing during the 1970s, thanks to small conscious raising groups and books published by feminist authors like Andrea Dworkin (Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality, 1974) and Susan Brownmiller (Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, 1975). These books were influential in literary and academic circles, but with the explosion of confessional daytime talk shows on national television in the 1980s, such as Oprah (which debuted in 1986), a much larger swath of the population heard stories from survivors of rape and child sexual abuse further opened the eyes of the public to sexual violence and led to calls for tougher punishment for sexual offenders. Allegations of sexual abuse at the McMartin preschool in Manhattan Beach, California made for scandalous headlines in the 1980s, though all involved were acquitted in 1990.

Also drawing media attention were celebrity accounts of abuse. Former Miss America Marilyn Van Derbur spoke publically about being sexually abused by her father in 1991. That same year, 1960s teen star Sandra Dee spoke of similar victimization from her step father.

In response to the increasing awareness about sexual abuse, social workers, medical professionals, and educators were expected to be on the lookout for tell-tale signs in children they encountered. Dramatic headlines kept sexual abuse in the news: Ellie Nesler famously shot her son’s accused molester in court in 1993, the same year that Polly Klaas was abducted from her bedroom by a stranger, and later found dead, causing national outrage and later prompting the passage of California's Three Strikes law, which mandates life in prison for an individual’s third felony conviction.

Public contempt for those that harm children—especially if the harm is sexual—rose to a fever pitch in the 1990s. Celebrities such as Woody Allen and Michael Jackson were accused of sexual abuse. (Allen was never charged; Jackson was charged in 2003 and later acquitted). Widespread allegations of sexual abuse by priests rocked the Catholic Church. Reports of sexual abuse allegations against teachers, coaches, and others became regular news stories, and from the coverage it seemed that children were under constant sexual threat.

Perhaps because of our increased awareness and concern about sexual violence, rates of rape have declined significantly since 1977. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, a nationally representative survey conducted annually by the U.S. Department of Justice, respondents in 1977 aged twelve and older were almost three times more likely to have been raped than those who completed the survey in 2008.

Child sexual abuse cases have been declining along with reductions in rape. A study conducted at the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire found a 50 percent reduction in national sexual abuse rates between 1992 and 2006. While accurate measures of all cases of sexual abuse are impossible, this decline is still important, particularly at a time when awareness about abuse might encourage more reporting.

But concern about sexual violence against children has not subsided. If anything, it has increased. The public is seldom aware of decreases in crime. Add to that fears about new media, like social networking sites on the Internet and anxiety about sexual imagery in pop culture, and concerns about young people and sex only increase.

Polanski would have been better off dealing with his case—and fighting alleged prosecutorial misconduct—in the 1970s. Not only would attitudes about sex and acquaintance rape have been more favorable to him in the 70s, it would have been the right thing to do, given his admission of guilt.

Everyday Sociology Talk: Advice for Students Taking Sociology Exams or Writing Papers

Karen Sternheimer asks sociologists at the University of Southern California what advice they would give to students taking sociology exams for the first time or writing papers for a sociology class.

Soap Operas and Postmodern Theory

By Karen Sternheimer

On September 18^th, the CBS daytime drama Guiding Light aired its final episode after 72 years on the air (fifteen years on radio and 57 on television). Ratings declined as they have for many soap operas over the past few years, leading to the network’s decision to end the longest running program in television history. Both my grandmother and great-grandmother watched the show religiously, and its end represents the passing of more than just a television show. It marks a major social shift.

Daytime melodramas became popular during a time when women spent less time in the paid labor force than they did in the early and later years of the twentieth century. In pre-television radio days, these dramas became known as soap operas because manufacturers of cleaning products advertised heavily to the mostly female audience.

The content of the soaps offered an escapist fantasy of outlandish plots that could temper the tedium of regular housework. For the uninitiated, soap opera characters regularly commit infidelity, plot each others’ deaths, come back from the dead, grow from childhood to adulthood after a year’s absence, and marry and divorce at a rate that would make Elizabeth Taylor’s eight marriages seem normal. Good and evil characters can change overnight and even come back in the form of another person, especially if a surgeon managed a scar-less face transplant.

