Abstract
Generational wealth, the speed of science, and women telling stories: A snapshot of new research.
Keywords
Okay, Boomer
Millennials are widely assumed to be economically worse off than Baby Boomers. Explanations range from the younger generation’s experience of precarious employment, rises in cohabiting and single parenthood, and even their alleged overconsumption of avocado toast. At the same time, Millennial billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Bankman-Fried have accrued early fortunes in fields such as tech and finance. So, are Millennials really the first generation to fare worse than their parents?
Solving rising wealth inequality will take more than encouraging Millennials to cut back on avocado toast.
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A new study published in the American Journal of Sociology by Rob Gruijters, Anette Fasang, and Zachary Van Winkle examines this claim. Using data comparing the work and family trajectories and wealth accumulation of early Millennials (born 1980-1984) and late Baby Boomers (born 1957-1964), their analysis reveals a complex story. The median Millennial does indeed have less wealth than the median Boomer at age 35, but inequality between the top and bottom of the wealth distribution has increased. So, while the poorest Millennials are worse off than the poorest Boomers were at 35, the wealthiest Millennials (hello, Mark Zuckerberg) are better off than the budding Boomer elites were at 35. The divergence stems from the fact that the economic advantages associated with typical middle-class lifestyles (pursuing professional careers, delaying starting a family) have increased since Boomers were coming of age. In contrast, the disadvantages associated with typical working-class trajectories (low-level blue-collar or service sector work, single parenthood) have persisted or worsened.
The study, which adds to our understanding of generational change and rising wealth inequality, includes a number of policy insights. The proposed interventions include measures to limit (and redistribute) wealth accumulation at the top of the economic distribution (e.g., tax reforms), as well as measures to promote wealth accumulation at the bottom (e.g., providing young families with access to stable housing). Encouragingly, the authors’ suggestions don’t involve cutting back on avocado toast.
AI and the Scientific Imagination
Climate change and COVID-19 are two key problems that have highlighted humanity’s race against time. In each case, life-saving scientific breakthroughs have hinged on imagining new solutions to seemingly unsolvable social problems. Could AI be the key to speeding up the process? A new paper, published in Nature Human Behavior, investigates.
Authors Jamshid Sourati and James A. Evans provided AI with millions of scientific articles—1.5 million articles related to energy efficient technologies and 27 million related to medications—in order to determine AI’s effectiveness in accelerating science.
Can AI speed scientific innovation in times of crisis?
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AI proved immensely fruitful. Each of the researchers’ AI models predicted both scientific discoveries and their discoverers four times faster than experts in the field were able to. Not only that, AI was able to fill in gaps of scientific knowledge and reveal new pathways to creation. Therefore, the authors conclude, AI sharpens the distance and focus of our scientific spyglass, potentially easing expedited science in times of need.
The Terminator, i,ROBOT, and other films reflect a common fascination with whether artificial intelligence will make or break humanity. While the answer to that question is still lost in the matrix, this article highlights AI as a helpful scientific tool, created by humans and now able to aid us in moments when we have little time to waste.
Who’s On Top?
Let’s face it: sex work is a highly stigmatized occupation. Although we might expect the shared experience of stigmatization to foster solidarity among sex workers, a recent study by Madeline Toubiana and Trish Ruebottom reveals that the reality is more complex: in addition to experiencing stigma from those outside the occupation, sex workers stigmatize one another.
Published in Administrative Science Quarterly, this six-year qualitative study examines stigmatization processes occurring within the Canadian sex work industry. Toubiana and Ruebottom identify a clear status hierarchy within the occupation, referred to by the sex workers themselves as “the whorearchy.” The authors identify physicality as the main criterion for this hierarchy, with those engaging in the highest degree of physical intimacy (especially intimacy with clients) at the bottom of the status hierarchy. Thus, a dominatrix would generally have higher status than a stripper, who would in turn enjoy higher status than an escort. The same principle applied within different specialties, based on variations in what individual workers were willing to do for clients. These hierarchies were further shaped by demographic characteristics (with those occupying privileged class and racial positions experiencing less stigma than others) and by workers’ motivation for their involvement (with those motivated by intrinsic enjoyment experiencing less stigma than those driven to sex work by financial need).
