Tag: sociology
Do A State’s Politics Influence Its Greenhouse Gas Emissions? Yes, Study Says

Do A State’s Politics Influence Its Greenhouse Gas Emissions? Yes, Study Says

By Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

Over the years, it’s been a tough road for environmentalists pushing for greenhouse gas emission curbs at the federal level — but advocates shouldn’t give up hope, say researchers at Michigan State University.

The team, co-authors of a study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, have found that efforts are getting results in individual U.S. states, where environmental politics have significantly impacted greenhouse gas emissions between 1990 and the present.

“The movement is having an effect — it’s just happening on a state-by-state basis,” said sociologist and co-author Kenneth Frank.

For years, sociologist Thomas Dietz, the lead author of the study, had been examining the factors that influence carbon emissions around the world. Two drivers — a country’s population and its affluence — are most important in determining greenhouse gas emissions (generally, carbon output rises along with both).

The current study was an effort to extend the previous work by measuring the impact of another factor — politics — and to gauge differences between and within U.S. states, since a lot of environmental policy is determined at the state level, Frank said.

The team didn’t catalog specific policies and their results, which would vary widely in their details from state to state and from case to case. Rather, they analyzed a range of standardized state-level data compiled since 1990, including carbon emissions, as reported by the Environmental Protection Agency; population and gross state product; and “environmentalism,” as measured by congressional voting data compiled by the League of Conservation Voters.

While members of the U.S. Congress are not directly involved in writing state environmental policy, Frank said, the researchers reasoned that voting records would reflect the orientation of their states.

The researchers looked at the statistics in two different ways. First, to get a broad snapshot view, they performed an analysis across all of the states using 1990 data. By and large, they found that states with higher environmentalism ratings had lower emissions, after controlling for population and other factors.

They also analyzed every individual state’s environmentalism and emissions over time. Again, the researchers found evidence that politics had made a difference. Generally, emissions rise as a function of population and a state’s economic strength — but greater environmentalism counteracted that growth. Even a 1 percent increase was sufficient to “neutralize” the typical annual increase in emissions, the team wrote.

States with higher environmentalism in 1990 tended to increase emissions at a slower rate, Frank said.

Rachael Shwom, an environmental sociologist at Rutgers University who was not involved in the study, said the Michigan State team’s study was the first to quantify the impact and strength of the environmental movement in this manner.

“Lots of people who study culture and politics think they are important (drivers of emissions levels), but it hasn’t been demonstrated with data in the past,” she said. “That they found the strength of the environmental movement mattered … is a really important finding.”

(c)2015 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Kim Seng via Flickr

Census Bureau Wants To Stop Collecting Marriage, Divorce Data

Census Bureau Wants To Stop Collecting Marriage, Divorce Data

By Adam Belz, Star Tribune (Minneapolis) (TNS)

The U.S. Census Bureau is proposing to eliminate a series of questions about marital history from its ongoing American Community Survey, now the only reliable source of information on marriage and divorce rates in the United States.

Demographers and sociologists are asking the Census Bureau to keep the questions, pointing out that if they are dropped, the United States will become the only country in the developed world that does not generate annual age-specific rates of marriage and divorce, and would lose its only reliable measure of divorce rates.

“It’s an example of the federal statistical system breaking down,” said Steve Ruggles, director of the Minnesota Population Center.

One of the questions up for elimination — “In the past 12 months did this person get married?” — was first asked in 1850, said Ruggles, a historian at the University of Minnesota who studies divorce and marriage. He says the questions and what they tell us about society are irreplaceable, and now more necessary than ever.

“The drop in marriage among young people is just extraordinary. I’m projecting that about a third of the people who are currently 20 to 24 years old are never going to get married, and that’s completely unprecedented in American history,” Ruggles said. “So this is a bad time to stop collecting any data on it. It’s an amazing transformation.”

The survey, sent annually to about 3 million U.S. households, asks whether in the past 12 months a person has been married, widowed, or divorced. It also asks how many times a person has been married and what year they were last married, which gets at how long American marriages last.

Those five questions about marital history are among seven on the chopping block as the Census Bureau tries to cut costs.

Since the answers to the marital history questions come with information on the age, race, education, and income level of the people divorcing or getting married, they allow demographers to analyze divorce and marriage rates in connection with a series of economic and cultural factors.

Researchers are able to figure out divorce rates by ethnic group, or by education. Sociologists use the data to investigate divorce rates and marriage duration during recessions, or in states with different levels of religious conservatism. They can come up with millennial divorce rates in the top 25 cities.

When people call Susan Brower, Minnesota’s state demographer, with questions about marriage, they often want to know what older adults’ households look like, what their economic situation might be and whether they’re on their first, second or third marriage.

