March 24, 2005

Violent Societies

Posted by Kieran

While thinking about the deterrent effect of the death penalty I wondered about cross-national variation in rates of violent death. Comparative data on homicide rates undoubtedly exist, but I don’t have them to hand. I do have OECD data on death rates due to assault, though, so here’s a nice picture of this trend for eighteen capitalist democracies from 1960 to 2002.

Death rate graphic

You can get this as a higher-resolution PDF file (with appropriately rearranged layout), too. Countries are arrayed from top to bottom based on their mean death rate over the period, with the lowest at the top left. As is immediately clear, the U.S. rate is both much higher and much more variable than any of the other countries. It rises rapidly through the 1960s and ’70s. It bounces around between the late 70s and early 1990s, falling then rising sharply again, before beginning a sharp and sustained decline that brings it back to about 1965 levels, though still more about three times as high as other countries.

Variations in other countries are harder to pick out because their differences look small when compared to the U.S. But many countries experienced small but steady increases until the 1980s. From there, rates generally leveled off or declined, though there are exceptions. Italy experienced a surge in violent deaths in the late 1980s. Dutch rates seem to have gradually climbed across the whole period, while Japan’s have consistently declined. Though it doesn’t change much after 1970 or so, Finland’s rate bounces around its mean value much more than other countries.

I’m a sucker for data visualization. Maybe I’ll post more of this sort of thing.

March 22, 2005

AddHealth Returns

Posted by Kieran

Nothing like teen sex to get sociology in the newspapers. Here’s more interesting stuff from the AddHealth dataset, and more particularly from Peter Bearman and Hannah Brueckner. This is the most recent in a line of papers on abstinence pledges and adolescent sexual activity more generally. A summary from the L.A. Times:

Young adults who as teenagers took pledges not to have sex until marriage were just as likely to contract a venereal disease as people who didn’t make the promise, according to a study in the Journal of Adolescent Health. … The study found that 88% of sexually active people who took the pledge had intercourse before marriage. Sexually active pledgers were less likely to use condoms the first time they had sex, Bruckner said. The study found that people who took an abstinence pledge were less likely to get tested and treated for venereal disease. They may then be infected longer than other people.

An earlier paper, Promising the Future: Virginity Pledges and First Intercourse addressed the question of whether abstinence movements like “True Love Waits” worked like they were supposed to:

Since 1993, in response to a movement sponsored by the Southern Baptist Church, over 2.5 million adolescents have taken public “virginity” pledges, in which they promise to abstain from sex until marriage. This paper explores the effect of those pledges on the transition to first intercourse. Adolescents who pledge are much less likely to have intercourse than adolescents who do not pledge. The delay effect is substantial. On the other hand, the pledge does not work for adolescents at all ages. Second, pledging delays intercourse only in contexts where there are some, but not too many, pledgers. The pledge works because it is embedded in an identity movement. Consequently, the pledge identity is meaningful only in contexts where it is at least partially nonnormative. Consequences of pledging are explored for those who break their promise. Promise breakers are less likely than others to use contraception at first intercourse.

In short, true love doesn’t wait, except to when it comes to going to the clinic.

March 03, 2005

Body Parts Sociology

Posted by Kieran

I have left the bitter Sonoran desert behind and am in balmy Chicago for a conference about body parts. Packing my suitcase, I realized that I’m going to have some trouble keeping my own body parts at a reasonable temperature: where are all those Winter clothes I used to own? Didn’t I live in New Jersey and Connecticut for years? So I just brought everything I had.

The conference should be interesting. Mainly lawyers and bioethics people, along with some economists. I am the token sociologist. I’ll be talking about some work I’m doing on organ procurement rates in seventeen OECD countries, so obviously I am on the panel titled “The Battle Between Bioethics and Religion.” As it happens, my friend John Evans wrote the book on the battle between bioethics and religion. The final score was Bioethics 3, Religion 1.

February 21, 2005

Summers Lovin'

Posted by Kieran

A correspondent writes that my complaints about the Summers controversy are unfair to Larry Summers. If you’re interested, his case and my reply are below the fold.

My correspondent says,

To pick just one relevant passage:
Now that begs entirely the normative questions-which I’ll get to a little later-of, is our society right to expect that level of effort from people who hold the most prominent jobs? Is our society right to have familial arrangements in which women are asked to make that choice and asked more to make that choice than men? Is our society right to ask of anybody to have a prominent job at this level of intensity, and I think those are all questions that I want to come back to. But it seems to me that it is impossible to look at this pattern and look at its pervasiveness and not conclude that something of the sort that I am describing has to be of significant importance.

Maybe I’m just imagining things, but Summers appears to be doing the opposite of reducing “entrenched” social expectations to “a more-or-less simple result of the expression of individual preference.”  Summers asks here:  “Is our society right to have familial arrangements in which women are asked to make that choice and asked more to make that choice than men?”  This appears to suggest that the socially structured “familial arrangements” are the key factor.  All through this passage, the way Summers begins each point is to ask “is our society right to expect …. Is our society right to have familial arrangements … Is our society right to ask … ?”

     Now, it’s also true that Summers didn’t put all his suggestions, speculations, and reflections in precisely this form.  At other times, he’s asking whether factors other than social arrangements might also play some role, including marginal differences between categories of people due to socialization or (a tricky point) genetics.  But that’s really the point. Whatever might be said for or against his social graces in other situations, in this particular context Summers was not handing down hard-and-fast conclusions but trying to frame open questions and alternative possibilities in thought-provoking (and sometimes provocative) ways.  One can certainly criticize a lot of his points on various grounds—and I agree that some of them provided reasons for people to get upset (though not hysterical)—but (in my humble opinion) there is just no way that the thrust of his remarks fits your characterization.

I see the point here, and there is something to it. Over the past few days, having re-read the transcript, I’ve thought myself that if Summers had pitched his remarks just a little bit differently, and demonstrated a just bit more knowledge of existing work on this issue, there would have been no controversy. But in his talk he failed to show that he knew what he was talking about, and he presented himself in a way that invited criticism that he deserved. (And the bulk of it wasn’t “hysterical”, either.) Take his main conclusion:

So my best guess, to provoke you, of what’s behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people’s legitimate family desires and employers’ current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.

Now, Summers might have said something like, “It seems the main reason for the under-representation of women in academia is that we have these expectations for work built in to the system that assume, in all kinds of ways, that you have someone taking care of you and the kids, if you have kids. Those expectations tend to disadvantage women.” And then he might have said “You know, there’s a been a lot of work by researchers in this area looking into just how this happens, and some proposals for how it might be fixed. Obviously, just one school can’t change the world, but here’s what could be done …” Instead, though, he frames the problem like this: “the first very important reality is just … who wants to do high-powered intense work?” (Emphasis added.) He then launches into his discussion of differences in IQ, differences in socialization (which are dismissed with the “mommy truck, daddy truck” story) and the role of explicit discrimination, which he thinks relatively unimportant.

These remarks are not focused on understanding the social context he gestures towards, notwithstanding his mention of very broad questions like “Is our society right to expect …” and so on. These ideas aren’t developed in the talk. Maybe if you knew Summers personally (I don’t) you could add that his heart is in the right place. But it’s obvious that the thrust of his remarks is that, for good or bad, our system presents people in general with a choice about working hard and (a) women tend to choose not to work hard, because they prefer to have kids, (b) sometimes they’re just not smart enough anyway, and © discrimination on the ground isn’t really as important as women’s initial choices or their mathematical limitations. This view is presented by shuttling back and forth between his own speculations and some anecdotes. It’s obvious from the content and tone that he neither knows nor cares about the relevant research literature. Work in this area makes it clear that the three mechanisms he mentions interact and reinforce each other: e.g., negative expectations negatively affect performance; broad expectations about careers lead to people making specific decisions for you (by not offering an opportunity, say); and small differences in initial advantage — I mean a bit of time off here, a nicer research budget there — can accumulate into large differences in outcomes. This means that the role for discrimination may be greater than Summers imagines, because discrimination isn’t just running into some guy who really believes women don’t want to or just can’t cut it in high-powered research jobs. Fine-grained features of the career path can accumulate into bad outcomes. This is what the MIT Gender Equity Project found:

Marginalization increases as women progress through their careers at MIT, and was often accompanied by differences in salary, space, awards, resources, and response to outside offers; women receiving less despite professional accomplishments equal to those of their male colleagues.

In nearly all cases, Department chairs or other decision-makers could give plausible particularistic reasons why a decision was made in a specific case, but the outcome was always gender-specific. Similar things happen even further back in the pipeline: if women get encouraged to pursue lower-status specialties, for example, or are not called for an interview because someone thinks they wouldn’t accept a job because they have a husband who works elsewhere. And that’s not even going further back to college or high-school. Of course, it should go without saying that if there are people who really believe women generally can’t or don’t want to manage a job at an elite school, and those people are in the happy position of having the power to help make their beliefs true — well, then discrimination can have a bigger role than we imagine. Summers’ convictions about women’s work choices and his anecdotes about Mommy and Daddy trucks rather put him in this position. The burden is on him to show that it’s not a problem.

So, I just don’t buy the defence that Summers wanted to understand what’s happening, and forthrightly put forward some challenging hypotheses about it, but was beaten up by the evil PC witches because he mentioned biology. Instead, I see someone who believes he already knows the answer, and frames it in a completely conventional rhetoric of work-family choices, with a bit of biology thrown in. Because he’s very smart, he came up with some decent, but half-formed, ideas about the structure of careers in academia. But they were presented in an empirically uninformed way. Listening to some of his defenders, you’d think no-one had ever raised the issue of career paths, or the role of gender differences in math ability or what have you, when in fact they have been the subject of research for years. In particular, the speech shows an impoverished understanding about the relationship between careers and discrimination. He sees the latter as overcome and the former as framing a perhaps tragic individual choice. There’s what employers want, and there’s what women choose. This is not a provocative analysis. It’s just Sunday-Supplement stuff. Combined with the obnoxious tone, and the record of tenuring and senior hires of women at Harvard under Summers’ administration, it’s no wonder his audience didn’t feel especially sympathetic. Frankly, when you’re the President of Harvard, you should do a lot better on a topic like this. And by “better” I don’t mean “you should be nicer”, or “you should deliver the usual bromides.” I mean, “you should know what you’re talking about.”

In summary, I agree that there were positive elements in the talk. That’s partly why it’s been such a disaster for him: a little more work and he could really have impressed people. But given what he said, it’s no surprise that he angered a lot of people in the audience, and I think he deserved to be criticized for it. As I said before, I really don’t think he should lose his job over this: if the Harvard Corporation removes him, it’ll be because this incident provided a focus for more widespread dissatisfaction with his Presidency and allowed his enemies, motivated by all kinds of grievances, to move against him.

February 19, 2005

Minding the Kids, Again

Posted by Kieran

Now that Larry Summers has begun to live up to his putative commitment to open, freewheeling inquiry by finally releasing a transcript of his infamous remarks, various people are commenting on it. Matt Yglesias says

I don’t think you can reasonably expect any given university (or corporation, or person) to singlehandedly shoulder the burden of changing a set of social expectations that’s become very well entrenched over a very long period of time. At the same time, you can’t just do nothing about it, either.

Bitch, PhD addresses this issue pretty well, as does a correspondent of Mark Kleiman’s. The main point is the first step toward addressing what Matt properly calls “a set of social expectations that’s become very well entrenched over a very long period” is — contrary to what Summers did in his remarks — to stop treating it as a more-or-less simple result of the expression of individual preferences. Now, in other social-policy contexts, economists will jump all over you for not properly considering the incentives that shape people’s choices and smugly wheel out one-liners like “People respond to incentives, all else is commentary.” There’s a lot to that observation. But in contexts like gender and the labor market, the emphasis instead gets put on individual preferences as the mainspring of choice, rather than considering the social origins of the incentive structure.

Here is an old post of mine, written in response to something Jane Galt (aka Megan McArdle) wrote. It addresses this issue a bit, with some pointers to accessible and practical discussions of it by specialists — some of the literature that Summers just baldly ignored, or was inexcusably ignorant of. As I said back then,

Jane’s initial question — “Should we [women] stay home, or shouldn’t we? It’s a difficult question for professional women” — effectively concedes the case as lost from the get-go. It frames the problem as wholly belonging to the prospective mother. Dad has no responsibility towards his potential offspring, is not required to make any work/family tradeoffs, and indeed has so much autonomy that a woman who chooses kids over career is “taking a huge financial bet on her husband’s fidelity.” … The institutions that structure people’s career paths may have deep roots, but that’s not because they spring naturally out of the earth. Cross-national comparison shows both that there’s considerable variation in the institutionalization of child care, and that this variation can have odd origins. … [They] aren’t immutable, either. In fact, in the U.S. they’ve changed a great deal since the early 1980s … Looking at the problem this way makes one less likely to fatalism about tragic choices, wanting to have it all, and the inevitable clash of work and family. … It also has the virtue — as C. Wright Mills put it forty years ago — of letting us “grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society,” rather than forever being stuck at the level of individual women facing insoluble work-family tradeoffs.

None of that is particularly original, by the way. It’s a well-developed perspective with plenty of empirical evidence and theoretical elaboration, and even a little bit of reading in this area would make that evident. That’s why Summers’ audience was so ticked off. In fairness to the guy, at this stage his perilous position has little to do with the remarks themselves anymore, and has become an ouster by opponents dissatisfied with his Presidency in general.

January 27, 2005

Specialization and Status in Philosophy

Posted by Kieran

I’ve been looking at some data from the Philosophical Gourmet Report, a well-known and widely-used reputational survey of philosophers in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australasia. The survey asks philosophers to rate the overall reputations of graduate programs as well as their strength in various subfields. The ratings are endogenous, in the sense that the philosophers who produce them are members of the departments that are being rated. This gives the survey some interesting relational properties and allows for an analysis of the social structure of reputation in the field. I’ve written a working paper that analyses the data from this perspective. It’s still in in pretty rough shape: there’s not much in the way of theory or a framing argument yet, and it’s way short on citations to the relevant literature. (So don’t be too harsh on it.)

I’m not sure whether philosophers will like the paper. On the one hand, they tend to think of themselves as sensible individuals guided by common-sense and rational argument. This makes them resist thinking of themselves in sociological terms, subject to the influences of context, social relations and role constraints. On the other hand, in my experience they have an insatiable capacity for gossip. Within the limits of the data, the paper addresses three questions:

  • (1) What contribution does prestige in particular subfields make to the overall reputation of philosophy departments?
  • (2) Does being a specialist in a subfield affect the way philosophers assign prestige to other departments?
  • (3) How much consensus is there about prestige in philosophy?

The answers are, in short, “It depends on the field”, “Yes, but only sometimes, and then only for high-status specialists”, and “A great deal.” Some quick findings:

  • Subfields cluster into four groups: Continental philosophy; Medieval/Religion; a large “contemporary” group comprising Metaphysics, Mind, Language, Epistemology, Science, and Ethics; and a “historical” group comprised of Ancient, 17th Century, 18th Century and Kant/German Idealism. High ratings in the first two groups do not contribute to a department’s overall ranking. High ratings in the second two almost always matter, but to differing degrees.
  • Metaphysics and Language make the largest contribution to overall reputation, though most other subfields also make a significant difference.
  • High-status specialists in Philosophy of Language, Ethics and Contintental philosophy are more likely to assess departments harshly.
  • British raters are substantially more generous than average.

Over the fold are two visualizations of the field: the first is a blockmodel describing the relational structure of prestige amongst U.S. philosophy departments. The second is a segment plot showing the profile of departments across a range of different subfields. I think they’re both pretty cool, so read on.

A Blockmodel of Prestige

First, the blockmodel. You can get the full-size version of this graphic, or a higher-resolution PDF version, or the captioned version from the paper. This picture is a department by department matrix. Each colored cell represents the average “vote” by a department in the row for a department in the column. Departments are sorted in the same order in the rows and columns, according to an algorithm that groups them by how similar their voting patterns. The row and column numbers DO NOT correspond to the PGR rankings. (That is, Department 10 in the figure is not the 10th-ranked department.) Purple and blue cells represent high rankings; green cells represent middling rankings; brown and yellow cells represent low rankings. (The captioned version provides a reference scale.) The main diagonal is blank because departments are not allowed vote for themselves. In a high-consensus field, we’d expect each column to be the same color all the way down: that is, everyone agrees on how good a particular department is. In a low-consensus field, we’d expect more heterogeneity, with disagreement on the quality of particular programs. The data suggest that — at least according to the respondents to the PGR — philosophy is a very high-consensus discipline.

To help the interpretation, we can further group departments into “blocks” based on their similarity: members of the same blocks will stand in similar structural relations to other departments. In this case, I’ve generated a model with 5 blocks. Blocks are set off by thicker lines that project out into the margin. Block 1 is made up of the just first four departments, so the first four rows and columns show Block 1’s assessment of itself, for example. The four Block 1 departments enjoy the highest prestige and the greatest degree of consensus about their quality. Looking down the first four columns lets you see what everyone else thinks of Block 1 — almost everyone agrees they’re the best, as you can see by the almost unbroken strip of purple and dark blue. Looking across the first four rows lets you see what Block 1 thinks of everyone else. Thus, focusing on the intersections of the graph created by the thicker horizontal lines lets you see how different blocks relate to one another (and themselves). For instance, the bottom right corner of the figure shows what the lowest-status block, Block 5, thinks of itself, so to speak. It turns out that it agrees with everyone else’s assessment of its relatively low quality. In fact, as I show in the paper, Block 5 thinks a little better of Block 1 than Block 1 thinks of itself, and thinks a little worse of itself than Block 1 thinks of it. In other words, the lowest-prestige block is slightly more committed to the hierarchy than the highest-prestige block. Although the mean scores awarded to blocks varies across blocks, there is complete agreement on the rank-ordering of blocks. So, for example, there’s no dissenting group that thinks itself better than everyone else believes.