An internal hierarchy may stymie sex worker solidarity.
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The findings offer a nuanced view of stigma, including how members of a stigmatized group can act as stigmatizers themselves. And they illustrate how such processes can undermine occupational solidarity—potentially deterring collective action. To the extent that sex workers are fragmented into smaller clusters of solidarity instead of identifying with the broader occupation, they may have less power to advocate for shared interests and effect social change.
Law and The Looky-Loo
Demonstrated by the popularity of Amazon’s Ring app, people are increasingly relying on private-sector technologies for safeguarding their properties and ensuring personal safety. Amazon profits—and its technologies enable law enforcement to access more surveillance content from more people more easily than ever before. Scholars Sarah Brayne, Sarah Lageson, and Karen Levy term this phenomenon, wherein “ordinary people use their labor and economic resources to engage in surveillance activities on behalf of the state,” surveillance deputization.
New technologies have aided the rise of surveillance deputies.
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In Law & Society Review, the authors use contemporary empirical examples to hypothesize the conditions that contribute to surveillance deputization. The first condition occurs when the interests of the state and the civilian converge. Such scenarios can range from instances in which civilians willingly provide information to state actors to situations in which state actors actively encourage and offer incentives for civilian participation in the surveillance project. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio advised residents to inform on individuals and businesses who were not participating in social distancing. A second condition arises when “law institutionalizes surveillance deputization or fails to clarify its boundaries.” Take, for instance, Texas’ S.B. 8. The legislation was crafted to “circumvent” Roe v. Wade by deputizing ordinary people to penalize those seeking abortions by filing lawsuits against anyone aiding them in the process, including doctors, nurses, and even Uber drivers. Finally, the conditions for surveillance deputization are right when digital tools incentivize the voluntary participation of civilians. For instance, the authors note how applications like Nextdoor provide relatively inexpensive platforms for “responsibilized citizens” to engage in consumption practices that produce surveillance data.
As technologies facilitate the escalation of private data collection and businesses identify strategies to capitalize on this trend, the frameworks presented in this paper enhance our understanding of the ways peer surveillance becomes a desirable extension of both state and corporate surveillance.
Canada’s Immigration Politics
In the realm of global politics, immigration stands as a polarizing issue, often framed in terms of openness versus restriction. Traditional assumptions tie political parties to clear-cut stances, portraying liberals as proponents and conservatives as opponents of immigration. But how has this played out in Canada, a country that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has claimed is “the first postnational state”? A recent publication in the Canadian Review of Sociology turns to data from Canadian parliamentary debates on immigration from 1968 to 2019.
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Using discourse analysis, Ravi Pendakur and Sabrina Sarna identify Parliament’s 24 most frequently mentioned immigration issues, ranging from intake classes to refugee crises. Across the roughly 24,000 speeches analyzed from this 50-year period, refugees were the most frequently discussed issue, even though they constitute a relatively small proportion of country’s total annual immigration intake. Conservative Members of Parliament transitioned from discouraging refugee intake due to security concerns and terrorism during the Harper years (2006-2015) to later questioning the Trudeau government about its failure to fulfill the refugee intake promise. Polarized until 2015, the Liberal party’s perspective shifted rightward on the political ideology spectrum, whereas the Conservative party moved leftward. This shows that both parties gravitated toward a more centrist stance on immigration toward the end of the study period.
Polarization between parties does not necessarily imply static views on immigration. As Pendakur and Sarna find, parties across the political spectrum may strategically shift toward the center, either to distance themselves from past leaders or to recapture moderate support within their respective political spheres.
Movies Reboot Gender Divides
Barbie, the 2023 film directed by Greta Gerwig, broke records as the first billion-dollar blockbuster solely directed by a woman. Why are females in cinematic leadership roles so scarce? Film to date has largely been built through the eyes and minds of men, with only 2-6% (according to prior research) of all films at any time being led by female cinematographers and teams. Pete Jones and colleagues took a network analysis approach to investigating the make-up of cinematic teams in a recently published paper in Social Networks. The network data for this study comes from a database of nine years of Australian film and television productions containing 3,023 unique people working in 9,445 roles on 774 productions, as well as a survey of 582 camera department workers.
