Category: Ungleichheit

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Age of maturity

The bronze statue by Camille Claudel „L‘âge mûr“ is her most famous works. It is part of the exhibition Claudel & Hoetger in the “Alte Nationalgalerie“ in Berlin. Usually the statue is part of the permanent exhibition in the „Musée d‘Orsay“. With the depiction of different stages of the life course and somehow revealing the emotional trajectories of the persons the scene of human joy and tragedy becomes tangible beyond her personal fate. The scenario and arrangement in the Alte Nationalgalerie allows to focus on this particular work with an emphasis on the trajectory and the evolutionary path. A unique arrangement does better justice to the particular message of the artist than being surrounded by too many other works of art. (Image: extract of Camille Claudel‘s „L‘âge mûr“ in showroom Alte Nationalgalerie, 2025-8)

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Home for dog

The places where some dogs live can be rather big. But even tiny dogs may enjoy a luxury home like their owners. This was certainly the case for the dog’s niche in a Paris home, a few years before the French revolution (1785). The exhibit is a testimony of the tough inequality of the late 18th century in Paris, where some enjoyed far reaching luxury and large parts of the population were forced to live in poverty within Paris or the suburbs with little access to basic sanitary facilities. The discrepancy between the luxurious homes of pets and the average person might serve as an indicator for income and health inequality. The Musée Histoire de Paris Carnavalet has a great stock of artifacts that can speak to the issue. Image: Musée Histoire de Paris Carnavalet dog niche 1785). 

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Air pollution dementia

A comprehensive review and update of evidence that indicates a link between air pollution and dementia has been published in “The Lancet” open access on 2025-7-25. Besides a genetic predisposition the environmental impact of our worsening air quality caused by fine dust particles and PM 2,5 and nitrogen dioxide NO2 has been found in several studies. This updated meta study should be an additional warning to take efforts to clean up our air more seriously. The diesel engines amongst other sources of air pollution have contributed a great deal to this evolution. Inner city inhabitants are at greater risks to suffer the consequences as they are more exposed to these pollutants and for longer durations. Clean air is a matter of brain health in advanced age and biodiversity as well.  

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Electrifying Jobs

The transition to the “all electric society” necessitates to prepare the labor force for the upcoming challenge. The knowledge about electricity and electric appliances constitutes the basics of the knowledge base of the future. This goes far beyond the basics of physics and electrical engineering. There many processes like sharing of electric infrastructure in households, cities, in and beyond countries that have to be delt with. Investment calculations and legal issues to address the different risks involved are another area to cover in the process to prepare society for the “all electric society”.
However, the skills of professions with more direct links to the fossil fuel based technologies have a role in the phasing out of the heavy reliance on fossil fuels. Reverse engineering of such engines and heating will need people still knowledgeable of the past, when younger generations set their focus primarily on professions with links to electricity. Even using a solar powered heat pump in a home requires pipes to the existing network of radiators, for example. This will most likely be a gradual shift of the job structure and occupational requirements over at least a decade, but the shift has started already. Some might argue we need a well functioning “transitional labour market”, labour market policies and social security system for this to happen smoothly.

 

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Work and Time

The link between work and time has been evolving as a major element of social progress over centuries. In what younger generations seem to take for granted, <40 hours week, paid time off-work. 4-5 days per week to name only the major ones, has been the result of huge struggles and hustles driven by employees and their trade unions to achieve such milestones. The current debate to get employees back into offices and/or to work longer hours again, is also in the end a debate about work and time. The advantage of working from home consists among other factors in saving a lot of valuable time and stress from commute to work. This unaccounted time to go to work has become a major health hazard even in an apparently comfortable company subsidized car or any other means of transportation. The traffic jams of so-called rush hours, when in fact everybody is slowed down, are a serious health hazard usually ignored by employers. However, these hours are a major part of the work-life-time balance of employees. In many negotiations and collective bargaining about working time this is the big elephant in the room rarely addressed.

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Bench the benchmarks

In the social sciences as well as in engineering it is common practice to use benchmarks as indicators of performance. Thereby, several countries or regions within a country are compared with respect to quantitative indicator. Let’s take employment ratios. A higher employment ratio, which includes many persons working few hours in part-time work, is different from a slightly lower employment ratio, but hardly any part-time employees.
The same rationale holds true for benchmarks of AI systems or the newer versions of agentic AI that are under construction in many fields. The paper by Yuxuan Zhu et al. (2025) proposes the ABC (agentic behavior checklist) for agentic AI developers. The reporting of benchmarks by such models should include (1) transparency and validity, (2) Mitigation efforts of limitations and (3) result interpretation using statistical significance measures and interpretation guidelines.
The aim of this research is to establish a good practice in establishing benchmarks in the field of agentic AI. The sets of criteria to test for is large and the focus of how the agentic AI treats, for example, statistical outliers much above or below the average i.e. (> 2 standard deviations from the average) assuming a normal distribution, is one case of application only.
We welcome the efforts to bench the benchmarks in the field of AI as is common practice in other sciences as well.