Departmental Strength in Specialist Areas

This is a segment plot. Again, you can get a larger version of it, or a much nicer PDF version. For each department, the wedges of the plot represent the department’s reputation rank in a particular subfield. The bigger the wedge, the better the reputation rank. A department that was ranked first in all areas would look like the key at the bottom. To simplify the presentation I’ve grouped metaphysics, philosophy of mind and philosophy of language into a single group, “MML.” (This has a substantive justification, as strength in these areas is highly correlated.) The distribution of segments gives a nice picture of a each department’s profile: what it’s known for. I’ve also ordered the subfields clockwise from the left, roughly in order of their contribution to the overall reputation of a department. You’ll notice that Princeton and Oxford are the only departments in the Top 15 or so to have a roughly symmetric “fan-like” structure, indicating strength in a wide variety of areas. By contrast, NYU is very strong in MML, Ethics and History, but not ancient or continental. Rutgers’ profile looks like a chambered nautilus: it’s very strong in MML and Epistemology, and gets progressively weaker as you move around the half-circle. Yet NYU and Rutgers outscore Oxford and Princeton in terms of overall reputation. This is because — as the paper shows — not all areas contribute equally to the status of a department. Strength in MML is more important than strength in, say, Ancient philosophy or (especially) Continental philosophy. The segment plot makes all the specialties have the same weight, but in reality this isn’t the case — so Oxford doesn’t capitalize on its strength in Ancient philosophy, for example. Michigan is an unusual case in that it ranks very highly despite lacking a strong reputation for MML and Epistemology. Conversely, strength in MML will only get you so far: MIT and the ANU excel in these areas, but probably won’t go any higher in the ratings without diversifying.

The plot shows some other features of departments and the field in general, too. Harvard’s relative weakness in metaphysics and mind is clear, for instance, as is Chicago’s strength in continental philosophy. As one moves down the rankings, the size of the wedges declines, of course, and departments with distinctive niches appear: the LSE is strong in the philosophy of science, Penn in modern history, Wisconsin in Science.

The data have a number of limitations, of course. For one thing, not all departments are present in the survey, and in most cases only one or two representatives of those departments were sampled. But it’s still a rich dataset. The draft paper has a fuller discussion of all this, together with a few other neat visualizations of the structure of the field. Comments are welcome, of course.

Update 2: Following a query from Tom Hurka, I discovered a small error in the segment plot. The original “History” measure mistakenly included Ancient history, which wasn’t my intention. That’s been fixed now, and the History measure is a department’s mean score in 17th Century, 18th Century and Kant/German Idealism.

There’s also a second question about interpreting the plots, especially if you’re looking closely at the profile of a particular department. The size of the wedges is not determined directly by the scores departments get in each area. First, they are scaled to have values between 0 and 1 in order for the plot wedges to be drawn. This rescaling can affect how departments appear. Imagine a department that scores the same in two subfields. If one subfield has a wider range of scores than another, however, a gap may open up in their position when this scaling takes place. This happened in some cases in the original segment plot. The range of observed scores for ethics is wider than for modern history, for example. The result is the relative position of some departments will differ from the former to the latter, even though their raw scores might be the same in both subfields. Originally I just left it at that, but to simplify things I’ve redone the segment diagram so that the size of the wedges is directly proportional to a department’s rank in that subfield. Bear in mind that ranks are calculated after being rounded to one decimal place, so ranks will often be tied.

Visually representing multivariate data is tricky, and this is an example of where a segment plot might be slightly confusing and the choice between using the raw means or the ranks isn’t entirely clear-cut. The ranks bring out the relative ordering of deparments but don’t convey how, for some fields, a few departments might be head and shoulders above the rest of the field. On the other hand, the ranks are easier to interpret than a “relative reputation” measure.

January 23, 2005

Durkheim and Desperate Housewives

Posted by Chris

The latest Prospect has a nice piece on Durkheim by Michael Prowse, arguing that we should take him seriously as a critic of free-market capitalism. I was, however, struck by this paragraph concerning Durkheim’s views on the advantages of marriage for men:

Durkheim used the example of marriage to illustrate the problem of anomie or inadequate social regulation. You might think that men would be happiest if able to pursue their sexual desires without restraint. But it is not so, Durkheim argued: all the evidence (including relative suicide rates) suggests that men do better when marriage closes their horizons. As bachelors they can chase every woman they find attractive but they are rarely contented because the potential objects of desires are so numerous. Nor do they enjoy any security because they may lose the woman they are currently involved with. By contrast, Durkheim argued, the married man is generally happier: he must now restrict himself to one woman (at least most of the time) but there is a quid pro quo. The marriage rules require the woman to give herself to him: hence his one permitted object of desire is guaranteed. Marriage thus promotes the long-term happiness of men (Durkheim was less certain that it helped women) because it imposes a sometimes irksome constraint on their passions.

No comment from me, except that it reminded me of a dialogue between Gabrielle and her boy-gardener lover during a recent episode of Desperate Housewives . It went something like this:

He: So why did you marry Carlos?

She: Because he promised to give me everything I desired.

He: And did he?

She: Yes.

He: So why aren’t you happy?

She: It turns out I desired the wrong things.

Cue Aristotle stage left?

January 22, 2005

Pharyngula on Larry Summers

Posted by Kieran

P.Z. Myers saves me a great deal of trouble by writing the post I had in mind about Larry Summers’ under-informed views about the gender division of labor. I’m particularly glad he takes the time to deal with Steven Pinker’s much quoted line that “Perhaps the hypothesis is wrong, but how would we ever find out whether it is wrong if it is “offensive” even to consider it? People who storm out of a meeting at the mention of a hypothesis, or declare it taboo or offensive without providing arguments or evidence, don’t get the concept of a university or free inquiry.” As Myers says, “If people started walking out on presentations of fact-free, unsupported hypotheses, Pinker wouldn’t have a career.”

In the spirit of adding a bit of empirical data to the discussion, have a read of Erin Leahey and Guang Go’s paper “Gender Differences in Mathematical Trajectories” which reviews a lot of evidence about the gender gap in math and analyzes some big data sets to find that it’s not nearly as large as you might think. (Erin is a colleague of mine at Arizona, by the way.) And to echo one of Myers’ points, the relationship between the distribution of measurable properties like math scores and the phenomenology of attainment within the social structure is (a) a very difficult question, and (b) something you might want to read up on, if you’re inclined to throw hypotheses around innate differences between women and men.

January 09, 2005

Sociology in Cafe Society

Posted by Kieran

Just before Christmas, a new cafe opened up outside the main gates of the University of Arizona. The coffee is good and it’s a shorter walk than the alternatives. The people are friendly, too. One of my colleagues was chatting with the owner, Danny, last week — he’s often behind the bar serving customers. Danny asked whether my friend taught at the university, and then in what department. “Sociology,” my friend said, which is usually enough to move the conversation to some other topic. But instead Danny said “Oh, my uncle was a sociologist — he was pretty well known in Europe years ago, but you’ve probably never heard of him. “What was his name?” asked my friend. “Oh, Mannheim,” says the owner. “Karl Mannheim?!” says my friend. “Wow, you know his first name!” says Danny. Small world. Sociologists know that already, but the point of that insight is precisely that you don’t know about every case. There are probably other connections of this sort in my acquaintance network that I’m completely unaware of. Yours, too.

December 15, 2004

Identity Politics for All

Posted by Kieran

Two posts sit side-by-side at the Volokh conspiracy at the moment. In one, Eugene Volokh updates a post making fun of some women protesting about not being picked for parts in a production of The Vagina Monologues:

Auditions Are So Patriarchal: Early this year, I blogged about a controversy related to The Vagina Monologues, in a post titled “Life Imitates The Onion.” An excerpt:
… In flyers handed out to audience members at the show, University graduate Nicole Sangsuree Barrett wrote that while there was “diversity” in the show, it was minimal. Women of “a variety of skin colors, body sizes, abilities and gender expressions” were not adequately represented, she said. …
… It turns out that variety of abilities really did mean variety of abilities …:
… Pete said the committee will select people who are “not necessarily drama-oriented” in favor of “people who work (toward) ‘The Vagina Monologues’ mission of ending violence against women.” … “The fact that they had auditions means that some people are automatically excluded,” [Women’s Center spokeswoman Stefanie Loh] said.
Not just some people — some vaginas! “Not all vaginas are skinny, white + straight,” or, apparently, have acting ability.

But just to show that identity politics is a game anyone can play, Orin Kerr raises an eyebrow at the sad tale of an oppressed conservative assistant professor. Forced to sit through the odd joke about Michael Moore, park his Honda alongside Volvos and Subarus, and endure a “semiotics of exclusion” (i.e., Kerry-Edwards and anti-war bumper stickers on the Volvos) he suffered grave emotional pain when “anti-Republican tenor” at the lunch table “ached its zenith with this vehement comment from one colleague, ‘I’m not even going to watch [the convention]. I can’t stand it’.”

Update: The going theory in the comments is that our oppressed conservative is a hoax. The internal evidence for this is pretty good.

Ain’t University life grand? Bliss it was on these campuses to be excluded, but to feel oppressed when your crew controlled all three branches of government was very Heaven. The social organization of opinion on university campuses ensures that all available identity niches will be occupied eventually. It might have to do with the way that student groups get funded. People are encouraged to create organizations that, in turn, help generate social identities, appropriate resources, and provide a toolkit of protest strategies. This isn’t anything new. When I was an undergraduate the Gay and Lesbian society on campus got attacked by the (notional) bisexual community for not being inclusive enough. So it became the GLB Soc. But then they worried about Transgendered people. So it became the GLBT Soc. It was then suggested (though not by society members) that they should just include heterosexual people as well and be done with it. While organizations founded on inclusionary rather than exclusionary principles are more prone to this problem, the proliferation of identities and the organizational technologies that foster them is quite general. This is why well-funded College Republicans began adopting the language of oppression some time ago.

Discrimination and oppression are quite real, of course, though the most compelling examples tend not to be found on college campuses. If our conservative professor was denied tenure on the basis of his voting record, we should be worried. And Eugene Volokh’s horse-laugh notwithstanding, it’s pretty well-established that auditions can be very patriarchal indeed. A well-known study by Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse found that blind auditions for orchestral positions increased women’s chances of making it past the first round by 50%, and of getting the job by 300%. (Though the number of jobs is so small that there was more uncertainty attached to this figure than the 50% one.)

December 13, 2004

Our Law and God's

Posted by Kieran

As Brian notes (via Kevin Drum), there are some people who think that

[Clarence] Thomas is one of the few jurists today, conservative or otherwise, who understands and defends the principle that our rights come not from government but from a “creator” and “the laws of nature and of nature’s God,” as our Declaration of Independence says, and that the purpose and power of government should therefore be limited to protecting our natural, God-given rights.

My feeling is that objections to Clarence Thomas’s jurisprudence should focus on what we think people’s rights are, substantively, rather than where we think they come from. But let me comment on the God vs Man question anyway. Actually, let Roberto Mangabeira Unger comment on it, from his Politics:

Modern social thought was born proclaiming that society is made and imagined, that it is a human artifact rather than an expression of an underlying natural order.

The Constitution of the United States is a decisive political expression of this conviction. It doesn’t preclude deep and shared religious convictions — it just doesn’t presuppose them. Having lived with this way of thinking about the social order for a few centuries, we know it threatens to create more problems than it solves. The hubris that leads to disastrous ventures in social engineering rests on it, as does the easy cruelty that always blames victims for their own misfortunes. Note that both of these vices can be found in religiously-motivated pictures of the world: the former in the zeal of fanatics who take it upon themselves to remake the world according to God’s plan, whether we like it or not; the latter in the complacent insistence that even the most vicious injustice must be part of God’s plan for us all. In many ways, modern ideologies — from a belief in the virtues of centralized planning to a commitment to the infinite wisdom of the market — are just secularized versions of essentially religious ideas about the perfectibility of human beings or the inevitability of fate. After Darwin, things get more complicated because a Social-Darwinian order could be presented as having the authority of nature without the contrivance of God. Because of Darwin, the boundary between what is given by nature and what is susceptible to reorganization became a dominant trope in 20th-century social thought. Nevertheless, the shift that Unger identifies is still a decisive one. The idea that society is a human artifact is what makes the political life of modern societies distinctive, if anything does.

Update: In comments below, Nicholas Weininger complains that “Unger’s dichotomy reads Hayek right out of the history of social thought.” I think this is wrong. For Hayek, the social order is certainly a human product, but (as Nicholas says) it’s not something that’s consciously designed. This was why I contrasted the pitfalls of believing everything could be planned with believing that everything would spontaneously order itself. The first is a vice of the left, the second, of the right. (Those are descriptions of tendencies, by the way, and not fair characterizations of particular thinkers like Marx or Hayek.) The bit above about Darwin is relevant too, as you can see a strong streak in libertarian thought about the inevitable failure of planning efforts due to planning’s incompatibility with the natural (but not divinely-given) tedency of societies to co-ordinate in a distributed way. In that sense Hayek is certainly part of the debate about “the boundary between what is given by nature and what is susceptible to reorganization.”

This shared commitment to seeing the social order as a human product helps explain why secular left-wing thinkers and libertarian types have tended to have more productive arguments with each other than either have with conservatives who see society as manifesting a divine order. The socialist calculation debate in economics is one example of this.

December 05, 2004

Academic Job Markets and Status Hierarchies

Posted by Kieran

Over at Brian Leiter’s blog, there’s a debate going on about the role of publications in the hiring process. Keith DeRose is arguing that a graduate student’s publication record should be given a larger role than it often is:

[W]hich graduate school one gets into and what job one initially lands tragically does very much to determine how well one is likely to do, long-term. It often happens for instance, that extremely talented philosophers who deserve to do as well as those landing the great jobs instead end up at some low-prestige job with a heavy teaching load. Every now and then, one of them quite heroically overcomes the odds of having to write while teaching so much and puts out a bunch of excellent papers in really good journals (which at least often they’re able to do largely b/c the journals use blind review!). But, too often, they can’t get the people with the power in the profession (& who know that the candidate works at a low-prestige place) to take their work seriously. They lose out to candidates (the “chosen ones”) who, despite their very cushy teaching loads, publish little in good journals but who have something that all too often proves more valuable on a CV: a high-prestige institutional affiliation.

The data strongly back Keith up on this point, but they also suggest that the probability that things will change is not very high. Studies of academic disciplines show that by far the most important predictor of departmental prestige is the exchange of graduate students within hiring networks. These networks shouldn’t really be called job markets, incidentally, because they lack most of the features normally considered necessary for a market to exist.

A recent paper by Val Burris in the American Sociological Review, for instance, shows that in Sociology,

centrality within interdepartmental hiring networks explains 84 percent of the variance in departmental prestige. Similar findings are reported for history and political science. This alternative understanding of academic prestige helps clarify anomalies —- e.g., the variance in prestige unconnected to scholarly productivity, the strong association between department size and prestige, and the longterm stability of prestige rankings — encountered in research that is based on the more conventional view.

The “conventional view,” of course, is that departmental prestige is a function of the scholarly productivity of faculty members and graduate students, but this is not the case in practice. A related paper by Shin-Kap Han describes the structure of the exchange network in several disciplines. A I wrote when discussing it last year:

Job candidates in all disciplines are exchanged in a well-defined manner between three classes of departments. Class I departments, at the top, exchange students amongst themselves and supply lower-tier departments with students but do not hire from them. Class II departments are on the “semi-periphery,” generally exchanging candidates with each other (though there is a hierarchical element to this) and also sending students to Class III departments, which never place students outside of their class and usually do not hire students from within their class.

What does all this mean for individual graduate students on the market? In effect, it means they are not market actors at all. They’re the currency in a different exchange system altogether, namely the status hierarchy of departments. The data show that departmental status rankings are remarkably stable — in some cases almost unbelievably so. It’s very difficult to fall out of the Top Tier once you’re in it, despite the enormous turnover of faculty, the way departments age, changing academic fashions and so on. So if you’re thinking about grad school, remember that the prestige of your Ph.D-granting department is the best predictor of your chances on the job market. If you’re at a low ranking school it is highly unlikely that you’ll move up more than one tier when you’re exchanged.

Now, top departments turn out more graduate students than there are jobs in top departments, so many Tier I products will not find Tier I jobs. So it’s not enough just to go to a top school. Formal research is harder to do on this point, but it seems clear that within Tier I there will be further stratification by status, with some advisors and research groups being more powerful or popular than others, and so on. Choosing the right topic and being in the right networks will increase your chances of getting a good position. The upshot is that in some fields it’s possible to get hired on the strength of pure “promise” — but of course only people in the right structural positions will be seen has showing promise, because everyone starts from the position of not having written anything. In philosophy, uncertainly about whether candidates will pan out is perhaps higher than usual because there’s no empirical component to anyone’s project and a lot of work gets done interactively, in conversation. As a result, the field’s collective commitment to the ideal of the individual genius is much higher. This may also make it possible to survive for longer in a high-prestige position on very little output.

Besides the question of whether this is a sensible way for supposedly rational philosophers to organize their field, the network perspective suggests a further irony. As Ron Burt argues in the current American Journal of Sociology, innovation and new ideas tend to come from the edges of networks, not the center:

Opinion and behavior are more homogeneous within than between groups, so people connected across groups are more familiar with alternative ways of thinking and behaving. Brokerage across the structural holes1 between groups provides a vision of options otherwise unseen, which is the mechanism by which brokerage becomes social capital. … Compensation, positive performance evaluations, promotions, and good ideas are disproportionately in the hands of people whose networks span structural holes. The between-group brokers are more likely to express ideas, less likely to have ideas dismissed, and more likely to have ideas evaluated as valuable.

In other words, it may be that the people in the structural position to get the best ideas are less likely to be hired. At the level of informal job-market gossip there are bits of conventional wisdom that remind people of this worry. For instance, people may say “X is just a clone of Prof Y,” or “X is just yet another person working on problem θ. Boring.” Burt’s argument suggests that in the long run, truly innovative actors should do better than the ordinary runs-of-the-mill, whereas Burris’s suggests that the stable center ought to prevail. I don’t know of anything that considers the structural stability of departmental rankings (and their dependence on exchanging students) alongside the idea that new ideas ought to be generated by unconventionally-networked individuals. It might turn out to be quite a complex dynamic.

