Hello interweb friends!
My posts here sometimes go way a little beyond The Lattice Group’s work/life balance mission, so I’ve starting a new perosnal blog at phdinprecarity.tumblr.com to deposit the miscellaneous thoughts in my head. Hope you’ll join me there.
Happy 2012!
Liz
There is a fascinating–and very long–article in The Atlantic making waves: ‘All the Single Ladies.’
Basically, when the author, Kate Bolick, was 28 she broke up with her boyfriend because “something was missing” and she thought she might emerge from the break-up a stronger, more independent person. Fast-forward to age 39: Bolick does appear to be a strong, independent person; she never did find a mate, though. Bolick doesn’t think she’s alone. Cut to recent demographic trends of less marrying and later marriages. Basis of article: There are a whole lot of single women out there!
Yes and no. As I think she mentions (the article really is long), actually marriage among highly educated and financially well-off women has increased in recent decades, except among black women.
Rising inequality in marriage aside, the cultural point Bolick speaks to is a question I think many Gen Y:ers, including myself, struggle with: should we try to make a relationship work or should we try to make ourselves happy, first and foremost?
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The Occupy Wall Street movement is heating up. As someone who studies inequality and social movements, I can’t tear myself away from the spotty coverage. As a 20-something increasingly anxious about my future in a country where “corporations are people,” I plan on taking a break from my armchair academic analysis to join the Occupy LA protests. Like many others who don’t consider themselves the protesting type, I’ll be venturing into new territory. But for me, the Occupy Wall Street slogan–“We are the 99%”–has really struck a cord.
Why? Because despite American optimism and ‘land of opportunity’ rhetoric, we’ve finally admitted to ourselves that the playing field in our country is not level. The game is rigged. The rich are getting richer, while the rest of us have seen our incomes stagnate or decline.
Of course, social scientists have been trumpeting rising income and wealth inequality for decades. Though there are a lot of ways to measure inequality and you will likely hear many different statistics as the debate unfolds, there is there is widespread consensus among researchers that inequality in income has increased markedly since the 1980s and that the level of inequality today is greater than at any point in the past 40 years.
The demands of the Occupy Wall Street protest are not yet clear. That’s okay, though–it would be seriously suspicious if a truly grassroots movement had a predetermined list of demands. But as long as Occupy Wall Street is taking suggestions, here are mine:
1. Tackle the distribution of wealth in the US
If we no longer want to be part of a 99th percentile whose wealth shrinks while the top 1% see their wealth continually rise, we’re going to need to tackle the distribution of wealth in this country. I know that sounds scary and socialist, but here’s a secret: socialist democracies do not have the kind of income inequality we do. For example, income inequality in France actually declined over the past four decades.
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Is this the future of higher ed? Even cheaper than an adjunct! (photo by tama leaver on flickr).
Yesterday I interviewed a university lecturer as part of a project I’m doing on “nonstandard work arrangements among professionals” (omg, someone please suggest a sexier title, that one made even me fall asleep).
Quick background: For a long time, most people had a standard employment arrangement. One, stable employer provided benefits and a largely indefinite contract. A lot of jobs are not standard in this way anymore. Think temps, independent contractors, freelancers, etc. The trend toward non-standard work started with low-paying jobs, as employers moved to the “just-in-time” production model and sought a more flexible workplace. But there is evidence that non-standard employment arrangements are increasing in more and more occupations, even among professionals.
Some people want a nonstandard arrangement. They want to a more flexible career path, they want to take time off, they want to work from more convenient locations–a lot of the things The Lattice Group has advocated over the years. With the rise of the internet and mobile technology, flexible employment has become more available to more and more people.
But there is a seriously dark underbelly to all this employment flexibility. And a lot of people are being forced into it by powers outside their control.
Take the lecturer I interviewed. She has a PhD. She couldn’t find a tenure-track job when she graduated so she took a lecturer position at a major university. While tenure-track professors teach 3-6 courses a year and then spend the rest of the time on research (which is what counts for climbing up the academic food chain), our lecturer had to teach up to 24–!!!–courses a year. That leaves no time for research, which means she will likely never get a tenure track job.
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photo by Sean Choe on flickr
With all the social and cultural changes in the last 50 years, you’d expect marriage to go the way of the dinosaurs. Women don’t need it for economic reasons anymore, we can enjoy premarital sex to our hearts content, and we’ve all heard the staggeringly high divorce statistics in America. And yet, studies find that today young people value marriage just as much as they did half a century ago. Demographers predict that a whopping 90% of us will eventually marry. But why?
For the prestige. At least that’s what some sociologists have begun to argue.
Fifty years ago, Americans of all social classes married at roughly the same, high rate. Today, poor men and women are half as likely to get married as individuals with higher incomes. It’s not because the poor don’t value marriage; on the contrary, studies find that the poor value marriage as much or more than most Americans. But they feel that getting married requires a certain degree of financial stability: the ability to buy a modest home, a car and some furniture, and enough money to afford a decent wedding. Poor people aspire to this modest material stability but most won’t be able to attain it.
On the other hand, for college-educated middle and upper-class Americans this modest amount of financial stability is more or less assured (or at least it has been for pre-Great Recession generations). It might take us longer these days—we feel we need to acquire a few letters to put after our last names or start a successful venture first—but we get there eventually.
Why don’t we just stick with cohabitation? It’s readily available, no paperwork required. Sociologists argue that cohabitation is a less prestigious form of union than marriage, requiring a less public demonstration of commitment and financial security.
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We could have better public child care or just start praying to fertility goddesses again.
Since about 1965, most countries in the Western world have experienced drops in fertility. For a population to keep from shrinking, women should have an average of 2.1 kids. (It’s called the replacement rate, and it actually varies depending on a country’s mortality rate, so the replacement rate for developing countries is higher). Fertility matters not only if you care about your country not disappearing, but also if you’re going to grow old. The lower the fertility rate, the fewer young workers there are to help support older citizens.