When I would visit my grandmother, I would hear the plot twists unfold to dramatic music, watch the camera zoom into an actor’s dramatic facial expression and think that this style of storytelling seemed so different than many other programs on the air today.

One might argue that reality shows are a twenty-first century answer to twentieth century melodramas. For those who watch them, reality shows suggest that we are getting an inside glimpse into someone’s private life, usually someone whose life is marked by drama (or edited to highlight--if not produce--dramatic incidents). Most viewers are now savvy enough to know that reality shows are not entirely unfiltered windows into participants’ lives, but it is their illusion of reality that is part of the interest.

This fascination highlights some of the ideas of postmodern theory, particularly French sociologist Jean Baudrillard. According to Baudrillard, the real and the simulated are no longer distinguishable. He argues that in our media age, images of reality and reality itself interact so much so that they have become interchangeable.

You can think of this as like a mirror that reflects an image from another mirror so much that the original image can no longer be identified. Baudriallard calls the outcome of this endless interaction hyperreality, and suggests in his 1983 book Simulations that we are fascinated by the "thrill of the real," particularly because in his view "reality" has imploded with simulation.

There are certainly limits to the application of postmodern theory, but it might help us understand why traditional twentieth century soaps are watching their audiences dwindle. Yes, with more women in the labor force fewer are at home during the day to watch television. And as women have more opportunities outside of the home they might find their lives less mundane and therefore would be less interested in melodrama.

Despite including younger characters, part of the soaps’ recent challenge has been that their audiences have aged and younger viewers have not begun watching in large number. A 2008 Boston Globe article describes how producers attempted to adopt the style of reality shows to attract new viewers. In particular, they sometimes use smaller cameras to mirror the informality of reality shows. But perhaps the biggest hurdle is that soaps are a product of twentieth-century modernity. Audiences may now prefer to observe people “being themselves” in our hyper-mediated age.

We can also look at the genre itself and see how it does not reflect our postmodern condition, where reality itself seems more entertaining than fiction. Soaps are deliberately unreal, asking viewers to enter a fantasy world and suspend their disbelief. We know the characters are played by actors, even if sometimes fans blur the boundary and think of the actor as their character. But the actors and producers make no claim that their character is real.

Realities shows like the Real Housewives and the Kardashian family shows, however, ask us to enjoy the illusion of reality itself by suggesting to us that these programs are depictions of real events. The stories are not limited to a television time slot: events can develop in blogs, tweets, texts, or even in the news, as pregnancies or marriages are reported by the press. Further complicating things, reality show participants are called casts and shows can win Emmys.

I think back to my grandmother, who to my knowledge had no interest in reality shows, and her mother before her, who knew nothing of them since she lived well before they existed. For those coming of age in an era of multimedia, a fantasy melodrama might not be as interesting as something that bleeds into many other forms of media. Rather than just different content, the different forms of media attract audiences today. How else might Baudrillard’s theory help explain today’s media environment?

Biography + History = Opportunity

By Karen Sternheimer

I recently read Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling book Outliers: The Story of Success, and highly recommend it to anyone interested in a sociological perspective of what factors enable some people to achieve more than others. Although not a sociologist, Gladwell is a journalist with a knack for explaining sociological and social psychological concepts in a clear and interesting manner.

While the American ethos of success suggests that it is the result of talent and hard work, Gladwell examines factors that sociologists refer to as social structure—things beyond our individual control—to understand what else successful people have helping them on their journey. Let’s be clear: skills and hard work are important, but so is timing. And one of the most important things to time well is something none of us can choose—when we are born, and to whom we are born.

Sociologist C. Wright Mills describes the importance of timing in his classic 1959 book, The Sociological Imagination, where he notes that all of our life chances are shaped by the intersections of our own personal biographies and history. Gladwell provides numerous examples of this, finding that the so-called Robber Barons who became America’s captains of industry in the late 1800s were mostly born within a few years of each other. People like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller were born just a few years apart in the 1830s, as were many other business titans who amassed great wealth. Was there something particularly profitable in the water back then? Lessons taught in school at that time that would have led to their incredible achievements?