My own intuition is that uncertainty about future productivity creates sufficient anxiety that departments tend to choose the safer candidates in the short run — i.e., the ones coming out of their peer-group departments. This might also account for the high propensity of academic exchange networks to herding behavior (where one candidate gets all the offers, initially). Indeed, according to Han’s paper, the discipline that does the most to take the market out of the market — to make it more like a hierarchical queueing procedure, instead, where the top departments get first pick of the candidates — is Economics. This is also a field where it’s conventional for candidates go on the market without any publications.

Notes

1 A structural hole is, roughly, a gap between two dense network clusters. If the two clusters have something to offer each other — resources, profit opportunities, information, ideas — then the individual who bridges the hole and serves as the connector between the two groups can benefit. The advantage to the bridging agent declines the more connections form between nodes in the two groups.

November 30, 2004

The Bradford Experience

Posted by Chris

I don’t want to turn Crooked Timber into a series of announcements for British radio shows, but I would like to give advance notice that Alan Carling , sociologist, electoral candidate, and one of my collaborators on Imprints, is now on the radio with Bradford Community Broadcasting . His show — The Bradford Experience — goes out this Thursday, and he’ll be interviewing Home Office minister Fiona McTaggart . The show goes out from 1600-1700 (UK time) and I rather suspect they’ll be discussing race, religion, secularism and such matters. There’s sure to be plenty on the live stream that might interest — or infuriate — Harry, Ophelia Benson, Russell Arben Fox and others around these parts. So perhaps Crooked Timber can get Alan an audience beyond the limits of the Bradford—Leeds conurbation.

UPDATE: Alan tells me that the programme will be repeated on Saturday (9.00-10.00 am) and Sunday (4.00 - 5.00). He’ll also be interviewing the Bishop of Bradford.

November 24, 2004

Framing

Posted by Kieran

Kevin Drum writes:

LAKOFF FRAMING…. it’s finally time for me to get a copy of George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant, which appears to be something of a Bible among despairing liberals who can’t believe that half the country likes George Bush and apparently doesn’t like us. Basically, Lakoff says we need to get our act together and “frame” our arguments in more positive ways

Although I know (and like) his work on Metaphor, I’ve only seen Lakoff’s stuff on this at one remove or more — snippets on TV shows here and there, and talk in newspapers and blogs. So I don’t know whether he’s pitching the idea of framing as new, or his own bright idea. But it’s worth noting that this concept is pretty old. I don’t mean some equivalent concept, either, I mean the same idea with the same name. Here’s a very short reading list to start you off. It has its prehistory in work in micro-interaction work in linguistics and cognitive psychology (going back to Gregory Bateson). It gets named in the sociological literature by Erving Goffman’s (1974) Frame Analysis, but like a lot of Goffman nobody could do anything with it unless they were him. It was developed into a useful tool explicitly oriented to the study of political processes (especially social movements) in Dave Snow et al’s Frame Alignment Processes (American Sociological Review, 1986). That paper spawned a very big literature. Benford and Snow’s Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment, (Annual Review of Sociology, 2000) reviews fifteen-or-so years of theory and research in the field, including plenty of stuff on the limits of the concept and its potential for overuse. If Lakoff has managed to get the media to put his name in front of this idea then I guess he’s worth listening to, because he’s clearly very good at framing indeed.

Update: Seems like Lakoff gives the history of the idea its due, develops a version of his own in terms of his views about conceptual metaphors, and then applies it to the liberal cause in an accessible way. All to the good. My memory of the conceptual metaphor stuff in Metaphors We Live By, though, is that the metaphors that book looked at (“Love is a Battlefield”, etc) can’t really explain how and why political framing is really successful, as it’s not just a cognitive process. Moreoever, the idea that metaphors underpin our concepts is very similar to the idea that the social structure decisively shapes our thinking: immensely suggestive, almost certainly right in some sense, but very difficult to specify in a satisfactory way. I guess I should read the books, though, before saying anything else.

November 20, 2004

Further Analysis of Electronic Voting Patterns

Posted by Kieran

Mike Hout and some colleagues at Berkeley have a working paper called “The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections”. A summary is also available as well as the data itself. Hout is a well-respected sociologist, so if he thinks the data for Florida show some anomalies he’s worth listing to. Hout et al try to estimate whether the presence of touch-screen electronic voting made a difference to the number of votes cast for Bush, controlling for various demographic characteristics of the counties as well as the proportion of votes cast for the Republican Presidential candidate in 1996 and 2000. Here’s the punchline:

As baseline support for Bush increases in Florida counties, the change in percent voting for Bush from 2000 to 2004 increases, but at a decreasing rate. Electronic voting has a main, positive effect on the dependent variable. Furthermore, there is an interaction effect between baseline support for Bush and electronic voting, and between baseline support for Bush squared and electronic voting. Support for Dole in 1996, county size, median income, and Hispanic population had no significant effect net of the other effects. Essentially, net of other effects, electronic voting had the greatest positive effect on changin percent voting for Bush from 2000 to 2004 in democratic counties. … Summing these effects for the fifteen counties with electronic voting yields the total estimated excess votes in favor of Bush associated with Electronic Voting; this figure is 130,733.

Hmm. I’m going to go mess around with the data for a while and see what we can see.

Update: OK, I’ve looked at the data, and so have others. I think the case is not proven. More below the fold.

Update 2: Mike Hout has added a comment below.

While mucking around with this, I see from the comments that Andrew Gelman (Statistics, Columbia) has done the job for me. He presents a very nice discussion of these patterns on his blog. You should read all of his post. Here’s a figure, similar to one on his blog, that shows the percent swing to Bush in Florida counties in 2004 against the Percent Republican vote in 2000 in the same counties. (A PDF version is also available.)

Counties using electronic voting machines are shown in red. You can see that Broward and Palm Beach counties (which have very large populations and lean strongly Democratic) swung much more toward Bush than was typical for counties where Republicans won less than 47 or 48 percent of the vote in 2000. It turns out that these two counties are driving the findings of Hout et al’s model. I ran a model identical to Hout et al’s, but with a variable (“pb-brow”) added to distinguish Broward and Palm Beach Counties from all the others. Here are the results:


Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) -2.13e-01 9.49e-02 -2.24 0.0289 *
b00pc 1.03e+00 3.25e-01 3.17 0.0025 **
b00pc.sq -6.62e-01 2.83e-01 -2.34 0.0230 *
size -2.88e-08 7.21e-08 -0.40 0.6908
etouch 2.98e-01 3.26e-01 0.92 0.3638
b00pc.e -8.82e-01 1.13e+00 -0.78 0.4373
b00pcsq.e 6.02e-01 9.71e-01 0.62 0.5377
d96pc -1.58e-01 1.19e-01 -1.33 0.1881
v.change -4.41e-08 3.21e-07 -0.14 0.8912
income -7.89e-07 7.64e-07 -1.03 0.3064
hispanic -5.21e-02 3.10e-02 -1.68 0.0988 .
pb-brow 2.14e-02 5.23e-02 0.41 0.6831
—-
Signif. codes: 0 `***’ 0.001 `**’ 0.01 `*’ 0.05 `.’ 0.1 ` ’ 1

Residual standard error: 0.0215 on 55 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-Squared: 0.539, Adjusted R-squared: 0.447
F-statistic: 5.84 on 11 and 55 DF, p-value: 3.55e-06

As you can see, putting in a dummy for Palm Beach and Broward Counties makes the significant effect of “etouch” (i.e., whether a county had electronic voting) go away. Now the only variables significant at conventional levels are the ones measuring the percentage voting for Bush in 2000. (Note that there’s also a hint of an effect for ‘Hispanic,’ as befits their ambiguous role in deciding the election.)1

So, all of the e-voting action is explained by two counties. The question is what’s happening in those counties. Andrew Gelman again:

One possibility, as suggested by Hout et al., is cheating, possibly set up ahead of time (e.g., by loading extra votes into the machines before the election or by setting it up to switch or not count some votes) … but an obvious alternative explanation is that, for various reasons, 3% more people in those counties preferred Bush in 2004, compared to 2000. As can be seen in the graphs above for 2000, 1996, and 1992, such a swing would be unusual (at least compared to recent history), but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen! … It would make sense to look further at Broward and Palm Beach counties, where swings happened which look unexpected compared to the other counties and compared to 2000, 1996, and 1992. But lots of unexpected things happen in elections, so we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that e-voting is related to these particular surprises.

In other words, if there is cheating it’s not centralized cheating where all the e-voting machines mess up in the same way. If you believe that the machines were rigged, focus on the ones in Palm Beach and Broward county. But it seems more likely that these results show the Republican Party Machine was really, really well-organized in Palm Beach and Broward, and they were able to mobilize their vote better than the Democrats. The general swing toward Bush in Florida seems consistent with this story.

Notes

A version of the analysis presented here is available in PDF format. The two models can be compared directly in that document.

1 Again, this analysis isn’t original to me: see Andrew Gelman’s post for more details.

November 19, 2004

Otis Dudley Duncan

Posted by Kieran

I learned today that Otis Dudley Duncan, sociologist and anatomist of the American Occupational Structure, has died at the age of 83. Duncan was a major figure in mid-20th century sociology, a pioneer in the theory and practice of social measurement, the analysis of stratification, occupations and prestige, organizations and urbanism. He taught at the University of Arizona for many years. Bloggers may know his name because — well into his retirement — he was one of the first people to notice and analyze inconsistencies, errors and omissions in John Lott’s claims about defensive gun use.

November 15, 2004

Common sense

Posted by John Quiggin
Kieran complains that
When you’re a Sociologist like me, and your field has no credibility, people just assume you’re stupid and don’t bother sending you their Final and Completely True Theory of X in the first place. On the other hand, it does invite people to assume the answer to any problem you are studying is simply obvious common sense.
But sociology is a victim of its own success here. All of the big insights of sociology, from its beginnings in the 19th century up to 1950s work like that of Erving Goffman are indeed common sense, not because they were already known, but because they have been incorporated into the intellectual baggage of everyone in Western societies, educated or not. No one, for example, would be accused of talking academic jargon if they raised the problem of “peer group pressure” at their local school, or made a reference to ‘social status’.

By contrast, almost nothing in economics has managed to become common sense. Something as basic as comparative advantage, a concept developed nearly 200 years ago, remains as counter-intuitive as quantum physics to most people. Opportunity cost also at least a century old, similarly requires years of intensive training before it becomes common sense rather than a memorised definition.

Yet it would be only a slight exaggeration to say that the basic analysis associated with these concepts is universally accepted by economists. Opponents of free trade would want to point out dangers in the uncritical use of comparative advantage as a guide to policy, and behavioral economists might observe that, in practice, people worry about sunk costs as well as, or instead of opportunity costs, but these qualifications do not affect the validity of the underlying analysis.

November 10, 2004

Going Home to a Foreign Country

Posted by Kieran

There’s a nice piece in the Times about Irish emigrants returning home from New York because they think they can do better these days in Ireland. (Many of them do, though very low-skill service jobs are done by emigrants from Eastern Europe and elsewhere.) The article gives some sense of the surprise many of them feel when they see how much the country has changed. That used to take a generation or more to happen — one of our American cousins, returning to Ireland in 1978 after nearly fifty years in San Francisco, lasted only three days before the presence of televisions and the absence of livestock in the house caused him to fly home in disgust — but now returning emigrants can get culture shock after only a few years away:

Counselors in immigrant advice bureaus on both sides of the Atlantic say that many returnees will have a rude awakening in Ireland — especially those who were stuck in the underground economy in the United States, unable to travel abroad for fear of not getting back in. The Irish government now puts out brochures warning that they will find not the Ireland of memory, but rather a fast-paced multiracial society where their dollars are weak against the euro and affordable housing scarce.

I go back as often as I can, in part to inoculate myself against misplaced nostalgia for the ole Green-n-Lovely. With typical good timing, I left Ireland in the Autumn of 1995, more or less exactly when the things were really starting to pick up. My younger brother had left the year before that, coming to college in the U.S. on an athletics scholarship. When he graduated, he convinced a big financial services company to sponsor his work visa and he got his green card last week. By contrast, my youngest brother and my sister left school a few years later and never gave a thought to emigrating. Neither of them even bothered to go to University and both have good jobs. Quite a transformation from a world where, around 1990, Career Guidance Counseling amounted to a recipes for leaving the country efficiently, and getting a Summer job stacking shelves in a department store required a family connection.

October 21, 2004

Over-Enthusiastic Organ Procurement?

Posted by Kieran

Reading about a case described in the National Review by Wesley J. Smith,1 Kevin Drum wonders “if there really are serious moves afoot to redefine “death” in order to expedite organ harvesting.” The case in question concerns a Colorado man, William Thaddeus Rardin, who shot himself in the head. His organs were procured for transplantation. In his report on the death, however, the local Coroner, Mark Young, ruled that proper procedure hadn’t been followed, that Rardin’s brain death hadn’t been properly established and so the cause of death was the organ procurement itself. The local Organ Procurement Organization (OPO), Donor Alliance, has strongly rejected this charge.

An answer to Kevin’s question, and some commentary, below the fold.

The OPO says,

The declaration of brain death was clearly documented. Donor Alliance does not accept a case for donation unless the patient is declared dead, and the declaration of death is documented and meets acceptable medical criteria. In this case all acceptable tests for brain death were conducted. Brain death was documented and confirmed, prior to any organ recovery.

This case surfaced on Transplant discussion groups a few days ago. On the face of it, I’d be inclined to believe the OPO. Bear in mind that Coroners are not medical professionals and that organ procurement from start to finish happens fast, within a 24-hour period or less. It might be that the Coroner has an axe to grind about organ donation. It’s also possible, of course, that proper procedure wasn’t followed in this particular case. But it’s hard to say from the evidence we have. So the short answer to Kevin’s question is No — there aren’t serious moves afoot to redefine death right now, despite the existence of the papers Smith cites in his article. But it’s worth making the broader point that death has already been redefined in ways that help make organ donation possible. As Margaret Lock argues in Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death (California 2001), the emergence, definition and successful spread of the concept of Brain Death from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s was bound up with the growth of the transplant industry. In the mid-70s, organ transplantation was often bundled together in public argument with things like stem-cell research, human cloning and genetic engineering. Advocates worked hard — and successfully — to present transplantation as a morally praiseworthy and therapeutic practice.2 The concept of brain death especially helped them overcome the fears of religious authorities.

Recently, another class of donors has been defined: non-heart-beating donors are not brain dead but have zero chance of survival anyway, because they have sustained a catastrophic gunshot would to the heart, for example, and are in complete and irreversible cardiac and respiratory failure. In such circumstances, waiting the required time to determine brain death will often make the other organs unusable, so death can be declared by this criterion instead.

The waiting list for transplants is larger than the number of cadaveric donors by a factor of about ten. The increasing use of living donors for kidney transplants (they now make up more than half of all kidney transplants) has eased the pressure on the waiting list a little, but living donation isn’t an option for most other organs. As a result, transplant professionals are constantly casting around for new ways to increase the supply. Taking poorer-quality organs, widening the age-range of potential donors, introducing some kind of presumed consent system2, and offering financial incentives to donor-families have all been mooted. Some (slackening the medical criteria) have been put into practice; others (financial incentives) have been pilot-tested. Further loosening the definition of brain death is another possibility. The main thing standing in the way of most of these proposals is the success of the prior efforts of OPOs to defined organ donation as the “Gift of Life”. In the ’70s and ’80s, the problem was convincing people that transplantation wasn’t grave-robbing or defiling the dead for the sake of a gruesome and often unsuccessful medical experiment. Now that transplants are routine, the supply constraints are hitting very hard, but many of the proposed solutions undermine the now widely-accepted idea that donation is a morally worthy gift. How far the existing system can be tweaked without provoking a severe backlash of public opinion is an open empirical question. Cases like the present one suggest that there may not be much leeway.

Notes

1 A Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute. Aren’t those the Creationism / Intelligent Design people?

2 This was also the period when Bioethics successfully established itself as an independent field. See John H. Evans, Playing God? Human Genetic Engineering and the Rationalization of Public Bioethical Debate (Chicago, 2002).

3 This one is a lot more complicated in practice than it sounds in principle. I hope to have an empirical analysis of cross-national presumed consent practices ready for circulation soon. I might post a link to it from CT when it’s ready.

October 20, 2004

Baby pictures on homepages

Posted by Eszter

If anyone has the time, I would love to see a systematic study of how many male versus female academics (or other professionals) portray themselves on their Web sites with or without babies. I realize the complications, e.g. really hard to sample people’s homepages, really hard to control for whether said person portrayed on a Web site even has a baby, but I’d still be curious to see someone gather data on this.

Here’s my motivation for the question. I recently saw a job talk where the candidate had pictures of his kids on his computer’s desktop. I have never seen a woman give a talk with this kind of background illustration (granted, I had never before seen a man give such a talk either). It made me think that this person could pull it off because as a guy he does not have to be concerned about committee members wondering whether he has a spouse who will need a job as well or whether he will take his work seriously despite the fact that he has children. But I recall plenty of cases of women who are married without children or on the market as mothers worrying considerably about how to downplay such personal information.

My impression is that men tend to put up pictures of their children on their professional Web sites more often, but I do not base this observation on any systematic analysis of the situation. I suspect the reason for this (assuming it really is the case) is that for male professionals to show themselves with a baby counts as a positive quality, or, in the least, will likely not count as a negative. It suggests that he is a concerned and proud father who takes his parental duties seriously (okay, that may be a leap:), he is an enlightened man. In contrast, I suspect women still feel that they have to prove themselves as professional first, parent second (or in the least prove that the latter doesn’t trump the former) thus prompting them not to be quite as forward about personal information on their Web sites. I guess one could argue that if for someone a proud father means an enlightened man then a proud mother should not come with negative repercussions, but it is not clear that the mothers feel that way about it.

