Social Problems
Darryl Hall
Department of Sociology
University of Nevada, Reno
Political Economy
- Politics is the social institution that controls and distributes resources and power, as well as organizes decision making. According to Harold Laswell, politics is “who gets what, when, and how.”
- Power refers to the capacity of one party to carry out his or her will despite the opposition and resistance of others. Power also involves controlling resources that others do not have; powerful groups control most of the resources, while powerless or marginalized groups have less or no resources.
- The nature of politics has much to do with the operation of the economy, the social institution that organizes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.
- Because economic and political institutions influence one another, many analysts use the term political economy to refer to the economic and political life of a nation or a region of the world.
Economic Transformations
• “Post-industrial” Economy – Based on service work and high-tech positions
• From the tangible to the intangible – the creation and manipulation of symbols
• Mechanical to literacy skills – Speaking, writing, and computer knowledge
• Decline of labor unions, organized labor seeking better wages and benefits for members, resulting from the loss of highly unionized jobs and concessions that have included the dissolution of unions
• Increase in the contingent, temporary workforce – Manpower is now the largest employer
Major Modern Economic Systems
Capitalism:
• Private ownership of the means of production
• Pursuit of personal profit
• Competition in a free market, without the interference of government
• Greater income disparity
• Personal freedom from government regulations
Socialism:
• Public ownership of the means of production
• Pursuit of collective goals
• Centralized decision making
• Democracy
• Less income disparity
• Personal freedom from basic needs
- A mixed economy combines elements of both capitalism and socialism. Sweden, Great Britain, and France have an economic and political system known as democratic socialism, in which private ownership of some of the means of production is combined with governmental distribution of some essential goods and services.
Understanding Corporations
• A Transnational or Multinational Corporation refers to a large-scale business organization that is headquartered in one country but operating in many countries
- The shareholders in transnational corporations live throughout the world. Most shareholders have little control over where plants are located, how much employees are paid, or how the environment is protected.
• The largest transnational corporations are headquartered in the United States, Japan, Korea, and Germany.
Concentration of Corporate Wealth
• Concentration of Wealth – Wealth in the business community is centralized in a relatively few major corporations, and this concentration is increasing. In 2000, for example, the minimum revenue to be in among the 500 largest corporations was $2.9 billion. The top corporation, Exxon Mobil, had $210 billion in revenues. Also, consider:
- Less that 1% of all corporations account for over 80% of the total output of the private sector
- Of the 15,000 commercial U.S. banks, the largest 50 hold more than one-third of all assets
- One percent of all food corporations control 80% of all the industry’s assets and about 90% of the profits
- Six multinational corporations ship 90% of the grain in the world
- Nine massive conglomerates dominate the U.S. media landscape, supplying virtually all the television programs, movies, videos, radio shows, music, and books
- Each of the top three companies—Exxon Mobil, General Motors, and Ford—has revenues greater than the national budgets of all but 7 of the 191 nations of the world.
• A country’s wealth is usually measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), but this indicator fails to show how the wealth is divided by the members of the society and how the people really live. It also does not take into consideration the informal economy, the alternative economic exchanges and activities (e.g., crime, drug trafficking, prostitution) that are not documented.
The Myth of Competition
• Interlocking Directorates refer to the linkages that result when an individual serves on the board of directors of two or more companies
• Megamergers – There are thousands of mergers each year, as giant corporations become even larger. The ten largest mergers in U.S. history have occurred in the last fifteen years:
1) Time, Inc. and AOL joining with Warner Communications
2) Disney merging with Capital Cities/ABC
3) Wells Fargo combining with First Interstate Banks
4) NationsBank joining with BankAmerica
5) Philip Morris taking over Miller Brewing
6) AT&T buyout of Tele-Communications, Inc.
7) Citicorp merging with Travelers Group
8) Texaco buying out Getty Oil
9) Exxon merging with Mobil Oil
10) MCI World-Com’s acquisition of Sprint
• The trend toward megamergers has at least four negative characteristics:
1) It increases the centralization of capital, which reduces competition and raises prices for consumers.