As Gladwell points out, their timing couldn’t have been better. Yes, they likely worked hard and had brilliant business minds. But they also came of age just as the industrial revolution was exploding in America. They were able to get in on the ground floor of advanced capitalism.

Of course people have gotten very rich before and after this period, and Gladwell describes how being born in the mid 1950s was particularly fortuitous for those interested in computer programming development (think Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, both born in 1955). It also helped to be geographically near what were then called supercomputers, the gigantic predecessors to the thing on which you’re reading this post. Back in the 1960s, when Gates and Jobs were coming of age, a supercomputer took up a whole room and was not something most youngsters would have had a chance to see, let alone work on. But because of their proximity to actual computers, both Gates and Jobs had a leg up on others their age and had the chance to spend hours and hours (10,000 of them in Gladwell’s estimation) learning about programming.

We can apply this model to more than just financial success. Think about what opportunities your own biography and history have afforded you. How has when, where, and to whom you were born shaped your life today?

I tried to think about the intersection of my biography and history to imagine how timing might have led me to write this post or to read Gladwell’s book in the first place.

As a member of “Generation X”, I was born following the massive baby boom. As you can see in the graph on the left, after a peak in the mid 1950s, the number of births sharply declined. How might this have affected me? As Gladwell describes, children born after booms like I was have the benefit of smaller class sizes. An unprecedented number of schools were built for Baby Boomers in the years before I was born. When my cohort was ready to go to school, there were newly-built buildings waiting for us, especially for people like me who lived in well-funded suburbs. (My hometown boasts that residents have never rejected a school levy in its entire history).

When I was in elementary school in the mid 1970s, there were so few students that many classes were combined: first and second graders had the same teacher, as did third and fourth graders. Looking back, this provided me with some unusual opportunities.

For one, a child in my district often had the same teacher for two years in a row. This teacher had the opportunity to know us better, and help us develop our strengths and provide lessons that could target any weaknesses. They would recommend us for special enrichment opportunities based on our talents too; there was a “Special Talents Program” we called STP where a few kids would spend time with the art teacher, in the music room, or reading additional books if we seemed particularly interested.

Another advantage: because children would necessarily have different skill levels in the same classroom, and might be nearly two years apart in age, a big difference for six- and almost eight-year-olds, the teachers would work with us in small groups, and sometimes one-on-one. Having small classes helped with that effort too.

We would be placed in small groups, sometimes based on reading level, sometimes based on more random factors (like where we happened to be sitting that day) and learned lessons with far more individualized attention. We were also given “contracts” by our teacher, who would meet with each student individually and assign lessons from workbooks based on our own level of achievement in reading, math, or another subject. We would then be able to work individually, return to show our work to the teacher, who would sign off on the “contract” that we had completed the assignment. We would also get individual help if we needed it from the teacher or occasionally from a student teacher if our classroom had one at the time.

Because I was a bit precocious as a child, this school structure really enabled me to thrive. Rather than get bored by a lesson designed to reach children at all levels, I could work as quickly as I wanted to and sometimes discover topics that I wanted to learn more about, and do separate research on my own. I also had college-educated parents who had taught me to read well before I entered school, frequently bought me books and could answer most of my questions if I had them.

Couple these factors with the lingering 1960s ethos which promoted experimental methods of learning and you have a better understanding of how the accident of my time and place of birth created an additional advantage. By the 1980s, when I went to middle school and then high school, this individualized learning model disappeared in favor of more traditionally structured classrooms, as the political backdrop shifted. There was one centralized lesson, one assignment for the whole class, and less one-on-one time with teachers. I got bored a lot more often.

So that’s the history portion of how my opportunities might have been shaped. Let’s bring biography back in.

You might have read about my elementary school days and thought, what’s to stop a kid from doing as little as possible? And what about children who aren’t willing or able to work independently?

I’m guessing there are many children who would not thrive in this independent environment that was so well-suited for me. Having the teacher meet with another group or another student one-on-one presented many opportunities for chit-chat and goofing off (I did my fair share of that too). So individual personality, work ethic, and talents do matter. They’re just not the only things that matter. How has your biography intersected with history to produce opportunities (or barriers) for you?