Just among the people I know, I can think of at least a few couples where the man’s Web site has relatively prominent family information whereas the woman’s site downplays any such content. Even if it is simply about the parents projecting onto their environment how they may be perceived, that is already something to consider about how mothers versus fathers are made to feel about their family situations in professional settings.

May-December Marriages Again

Posted by Kieran

For the sake of reducing the general level of snarkiness in the world, the pursuit of truth to its innermost thingys, and of course the children, I’ve looked a bit further at the question of May-December marriages and what that tells us about revealed preferences. As is often the case, the data tell us both more and less than you might think. The amateur demography continues below the fold, at Holbovian length.

You’ll remember that David Bernstein used the example of May-December weddings as an example of revealed preferences in the mate market:1

I do wonder whether the authers considered the revealed preferences that seem blatantly obvious to those of us who merely observe human behavior (and maybe even look at the statistics, e.g., on which sex the Mays and Decembers tend to be in May-December relationships).

His thought was that, whatever people may say, their actions will tend to reveal that men go for looks and women for financial success. Not all the time, of course, but that’s the way to bet them. It’s easy to imagine an economic model of the same behavior, and that’s what’s suggested by the “revealed preferences” idea. We shouldn’t just discount the idea of revealed preferences, of course. We use it to explain people’s actions all the time in everyday life. But we should also remember that sometimes people have much less in the way of choice than we’d like, sometimes they just act in ways that seemed like a good idea at the time, and other times they are subject to what Harrison White once called (in a review of James Coleman’s Rat-Choice masterpiece, Foundations of Social Theory) “the awful grip of chance in human affairs.” It’s very tempting to assume that whatever we see people doing must reflect their preferences because otherwise, given they are rational utility maximizers, they wouldn’t be doing it. It certainly makes research much easier. But the danger is obvious: you’ll tend to assume what you need to prove —- i.e., that people are rational utility maximizers -— or infer panglossian conclusions about everything being for the best (rational choice sociodicy) or as nature intended (evolutionary psychology biodicy).2

The picture David conjures up is the familiar one of the disgustingly rich, ugly old guy with the beautiful young wife. This is common enough — much moreso, as David says, than the pattern of older women marrying younger men. I’d hazard a guess that in the (few) cases where women have attained a real measure of wealth or power, they have little trouble finding younger people to sleep with them, if that’s what they want. You might be surprised, for example, at the number of Margaret Thatcher’s underlings who had the hots for her. But it’s certainly true that men are everywhere much more likely to be older than their spouses. How much older varies cross-nationally and also historically, but typically there’s about a 2-3 year gap when both partners are marrying for the first time. This is partly conditioned on the economic and social position of women. The more opportunities they have (in the labor market, for example) the more likely it is that we’ll see homogamy (similarity) on partners’ age and education. This raises a nice question for Revealed Preferencers. If freeing up the choice-set for women results in a change in their decisionmaking, then it is hard to see the prior choices by similar women as representing their true preferences. The RP approach works best if we assume the institutional environment is fixed and there are only minimal constraints on people. The opportunity to exercise free choice with respect to one’s marriage partners is a comparatively recent (and still somewhat restricted) practice. Just read Jane Austen. Saying that people’s decisions reflect the best choice available under the circumstances would be cold comfort for, say, all the Charlotte Lucases who choose to marry their Mr Collins.

A common conservative move at this point is to say that traditional institutions exist because they stabilize the social order, and that people who make unconventional choices will end unhappily, as will the societies that permit such choices. There is an EP twist on this, too: it is the ham-fisted social engineering efforts by politically-correct lefties that prevent the evolutionarily correct patterns (to coin a phrase) from doing their work. But this forgets that the institutions which created the dilemmas faced by Charlotte Lucas and Elizabeth Bennet — such as Entailment — were themselves historically specific bits of social structure, not inevitable facts of nature. In our own time, arguments that American girls weren’t cut out for (EP) or didn’t really want to (RP) play sports look rather threadbare given the explosive growth in participation in women’s sports following the passage of Title IX. That case reminds us that creating variety of choice by reducing constraints on particular decision-makers is not equivalent to just junking the institutional rules and letting people do whatever they want. Freedom of choice in marriage partners (or anything else) is itself a positive, social accomplishment. Contexts where choice is free — like proper markets — are possible only because many other things are highly constrained, such as the chance to freely cheat, renege or use violence in exchanges. Widespread, stable freedoms are not the same as the state of nature.

Back to marriages. Vera, Berardo and Berardo’s “Age Heterogamy in Marriage” (Journal of Marriage and the Family, 47, 1985: 553-566) presents evidence about marriages where the husband is significantly (11 more more years) older than his wife. They are interested in whether such marriages are concentrated amongst better-off households, and in whether these marriages are unhappier than usual. They find the first hypothesis “was not supported: age-discrepant unions are clearly more prevalent among lower classes.” Age-discrepant unions are also much more prevalent amongst blacks and Hispanics than whites. So heterogamous marriages are much more common amongst poorer groups, not richer ones! This should come as a surprise if our image of the typical May-December union is Donald Trump and whatever her name is. If you are a seasoned RP or (especially) EP thinker, you will no doubt even now be constructing a rationale to explain this pattern: Out there on the Savannah, life was hard and when the hunters were killed on the job, their widows became poor and had to marry the old guys who were left behind… As you please.

The paper’s second hypothesis is also of interest. May-December marriages are typically frowned on, often provoke disgust, and are usually thought to be less happy than marriages contracted for better reasons than money. But, in fact, it turns out that these marriages appear no less happy than average.3 Socioeconomic position is the best predictor of happiness in marriage.

Bytheway’s “The Variation with Age of Age Differences in Marriage” (JMF 43, 1981: 923-927) discovers more subtle patterns of variation in age-differences within marriage:

This paper is based upon an analysis of all marriages in England and Wales in 1976. It shows that the pattern of variation with age of age differences in marriage is not simple but is characterized by a change of direction in middle age. In particular it is apparent that both sexes are more likely to marry an older person at the age of 50 than at the age of 30. The same pattern is found in a large number of other countries.

What to make of a pattern like that? Bytheway thinks that the answer is found in changes in the meaning of marriage with age. And there’s also the question of where the criteria for a meaningful marriage come from to begin with. There seem to be a lot of open questions here.

A relaxed assumption of Revealed Preferences won’t help us find the answers. Sloppy application of ideas from evolutionary psychology makes it even easier to just Make Shit Up (MSU). Because David Bernstein’s original post didn’t make any claims about Evolutionary Psychology, I was surprised to see the comments thread to my post quickly become home to a bunch of accusations that we here at CT are all blank-slater Marxists from the ’70s who just can’t face up to a supposedly emerging scientific consensus about the hard-wired nature of sex roles. That’s just rubbish. No-one around here is denying that our evolved biological nature plays some role in everything we do and a large role in some things we do. But the Devil is in the details. Popularizers like Steven Pinker are notorious for spending their time knocking down straw Blank-Slaters and then cheerfully MSU-ing an evolutionary rationale for the contemporary behavior of their choice. Here, for instance, is Jerry Fodor (no Blank-Slater he!) giving Pinker the treatment he deserves for this:

The literature of Psychological Darwinism is full of what appear to be fallacies of rationalisation: arguments where the evidence offered that an interest in Y is the motive for a creature’s behaviour is primarily that an interest in Y would rationalise the behaviour if it were the creature’s motive. Pinker’s book provides so many examples that one hardly knows where to start. … [H]ere he is on why we like to read fiction: ‘Fictional narratives supply us with a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday and the outcomes of strategies we could deploy in them. What are the options if I were to suspect that my uncle killed my father, took his position, and married my mother?’ Good question. Or what if it turns out that, having just used the ring that I got by kidnapping a dwarf to pay off the giants who built me my new castle, I should discover that it is the very ring that I need in order to continue to be immortal and rule the world? It’s important to think out the options betimes, because a thing like that could happen to anyone and you can never have too much insurance.

When pushed in this way, the better EP people emphasize much more circumscribed claims. They will point to very carefully designed experiments with interesting results, on the one hand, and the generalized promise of evolutionary thinking for constructive social theory in general. These are reasonable points. It’s the difference, to put it in terms of the popular literature, between Pinker’s The Language Instinct, where he makes an accessible case about a literature he knows very well, and How the Mind Works, which is larded with EP howlers like the one just cited. Sloppiness like that doesn’t do any justice to those in the field who are trying to make it work properly.

Relations between the sexes provide the most fertile soil for the proliferation of the MSU branch of EP. Gender roles are deeply institutionalized — that is, they are highly scripted and chronically reproduced — and we like nothing better than to think of our institutions as inevitable or natural.4 I can see how very widespread trends — such as men being slightly older than women at first marriage, for instance — might be traced back to very ancient social arrangements, though even here there’s enough variation to make it a difficult sell. Neither am I opposed to the idea that there are very basic drives or predispositions that go back very far which might reliably generate patterns of social organization or culture. But it also seems obvious to me that ideas about the appropriate relations between the sexes — or races, classes, nations, or whatever you like — thrive best if they appear to be emanations from the mind of God or the structure of DNA. This has consequences on the input and output sides of EP arguments. On the output side, it’s no surprise that Sunday-Supplement versions of EP gender theory have been taken up by those who would benefit if things were organized the way those arguments suggest. On the input side, it’s striking how the natural gender division of labor theorized to have evolved once-and-for-all on the Savannah often bears a strong resemblance to middle-class life on the Eastern seaboard of the United States around 1960. The Darwinian mode of argument is very powerful, and it’s easy to go crazy with them when all you have to constrain you is the complete body of surviving evidence about how social groups were organized in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness — which is to say, bugger all.

Getting at the truth the relationship between biology, social organization and individual behavior is a lot harder than the likes of Steven Pinker make it seem. It’s clear that society as we know it wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for our evolved capacity for language. Or that things would be very different if, like many other mammals, bits of us started broadcasting “Time To Reproduce!” to the world every few weeks. Or that Presidential debates would be trickier to manage if women laid eggs and men had to incubate them for a year.5 Patriarchy would be harder to organize if females were 25,000 times larger than the colony of tiny males that lived inside them. But as we move down this scale towards differences like “If kinship relations were everywhere fully matrilineal”, or “If females were allowed to own property and vote” or “If men were capable of accurately assessing how much housework they do” — well, clearly there must be a sweet-spot along the way where EP explanations are both non-trivial and supportable by the evidence. It’s just really hard to establish where that sweet-spot is. Taking that view doesn’t make you science-phobic, it makes you a better scientist.

Notes

1 It’s not really a market, of course. This is just a metaphor. But insofar as it is, it’s a mate market and not a marriage market. You can’t buy a marriage. Why would you even want two extra people in your house, anyway?

2 As Jon Elster complains, there are “inverted sociodicies”, too, where all is for the worst in the worst of all possible worlds. That’s a vice as well.

3 This need not be particularly happy.

4 To pick an article at random, see Karen Martin, “Becoming a Gendered Body: Practices of Preschools” (American Sociological Review 63, 1998: 494-511) for some data on a tiny piece of this effort, directed at little kids.

5 It would explain the bulge in Dubya’s suit, though.

October 18, 2004

Pursuing the Truth

Posted by Kieran

David Bernstein in lofty principle:

Maybe I’m a little old-fashioned, but aren’t universities supposed to stand for the pursuit of truth, “even unto its innermost parts” (Brandeis’s motto). Will a faculty member who pursues such truth get hired to teach Women’s Studies? Will a student who pursues such truth get a good grade?

David Bernstein in empirical practice, one paragraph earlier:

EVER HEAR OF “REVEALED PREFERENCES”? An article in my alma mater’s (Brandeis University) newspaper, The Justice explains that two Brandeis Women’s Studies professors argue that (surprise!) what most of us think of as gender (or, some would say, “sex”) differences are actually mere stereotypes. Maybe it’s unfair for me to comment without reading the professors’ entire book, not to mention the numerous studies on which they claim to rely.

Maybe I’m a little old-fashioned, but would it really be too much effort to do a bit of reading beyond the alumni magazine before blandly dismissing something as lefty claptrap just because it contradicts “revealed preferences that seem blatantly obvious” to you? Especially when one believes in, you know, pursuing the truth unto its innermost wotsits? The preferences revealed in this case suggest the answer is “Yes.”

October 16, 2004

Brad DeLong discovers Cultural Capital

Posted by Kieran

Brad DeLong notices a relationship between the PSAT tests and the magazines lying around his home:

Dubbed… declaimed… reflexive… inquisitive… sustenance… enumerated… demeaned…harangue… munificent… straitened… divestment… sinecure… corollary… culmination… manifestation… constellation… amalgam… embodies… sanguine… impudent… reiterating… carapace… antennae…

[I]t’s hard to avoid noticing something about the vocabulary that they are testing. It’s not, by and large, science or engineering vocabulary. It’s not financial or commercial vocabulary. It’s not political or quantitative vocabulary. What they are testing is the high humanistic vocabulary of the Sunday New York Times Arts and Leisure section, of the New Yorker, of the New York Review of Books.

Now we get all three of these publications. And my children thus get an extra edge through this testing process. But is this really what we want to allocate resources based on—whether people’s parents have the NYRoB lying around and whether their children pick it up and read it?

Cultural capital is indeed a vital factor governing resource allocation in contemporary societies. For more information on what might happen to his fourteen-year-old in the near future, Brad should consider reading an oldie-but-goodie article from Paul DiMaggio, 1982, “Cultural Capital and School Success: The Impact of Status Culture Participation on the Grades of U.S. High School Students” (American Sociological Review, 47: 189-201). And for longer-term prospects, there’s Paul DiMaggio and John Mohr, 1985, “Cultural Capital, Educational Attainment, and Marital Selection” (American Journal of Sociology 90: 1231-61).

September 22, 2004

The Condition of the Working Class in Manchester (and New England)

Posted by Kieran
Snippet of a conversation with a student from my Sources of Social Theory class:
Student: I just wanted to be sure I understood the Engels reading.
Me: OK.
Student: I mean, I think I got it — like, he went to Manchester and it was totally gross and everything, right?
Me: That’s about right, I suppose.

And speaking of class warfare, consider the headlines from these two stories, nestled next to each other in the Times right now:

U.S. Seeking Cuts in Rent Subsidies for Poor Families. The Bush administration has proposed reducing the value of subsidized-housing vouchers given to poor residents in New York City next year, with even bigger cuts planned for some urban areas in New England. The proposal is based on a disputed new formula that averages higher rents in big cities with those of suburban areas, which tend to have lower costs…

Legal Loophole Inflates Profits in Student Loans. The federal government is paying hundreds of millions of dollars in unnecessary subsidies to student loan companies even though the Bush administration has the authority to cut them off immediately, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office.

It’s probably worth some Think-Tanker’s time to express the money involved in the former story in terms of the money involved in the latter story, and package it into a 1-liner about the present Administration’s approach to social policy.

September 17, 2004

Sui Generis

Posted by Kieran

Jim Lewis has a piece on Slate about the photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue, who is famous for candid shots of fashionable French people in the early 1900s. The stock story about Lartigue was that he “achieved late-life fame as one of the first masters of the medium, an unschooled amateur who achieved genius entirely by naive instinct.” But there’s plenty of evidence that, in fact, this is rubbish:

His father was a camera buff, and the son was given every possible advantage: the newest equipment, lots of leisure time, and a thorough education in the ways of the medium. Moreover, it was an era when amateur photography was all the rage, when magazines and books were full of instruction, debate, and example.

Still, Lartigue presented his work as the innocent expression of a wonderstruck boy amateur, and MoMA was happy to promote it as such.

I recently came across a nice discussion of this phenomenon in Alan Bennett’s superb Writing Home:

Here is Bennett writing in his diary for March 15th 1980:

Finish a draft of my piece for the Larkin Festschrift, Larkin at Sixty. Parts of it I like and are what I want to say, but I detect a note of Uriah Heep-like self-abasement, which could be taken to denote (and maybe does denote) arrogance. I seem always to be saying ‘What am I doing here I’m not a literary person at all.’ Apropos of this I have just ordered a copy of a book I saw reviewed, a translation of Ernest Kris and Otto Kurtz’s Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist, the main point of which is that there is a tradition, in which the artists themselves conspire, of making a painter’s beginnings humbler and less sophisticated than in fact they were. The public liked to believe an artist had no training, that he astonished his elders, who picked out his skill when he was in lowly or unlikely circumstances. This has always been the case, and K. and K. demonstrate it from many periods. I suspect this is also true of literature. My contribution to the Larkin book discusses his poem ‘I Remember, I Remember’, in which e recalls what elsewhere he called the ‘forgotten boredom’ of his childhood and Coventry ‘where my childhood was unspent.’ He is trying to appear an artist without a past. And so am I in my piece, claiming I had little reading and no literary appreciation until I was in my thirties.

It’s an old story. Not even the Son of God himself was above indulging in it a little. It is closely tied to the desire for authenticity (the wish, that is, both to project and experience it). We want to present our abilities and achievements as the unforced outcome of our natural talents because this is one of the main means through which we legitimize our social identity and, in the process, stay ahead of the competition. The best way to win a race is to insist you’re not in one, while still managing to convey the impression that if there were such a race you would happen to be comfortably in the lead. You might be surprised to learn that the degree to which this sort of thing is a conscious strategy or an ingrained disposition is an important question in social theory. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s spend much of his career circling round the problem. His theory of practice tries to get a grip on the fit between class position and one’s disposition to speak or act in particular ways, or develop some tastes rather than others. Bourdieu’s key concept, a slippery one, is the habitus. Loic Wacquant provides a good, compact discussion of the idea in this encyclopedia article:

Because it is both structured (by past social milieus) and structuring (of present representations and actions), habitus operates as the “unchosen principle of all choices” guiding actions that assume the systematic character of strategies even as they are not the result of strategic intention and are objectively “orchestrated without being the product of the organizing activity of a conductor”

If the style of Francophone social theory is a little much for your Anglo-Empiricist mind — Bourdieu’s style is enough to give anyone a migraine after a while, frankly, though he would probably say that both his prose and your headache can be traced to differences in the habitus of French and Anglo-American academic cultures — then consider this comment from a later part of Bennett’s Writing Home, which conveys the nub of the issue very well:

There is a passage in [Namier’s] England in the Age of the American Revolution …: ‘A man’s status in English society has always depended primarily on his own consciousness … whatever is apt to raise a man’s self-consciousness — be it birth, rank, wealth, intellect, daring or achievements — will add to his stature; but it has to be translated into the truest expression of his sub-conscious self-valuation: uncontending ease, the unbought grace of life.’

