Sociology Review sheet

Social demography takes populations or groups, not individuals, as its main unit.

T.

In the Saez chart, the top 0.1% income share in 2017 exceeded both the 1928 and 2007 peaks.

F. It had returned to Gilded Age levels (about 10.5%) but sat below the ~11.6% (1928) and 12.3% (2007) peaks.

The "Fading American Dream" chart plots relative mobility.

F. It plots absolute mobility: the share of children earning more than their parents (~90% for 1940 births, ~50% for the mid-1980s).

In the SCF chart, 2022 median family wealth was about $285,000 (white), $61,600 (Hispanic) and $44,900 (Black).

T. Black median wealth is roughly one-sixth of white.

Black and Hispanic median wealth were close through about 2013, with Hispanic families pulling ahead by 2022.

T.

The Great Recession cut median white wealth sharply, but by 2022 it was well above its pre-recession level.

T. Black median wealth is roughly one-sixth of white.

The social is simply the sum of individuals.

F. It is a level of reality with its own properties and dynamics; a sum of individuals gives you a crowd, not a society.

In Schelling's (1971) model, segregation emerges only if agents strongly prefer segregated neighborhoods.

F. Each agent merely prefers that at least half its neighbors be similar, and segregation emerges anyway.

Quetelet and the moral statisticians were struck that crime, suicide and marriage rates were stable year to year.

T.

Durkheim's Suicide found higher rates among Catholics than Protestants.

F. Protestants > Catholics; single > married.

For Mills, one person unemployed in a city of 100,000 is a public issue.

F. That is a personal trouble. Fifteen million unemployed in a nation of 50 million is a public issue.

For Mills, public issues are resolved mainly by character, skill and opportunity.

F. That describes personal troubles; issues require changing structure.

The lecture says luck is the residual in our models, so it cannot be socially patterned.

F. It is the residual and it is patterned: the same shock is a setback for a rich family and an eviction for a poor one.

The ecological fallacy reads group-level facts onto individuals.

T.

Robinson (1950) found that immigrants were more literate and that states with more immigrants had higher literacy, so both levels agreed.

F. States with more immigrants had higher literacy, but immigrants themselves were less literate. A sign flip, not a subtlety.

"My three friends who skipped college are thriving, so college is a scam" is an atomistic fallacy.

T.

"Our precinct has the city's highest turnout, so my neighbor definitely voted" is an atomistic fallacy.

F. It is ecological: group fact to individual.

Concluding that any resident of a high-crime neighborhood is dangerous is an atomistic fallacy.

F. It is ecological.

A fertility rate of 1.6 is a property any individual woman can have.

F. Rates exist only at the population level; no one has 1.6 children.

The Messerli chocolate-Nobel correlation illustrates a correlation at the wrong level.

T.

Social demography is a field of sociology alone.

F. Sociology, economics, political science, public health, medicine, biology and more, united by the population lens.

The lecture treats difference as something to be eliminated in every case.

F. Difference is not a dirty word. Ask which differences, in what, produced how, for whom.

Christakis's "social suite" includes strict hierarchy.

F. It includes mild hierarchy (relative egalitarianism), plus in-group bias, friendship, cooperation, networks and social learning.

In the USSR, physicians earned more than factory workers.

F. Less; a coal miner out-earned a doctor by design. Status and money can come apart.

Stratification refers to the distances between reward packages.

F. That is inequality. Stratification is the system: positions ranked with unequal rewards, and people sorted into them.

Mobility, in the building metaphor, is the elevator.

T.

Moynihan's 1965 report attributed Black family patterns only to structural forces such as discrimination and joblessness.

F. A mix: structural forces and a "tangle of pathology" in family culture.

The part of the Moynihan Report that survived in public debate was the structural half.

F. The phrase that survived was not the structural half.

The "essentialist shortcut" reads a group difference in rates as evidence that "those people" are different kinds of people.

T.

The "welfare queen" entered American politics in 1976.

T.

Gilens found that as coverage of poverty turned negative, images of the poor turned Black far beyond their actual share.

T.

The 1996 welfare law kept AFDC and added work requirements.

F. It abolished AFDC and created TANF, with time limits, work requirements, sanctions and state discretion.

The 1994 Violent Crime Control Act and the 1996 PRWORA both rested largely on a behavioral diagnosis of poverty.

T.

For Wilson, deindustrialization is one structural cause behind apparent "cultural" symptoms in family, work and crime.

T.

Edin & Kefalas (2005) found that poor women devalue marriage.

F. They revere it, hold it to a high standard, and won't enter it on shaky economic ground.

Edin & Kefalas drew on five years with 162 low-income single mothers in Philadelphia and Camden.

T.

Edin & Lein (1997) showed that welfare-reliant mothers' budgets don't add up, so most combine aid with work.

T.

Newman found Harlem fast-food workers lacked a mainstream work ethic.

F. They held a fierce, mainstream work ethic.

Anderson's "code of the street" is an inherited value system.

F. It is a situational adaptation to structural abandonment; most families are "decent".

The predicted "superpredator" wave of juvenile violence arrived on schedule.

F. Juvenile violence plummeted; Dilulio recanted.

"Mexican" appeared as a race category in 1930 and was removed by 1940 after protest.

T.

The 2000 Census was the first to let respondents select multiple races.

T.

Mittleman (ASR 2022) found that women's academic advantage is spread evenly across sexual orientation.

F. It is largely confined to straight women; gay boys outperform, and the pattern tracks gender conformity.

"Compositional heterogeneity" means to ask which subgroups drive a group-level trend.

T.

If the Black-white incarceration gap narrows, Black Americans' lives have necessarily improved.