Women remain scarce in the film industry’s leadership roles.
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The research team found that, on the one hand, men in the film industry tend to work with men, preserve the same teams over time, and occupy and maintain many leadership roles within the film industry. Some men in leadership roles include women on their teams, but there are far fewer women than men to choose from within the industry. Women, on the other hand, while working alongside men, frequently jump from one team to the next post-production because most film crews are led by men who hire men instead of women. That the few women who gain access to leadership roles make sure to diversify their film teams highlights the fact that inequality in film is not merely due to unequal numbers of men and women, but is likely the result of exclusionary practices that reproduce male domination.
What we see on the big screen impacts how we perceive the world and our place in it. But the images we ingest have largely been conjured and brought into our theaters and homes by men. How might a world of cinema drafted and crafted by women influence our social worlds? Well, if Barbie’s smash success is any indication, audiences can’t wait to find out.
Trust and Stratify
Imagine waking up one day to another you. Instead of a physical clone, though, the new you is a digital doppelganger who has taken control of your credit card and locked you out of all of your accounts. While the experience of identity theft may feel stranger than fiction, for the millions of Americans who have their identities stolen each year, the consequences are all too real. Chief among these consequences is the economic insecurity that comes from having one’s personal data compromised. As a new study by sociologist Jordan Brensinger demonstrates, this insecurity makes an individual-level financial crisis a sociological one, too.
Published in the American Sociological Review, Bren-singer’s article argues that the experience of economic insecurity from identity theft is shaped by breaches in trust across three levels of social life. These include interpersonal trust breaches between individuals and other members of their social networks, like friends and family; organizational trust breaches between individuals and responsible institutions, like banks and businesses; and systemic breaches between individuals and social structures, like class and race.
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By using this framework in a qualitative analysis of the identity theft resolution process, Brensinger finds that, in the wake of a personal data breach, victims describe identity theft as a breach in trust, but their attribution of blame is sharply patterned by race and class. Low-income people and people of color in Brensinger’s study reported feeling “taken advantage of” and tended to be suspicious of their personal networks, whereas middle-class and upper-income and White people tended to feel as though organizations had “failed” them and demanded increased institutional protections.
Brensinger’s findings suggest that the ways people interpret the experience of identity theft and how they attempt to mitigate against future risk threaten to entrench existing inequalities. By creating mistrust among the personal networks of low-income and people of color, identity theft may work to alienate these groups from the sources of informal assistance that they often rely on to navigate an economic system stacked against them. At the same time, by demanding protection from organizations, middle- and upper-class victims may force those organizations to further prioritize their needs over those of less advantaged groups.
Wealthy Disillusioned with Politics, Too
As the rich get richer, as the old saying goes, we might expect their political influence to expand. This logic, however, assumes that elites believe in political solutions—an assumption that a recent study by Finnish sociologists Hanna Kuu-sela and Anu Kantola calls into question. Indeed, even in one of the most progressive liberal democracies in the world, we see the rich get richer and more cynical of democracy.
Published in the British Journal of Sociology, the article draws on 90 interviews with Finland’s wealth elite to examine how this small, extremely powerful segment of society views the utility and capability of liberal democracy. While some participants avoided discussing politics altogether, most responses drew on a combination of three main frames of critique. The first, which the authors dub the cynicism frame, paints democracy as an inefficient and ineffective system of governance that has been “hijacked” by special interests. The second, the impatience frame, locates its consternation in the deliberative element of democracy, claiming that debate and consensus-building are barriers to the types of strong action needed to create change. The third, the boldness frame, builds on the impatience frame to claim that democratic leaders lack the courage to make the difficult decisions needed to solve big social and political problems (ones that the participants often failed to identify explicitly).
To make sense of their respondents’ critical frames, the authors draw together theories of unpolitical democracy, which describes the rise of anti-political, antagonistic, and populist parties within democratic systems, and solutionism, the belief in simple, often technological solutions to complex social and political problems. These suggest that today’s wealth elites largely see liberal democracy as an inefficient system incapable of solving pressing, yet unspecified social and political problems. The result is that elites appear to echo the sense of political powerlessness and support for strongmen leaders found among populist partisans and the lower classes.