It’s the process of generating the (apparently) “unbought grace of life” that concerns Bourdieu, and that Lewis is probing in Lartique’s history. Transparent efforts to acquire and display it are bound to fail, but we try anyway. One of the favorite tropes of the blogging world, for instance, is the David vs Goliath story of the lone (self-taught, self-powered, grittily independent) blogger assiduously fact-checking Big Media or producing a devastating critique of some bit of mainstream science or other. It’s the same story: the lone blogger is just another version of the artist without a past, upending the conventional wisdom with his special brand of outsider-status and sui generis credibility.

September 03, 2004

Emile Durkheim on Zell Miller

Posted by Kieran
Well, OK not really — Durkheim died in 1917. But there’s more to crowds than being able to estimate prices accurately and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is without doubt the place to begin when reflecting on the Republican Convention once the speeches are all done:
The force of the collectivity is not wholly external; it does not move us entirely from outside. Indeed … it must enter into us and become organized within us … This stimulating and invigorating effect of society is particularly apparent in certain circumstances. In the midst of an assembly that becomes worked up, we become capable of feelings and conduct which we are incapable when left to our individual resources … For this reason all parties — be they political, economic, or denominational — see to it that periodic conventions are held, at which their followers can renew their common faith by making a public demonstration of it together … In the same way, we can also explain the curious posture that is so characteristic of a man who is speaking to a crowd — if he has achieved communion with it. His language becomes high-flown in a way that would be ridiculous in ordinary circumstances; his gestures take on an overbearing quality; his very thought becomes impatient of limits and slips easily into every kind of extreme. … Sometimes he even feels possessed by a moral force greater than he, of which he is only the interpreter … This extraordinary surplus of forces is quite real and comes to him from the very group he is addressing. The feelings he arouses as he speaks return to him enlarged and amplified, reinforcing his own to some degree. … It is then no longer a mere individual who speaks but a group incarnated and personified.

Continuing in a Durkheimian mood, it strikes me that, by holding the convention in New York, the Republican Party has managed to have it both ways with the conscience collective: Party solidarity is enhanced positively as the delegates make a reverent pilgrimage to the site of the September 11th attacks, but also negatively through the buzz they get from feeling angry at and superior to the actual New Yorkers loudly protesting their presence. Thus the real New York of September 2004 provides the raw emotional energy used inside the convention hall to sanctify an image of the New York of September 2001.

August 27, 2004

Altruism as an Organizational Problem

Posted by Kieran

The University of Arizona’s news service has done a little press release covering a recent paper of mine about the social organization of cadaveric organ procurement in the United States. One way to think about the paper is in relation to ongoing debates about offering commercial incentives to donor families. These debates are conducted in individual-level terms — they are about appealing people’s to selfish rather than their altruistic impulses — and they rely on a straightforward contrast between giving and selling. By doing so these arguments (both for and against markets) miss the role of organizational infrastructure and logistical effort in donor procurement, and the wide range of variation in procurement rates associated with it.

August 21, 2004

iPods in the Classroom

Posted by Kieran

Alan reports that

Students in the incoming Class of 2008 at Duke University each get a brand-new iPod, to be used, says the university’s IT wonks, as part of a project exploring innovative classroom technologies.

I’m thinking of using an iPod in my graduate seminar this semester. The idea is that the students divide into groups and then buy me an iPod and, um, that’s it. Perhaps also items from my Amazon wish list, for the advanced ones.

As it happens, I do know of a student at Arizona who used an mp3 player as an innovative classroom technology: he was noticed wearing headphones during his final exam and it turned out he’d recorded himself speaking the answers to likely exam questions.

August 18, 2004

Krugman at the ASA

Posted by Kieran

Paul Krugman and Fernando Cardoso were the final plenary speakers yesterday evening at the American Sociological Association Meetings in San Francisco. The topic under discussion was “The Future of Neoliberalism,” and both of them did a pretty good job. The panel was introduced and moderated by Juliet Schor, who spoke for twenty-odd minutes at the beginning and seemed just a tiny bit reluctant to give up the mike. That was understandable, I suppose, as the ballroom was jammed — standing room only and spillover into the hallways outside, and it’s hard to resist a crowd that big. I hadn’t seen Krugman speak before. He was refreshingly nerdy. His detractors work incessantly to make the “shrill” label stick, but in person he comes off more like Woody Allen’s accountant brother.

Krugman made a passing reference to Enron and wondered whether Homeland Security was responsible for the intermittent problems with the lights and sound, but otherwise stuck to the topic at hand, arguing that “neoliberalism” could and should be decomposed into policies that ought to be evaluated independently. So whereas free-trade and export-led growth has clearly gotten much better results than tariffs and import-substitution, the benefits of unrestricted capital mobility or gung-ho privatization aren’t as well established. He emphasized the complexity of the problems at issue and the dangers of hubris in development policy. He came across, in other words, like a theoretically-driven social scientist determined to learn from the data and looking for the answer to the question “How can we make as many people as possible better-off?”

All of which made some of the questions from the audience (passed up on cards and read out by Schor) more than a little irritating. The worst one, stupid as well as rude, asked whether economics was “too mired in the muck of right-wing thought” to do any good in the world. (I should say that no-one clapped at that one, and a lot of people were clearly embarrassed: in many respects this was the friendliest of all possible audiences.) Krugman politely stood his ground. Whoever submitted the question is probably well-used to (correctly) arguing that the horrors of Stalin don’t invalidate the fundamental insights of Marxists. How hard can it be to apply the same basic point to the WTO and the neoclassical toolkit?1 Questions like that are the bobblehead left-wing analogue to the pez-dispenser right-wing trope that if only you understood “Econ 101” or “the basic laws of the market” you’d agree with every wingnut idea put to you. I have all kinds of criticisms and qualms about economics as a body of knowledge and a professional enterprise, and naturally I’d like to be right about all of them all the time. But, sadly, easy certainty is continually frustrated by the fact that many of the economists I know are much smarter than me and have the irritating ability to make good arguments for their point of view. And so even though I will of course prevail in the end I can’t just dismiss them out of hand. I expect the same consideration in return, the odd snotty economist (or, more often, their camp-followers in political science and law) notwithstanding.

Anyway, if you get a chance to see Krugman at a book-signing or whatever — especially of the topic is international macroeconomics — take it. He’s good value.

1 Comments to the effect that I am implying that the WTO is as bad as Stalin here will be ignored.

August 15, 2004

Conferencing

Posted by Kieran

I don’t know when “conferencing” became a verb, but I guess I’m doing it all the same. I’m at the ASA Meetings in San Francisco, where the keynote speakers include well-known sociologist Paul Krugman. I’m off to the Economic Sociology Section reception soon, but I am nevertheless tempted by the Section on Alcohol Drugs and Tobacco reception. Meanwhile, the storm damage in Florida reminds me of the answer to the stupidest question in the world.

August 13, 2004

Love is a Battlefield Spanning-Tree Network with no 4-Cycles

Posted by Kieran

Quick, in high school were you ever told not to date your old girlfriend’s current boyfriend’s old girlfriend? Or your old boyfriend’s current girlfriend’s old boyfriend? Probably not. But I bet you never did, either. This month’s American Journal of Sociology has a very nice paper (subscription only, alas) by Peter Bearman, Jim Moody and Katherine Stovel about the structure of the romantic and sexual network in a population of over 800 adolescents at “Jefferson High” in a midsized town in the midwestern United States. They got a pretty well-bounded population (a high school included in the AddHealth study) and mapped out all the connections between the students. Read on for the lurid details.

The authors found that the observed network isn’t well-represented by existing models, which are mainly concerned with predicting how STDs propagate through populations and have often been based on ego-centered network data. These are surveys where you ask the respondents about their sexual networks, but the respondents aren’t necessarily in the same network. Here’s a picture of four kinds of network:

Core models posit a small group of very sexually-active individuals who occasionally come into contact with (and infect) those outside the core. Bridge models think in terms of an infected component and an uninfected component which join at some point. The biggest network component observed at Jefferson High turned out to be the fourth type, however: a “spanning tree” structure. This is “a long chain of interconnections that stretches across a population, like rural phone wires running from a long trunk line to individual houses … characterized by a graph with few cycles, low redundancy, and consequently very sparse overall density.” When they tried to simulate this bit of the graph structure, the authors found they could get most of the way there using a simple model where the probability of a tie depended on individuals having a preference for others with the same amount of sexual experience as themselves.1 But simulated networks based on this model didn’t quite match the properties of the observed network. In particular, while the simulations had cycles of length 4, the Jefferson High network did not.

What’s a cycle? If you start at Crooked Timber and click over to Dan Drezner and then click Dan’s link to Mark Kleiman and then return to Crooked Timber via Mark’s link to us, you’ve completed a cycle of length 3: a walk through the network that starts and ends with the same actor and where all the other actors are different and not repeated along the way. Cycles of length 3 are the smallest possible cycles. When it comes to tracing paths through heterosexual relationships, though, the smallest possible cycles are of length 4. In order to make a cycle beginning and ending with yourself, you need two members of the opposite sex plus one intervening individual the same sex as you. It turns out that this kind of cycle is just not found in the Jefferson High network. Although there’s no explicit taboo or social norm against that kind of pattern, nevertheless people just don’t date their old partner’s current partner’s old partner.

From the perspective of males or females (and independent of the pattern of “rejection”), a relationship that completes a cycle of length 4 can be thought of as a “seconds partnership,” and therefore involves a public loss of status. Most adolescents would probably stare blankly at the researcher who asked boys: Is there a prohibition in your school against being in a relationship with your old girlfriend’s current boyfriend’s old girlfriend? It is a mouthful, but it makes intuitive sense. … For adolescents, the consequence of this prohibition is of little interest: what concerns them is avoiding status loss. But from the perspective of those interested in understanding the determinants of disease diffusion, the significance of a norm against relationships that complete short cycles is profound. The structural impact of the norm is that it induces a spanning tree, as versus a structure characterized by many densely connected pockets of activity (i.e., a core structure).

Individuals constitute social structures, yet those structures have properties that the members do not know about and can’t easily grasp — our vast amount of folk knowledge about our social relations notwithstanding. These properties can have all kinds of serious consequences. The “No 4-cycles” rule is interesting because on the one hand it reflects a very simple bit of structure and it’s not something that’s prohibited in any strong normative sense. I’m not sure I buy the authors’ status-based explanation for it, though. They suggest some alternatives — “‘jealousy’ or the avoidance of too much ‘closeness,’ a sentiment perhaps best described unscientifically as the ‘yuck factor.’” I find the yuck-factor idea more intriquing: I wonder whether it’s more likely to show up at the limits of easily-described network structures. Bigger cycles defy easy verbal description altogether and are also subject to lack of information because some of the ties will be in the past or far away, so they’re not subject to avoidance. Dyadic ties are easy to keep track of. Short cycles are still tricky to grasp, but it’s not that hard, so being able to trace them triggers the taboo-like “yuck” response.

As for consequences, the spanning-tree structures created by experience homophily plus the 4-cycle rule are very effective at propagating diseases along their chains. But they are also easy to break in a way that core-type networks are not:

Under core and inverse core structures, it matters enormously which actors are reached, while under a spanning tree structure the key is not so much which actors are reached, just that some are. This is because given the dynamic tendency for unconnected dyads and triads to attach to the main component, the structure is equally sensitive to a break (failure to transmit disease) at any site in the graph. In this way, relatively low levels of behavior changeeven by low-risk actors, who are perhaps the easiest to influence can easily break a spanning tree network into small disconnected components, thereby fragmenting the epidemic and radically limiting its scope.

1 Homophily, or the tendency do associate with others with similar traits to oneself, is a powerful social force that explains a great deal about the structure of social networks — in this case, homophily on experience.

August 11, 2004

Good Stuff from the Decembrist

Posted by Kieran

Two good things from Mark Schmitt (but you wouldn’t expect anything less, right?). There’s an American Prospect Piece by him about the long-term effects of the congressional reforms of the 1950s and ’60s, and a post about jobs with no sick leave:

According to the brilliant analysts at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, sixty-six million workers, or 54% of the workforce, does not get a single paid sick day after a full year on the job.

That statistic, I think, is one of the best indicators of the two classes of the labor market, and how the divide is not so much about wages and income as about benefits and security. And those of us on the relatively secure side of the divide cannot really understand how different life is in a world where you don’t have any paid sick leave. I might think I understand what it is to earn low wages — $10,500/year, in my first job — but I’ve never had a job that didn’t offer sick days. Can’t even imagine it.

Jacob Hacker has a sort of preview of his next book in The New Republic, and I think he is most clearly saying the big thing that needs to be said about the economy: That the principal problem, the big thing that has changed, is not the number of jobs, the rate of growth, or income inequality. It’s the shift in risk from the government and corporations onto individuals. … [B]ut while some of us have been able to exchange the security of the past for greater economic opportunity, a majority of workers are absorbing more risk without accompanying reward.

We’ve mentioned this phenomenon before at CT, as has Daniel in some older posts about pension schemes.

August 10, 2004

Egalitarian Capitalism

Posted by Kieran

I’ve mentioned this book before, but now that it’s been published so I thought it worth mentioning again. Egalitarian Capitalism is a new book by my new colleague Lane Kenworthy, who’s just joined us at Arizona. It’s a comparative analysis of trends in income inequality and household pre- and post-tax transfers in sixteen wealthy capitalist democracies. Lane’s approach is to ask whether the data support the idea that there are tradeoffs between a low degree of inequality, on the one hand, and strong growth, high employment and growing incomes on the other. The short answer is “not really.” The longer answer has interesting discussions of which approaches work and which seem not to. It’s a good book: the argument, the writing, and the data analysis are accessible and easy to follow. As has often been said around here, policy and public debate in the United States hardly ever looks around to see how other countries organize the relationship between economy and society. Maybe the current climate provides an opportunity to change that: To see how equality is compatible with various measures of economic success, read the book. (To get a sense of how these countries compare to Neoconservative ideals, just continue to follow the news about Iraq.) You can read the first chapter to get a better sense of what the project is; look at the cover; or just buy it.

August 07, 2004

The joy of idleness

Posted by Chris

The Guardian have a long extract from Tom Hodgkinson’s How to be Idle , an entertaining polemic against hard-work, time-keeping, self-improvement, and Protestant anxiety: a worthy riposte to those who think the quality of life is best measured in terms of per capita income. It also gives me an excuse to link to Paul Lafargue’s The Right to be Lazy .

July 23, 2004

Markets, Firms and Planning

Posted by Kieran

Some threads of the ongoing discussion about the Efficient Markets Hypothesis have begun to address the contrast between markets and planning, with the state as the prospective planner. As is often the case in such discussions, the implicit contrast is between a Hayekian information-processing ideal and, say, North Korea. To break down this assumption a bit, it’s worth drawing a link to a related debate in the economics and sociology of organizations about the existence of the firm. A long time ago, Ronald Coase asked why, if markets are so great, are there so many firms? Below the fold is an old post of mine where I examine Brink Lindsey’s efforts to defend the virtues of free markets in the light of Coase’s ideas. It might be of interest as a sidelight to the EMH debate.

In this post to his weblog, Brink Lindsey, author of Against the Dead Hand, tries to put the recent corporate scandals in the context of a wider debate about markets and hierarchies. He wants to answer three questions, in descending order of generality.

First, why are markets so great? Lindsey’s starting point is a standard one. Free markets are the best way to produce and allocate goods, and thereby promote growth and maximize welfare. The reason markets are better at this than (say) the state, was best expressed by Hayek. The distributed and decentralized nature of the market mechanism gathers and transmits a vast amount of dispersed information about demand and supply. The flow of information is reflected in changes in prices. Markets quickly and efficiently allow people to make more or less the right decisions about of how to allocate scarce resources with alternative uses.

Market ideologues generally stop there. Lindsey is more sensible, and asks the second question: If markets are so great at doing what Hayek claims, then why are there so many firms? Let alone, we might add, positively enormous corporate organizations? Lindsey gives the standard response from economics, which originates with Ronald Coase. Firms exist
because markets entail transaction costs (finding parties with whom to exchange, ensuring that exchanges will be performed appropriately, etc.), and administrative hierarchies can sometimes outperform markets by reducing those costs.

Well, maybe. We can note right away that Coase’s explanation for the existence of firms is at odds with Hayek’s reasoning about the superiority of markets. Hayekian markets are spontaneous, costless information processors. The lack of cost-based friction is what allows them to work their magic. When exchanges are costly, then what Lindsey calls “clarity of market feedback” will be severely impaired. A good deal of modern economics has focused on the problems that arise once information is no longer assumed to be cost-free.

Of course, this doesn’t mean Lindsey’s position is automatically undermined. Instead, he suggests that we can combine the two views:
Putting Coase and Hayek together, the organizational structure of a modern market economy reflects the interplay between transaction costs on the one hand, and what might be called “hierarchy costs” on the other—the costs of ignoring dispersed information not available to the decision-makers in the organizational hierarchy. Firms grow in size and scope to the extent that reductions in transaction costs outweigh the loss of access to outside information. To look at the matter from the perspective of creating value rather than containing costs, the boundaries between firms and markets are set according to the relative value of applying specific, available information versus openness to unknown information.

I think Lindsey’s argument begins to break down here. At least, it runs into some unacknowledged issues. First, can we measure the “value of applying specific, available information versus openness to unknown information”? Transaction costs are difficult enough to estimate, though their existence is intuitively compelling. But how does a firm begin to figure the opportunity cost of forgoing some “openness to unknown information”?