F. Partly driven by rising white incarceration. The anchor matters.

The lecture says the right anchor is parity with the white rate for every construct.

F. Poverty: closer to zero; inequality: contested; mobility: somewhere between perfect and none.

Poverty is a single, agreed-upon construct.

F. Five constructs in one word: material, social, moral, political, policy.

Every poverty measure has three ingredients: a threshold, a resource measure, and a unit plus equivalence scale.

T.

Orshansky set the threshold at three times the Economy (Thrifty) Food Plan because a 1955 survey showed families spent about one-third of income on food.

T.

Since 1963 the official threshold has been updated for both inflation and rising living standards.

F. Inflation only (CPI-U); the 1963 living standard is frozen inside it.

The OPM counts pre-tax cash income as resources.

T.

The OPM counts the EITC and Child Tax Credit.

F. It ignores taxes paid and refundable credits received, plus in-kind aid such as SNAP, housing assistance and Medicaid.

OPM thresholds adjust for local housing costs.

F. One national line; only Alaska and Hawaii differ.

In 2024, 10.6% of Americans (35.9 million) were below the official line.

T.

Orshansky remained a proud defender of the measure she built.

F. She became one of its sharpest critics: "the best that you can say… is that at a time when it seemed useful, it was there".

More than 85 federal programs use the poverty line in eligibility, including Medicaid, CHIP, SNAP, WIC, Head Start and LIHEAP.

T.

The SPM threshold is based on what families actually spend on food, clothing, shelter and utilities (FCSU).

T.

The SPM adjusts for local housing costs.

T.

SPM resources are cash plus taxes plus in-kind benefits, minus medical and work expenses.

T.

The SPM grew out of National Academies reports (1995, 2005) and has been published annually since 2011.

T.

The SPM counts in-kind benefits but ignores taxes and credits.

F. It counts taxes and credits too.

A relative poverty line is typically set at 50% or 60% of median income.

T.

Gallup's public "minimum to get by" line runs well below the official line.

F. Well above.

For Sen, poverty is low income itself; income is the end, not the means.

F. Poverty is capability deprivation; income is a means.

Because it counts only pre-tax cash, the OPM cannot see most modern anti-poverty policy.

T.

A group that makes up a large share of all poor people must have a high poverty rate.

F. Composition and rates are different questions.

In 2024 the SPM rate (12.9%) was higher than the OPM rate (10.6%).

T.

The SPM is now used for program eligibility.

F. It is still calculated but remains "supplemental".

By the OPM, poverty looks little changed since the 1960s; by the SPM, poverty is far lower than it otherwise would be because taxes and transfers did the work.

T.

The long-run OPM-SPM divergence reflects the growth of transfers that only the SPM counts.

T.

The 2021 Child Tax Credit expansion cut SPM child poverty to about 5.2%, and it rebounded to about 12.4% in 2022.

T.

Evaluations found a collapse in parental employment under the expanded CTC.

F. No detectable collapse; food insufficiency fell too.

The expanded CTC expired because it failed to reduce poverty.

F. Cost and work-incentive debates.

TANF is a federal entitlement that expands automatically with need.

F. A block grant to states, with time limits and work requirements.

TANF's real value has roughly doubled since 1996.

F. It has fallen about 50%; the block grant was never adjusted for inflation.

AFDC/TANF families per 100 poor families with children fell from 68 (1996) to about 21 (2020).

T.

About 5 million families received AFDC in 1994; about 840,000 receive TANF today.

T.

Maximum TANF benefits exceed the poverty line in most states.

F. They sit far below it everywhere.

Shaefer & Edin found that households with children living on $

le

$2$ per person per day roughly doubled after the 1996 reform.

T.

Shaefer & Edin's rise in extreme poverty disappears once SNAP is counted.

F. SNAP and other aid blunt it but don't erase it; the rise of near-cashless households is the robust finding.

Parolin, Desmond & Wimer found that safety-net changes lifted the poor near the line while leaving the deepest poor behind, so inequality below the line grew.

T.

Parolin et al. found that poverty-reducing policies also increased inequality among the poor before the mid-1990s.

F. Unlike in previous decades: the link emerges after the mid-1990s.

Parolin et al. reconstruct the SPM back to 1967 and apply a decomposition of taxes/transfers vs. composition.

T.

Relative poverty can rise during an economic expansion if the median grows faster than the bottom (Ireland's Celtic Tiger).

T.

Sen's capability view supports a relative line because participating in society is itself relative.

T.

Among rich democracies the U.S. has among the highest relative poverty rates, worse still for children, which the lecture calls a policy choice.

T.

Income is a stock; wealth is a flow.

F. Reversed: income is the flow, wealth the stock.

$Gini = A/(A+B),$ where A is the area between the line of equality and the Lorenz curve.

T.

Two countries with the same Gini must have the same distribution.

F. Different Lorenz curves can share a Gini.

The Palma ratio is the top 10% share divided by the bottom 40% share.

T.

The Atkinson index builds in an explicit inequality-aversion value judgment.

T.

Theil and mean log deviation are decomposable into within- and between-group inequality.

T.

The Hoover ("Robin Hood") index gives the share of income to move to reach equality.

T.

Rich counties tend to have low Gini coefficients.

F. Rich or poor, equal or unequal.

The top 0.01% is roughly the top 12,000 families.

T.

Over the century U.S. income inequality traces a U: high in the 1920s, compressed mid-century, rising since the late 1970s.

T.

The modern rise is driven overwhelmingly by the top 1%, and the 1% itself is not the whole story (it is "fractal").

T.

Aeppli & Wilmers found that earnings inequality kept rising through 2019.

F. It has not risen since about 2012, the first sustained pause since 1980.