2) As corporations become fewer and larger, they have increased power over workers, unions, and governments.
3) It reduces the number of jobs as the merged companies eliminate redundant positions. Companies frequently downsize the workforce even though they are making record profits.
4) It is nonproductive. Mergers do not create new plants, products, or jobs. Rather, they create tremendous profits for chief executive officers, lawyers, accountants, brokers, bankers, and big investors.
Who Rules America? Explaining Political Power
• The Power Elite Model is associated with C. Wright Mills, who argues that power is concentrated in the hands of a small group of people known as the power elite. They are part of the top positions of political, economic, and military positions. These members are interchangeable (e.g., a military leader may easily become a political leader). Members share a common class background and class culture.
• The Pluralist Model assumes that there are many different competing bases of power, with no single group dominating another. No one group has access to most resources or controls decision making. Pluralists point out that businesses are not monolithic—policies may help large (core) businesses but not small businesses. Also, various sectors may compete for resources (e.g., military and economic sectors compete for experts).
Special Interests
• Special Interest Groups – a political alliance of people interested in some economic or social issue (e.g., the NRA, AARP, AMA)
• Political Action Committees (PAC) – organizations formed by special interest groups, independent of political parties, to pursue political aims by raising and spending money
• The U.S. principle of democracy is violated by the special interests, which by financial support of political candidates attempt to deflect the political process for their own benefit. The existence of lobbyists does not ensure that the national interest will be served or that the concerns of all groups will be heard.
Voter Apathy in the US
- Compared to other industrialized countries, voter turnout rates in the U.S. are the lowest. There are three major reasons:
1) Most American voters believe (correctly or incorrectly) that their vote does not count or matter; they feel powerless to Political Action Committees.
2) There are two major political parties (republican and democratic) which represent a coalition of interest groups.
3) Voluntary registration for voters and bureaucratic constraints involved in registration may turn away many potential voters.
War and Peace
• War is violent conflict among nations or organized groups; peace refers to the absence of violent conflict.
• Although people think of peace as the normal state of affairs, with wars breaking out from time to time, wars have always been part of human history. Indeed, in its short history, the United States has been involved in ten large-scale wars and many more minor conflicts (e.g., those in Grenada, Panama, Somalia, and Bosnia). Globally, there has never been a point during the last century when nations were not in conflict somewhere around the world.
• Although war is a common event in human history, the level of violence typical of wars has sharply increased over time. In the twentieth century, weapons have become very lethal: machine guns replaced single-shot rifles; new kinds of chemical weapons and explosive bombs have been developed; and missiles can rain death and destruction on entire cities. Such armaments are called weapons of mass destruction because they have the destructive capacity to kill many thousands of people at one time.
The Proliferation and Control of Nuclear Weapons
• In the 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union led the world in an arms race, each competing to build a more powerful military arsenal than its adversary. If either superpower were to initiate a full-scale war, the retaliatory powers of the other nation would result in the destruction of both nations. Thus, the principle of mutually assured destruction (MAD) that developed from nuclear weapons capabilities transformed war from a win-lose proposition to a lose-lose scenario. If both sides would lose in a war, the theory goes, neither side would initiate war.
• In a recent national survey of U.S. registered voters, 69 percent responded that a goal of the United States should be to reduce or eliminate nuclear weapons, 14 percent favored building “new or better nuclear weapons,” 13 percent favored maintaining current levels, and 4 percent were unsure.
The Costs of Militarism
• The U.S. defense budget was roughly $291 billion in 2000 – about $1000 for each person in the United States. Put another way, military spending accounts for 16 percent of the federal budget.
Why has U.S. military spending remained high, even after the cold war and the fall of the Soviet Union?
