AgSIT and Lifecourse

Here are some somewhat disjointed thoughts on Banding Together by Jen Lena and Is Rock Becoming The New Jazz? from Rick Beato.

For the tl;dr, skip to 10:32.

I think Rick makes an interesting point. Is what Lena's claim about dominant trajectories really just a life-course effect? Is it that the audience (i.e. the genre community) ages and takes their music with them? How much is the genre trajectory really just the lifecourse trajectory?

Rick calls it "demographic level."

• Avant-garde is the young, whippersnappers breaking rules that they haven't fully learned yet.
• Scene-based is youth settling into geographic stability and creating their own communities.
• Industry-based is the capitalistic exploitation of adults as they start careers and become economically stable.
• Traditionalist is the nostalgic institutionalization of the music of those who are older.

Lifecourse Stages*

• Stage I: Achieving Independence (16-23)
• Transition from lives centered psychologically and emotionally on parents to lives in which we stand on our own.
• Stage II: Balancing Family and Work Commitments (18-40)
• Stable worker, partner/spouse, and parent roles with the challenge of establishing oneself firmly in these roles and forgoing other options.
• emerging adulthood
• Stage III: Performing Adult Roles (35-70)
• An occupational plateau for many employed adults, who seek other challenges such as trying to be good workers, parents, and spouses.
• Stage IV: Coping with Loss (60-90)
• The central challenge during this period is to cope with a series of losses, including the loss of one’s occupational role through retirement, loss of significant relationships through death, and the eventual loss of health, energy, and independence.

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* - DeLamater, John and Daniel Myers. 2007. Social Psychology, 6th ed. Thomson Wadsworth: Belmont, CA. P. 440

Memories of Lake Michigan

I grew up in Saint Joseph, Michigan, a small town on the shore of Lake Michigan. I remember going away to college in Tennessee, and suddenly, the absence of The Lake became palpable to me. I had taken it, in all its grandeur, for granted for all of my first 19 years. I was reminded of this a couple weeks ago listening to one of my favorite podcasts, The Writer's Almanac, as is part of my daily morning routine:

Heather McHugh..., born in San Diego, California (1948). She said: "I have always lived on waterfronts. If you live on the edge of an enormous mountain or an enormous body of water, it's harder to think of yourself as being so important. That seems useful to me, spiritually."

My experience of The Lake wasn't quite as McHugh describes it. For me, it was less humbling than it was confining or, perhaps, embracing. In Middle Tennessee, I had 360 degrees in which to possibly travel; in St. Joe, I had roughly half that. Instead of feeling limiting, it felt comforting. I knew that there were possibilities out there, but as a youth, I did not have to bear the anxiety that can come from the overwhelming sense of endless possibilities.

The allegory is not lost on me here, that hometowns can be simultaneously nurturing and limiting and that college opens one to an expanse of unimagined opportunities. My experience, though, was much more material and much less transcendent. I simply felt The Lake.

Race and Class in Retirement Communities

My parents bought a property in a gated retirement community in Florida recently and spent their first winter as snowbirds down there. During my spring break, I drove down to visit. I was struck with how homogenous the population was: all white, upper-middle class, and heterosexual. As I've thought more about this--which I assume is a well-established social fact--it occurred to me that my parents' non-retirement neighborhood in Michigan is nearly as homogenous. It seems anecdotally that relocation in retirement does not so much exacerbate residential segregation as it simply extends and reifies it. Does anyone know of research in this area? It has to be out there.

Empty Nests, Empty Trees, and Empty Forests

Here is something that my wife and I were wondering: are people more geographically mobile today than they were in the past? Specifically, is occupational mobility increasing? Even more particular, assuming increased mobility, what effect does this have on extended family connections, childcare, and child socialization? Surely, researchers are looking at this, no?

The Incredible Shrinking Man

These are pictures of the same historic figures. What difference jumps out at you?

If you're like my introductory students, you'll note that while the more recent depiction of the baby on the right (i.e. Jesus) is fairly realistic, the ancient one on the left is oddly stylized. "He looks like a shrunken man," students will often say. And, indeed, that is the very point I use these images to convey to them: in the past, children were seen as little adults. This was consistent with the view that children were assets in an agrarian world, extra hands to help around the farm, as it were. It isn't until the Victorian Era that our modern notion of childhood as a protected part of the lifecourse developed. Industrialization meant that children became competition for adults in the labor force so children were forced out of the workplace as a reserve labor force with child labor and compulsory education laws, which made them liabilities. As a rationalization of this altered notion of the lifecourse, children then must be conceptualized as vulnerable, and this carries over into how they are depicted in popular culture and, as we see above, in art. If you need the kids to help with the daily work, you tend to see them as "shrunken adults"; if you need kids to stay out of your factory, you tend to see them as little helpless balls of pudge.* I've found this to be an excellent way to teach about the social construction of childhood and family.

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* - Seriously, contrary to popular opinion, babies look odd. As a former professor of mine used to say and as I now pass on to my students, imagine a baby blown up to adult proportions; that thing would be ugly and terrifying!

Social Security, Life Expectancy, and SES

It's a twofer Tuesday! Just a short note of additional interest.

Paul Krugman has a very sociological post on his blog today refuting the "zombie" idea that the retirement age needs to be increased as a way to deal with the troubled status of the Social Security trust fund since life expectancy has increased over time. He makes (and has been trying to for some time) two sociologically interesting points worth sharing. First, a big part of that increase in life expectancy has to do with decreases in infant mortality. Those changes, while positive, distort what's going on at the opposite end of the lifecourse. Second, socioeconomic status is highly correlated to life expectancy. The reported gains in life expectancy belong disproportionately to those of higher socioeconomic status. The poor and working classes have not seen the same gains. According to the data Krugman cites, the lower 50% gained only a year of additional life on average for every compared to the five years that the upper 50% gained (UPDATED 11:33 AM). Raising the retirement age (even further than is already scheduled) would put an undue burden on those who most need the benefits from Social Security.