Second, given the importance of good information to the smooth functioning of markets, what effect should we expect the various information revolutions of the past 200 years to have on the process of market/firm partitioning? One of the main effects of information technologies, according to many free-marketers, is to reduce friction between buyers and sellers. In other words, I.T. is supposed to lower transaction costs. Wouldn’t we expect more markets and fewer firms as information transmission became cheaper and cheaper, rather than bigger and bigger firms? Yet these revolutions — telegraph, telephone, radio, TV and the computer/Internet — seem to have gone hand-in-hand with the growth of the modern corporation. Shouldn’t someone adopting Lindsey’s theory be surprised at this?

That’s an honest question, by the way: I haven’t thought hard about what the expected effects should be, and I don’t know if any economists have. Alternative stories are easy to tell. On one view, information technology makes social organization and control possible on an unprecedented scale. (Recent books by Chick Perrow and Bill Roy give accounts consistent with such a view.) Or you could also claim that cheap information technology doesn’t affect the ratio of transaction costs to hierarchy costs. But if it doesn’t, what does? And, more importantly, how do we measure it? The Hayek/Coase rationale for the make-or-buy decision ought to be more than a rationalization.

Lindsey’s third question is this: If markets are so great and firms come into being only for sensible reasons to do with transaction costs, then why is there a horrible wave of corporate scandals right now? He answers that Enron happened because firms are not markets. Instead, they are “pockets of corporate central planning” which , alas, the market is forced to rely on for Coasian reasons. Corporate malfeasance can be traced to agency problems between shareholders and managers. And
Just as we can’t trust politicians and bureaucrats to pursue the public interest rather than their own selfish interests in power and perks, in the same way there is an ever-present risk that corporate managers will feather their own nests at the expense of shareholders.

Lindsey’s position is appealing — it is a tragic market-liberalism rather than a triumphalist one. The tragedy is that, despite being so great for all those Hayekian reasons, markets can’t live without the state to support them on the one hand, or without creating islands of hierarchy inside them on the other. Lindsey takes a much more interesting and sophisticated position than many of his intellectual relatives. Note, though, that his irony-tinged neoliberalism leaves the market mechanism itself off the hook for Enron altogether. This makes me sceptical. For one thing, I think Enron shareholders were quite happy with how their stock was doing, to the point where they weren’t inclined to question their agents about how they could be doing so well. The traditional principal-agent problem is “Can’t Ask, Won’t Tell”. With Enron, it was “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” It happened because of how markets (or particular types of real markets) work, not in spite of it. What Lindsey construes as a failure of bureaucracy inside the firm can just as plausibly be seen as a problem created by market incentives to cheat and lie about profits.

Lindsey sees the institutional machinery that markets need to function, as writers like Adam Smith did and so many contemporary free marketeers do not. He also knows that the market cannot, by itself, be the only check on corporate mismanagement. The difficulty with his position, it seems to me, is that he wants to absolve the market mechanism of any share of blame for Enron et al. So he blames “bureaucracies” instead. Hence his claim that firms are little “pockets of central planning” inside a wider market system. This makes it sound as if WorldCom was managed like North Korea. The distinction is much too sharply drawn. (Read some of the vast literature in organizational sociology on network forms of organization, relational contracting, internal markets or small-firm networks, to see a very different picture of firms.) Further, while Lindsey examines the problems of bureaucratic organization, he lets potential difficulties internal to the Hayekian market mechanism go by without scrutiny. If someone criticized the empirical pathologies of markets in detail and offered an idealized picture of a perfectly rational Weberian bureaucracy as an alternative, Lindsey would rightly cry foul. But he seems unwilling to ask whether an actually-existing market might differ from the idealized Hayekian mechanism, not because of external interference, but for reasons internal to itself.

July 21, 2004

Congratulations to Eszter

Posted by Kieran

My fellow sociologist, former office-mate and CT Comrade-in-Arms Eszter Hargittai has won the National Communications Association’s G. R. Miller Outstanding Dissertation Award for How Wide a Web? Inequalities in Accessing Information Online.

July 17, 2004

A New Analysis of Incarceration and Inequality

Posted by Kieran

I’ve written about the intersection of incarceration, race and the labor market several times in the past. In the United States, the remarkable expansion of the prison system over the past thirty years, despite generally falling crime rates, has had far-reaching effects on large segments of the population, but especially amongst unskilled black men. A striking way to characterize the depth of this change is to make a comparison to rates of participation in some other institution —- say, for instance, that more black men have been to jail than are in college. But, as a lobby group found out last year, these comparisions are quite tricky to make properly, because the populations are different (all black men vs college-age black men, for instance).

But one of the many good reasons we have sociologists and demographers is to work out those numbers properly. A new paper [pdf] by Becky Pettit and Bruce Western1 does a terrific job of estimating how the effects of mass incarceration are distributed across the population. They estimate the risk of imprisonment for black and white men of different levels of education.2 The paper is worth reading in its entirety, both to see how the findings might be understood and to understand how one goes about estimating these numbers in the first place — it’s not at all trivial to calculate them. Two core findings — bearing in mind these are the best available estimates — are remarkable:

  • Among black men born between 1965 and 1969, 30.2 percent of those who didn’t attend college had gone to prison by 1999. A startling 58.9 percent of black high school dropouts born from 1965 through 1969 had served time in state or federal prison by their early 30s.
  • “Imprisonment now rivals or overshadows the frequency of military service and college graduation for recent cohorts of African American men. For black men in their mid-thirties at the end of the 1990s, prison records were nearly twice as common as bachelor’s degrees.” In the same cohort, “imprisonment was more than twice as common as military service.”

Interestingly, racial disparity as such has not grown in sentencing: the rates and risks of imprisonment are 6 to 8 times higher for young black men compared to young whites in both the ‘45-‘49 and ‘65-‘69 cohorts. But class inequality has increased. So while lifetime risk of imprisonment nearly doubled between 1979 and 1999, “nearly all of this increased risk was experienced by those with just a high school education.” Incarceration is now the typical life-event for young, poorly-educated black men.

1 Full disclosure: Becky’s a friend of mine and Bruce was one of my Ph.D advisers.

2 To forestall any misinterpretation, note that “risk” is a technical term here meaning roughly “the probability of being observed as ‘incarcerated’ during the period under study.”

July 15, 2004

My Irresistible Rise

Posted by Kieran

Speaking of accepting responsibility, I am planning to take the credit for this trend (also pdf, to print out and hang on your wall). Go to the Social Security Administration Website and investigate some trends for yourself. See the decline of the Heathers, the sudden, spectactular rise of the Ellas, and the terrible Hillary crash of 1993. Then read Stanley Lieberson’s A Matter of Taste for the sociology.

July 02, 2004

Public Sociologists

Posted by Kieran

I agree with Brayden. In a year when the theme of the ASA’s annual meeting is Public Sociologies, it’s appropriate that the winner of the ASA’s dissertation award is a Blogger. Congratulations to Brian Gifford and also co-winner Greta Krippner.

Rabies via Organ Transplant

Posted by Kieran

The Centers for Disease Control report that three people have died from rabies contracted after receiving transplants that originated with the same donor. The donors lungs, liver and kidneys were recovered. The lung recipient died during the transplant of unrelated causes. The recipients of both kidneys and the liver died of rabies. In their more detailed investigation of the events, the CDC report that the donor

as an Arkansas man who visited two hospitals in Texas with severe mental status changes and a low-grade fever. Neurologic imaging indicated findings consistent with a subarachnoid hemorrhage, which expanded rapidly in the 48 hours after admission, leading to cerebral herniation and death.

Rabies has about a three-week incubation period, and the three surviving recipients were re-admitted to hospital between 21 and 27 days after their transplants, where they died. Regular readers of CT know that one of my main research interests has been the social organization of exchange in human blood and organs. In particular, I’ve looked at how the logistical underpinnings of the procurement system drive variation in rates of donation, and argued that it’s a mistake to frame the debate about organ donation in terms of stylized images of givers versus sellers. In other words, whether the process is industrialized matters more than whether it is commodified. Often, it’s only in tragic cases like this that this logistical aspect is brought to light. Of course, that doesn’t mean I think highly rationalized organizational systems are a necessarily a bad thing. Just take the CDC itself, and its remarkable Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which tracks what people are dying from this week in the United States. The MMWR was where the earliest signs of the size of the HIV disaster became apparent to the epidemiologists, though alas not to the blood banks or the Reagan administration.

June 26, 2004

Sociology's Final Frontier

Posted by Kieran

Via Baptiste Coulmont comes word of an effort to establish a new subfield of Sociology. Jim Pass, who as far as I can tell is an adjunct sociology instructor at Long Beach City College, is trying to get Astrosociology [Warning! Monster Java Zombie Nightmare Website from Beyond 1996], um, off the ground. He has managed to get a paper on this topic accepted at an Informal Roundtable Session at the upcoming ASA meetings in San Francisco. He’s also organizing an Astrosociology Interest Group meeting1 for the many, many sociologists who will want to join his proposed section-in-formation.

What is Astrosociology? You may well ask. According to Jim’s helpful email,

Generally, astrosociology is the study of astrosocial phenomena (a subset of all social phenomena)

Well, obviously. My initial thought was that the field would be picking up where Elizabeth Tessier left off. Elizabeth managed to extract a Sociology Ph.D from the Sorbonne a few years ago with the argument that Astrology was as good a science as any other, and vice versa. America is always a few years behind the French trend-setters. But this hope was dashed when I read Jim’s clarification that the field dealt mainly with

all human behaviors related in some way to outer space; a neglected area of sociological inquiry.

Now, it’s true that outer space is a neglected area of sociological inquiry. My naive view was that this was explained by the fact that, at any one time, there are are perhaps three or four people in outer space. That’s enough to keep a social psychologist happy for most of their career, but the rest of us might run into problems. As a great sociologist once said, after all, the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market. But Jim is not confining himself to outer space. Although this is a wise move, it makes Astrosociology rather less interesting than it first appears. Jim’s programmatic statement on the field at the roundtable (Table 15: New Ideas in the Sciences) is paired with just one other paper, by Juan Miguel Campanario of the Universidad de Alcala. Unlucky for Juan Miguel, you might think, but his paper title is Resistance to New Ideas In Science, so they should be well set up for a good chat. In a creative scheduling decision, Juan Miguel is also supposed to be speaking simultaneously at Table 16, “Media, Sport and Science.”2 Bizarrely, his paper title at that Table is Studying the Competence for Space in Sociology Journals. But it’s the wrong kind of space! So near and yet so far!

1 Monday August 16, 6:30pm, Union Square 24/San Franciso Hilton. I’ll be there!

2 It’s a big tent at the informal roundtables, alright.

June 22, 2004

A Piece of the Pie

Posted by Kieran

Via Nathan Newman, Kevin Drum links to an EPI graphic showing differences in the growth of corporate profits, labor compensation and private salary income between the current business cycle and the average of the last eight recoveries. This time round, Kevin summarizes, “workers have gotten almost nothing while corporate profits have skyrocketed.” Then he asks,

But how can anyone defend this? Easy. The free market extremists at the top of the modern Republican party argue that economic growth is caused by the risk-taking executives of Fortune 5000 companies, and therefore they deserve the benefits of that growth. Worker bees don’t make any contribution — they just work — so why should they get anything?

Treating labor like a commodity is a morally bankrupt policy, but it’s one that’s become an epidemic in the Republican party …

The thing is, the “free market extremists” Kevin complains about have it backwards. Treating labor like a commodity is a way to transfer the burden of risk away from businesses and on to workers. In general, CEOs of big corporations do not engage in the kind of risk taking that they typically ascribe to themselves. Or more precisely, there is plenty of evidence that they do not have to suffer the consequences of the risks they take. The United States has always been ahead of other advanced capitalist democracies in this department, because it offers less in the way of social insurance than its counterparts. (Instead of a welfare state it has a prison system.) But much of what got called “downsizing” in the early ’90s and the New Economy a few years later can be seen as a new round of risk-redistribution noticeable in even the U.S.’s nominally unregulated labor market. The stuff you see these days in the Business Section of Barnes & Noble about the brave new “Free Agent Nation” and its creative class is the optimistic spin the disappearance of defined-benefit pension funds, the decline of decent health benefits, the rise of temp work, and other changes in the employment bargain that push more of the risk onto workers.

June 09, 2004

The Social Production of Libertarians

Posted by Kieran

I swear I had this post ready before all this stuff about positive and negative rights. My appetite for that kind of thing isn’t terribly high, except as an opportunity to think up slogans like “Libertarianism is the Socialism of Lawyers.” But a few months ago I made a passing comment that “Libertarianism has always seemed to me to depend for its realization on features of the social structure that it officially repuditates.” There’s probably a nice theory to be built about how this is true of all programmatic ideologies for social reorganization. For now, Peter Levine sketches some sociological ideas about Libertarianism in particular.

Libertarians should be much more concerned than they are with political socialization … If millions of kids grow up in communities that are wealthy but intolerant of public speech, they are likely to draw the conclusion that speech is detrimental to order and prosperity. As I wrote in my last post, this is political socialization for fascism. Libertarians are loath to restrict private contracts, even those that voluntarily restrict speech. They have a point: we aren’t free if we cannot associate in intolerant communities. But if many people choose to ban freedom within their commonly-owned private property, then they are highly unlikely to raise libertarian kids. … The great libertarian economist Frank Knight wrote in 1939:
The individual cannot be the datum for the purposes of social policy, because he is largely formed by the social process, and the nature of the individual must be affected by social action. Consequently, social policy must be judged by the kind of individuals that are produced by or under it, and not merely by the type of relations which subsist among individuals taken as they stand.
Moral: if you want libertarian policies, you need “social processes” that make people libertarians, and those policies may not arise as a result of free choices by individuals “taken as they stand.”

One of the most famous examples in the Libertarian canon is Nozick’s Wilt Chamberlain case which is used to show that, even if we start everyone with the same amount of money, the free transfer of resources through contract will likely cause a society to drift towards some unequal distribution — in this case, Wilt Chamberlain being much richer than everyone else because people are willing to pay money to see him play. Other Objections to this idea notwithstanding, Levine suggests that much the same process of drift could happen to the commitment to Libertarianism itself, not because people deprive themselves or others of their rights but because over time they and their children make a series of choices that create a culture where no-one wants to be a Libertarian. The easiest way to avoid the implications of this argument is to assert that people are just born with rational self-interest built-in, together with the required substantive libertarian preferences, but there’s too much empirical evidence against the former and no plausible story about the latter.

June 07, 2004

D-Day in the Public Mind

Posted by Kieran

With all the hoopla over D-Day remembrances, I found myself wondering whether remembering the anniversary had become more or less important in the last twenty years. To this end, I spent twenty minutes getting LexisNexis to email me New York Times stories mentioning D-Day since 1980, running it through the world’s kludgiest Perl script to clean it and drop irrelevant entries1, and looking at the data in R.

The result is the figure to the right, which shows the number of stories per year over a 25-year period, though of course the 2004 data only go to June 6th of this year. D-Day stories in the Times The number of stories per year varies from zero to 120 with a median of about 17. The two biggest years by far are 1984 and 1994, the 40th and 50th anniversaries respectively. A smoothed regression line picks out a gentle but consistent upward trend in coverage. There are more stories as time goes by. It’s not surprising that the big anniversaries are the most covered. Beyond that, coverage seems to be increasing as the D-Day cohort ages. The contemporary political benefits of making a big deal of such a praiseworthy event probably amplify this trend. This would lead us to expect the D-Day commemorations to decline as time goes by, though on the other hand World War II lives on in our culture (as a good war as well as the biggest one) in a way that most other wars do not.

Of course none of this tells us anything about the substance of the commemoration and whether that’s changing over time. Historical events are remembered in the light of present-day concerns, and very well-commemorated events or major monuments are reinterpreted or forgotten as circumstances change. I wonder how long this upward trend will continue: it’s a question of whether D-Day is tied to the cohort who fought it, or whether its commemoration is attached to its veterans or whether it will become a more general event as time goes by. Probably the former, but it’s hard to say.

1 Mainly paid death notices of people who had served on D-Day — casual Lexis-Nexis queriers should beware of this kind of thing.

June 01, 2004

Sociology of Culture

Posted by Kieran

Draft Syllabus for Soc 508, a graduate seminar/survey course in the Sociology of Culture. Coming this Fall1 to a University of Arizona near you. Comments welcome.

1 If August 24th can count as the Fall. The University of Arizona thinks it can.

May 29, 2004

Professional Misconduct

Posted by Kieran

Eugene Volokh has an interesting post about unsolved or unexplored issues in First Amendment doctrine. His topic is Professional-Client Speech:

Many professional-client relationships — lawyer-client, psychotherapist-patient, accountant-client, even often doctor-patient — mostly consist of speech. Sometimes, of course, they involve physical conduct (surgery) or the submission of statements to the government (a lawyer arguing in court). But often they consist solely of two people talking with each other, one asking questions and the other giving advice. And yet this communication is often subject to speech restrictions and speech compulsions that would generally be forbidden in other contexts.

He gives five examples, including professional negligence, professional advice being dependent on a license (a prior restraint in other contexts), and banned sexual relations between professionals and clients (doctors, etc). “What should be the proper analysis be under the First Amendment?” he asks. I have no idea, of course, because I’m not a lawyer. But sociologically, these restraints are generally self-imposed should be seen as constitutive of professional authority in the first place. A professional association that endorsed this kind of lawsuit would be making a big mistake.

Professions claim a monopoly on legitimate knowledge or expertise about something — medicine, dentistry, the law and so on. Professional societies organize to establish and enforce a monopoly on this knowledge. They do it in various ways: by setting up professional schools, by licensing practitioners, by lobbying the state to formally recognize and guarantee their legitimacy while banning their competitors, and so on. Because there are often multiple claimants to professional experise, the system of professions is a complex ecology of social actors trying to establish or entrench their professional status while fighting against those whom they want to label as quacks or impostors. The fringes of professional life are full of the authority-claims of upstart semi-professions (chiropractors, homeopaths, economists1) and concomitant efforts to leverage existing professional authority into new areas (intellectual property law, bioethics, social work).