In Europe, only the Irish manage to reach replacement rate, though France and some Nordic countries come pretty close. The U.S. fertility rate is 2.1, but that is only because of the higher fertility rate of immigrants who come from developing countries where fertility rates are high. Native-born women are in the same boat as their European peers. That is, they’re either not having kids or having fewer kids.
Why?
Demographers have been trying to figure this out for decades. Some argue that we’ve become increasingly individualistic. Others argue that people opt for a quantity-quality balance with their children. Now that it takes so much effort and money to raise a child of sufficient quality to be worth our while, we’ve had to reduce the quantity of kids we have. Then there is the advent of modern forms of birth control.
The best explanation I’ve come across so far, though, is from a paper by Peter McDonald, a demographer at Australian National University. It’s a little difficult to follow at first, but bear with me.
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I’m moving into a new apartment today! After about a month of living with my parents while frantically searching for a place in Los Angeles that did not trigger a gag reflex, my manfriend and I finally found a home.
As soon as we signed the lease I set off making budgets and shopping lists because I’m slightly obsessive like that. I became a bit overwhelmed while making the cleaning supplies list. Frankly, I don’t have any idea how to really clean. So far, I’ve managed to keep my shared apartments looking habitable with some superficial dusting and tiddying, but I never regularly clean.
I shared my last apartment with two other girls. I did my best to clean up after myself in the common spaces, but we never divided the hardcore cleaning jobs– the toilet, the shower, the oven grease. So it went un-done. After a few months one of my roommates suggested we hire a cleaning service (I can’t get myself to write maid). Having read Nickel and Dimed, I felt uncomfortable about it but not uncomfortable enough, apparently, to argue.
The cleaning lady arrived with an army of products–and her young son. Together they spent 2 hours cleaning our apartment. The apartment was spotless and I never felt so horrible in my entire life.
There are two arguments I can think of on the pro side of hiring a cleaner. One is that that dual-earner households or individuals who work long hours need help. I have a friend who is an investment banker and works 12-14 hour days. I can’t imagine how she would fit in a toilet cleaning. The other argument is that it’s a need that creates jobs.
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photo by kandyjaxx on flickr
More on the changing role of men and fathers–but this time with a scientific twist:
…new fathers everywhere were calibrating the state of their manhood after the release of a much-discussed study of 600 men that indicated that testosterone — the defining hormone of maleness — drops after a man becomes a father.
If that were not enough, the study seems to suggest that practice actually makes imperfect when it comes to the hours men spend in rearing children. It found that the more time a man spends each day, say, strapping Crocs onto his toddler’s feet or helping her off the monkey bars, the more the hormone flags. (“Fathers and the XX-Factor,” New York Times).
Cue freak out about loss of manlyness. My first reaction was ‘oh crap, now people are going to argue there is biological proof that I should get stuck with all the butt-wipping at 3 a.m.’ But then I read on:
“It’s a natural process,” Matt Schneider, a stay-at-home father of two young children who lives in Battery Park City in Manhattan, said of the testosterone dip reported in the study. The finding, he said, was unfortunately being interpreted by some “as a way to emasculate men, when really it should be used as a way to show us all that we’re meant to be part of the caregiving process.”
That, in fact, was a point that the study’s authors emphasized: a dip in testosterone does not mean a man is less virile. Rather, it seems to be nature’s way of slightly adjusting impulses, to make him less likely to stray once he has a family to look after, and more likely to focus on the tasks at hand.
Biology is an interesting thing. Our ideas about biology and how we make biological arguments about what is or is not appropriate for people to do is even more fascinating. While this study seems to support my personal view that men are just as capable of being caregivers as women–even biologically!–it raises the question of how important biology is in how we should live our lives. We’ve out-smarted biology in so many ways (think modern medicine), should we even care about biology anymore?
photo by Arbeiderpartiet on flickr.com
On Thursday, Danes put the Social Democrats, led by Helle Thorning-Schmidt, back in power after a decade of center-right government.
It’s the first-ever female Danish Prime Minister.
Schmidt and the Social Dems even appear to have a reasonable economic plan: a comibination of increasing taxes on banks and increasing the Danish work day by 12 minutes. Happily absent are austerity programs, which tend to disproportionately burden those individuals who can least afford to bear them, and more anti-immigration policies, which have been all the rage in Denmark but to little economic avail.
I’m just happy to see different political approaches–alternatives to America’s cut throat capitalism model–once again be taken seriously in Europe. But with 9.1% unemployment, a stagnant economy, 15% poverty rate, 49 million people without health insurance, and a lack of regulation which helped put us in this mess…I guess enthusiasm for low-taxation/low-regulation is waning.
by phd comics
As my summer break comes to an end, I’ve begun to panic about the summer to-do list that never quite got done. It was a little ambitious considering I was also committed to enjoying a full six weeks of vacation (in Sweden; don’t worry, that’s normal there).
So in desperation and anticipation of a jam-packed fall quarter, I googled “time mangement.” I stumbled upon this blog entry from an MIT post-doc. He’s written 3 books. One while finishing his dissertation. That is absurd.
Basically, his advice is:
- do only things that are necessary for you to achieve your larger goals (right, must decide on those)
- say no to everything else (but won’t people stop liking me?)
- make a schedule and stick to it (hmpf)
Here is a link to the full blog.
I found the suggestions helpful–especially the part about clarifying your goals– though I suspect the productivity I’ve achieved today will be fleeting.
I’ve also signed up for a mindfulness meditation class at the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA. Meditation has always sounded a bit frou-frou to me, but I’d like to finish my PhD before retirement age. Whatever helps.