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Pervasive waste

From time to time waste from so-called highly developed countries is making headlines and then it is forgotten again. Huge amounts of plastic waste gets shipped for example from the USA to Malaysia in containers regularly (NYT 2025-7-1). The dumping of waste in other countries where it is cheaper to waste the waste is a cynical practice. Not only is the potential for reuse and a circular economy disregard, the little control that is exercised how the waste is treated afterwards is neglected. Some might just end up in our oceans later on or find its way in our food chains. The recent discovery of lots of nuclear waste at 5000 m depth in the sea in another extreme example of this practice to dump waste affecting all of is when profits have been accumulated inn the hands of a few enterprises and states. Such external effects as they are called in economic theory are part of the standard economic thinking. The challenge is to detect such behavior, persecute or better prevent it. This calls on countries who produce the waste to check for the contamination potential and treat their own waste. Fukushima has lots of barrels of nuclear waste waiting. The pervasive nature of this waste will make it last for thousands of years. “Beggar thy neighbor” with your waste is a major default of our current economic and social model. It remains an unresolved puzzle why mankind continues to work towards its own extinction. (Image: Le grisou, Constantin Meunier, MRBAB, Brussels). 

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Social promise

In the beginning and middle of the 2020s the social promise to younger generations has been broken. The latest figures from the USA reveal that 2 million students (WSJ 2025-6-25 A3) who have financed their studies and potential social mobility by taking out a substantial loan are very likely to default on their credits. This observation was less a surprise to labor market analysts as the stalling of student hiring in many countries has happened for several years now. The more surprising finding is that the Wall Street Journal 2025-6-25 has been reporting on this. Banks or universities who are highly exposed to this kind of risk will themselves become downgraded for their credit rating. Higher interests for universities means higher fees and higher student loans eventually. The social promise to reach higher status and earnings through higher education as the social promise of the meritocratic society becomes an illusion. Investors in student housing might also find the sector less juicy for them. Students and their parents were taken hostage by an excessive commercialization and commodification od education. Lifelong learning is a still a promising route to revitalize the social promise.

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Home financing

For most people the biggest investment decision during their entire life course is the decision how to finance their home. The calculation of the costs of a bank loan over 10, 15 or 20 years to finance the acquisition of a home is a necessary part of basic financial literacy. The contract of monthly installments over years, considering economic uncertainties like inflation and interest rate payments, necessitates some basic knowledge of calculus and maybe the use of a spreadsheet to prepare payment plans with different scenarios. According to the Wall Street Journal of 2025-6-25 many home owners in southern states “slipped under water” in recent months in the USA. In short, buying a house when they are most expensive with a high interest loan and little down payment puts you at high risk if the prices for homes decline, for example like in a recession or stagnation. You can find yourself in the situation that the mortgage you have to pay suddenly exceeds the value of your home at actual prices. It is really important to be aware of the overall economic situation and risks of changes, like interest rate or inflation spikes due to a changing policy on tariffs. Reading and learning about financial risks should really enter into the school curriculum, but not left to maths classes as this will frighten off many students to take this topic seriously enough. 

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Contextual Vision

The attempt to define a sociology of vision has had a hard time to build on hard evidence that vision may depend on context or in a broader sense your visual heritage. A standard definition of context in vision highlights the areas around a focal point. The findings by Krupin et al. (2025) show through the comparison of persons from very different populations that our vision depends on our cultural background. It is the social background and upbringing in a specific cultural setting, which determines what we see in an image at first sight.  The so-called Coffer illusion test (Deregowski 2017) reveals what we see in an image spontaneously and maybe after some longer staring at the image or doing it repeatedly, we learn to see that there is more to see than our original impression. Depending on our cultural heritage we might focus unconsciously on rectangular or round shapes in a geometric image. This fundamental finding questions the view that there is only one universal kind of vision common to all humans. In fact, there is variance around what we see and thereby how we perceive an image. This research provides a justification to delve also into the field of a sociology of the visual. Because of the common term in informatics “WYSIWYG”, (what you see is what you get), we might  spend more efforts on research of how human vision is shaped over generations or according to social background. We know that in some images different people see different things. What appears as a splendid opportunity for some, is a very risky situation for others. Eyes are so closely wired to our brain that inscriptions of vision on the brain functioning are quite likely. The plasticity of this process over the life course remains a crucial topic to understand the process(es) of how a person’s social background shapes her/his vision.