In their efforts to establish legitimacy, particularly in the eyes of the state, professions adopt codes of conduct that bind their members to standards of practice. Professions agree with Superman that with great power comes great responsibility, with the caveat that with great responsibility comes the ability to police oneself. The benefits of being licensed to practice law or medicine by the state are paid for, in part, by deliberately giving up some of the opportunities that come one’s way as a consequence of holding that license. This contributes to the legitimacy of the field as a whole and provides further ammunition to fight charlatans and quacks who can now be identified by the absence of such codes and their attendant willingness to go into business, party or sleep with their clients. You see this clearly in cases where professionalization hasn’t happened. Management is a good example. Despite the proliferation of business schools and MBA programs, you don’t need a license to be a manager. As Rakesh Khurana — whose book I warmly recommend, and who, I’m delighted to discover, has a weblog — commented in last week’s Economist, professions are all about renouncing something, and managers in the U.S. haven’t shown much interest in giving things up in the past few years.

So, First Amendment Law in this area is probably unexplored because the kind of professional who would take a First Amendement case because she wasn’t allowed to knowingly give bad advice, lie to and sleep with her client, and then blab to her friends about his medical condition, is ipso facto likely to have her license revoked for unprofessional conduct. Moreover, the desire of professions to police themselves leads to systems of internal review and the like aimed at preventing cases of misconduct from making it to the courts. This isn’t to say that such cases are unheard of, though I imagine it’s much more likely that it would originate from an incompletely institutionalized profession, or perhaps one presently in conflict with a competitor. Indeed, one of Eugene’s examples concerns bad advice given by marriage counselors.

All of which says nothing about the legal questions of First Amendment Doctrine, I suppose, but as I say I’m more interested in the sociology of professions. Note that the ability to pose questions like this — that the First Amendment might impinge on, and take precedence over, professional rules of conduct — is itself an aspect of the professional power of the law. Lawyers are in the happy position of being able to sit in judgment on themselves, and have the unique capacity to regulate and adjudicate disputes between other professions. And all billable by the hour, too. But of course it would be wrong to abuse that power.

1 Sorry, sorry.

May 24, 2004

Another one for the pile

Posted by Kieran

My pile of Books to Read grew considerably over the past two months (though not as much as my pile of books to not read). Robert C. Allen’s Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution sounds interesting, though I’m not likely to get to it. It makes the argument that, comparatively, the Russian economy was very successful from the late 1920s to the early 1970s. The gray world of ’70s Communism wasn’t exactly Big Rock Candy Mountain, but economically it was in the same league as second-tier capitalist countries like those on the European semi-periphery. Considering that Russia was barely post-feudal when the Soviets arrived, this is (to coin a phrase) a big leap forward — at least comparable to the growth-rates of many of the advanced capitalist democracies, and much better than almost all other “developing” countries over the same period.

The book seems like a strong effort to separate the question of economic growth from the political dimensions of Soviet failure. Allen argues that Stalin’s brutal collectivization schemes didn’t do much for growth rates and that most of the benefits of mid-century growth were squandered by bad decisions from the Kremlin gerontocracy. I’ll wait for a full book report from Brad DeLong.

May 14, 2004

Fingerprints

Posted by Kieran

My post about voting networks in the Eurovision led to a followup from Danyel Fisher, a grad student at Irvine who studies social networks. His weblog is has lots of interesting stuff, including a better-informed version of a post I’ve been meaning to write for a while about fingerprint databases. When the U.S. announced that it was going to fingerprint visitors entering the country, I began to wonder when the vast size of these databases was going to run up against the problem of false positives. Although we think of fingerprints as unique, the matching process is prone to error (like everything) and, for a large enough scale, your prints may be essentially identical to someone else’s. Daniel’s post links to a story where exactly this happened, in the case of the Spanish investigation into the train bombings. A perfect match turned up in Portland, Oregon.

Danyel links to a paper On the Individuality of Fingerprints (pdf). I also know of — but haven’t read — Simon Cole’s Suspect Identities, a study of the emergence and institutionalization of standards for fingerprinting.

April 25, 2004

Red and Blue America

Posted by Kieran

Via Kevin Drum comes this comment from political scientist Hans Noel, quoted in the Washington Post:

“Most people say they are ‘moderate,’ but in fact the country is polarized around strong conservative and liberal positions.” [Noel said, and the article continues] … As it becomes more difficult to reach across the party line, campaigns are devoting more energy to firing up their hard-core supporters. For voters in the middle, this election may aggravate their feeling that politics no longer speaks to them, that it has become a dialogue of the deaf, a rant of uncompromising extremes.

Noel is pushing the attractive idea that polarization feeds on and reinforces itself. (Attractive from the point of view of elegant social mechanisms, I mean.) And Kevin can’t see a way to break the cycle. Red and Blue America is the latest version of the Culture Wars thesis. However, while it’s clear that the chattering classes — at least their representatives in the media — have become more polarized over time, I’m not sure I believe that everyone else has.

My main evidence for this comes from a 1996 paper by Paul DiMaggio, Bethany Bryson and John Evans called “Have Americans’ social attitudes become more polarized?” (JSTOR link, institutional subscription required).1 They used a long time-series of General Social Survey opinion data and measured how skewed the distribution of public opinion on a wide range of questions was, and whether that changed over time. Respondents to opinion questions are generally given a statement and asked to choose a place on a five- or sometimes seven-point scale ranging from “Strongly Agree” to “Strongly Disagree.” If polarization was happening, you would see more and more people at the extreme ends of the scales and fewer in the middle. But DiMaggio et al found that, with the exception of questions about abortion, the distribution of opinion had not become more skewed. Across a wide range of issues, there were about as many people in the middle in the early 1990s as there had been in the early 1970s. I don’t know of sample-based research that rebuts this finding. At the same time, as an an update by John Evans demonstrates, more recent data suggests that such polarization as does exist is being driven by the political system: “it seems clear that members of the public who are involved in politics are becoming polarized on moral issues.”

1 Full disclosure: Paul was my Ph.D advisor and John and Bethany are friends of mine.

April 24, 2004

Culture Matters

Posted by Kieran

There’s often a strong temptation to think that only other people have culture, a mistake of the same kind as thinking only other people speak with an accent. The odd beliefs and attitudes of foreigners are best explained by reference to their culture, whereas our own actions are generally rational and defensible on their own terms. This fascinating story is about the Japanese hostages recently released in Iraq and their subsequent reception on their return home. It’s a reminder that culture matters and an invitation to the comparative sociology of culture. Thanks to my friend Marion Fourcade-Gourinchas for the pointer. Incidentally, you really should read Marion’s terrific article on Politics, Institutional Structures and the Rise of Economics.

April 19, 2004

Preferred Modes of Domination

Posted by Kieran

Adam Kotsko comments in a thread about smoking in public:

All the various smoking bans are simply further evidence of the repressive nature of postmodern biopolitics.

Which is fair enough. But my first thought was that I might prefer the repressive methods of postmodern biopolitics to those of, say, modern or feudal biopolitics. I’m just saying.

Smoking in Public

Posted by Kieran

Ireland’s ban on smoking in buildings other than private homes has been in place for a few weeks now, and appears to be holding. Wandering around Cork and Dublin over the past week, hotels, cafes, shops, and of course bars are all smoke-free. According to the OECD, 27 percent of Irish adults smoked every day in 1998 (down from 34 percent in 1985), which puts Ireland in the middle of the distribution internationally. There seem to have been two main effects so far. First, there are a lot of jokes and complaints about the effects of the ban. For instance, you can tell what those around you really smell like, which has come as a nasty shock to some people. The same goes for bar food. Second, all the smokers have been driven out on the street. You must now run a puffing gauntlet outside of hotels, restaurants and bars. It would be worth checking to see whether there isn’t one of those perverse little public goods effects here, people are now much more likely to encounter a faceful of smoke in true public spaces like footpaths, parks and the like than before.

Economists and sociologists tend to look a bit too hard for ironies of this sort, so maybe I’m overreaching. I still think that the best solution to the problem of smoking as it’s usually defined is the one found in many U.S. airports: a special, glass-walled smoking lounge with seats bolted to the floor, where smokers can go to light up and everyone going by can glance in through the haze at the yellowed wallpaper, the dirty floor and the unhappy looks of the addicts staring off into space, not talking to one another, trying to convince themselves that cigarettes really are sublime.

April 08, 2004

Psychology and Sociology

Posted by Kieran

A little bit of CT synergy. In his post about bad explanation in Evolutionary Psychology, Daniel says in passing that “Part of the issue here is that any form of psychology makes a poor sociology.” A commenter asks that someone say more about that. Well, Brian’s post on, inter alia, women in philosophy, provides a good example. There’s a lot of anecdotal and formally—collected evidence that women in Philosophy can have a hard time of it. There appear to be fewer of them in graduate programs and especially faculty positions than we would expect. Why?

I’ve often heard two explanations. The first — an argument from ability — is that they aren’t smart enough. They’re just not sharp enough to do technically demanding philosophy as well as men. You might think that this argument hasn’t been made since the 1970s, but I’ve heard it seriously expressed. The second — an argument from choice — is that women don’t like the often aggressive tone of debate in philosophy, and so bail out and go elsewhere. Both arguments are often backed up by appeals to the psychology of women: whether for reasons of evolution or socialization or both, women don’t have the mental facility or aggressive temperament for philosophy. Hence the lack of women. Now, I don’t think these arguments have much merit on their own terms — particularly the first one. But let’s assume that it’s true that, as a matter of psychology, women tend more than men to avoid aggressive or argumentative social interaction. Can this explain the outcomes we observe?

No. And the reason is that we have comparative evidence from closely-matched social contexts where women are well represented. Linguistics is a very technical field with what we can charitably call a tradition of very robust argument. A number of its most prominent exponents are women. Similarly, cognitive science is a technical field that overlaps with philosophy of mind but women are better represented in the former than the latter. Examples like this show that the distribution of women (or other groups) within academic fields can’t be explained by unvarying facts about the psychological differences between women and men. Features of the social structure are much better candidates for explaining what we observe. Yet in discussions of this kind, people routinely confine themselves to a particular social context (such as life within a particular profession) where stereotypes about individual psychology — themselves highly institutionalized and flexible with respect to context, by the way — have the best chance of appearing to explain things. But it’s the comparative cases that show why psychology, even good psychology, often makes for bad sociology.

Update: Having posted this, I notice that Brian and Jason Stanley (a philosopher at the University of MIchigan) make essentially the same point about cognate fields, in this thread

April 02, 2004

The La Perla Exception

Posted by Belle Waring

Eugene Volokh has a post on whether pictures of naked children are regarded as per se child pornography, and what legal standards are applied to determine the status of such photos. The conclusion he draws is, be careful: “So when in doubt, you might want to cut down on the nude pictures, especially once you’re getting past the clearly socially well-accepted (e.g., the naked infant in the tub).” This is probably right (consider this case of a woman charged with child pornography for a photo of herself breastfeeding her naked one-year-old — her children were taken away by the state for a time before charges were dropped), but really very depressing. The curious thing about this attitude is that under the guise of protecting children from exploitation, it unnecessarily sexualises them. The vast majority of people are not pedophiles, and if they want to take pictures of their naked children frolicking in the sprinkler they should not have to worry that some busy-body at Rite-Aid is going to narc them out to child welfare. Children like to run around naked, and it would be wrong to give them the idea that all the adults around them regard this as titillating. It’s enough to make you get one of those home printers for your camera, though, so that you’re not haled off to jail for posing your toddler on the sheepskin rug. How are we meant to embarrass her in front of her prom date, I ask you?

This brings to mind another conundrum, roughly the inverse of the first, namely: why aren’t the editors of fashion magazines regularly being charged with child pornography? Now, it’s true that such magazines don’t feature pre-pubescent children, who are the focus of most serious enforcement. Nonetheless, most models being their careers at 14 or 15, and many at 13 or even 12. And no one could deny that much fashion photography meets the tests Volokh cites as laid out in US v. Knox:

1. whether the focal point of the visual depiction is on the child’s genitalia or pubic area;
2. whether the setting of the visual depiction is sexually suggestive, i.e. in a place or pose generally associated with sexual activity;
3. whether the child is depicted in an unnatural pose, or in inappropriate attire, considering the age of the child;
4. whether the child is fully or partially clothed, or nude;
5. whether the visual depiction suggests sexual coyness or a willingness to engage in sexual activity;
6. whether the visual depiction is intended or designed to elicit a sexual response in the viewer.

I think particularly of a Vogue Italia spread from a few years back (European fashion mags regularly show the models topless, unlike their US counterparts). It was a lingerie shoot, and the two models were unquestionably under 15. The look was very soft-focus, 70’s Penthouse, with the young ladies disporting themselves over various chaises and such in a decrepit villa. Manifestly, if the same photos had appeared bound between the covers of some more pruriently titled publication, the whole thing would have been a serious crime. So, what’s the deal? A grandfather clause, since fashion mags have been offering up scantily-clad girls below the age of consent since at least the 60’s, with no complaints so far? Or perhaps the rule is that if the underwear cost more that $200, you’re off the hook. Would-be pornographers, take note.

March 27, 2004

Seduced by a Model

Posted by Kieran

A nice example via Crescat Sententia of an issue I’ve mentioned before, namely, a case where the stylized facts lend themselves to an elegant bit of modeling that seems to analyze things very neatly, but the empirical details turn out to be much messier or a different kind of process altogether. Here it’s the debate about the Hijab in French schools. This is why fieldwork is important. The identification of mechanisms like sub-optimal conventions, failed co-ordination, tipping phenomena, self-fulfilling prophecies or auto-equilibrating systems are amongst the most useful and powerful tools in social science, but the number of phenomena they appear to explain is much larger than those they in fact explain. This can lead to odd consequences. For example, John Sutton’s little book Marshall’s Tendencies (which I didn’t read carefully enough when I picked it up) makes the point that we can be led to misapply standard models not just when the reality is much more complicated or otherwise difficult, but even when there’s a perfectly good alternative model available, just not the obvious one.

Reaction to my last few posts make me want to add disclaimers like “Look, this doesn’t mean formal modeling is unimportant or bad,” “Yes, yes, of course there are lots of very smart game theorists,” and “No, Libertarians, I am not talking about you, so please relax.”

And sorry to anyone who was expecting this post to be about the attractions of the other kind of model.

March 24, 2004

More of the Same

Posted by Kieran

Henry’s post on Microsoft as a monopolist is generating a lively discussion. A side-point popped up that I think is worth discussing. As a libertarian, Micha Gertner doesn’t like Henry’s argument that “sometimes (as here) the maintenance of competition requires vigorous state intervention”. Micha asks,

So the solution to a monopoly is … a monopoly? […] Henry’s proposed solution—vigorous state intervention—is no solution at all; it merely sweeps the problem under the rug.

Leaving aside the empirical details — Henry isn’t arguing that the State become a manufacturer of operating systems, Micah equivocates in his use of the word “monopoly” and also understates heroically when he says “the only advantage Microsoft has over Mozilla in this respect is that Internet Explorer comes preinstalled with the Windows operating system” — I just want to focus on Micha’s implication that Henry is arguing in a circle. As it turns out, this kind of argument is a mainstay of social theory. And libertarians are the people most likely to make it in other contexts, as with the claim that the solution to a market failure is more markets. That is, when they acknowledge the reality of market failure at all, free-marketeers often want to argue that the problem isn’t that the market has run amok but that it hasn’t been allowed enough room to work its magic. For example, a market failure in one area — say, negative externalities due to pollution — can be remedied by introducing another market — say, for pollution credits.

There are two closely related ideas at work here. The first is the notion that society can be a self-regulating system. The decentralized market is one version, developed in various ways since Adam Smith. There’s also a hierarchical version. In the twentieth century its found in cybernetic theories of feedback-governed systems, but it can also be traced to the organic conception of the social order found in Durkheim, for instance, not to mention even older versions of the corporate, complementary social order that go back to feudalism. There are important differences between these, of course.

The second idea is narrower and stronger — that the cure for what ails you is more of the same. This “hair of the dog” view is found in strong versions of market theory, but it also has a political analogue. DeTocqueville argued that democratic societies, founded as they are on principles of equality, tend to encourage selfishness and indifference to one’s fellows. “Equality places men side by side, unconnected by any common tie … [which] makes general indifference a sort of public virtue.” This encourages despotism, as the despot “easily forgives his subjects for not loving him, provided they do not love each other.” The solution to this problem, DeTocqueville argues, is more democracy rather than less:

The Americans have combated by free institutions the tendency of equality to keep men asunder, and they have subdued it. The legislators of America did not suppose that a general representation of the whole nation would suffice to ward off a disorder at once so natural to the frame of democratic society, and so fatal: they also thought that it would be well to infuse political life into each portion of the territory, in order to multiply to an infinite extent opportunities of acting in concert for all the members of the community, and to make them constantly feel their mutual dependence on each other. The plan was a wise one. The general affairs of a country only engage the attention of leading politicians, who assemble from time to time in the same places; and, as they often lose sight of each other afterwards, no lasting ties are established between them. But if the object be to have the local affairs of a district conducted by the men who reside there, the same persons are always in contact, and they are, in a manner, forced to be acquainted, and to adapt themselves to one another.

Elegance is the attraction of these ideas. Not only does the system heal itself (as in the first version) but the very mechanism that created the problem in the first place will also solve it for us. What’s intriquing here is not just that this harmonious vision is so common across the terrain of social theory, but that self-regulatory and self-remedying processes are so close in principle to negative mechanisms like throwing good money after bad, chasing sunk costs, the gambler’s fallacy, or self-reinforcing policy quagmires. Of the classical social theorists, Marx is the thinker who is most gripped by this negative image of the tendency for the social order to disastrously undermine itself, while Smith — perhaps against his will — has come to represent optimistic self-regulation in its decentralized mode, and Durkheim in its corporate form; whereas many mechanisms of both sorts can be found in DeTocqueville.

I’m not claiming much originality for these observations, by the way. Indeed, as Henry said in this own post, Albert Hirschman is the man to read on these questions. Essays like Rival Views of Market Society or The Passions and the Interests are little masterpieces, the kind of compact, lucid and judicious analysis that you pray might rub off on your own work.