“All of these things have real consequences when you’re thinking about how people set up their households, how they share income, how they care for each other,” Brower said. “These are going to be really important questions in coming years as we move into the aging of the population.”

The Census Bureau wants to drop the questions on marital history because they are not required by law and are not used for county-level, tract-level, or metropolitan-area analysis. As Ruggles points out, they were never meant for local analysis because the sample is too small. “These questions aren’t designed to do that,” he said.

Two other questions are proposed for elimination. One asks whether a business or medical office is located at the property where the respondent lives, and one asks what bachelor’s degree the respondent has earned. Demographers argue the bachelor’s degree question is important, too, since it is used to study the characteristics of the workforce.

The comment period for the proposed changes to the American Community Survey ends on Dec. 30.

“The Census Bureau is in a tough spot,” Brower said. “But overall my sentiment is that every single question on this survey is very important.”

Photo via WikiCommons

Lillian B. Rubin, Sociologist And Best-Selling Author, Dies At 90

Lillian B. Rubin, Sociologist And Best-Selling Author, Dies At 90

By Elaine Woo, Los Angeles Times

Lillian B. Rubin, who at midlife became a sociologist, psychotherapist and best-selling author of books that examined race, class, and the sexual revolution from the viewpoint of those caught in society’s shifts, died June 17 at her San Francisco home. She was 90.

Her death was confirmed by her daughter, Marci Rubin.

A prolific writer well into her 80s, Rubin wrote a dozen books, including “Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working-class Family” (1976), a classic sociological study exploring the strains and struggles in blue-collar life; “Intimate Strangers: Men and Women Together” (1983), about how differences between the sexes affect matters such as sexuality, work and parenting; and “Quiet Rage: Bernie Goetz in a Time of Madness” (1986), about racism’s “new respectability” in the wake of the sensational “subway vigilante” case of the early 1980s.

Raised in poverty by an abusive mother, Rubin had a deep personal connection to some of her subjects, particularly “The Transcendent Child: Tales of Triumph Over the Past” (1996) and “Tangled Lives: Daughters, Mothers and the Crucible of Aging” (2000).

“What strikes you is the variety of her work, but I think her driving interest was social class, and then race,” said longtime friend Arlie Hochschild, a retired University of California, Berkeley, sociologist known for her scholarship on women, gender, and work. “She had an eye for those who got stuck, lost and left behind.”

Rubin could have been one of the lost. Born Jan. 13, 1924, in Philadelphia, she was one of two children of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. Her father, a furrier, died when she was 5. Her illiterate mother moved the family to New York where she did piece work in the garment industry.

In “The Transcendent Child,” Rubin described her mother force-feeding her vegetables until she choked, swallowed, or vomited. Her mother favored her brother, Leonard, and frequently told her “Girls shouldn’t be born.”

“I was seven years old when, bewildered by her rage and hurt by her rejection, I began consciously to remove myself psychologically from the family scene,” Rubin wrote. “It was then that I first said to myself clearly, I won’t be like her.”

She graduated from high school at 15, married at 19, and had a baby soon after. In 1952 she moved with her family to Los Angeles, where she managed congressional campaigns for progressive candidates. In 1959 her marriage ended in divorce.

Through her political work she met Hank Rubin and married him in 1962. They moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he wrote a wine column for the San Francisco Chronicle and ran restaurants that helped spur the Berkeley food movement.

In 1963, Lillian Rubin launched the next stage of her life: At 39 she entered UC Berkeley as an undergraduate. She earned a bachelor’s degree in 1967, followed by a master’s in 1968 and a doctorate in sociology in 1971. She worked for many years as a research sociologist at the university’s Institute for the Study of Social Change.

She and her daughter were students at the university at the same time. In 1967, as anti-Vietnam War protests were heating up, they joined a peaceful demonstration at the Oakland induction center and wound up in jail along with 70 other women, including folk singer Joan Baez and her mother. The Chronicle’s Herb Caen noted the arrests of “Hank Rubin’s wife and daughter” in his column.

In her last years Rubin wrote about death, including a 2012 piece for Salon in which she disclosed her plan to end her life if illness or frailty made it unbearable. Blind in one eye and in pain from a number of ailments, she did not want to wind up like her husband, who died in 2011 after a decade-long decline into dementia.

“She could not brook people who tried to talk about the glories of aging. Her last year was really bad,” said Marci Rubin, who survives her along with a grandson and a great-grandson.

Her suicide plan was, in the end, unnecessary. On the day before she died, she had taken a bus and a cab to the doctor’s office by herself, then spent the afternoon in long conversation with an old friend, Anita Hill, before having dinner with her daughter. She died in her own bed of natural causes.

Photo: Castles, Capes & Clones via Flickr

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