1) Some argue that the world remains a dangerous place. Even though the Soviet Union no longer exists, thousands of nuclear weapons remain in place in what is now the Russian Federation. Further, the U.S. faces threats from many other nations and must be prepared to respond to regional conflicts.
2) Others argue that the powerful interests in the United States actually benefit from high levels of military spending. They see the U.S. as dominated by a military-industrial complex, a political alliance involving the federal government, the military, and the defense industries. From this perspective, U.S. militarism is less a matter of national security and more a matter of power and profit for the country’s “power elite.”
Nuclear War
• The devastation from an all-out nuclear war would go beyond description. The potentially destructive effects of nuclear war can be seen in the U.S. attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. In an effort to end World War II, a U.S. aircraft dropped a 1.5-kiloton atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing 130,000 people either instantly or over the next few months as a result of the deadly radiation that rained on the city.
• Today, some nuclear warheads held by governments throughout the world are more than 4,000 times as powerful as the bombs that were dropped on Japan. Scientists estimate that a nuclear war would kill more than 160 million people outright and that more than 1 billion people would die in the first few hours as a result of radiation poisoning, environmental contamination and destruction, and massive social unrest.
Civilians as Casualties
• The trend toward more civilian casualties that began in World War II has continued in subsequent wars, including the Vietnam War and the Gulf War. Some analysts report that civilians accounted for 75% of all war-related deaths in the 1980s and nearly 90% in the 1990s.
• A demographer employed by the U.S. Bureau of the Census calculated that 40,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed during the war but more than 80,000 Iraqi civilians, mostly women and children, were killed in air strikes—13,000 in “precision bombing” and 70,000 as a result of disease associated with the systematic destruction of water purification and sewage treatment systems in their country.
Terrorism
• Terrorism is the use of calculated, unlawful physical force or threats of violence against a government, organization, or individual to gain some political, religious, economic, or social objective.
- Terrorist tactics include bombing, kidnapping, hostage taking, hijacking, assassination, and extortion.
• One form of terrorism, political terrorism, uses intimidation, coercion, threats of harm, and other violent attempts to bring about a significant change in or overthrow an existing government.
Explanations of War and Terrorism
1) Biological Perspectives emphasize that people inherit a tendency (or predisposition) toward aggressive behavior, which may culminate in warfare or terrorist acts. Contemporary policy makers who trace violent behavior to chemical or physical abnormalities such as a brain dysfunction, hormonal imbalance, or other genetic factors are taking such an approach.
• These biological proponents say that humans, especially males, are innately violent, but there is no conclusive scientific evidence to support this view.
2) Psychological Perspectives on war and terrorism emphasize individualistic sources of violence, resulting from such causes as abnormal psychological development. For example, Sigmund Freud argued that violence occurs when three aspects of human personality—id, ego, and superego—come into conflict with one another.
• Contemporary social psychologists generally believe that both individual and cultural factors must be considered in explaining why people go to war or engage in terrorism. Their studies reveal that it is easier to harm enemies when they have been depersonalized and that people are more likely to behave violently when they are placed in positions in which they have a great deal of power.
3) Sociological Perspectives examine the structural conditions of war and terrorism, rather than focusing on individual deficiencies. They include the functionalist, conflict, and symbolic interactionist paradigms.
• Functionalists argue that war serves certain functions for society: War settles disputes; demonstrates that one nation or group has power over another; punishes; is a way to disseminate religious and political ideologies; controls the size of the population; and stimulates the economy.
- What are some of the dysfunctions of war?
• Conflict theorists argue that militarism and preparedness of war contribute to the economic well-being of some, but not all, people. Nations inevitably use force to ensure compliance within their society and to protect themselves from outside attacks. Further, conflict theorists note that the military is a male institution, and it is almost impossible to untangle masculinity from militarism.
• Symbolic Interactionists focus on the social construction of reality, including the ways in which manhood and militarism is historically created and recreated through gender socialization. They also examine how a particular act comes to be described as “terrorism” and how others are labeled as legitimate targets of violence.