Suburbanizing Rural America

By Karen Sternheimer

When I was growing up, I loved going to an amusement park about 20 miles away from my home during the summer. To get there, we had to drive for what seemed like forever on a two-lane highway through what I thought was the middle of nowhere. I lived in a suburban area not too far from the mythic place Leave It to Beaver’s home was supposed to be located. The rural landscape felt foreign, someplace to drive through on our way to someplace else.

Years later, my mother moved into a new development a few miles past the amusement park. It was a big change from where I grew up, but had a retreat-like atmosphere. Similar developments sprang up in the area with names reminiscent of grand estates: Barrington, Hawthorn, and Hidden Valley to name a few. Off of two lane highways, each development features homes that are nearly identical in size, design, and color and include amenities like private lakes, club houses, pools, and golf courses. A five-star resort across the street from my mother’s development attracts corporate groups, weddings, and diners to the highly acclaimed restaurants on the property. This is a major change from an area of forests and farms and a far-flung amusement park.

I have watched this area morph into what some call “ruburbia”: a fully suburbanized community whose rural character is now more about style than substance. More commonly called exburbs, or outer-ring communities further removed from a central city than traditional suburbs. People who move there today will no longer find the small town lifestyle that likely attracted people in the past, but instead remnants of small town “charm” with all the amenities of most American suburbs: restaurant chains, fast food, big box stores, and eventually office buildings. In a region whose population has been shrinking over the last several decades, this area has seen a boom from just over 8,000 residents in 1980 to over 14,000 in 2005. While this growth has expanded the once small-town’s tax base—especially by drawing young affluent families—the shift into suburbia has brought with it some of the things residents might have hoped to avoid by moving to ruburbia in the first place.

One of the town’s initial attractions was its lush forests. When my mother bought her home, there were trees as far as the eye could see in her backyard, and realtors sold the property in part based on the serenity and privacy the trees provided. Now just a smattering of trees remain behind her house, and her view is mostly of house built a few years later. To add insult to injury, the homeowners often hold loud parties into the night during the summer. So much for serenity.

Of course, the environmental impact of cutting down trees trumps the inconvenience to the homeowners who once enjoyed looking at them. Deer with no place else to go often dart into traffic. The shade trees once provided is gone, so now people require greater use of air conditioning in the summer. And while it might seem as though the economic downturn might slow development, developers are still clearing land in hopes of attracting new business to the area. Acres once covered with trees have been cleared to make way for new developments like the one visible in the background of the photo below. For Sale signs, like the one in the foreground of the photo below, offer unoccupied land throughout the area.

Despite the signs indicating that several existing homes are for sale, many acres of land have been cleared to expand one housing development. While the housing bubble never affected this area as severely as other communities in the region, high unemployment in the state will likely make it more difficult to sell many homes, which can be significantly higher than the region’s median home price.

The acres surrounding big box stores, as pictured below, have also been cleared, leaving just a handful of trees and planting lawns in their place, which require a great deal of water to maintain. At one strip mall, two of the major chains, Circuit City and Linens ‘n Things, have gone out of business. The Linens ‘n Things store is still vacant, and yet a sign just beyond this open space advertises that the land is for sale in case retailers would like to build a new store in the space.

Before the development frenzy began, the landscape was dotted with small houses and businesses like the one pictured above, a store that advertises feed and live bait to passersby. I recently went inside the shop for the first time. It was empty and the owner was glad to have potential customers to show around.

She told us that the building was constructed in 1899, but may soon be bulldozed to make way for an office building. The owner doesn’t want to sell it, but she is afraid that eminent domain laws will force her out. I was surprised to hear that a building like this would even be considered for demolition, primarily because there were so many other areas of cleared land with no buildings, not to mention those spaces near the strip malls. Across the street from an outlet mall, the shop now seems to lend some of the rural authenticity that the new chain restaurants and big box stores do not. Even for those bent on new development, I assumed that keeping a few of these places around could add to the “small town charm” that could cynically be used to attract business.

I’m not bashing my mother’s community—I enjoy visiting and still find it a relaxing place to be (except when caught in traffic on the once rural roads now serving as major suburban arteries). What other social consequences of “ruburbia” can you think of?

Photos courtesy of Linda Sternheimer