March 20, 2004

The public life of a dissertation

Posted by Eszter

It is not often that a dissertation gets written up in the New York Times so I thought it was worth a mention here. Kieran has written here about Devah Pager’s work earlier including a bit of context. Since Devah is a friend of mine, I would like to add that not only is she really smart and great at finding innovative approaches to research questions, but she’s also a delightful person. It’s wonderful to have people like her in academia and in sociology in particular using her talents to work on important questions… and it’s also nice to see good academic work get public recognition for a change!

Update: Be sure to check out Kieran’s note in the comments for more details about the public life of this dissertation.

March 09, 2004

The Sociology of Blood and Guts

Posted by Kieran

The director of UCLA’s Willed Body Program, Henry Reid, has been arrested for illegally selling human body parts from perhaps as many as 800 cadavers. A second man, Ernest Nelson, has also been arrested and charged with receiving stolen goods. Nelson claims that he routinely showed up hacksaw-in-hand at UCLA, with the full knowledge of the Program, and left with knee joints, hands and other body parts. UCLA officials describe Nelson and Reid as a pair of criminals operating without the knowledge of the University. The practice came to the attention of other administrators when Nelson wrote a letter to UCLA demanding $241,000 compensation for body parts he had been forced to return after UCLA banned transfers of cadavers to people or organizations unaffiliated with the University.

Exchange in human goods is a topic near and dear to all my major organs. At the moment, I’m trying to write the conclusion to a book about some aspects of it. Over the past twenty years or so in the United States, a very large and complex system of tissue procurement and distribution has grown up, mostly to service the demand created by new medical technologies. Some of these, like heart and kidney transplants, enjoy broad public support. Others, like the use of processed cadaveric skin for lip enhancement and penis enlargement, bone screws for orthopedic surgery or cadavers in automobile crash tests are less well known.1 With the exception of the plasma market in the U.S., almost all solid organs and human tissues come from voluntary donors. The increasing demand for body parts has led to a lively debate (going back to the 1970s) on whether some kind of market in human body parts is a good idea. Although this is a very important question, in my view debate about it misses a lot of what’s really interesting about actually-existing systems of exchange. The wide range of empirical variation in rates of blood and organ donation across countries, and within the U.S., for example, complicates the simple contrast between giving and selling that underpins arguments about markets for organs. So does the terrific amount of cultural work that goes into maintaining the viability of organ donation, on the one hand, and real markets for things like human eggs, on the other.

Demand for organ transplants now outruns the supply of organs by a factor of about ten, and bioethicists and many medical professionals have come around to the view that some kind of financial reimbursement might increase the supply of organs. The main thing standing in the way is the terrific success of their own efforts, since the 1970s, to convince people that organ donation was a morally worthwhile practice rather than a ghoulish reprocessing of the dead. Central to this effort was the idea that organ donation is the “gift of life,” a way for a person to go on doing good after their own death and a means for grieving families to see their loved ones live on in a quite literal way.

Now, it is important not to romanticize gift-giving. The obligation to return a gift with something of equal or greater value can keep power relations ticking along nicely. There is nothing like an exchange of gifts for insulting someone to their face. But gifts do tend to be very particular. They are for someone special. They are not given at random. Even anonymous gifts, such as the gift of a human heart or liver, tend to take on this character. Both donor families and recipients tend to have an ideal picture of the other partner in the exchange. Much of the early media coverage of organ transplants encouraged this tendency, focusing as it did on particular people — often children — desperately in need of a transplant. The wrinkle in this idea is that, as Viviana Zelizer has shown, similar processes can be found at work within market exchange. Egg donors are really egg sellers, for instance, but much of the exchange in this market takes place in an atmosphere of gift-giving. The money is still there at the center of it all, of course, but it won’t do to say that the associated gifts and other features of the transaction are simply window-dressing for a simple sale.

The key interface is not the individual-to-individual transaction (largely a myth anyway, in this area) but the transition into the secondary exchange of human goods — the world where donated hearts go, where donated skin is rendered, and where knee joints and heart valves and tendons are processed. This organizational layer does not have the (even fictively) particularized quality that individual decisions to donate or sell may possess. It is concerned with maintaining a reliable supply of homogenous products to cope with a generalized demand. It shouldn’t be a surprise that UCLA’s program has been in trouble before for mixing donated bodies with medical waste and animal remains and dumping them in a landfill. That sort of tendency is built into complex organizations, and it persists whether or not the raw materials are sourced via markets or gifts. It’s a consequence of the industrialization of exchange in human goods, not its commodification.

1 I hope that link won’t get us banned by filtering software.

February 18, 2004

"Twenty or thirty years ago..."

Posted by Chris

I was at a meeting the other day where the question of “normal” boy and girl behaviour came up. I mean by this what girls and boys, especially teenagers, take to be normal behaviour for those of their own and the opposite gender. I don’t mean what they ought to do. The opinion was voiced by others present that these norms had shifted appreciably in the last twenty or thirty years. Wearing makeup, for instance, they thought, was far more acceptable for boys today that for boys “twenty or thirty years ago”.

Since I was myself a teenager thirty years ago, I think I can say with some authority that this is mistaken, at least for the UK. Sexual intercourse was, as we know, invented in 1963 , and by the early-to-mid-1970s glam-rock in the shape of David Bowie and Marc Bolan had made all kinds of flirting with cross-dressing and ambiguous gender identity acceptable for teenage boys. Punk followed almost immediately afterwards. (I’m told that things were different and more backward in the US, which, for James Miller, in his magisterial Flowers in the Dustbin , explains Bowie’s initial lack of success over there — until he toned things down.) But my guess is that, in the UK at least, teenagers were more ready to play with mixed sexual signals in the 1970s than they are today (and have been since the advent of “new laddism” in the 1990s).

My reading of the evolution of teenage mores may, of course, be wide of the mark. But my point in making it is just to observe how common is the notion of a “dreamtime” about “twenty or thirty years ago” when 1950s moral and cultural norms are supposed to have applied. Probably such standards didn’t obtain in the 1950s either, but people look on the past with a permanently moving horizon before which things were different, everybody was straight, lived in conventional families and playing with sexuality (and indeed being serious about it) was the preserve of intellectuals, poets and German cabaret artistes. It wasn’t like that.

February 16, 2004

The World City System

Posted by Kieran

The latest issue of the American Journal of Sociology [subscription required] has a number of interesting articles, but given the, ahem, cosmopolitan nature of the crew here at CT, a paper by Alderson and Beckfield on Power and Position in the City World System [also pdf] caught my eye. They examine power relations between three and a half thousand cities in a network analysis, operationalizing ties with a measure of HQ and branch locations of the world’s 500 largest corporations. The authors develop a blockmodel to identify clusters of regularly equivalent cities. Roughly, members of regular equivalence sets have similar relations to members of other equivalent sets, so equivalent cities stand in the same relations to other groups of cities.

As you might expect, the core of the city world system is the block made up of London, New York, Paris and Tokyo, and these four cities are much more powerful than any of the others. But outside this core group, the analysis suggests some patterns that aren’t visible from less formal approaches. Outside the “L-N-P-T” block, there are six other “Primary” blocks:1 Amsterdam, Basel, Atlanta, Caracas, Cologne and … Bristol. Chris will be delighted.

1 These are “cliques whose members are involved in high levels of relations with outsiders. More specifically, they are blocks with greater than expected ingroup preference (their cliquishness), but also greater than expected outdegree and indegree.”

February 11, 2004

Conservatives in Academia

Posted by Kieran

I’ve never found the argument that conservatives are discriminated against in academia terribly compelling. But it does seem like an interesting case, if only because in making it common or garden conservatives are forced to admit the existence of institutionalized inequality, something they are usually loath to acknowledge. Andrew Sullivan just bumped into this question. (Via Pandagon.) He raises and then dismisses the most parsimonious explanation for this inequality, namely that conservatives are just not as clever as liberals and so don’t get hired. He quotes a tongue-in-cheek line from a Duke Prof, who says “If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire. Mill’s analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia.”1 Andy is not persuaded, of course. But why not?

As a paid-up sociologist with a left-liberal outlook, I have no trouble believing, as a starting point for empirical enquiry, that entrenched inequalities based on social categories (Male/Female, White/Black, and so on) are to be found all over the place. Inequality gets institutionalized via many mechanisms — Chuck Tilly’s book Durable Inequality provides a handy taxonomy — and there’s a lot we don’t understand about it. But for a given case, by temperament I’m more inclined to believe that one of these mechanisms is at work rather than, say, the fair return to human capital secured by rational choices in an open market. The trouble is that conservatives, by and large, tend to believe that people get what they deserve in life and that labor markets — whether for food service workers, corporate consultants, assistant professors or any other occupation — shake out fairly. When confronted with evidence of systematic racial or gender inequality, for example, they’ll go to considerable effort to argue that it’s differences in natural talent, acquired skills or personal preferences that are driving the outcome.

So if we assume along with Andy and his ilk that conservatives really are significantly underrepresented in academia, it seems to me that conservatives face a simple choice. They can acknowledge the wealth of evidence for durable inequality of different kinds and join the people investigating the many and varied ways that it’s produced and sustained, and maybe even sometimes eliminated. Or they can bite the bullet and accept that the poor market performance of conservatives must reflect their inability to compete on human capital terms with their sharper, more skillful and harder-working liberal competitors. To borrow a recent argument from someone else, if we measure things by revealed preferences, i.e. voting with their feet, it seems conservative academics just prefer to be Resident Scholars at the AEI rather than tenured professors at Wharton, Yale or Chicago. In any event, the least plausible option is to argue that the embedded, political character of markets and the occupational structure is obviously at work in the labor market experiences of conservative academics, but not the life-chances of, say, women or black men.

1 Note that, the comments of this particular Duke prof nothwithstanding, if stupid people tend to be conservative, it does not follow that conservative people tend to be stupid. It should be clear that nothing in this post depends on the latter assumption.

February 09, 2004

SASE Conference

Posted by Henry

The Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, or SASE is a fun crowd of people; the society’s president is Colin Crouch, who taught me most of what I know about the relationship between economy and society when I was doing my Ph.D. They’re running a conference this year in Washington DC, July 8-11, on the theme, “Private Powers and Public Domains: Redefining Relations Among States, Markets, and Societies.” Highly recommended for renegade economists, maverick sociologists and geographers, and political theorists with a practical bent; paper submissions are due by March 1.

February 08, 2004

Tragedy at Morecambe

Posted by Chris

The deaths of nineteen Chinese illegal workers who were cockling on the treacherous sands of Morecambe bay has generated much comment in the British press. Much of that comment has focused on their illegality, the exploitation of such workers by gangmasters, the need or otherwise for tighter immigration controls, globalization and so on. Indeed. There was a similar burst of indignation when some immigrant workers were hit by a train back in July . But one thing that needs saying is that such tragedies are a normal and predictable consequence of capitalism and not simply the result of coercion and abuse by a few criminals. In his Development as Freedom , Amartya Sen discusses two examples where workers, in order to assure basic capablities (such as nutrition and housing) for themselves and their families, have to expose themselves to the risk of injury or death. Jo Wolff and Avner de-Shalit have a paper on this theme (Word format) that is on the programme of the UCL’s School for Policy Studies for this Wednesday, they recount Sen’s examples:

The first is from the southern edge of Bangladesh and of West Bengal in India, where the Sundarban [forest] grows. This is the habitat of the Royal Bengal tiger, which is protected by a hunting ban. The area is also famous for the honey it produces in natural beehives. The people who live in the area are extremely poor. They go into the forests to collect the honey, for which they can get a relatively high price in the city. However, this is a very dangerous job. Every year some fifty or more of them are killed by tigers. The second case is of Mr. Kader Mia, a Muslim daily labourer who worked in a Hindu neighbourhood in Dhaka, where Sen grew up as a child. Mr. Mia was knifed on the street by Hindu people, and later died. While he was deeply aware and concerned about the risk of going to look for a job in a Hindu neighbourhood in troubled times, Mr. Mia had no other choice but to do so because his family had nothing to eat.

Those are third-world examples. But it is not be hard to add to the list of disadvantaged workers who take dangerous jobs to secure the means of life for their families. Whilst some of them involve illegal workers at the margins of society, not all of them do or have done. Mine workers get trapped underground even in advanced capitalist countries and many workers in the oil and chemical industries run a greatly increased risk of death or injury. And many people who have worked with asbestos now face a slow, lingering death.

All of these “normal” examples should give us some perpective on the image of the heroic risk-taking entrepreneur, who typically risks a great deal less than any of these workers do. Those who consider Marx outmoded and are amazed that anyone should take him seriously (scroll to comments) would also find that Capital volume one attends rather more closely to this enduring feature of capitalism than do more conventional accounts.

Trade unions, the Health and Safety Executive and other bodies such as local authorities and the police certainly need to do more to protect people as vulnerable as the Chinese cocklers who died at Morecambe. But we mustn’t forget that the root cause of many such tragedies is that poor people need to risk themselves in order that they and those they love may live. Unless they cease to be poor, and cease to face such unpalatable choices, such events will happen again and again.

UPDATE: See Felicity Lawrence in the Guardian .

February 04, 2004

Walking to School

Posted by Kieran

Kevin Drum asks why kids don’t walk to school anymore:

according to the CDC, only 31% of children ages 5-15 who live within a mile of school walk or bike. That’s down from 90% in 1969.

But I still can’t figure out why. Why do parents ferry their kids around when there’s no reason for it? What’s the motivation?

There might be more than one initial impetus — irrational concerns about safety, heavier school backpacks making walking more difficult, busier parents using the commute as quality time, and the like. Once it gets moving, the phenomenon seems vulnerable to a self-reinforcing tipping phenomenon. By not letting your child walk to school because the streets aren’t safe, you take one more child off the sidewalks and incrementally exacerbate the problem of deserted streets.

Like the original Schelling tipping model of racial segregation , this explanation has some very attractive characteristics. It’s parsimonious, self-propelling and grounded in simple, disaggregated individual choices. It’s got all the desiderata of an elegant theory that satisfies the strictures of methodological individualism mentioned recently. It might be right. But there’s still a good chance that, empirically, it’s wrong.

For example, in many parts of Tucson you court death by walking to school, or anywhere else, because the city is built to accommodate cars and not pedestrians. You routinely have to cross 4-lane highways and often there are simply no sidewalks to walk on. The lack of children walking to school might then be explained by the design choices behind the built environment rather than by a nice tipping effect. The other potential explanations mentioned above are also exogenous in this way. But we might find that the appeal of the tipping explanation is so strong that it becomes conventional wisdom without anyone actually studying the problem.

Social Dynamics, a recent volume of studies of tipping and agent-based simulation models of various phenomena showcases some nice work on trying to capture the emergent character of many social phenomena. But lovely as these models are, we know empirically that many phenomena that can be formulated as tipping processes do not, in fact, happen in that way. Neighborhood racial segregation, for instance, has historically been actively enforced and collectively sustained, and is not simply the unpleasant byproduct of innocuous choices. Similarly, social movements that successfully propagate ideas or initiate collective action tend not to rely on contagion but are usually very well organized. (In my experience, although they may not describe the empirical process properly, Schelling-type models are good rhetorical tools for motivating people to admit that there might be a problematic pattern of racial or gender discrimination in their organization. This is because they give you the ability to say “There is this collective problem but it wasn’t caused by any of us making choices that were racist/sexist/whatever.” Very handy.)

To put it (somewhat unfairly) in disciplinary terms, economists are really clever model builders with no tradition of fieldwork, particularly in the more sociological areas that are now becoming popular amongst empirically-minded economists. They’re also strongly predisposed to explanations that can be put in terms of the collective consequences of isolated individual rational choices. Because these kinds of explanations can be really, really appealing, the need to go back and forth between the empirical data and the models is even more pressing than usual.

Update: I just remembered where I was channeling some of this line of thought from: I’d read a review of Social Dynamics by Michael Chwe a while ago, I think in the Journal of Economic Literature.

January 29, 2004

Inequality and the Varieties of Capitalism

Posted by Kieran
My department has a job offer out to Emory's Lane Kenworthy, a comparative macro-sociologist. We hope he accepts, of course, because his stuff is very interesting. His homepage has a list of his papers, along with various datasets. He also has a complete draft of a forthcoming book, Egalitarian Capitalism [2mb PDF]. It's an examination of trends in growth, employment and income in 20 of the advanced capitalist democracies. The analytical focus is on whether there is a tradeoff between each of these desirable goals, on the one hand, and income equality, on the other. The general conclusion is that there is no such tradeoff --- or at least, the kind of income distribution that would look very good to egalitarians can be achieved without growth taking a big hit. Egalitarian Capitalism is very accessible to the general reader, I think, and relevant to the question "If not the New Economy, then what?" that's been suggested by our ongoing discussion of Doug Henwood's book.

January 19, 2004

Cheating Culture

Posted by Chris

An email from a reader alerts me to The Cheating Culture by David Callaghan, a new book which blames a whole raft of scandals in the US — from Enron to athlete doping — on the erosion of a sense of fair play in the winner-takes-all society. The book’s website has an interview with the author and also incorporates the author’s own blog on the issues covered by the book. Worth a look.

January 06, 2004

Mafiyosi

Posted by Henry

Fabio Rojas has an interesting entry at Marginal Revolution on the the evolution of organized crime in Russia. He suggests that one of the more interesting features of the Russian Mafia is “that Russian business and organized crime have become symbiotic,” as gangsters have come to act as guarantors of transactions. As it happens, this is true of the original Mafia too, as Diego Gambetta points out in a classic essay on the evolution of the Mafia in Sicily. Gambetta argues that the Mafia’s main traditional role has been to enforce local monopolies, and to guarantee transactions between economic actors. However, he also points out that Mafiosi may sometimes have an interest in brokering bum deals - they will want to regulated amounts of distrust into market transactions in order to prevent people from coming to trust each other independently, and thus to maintain their own effective monopoly as enforcers of market deals. This analysis suggests that Mafia-style rackets may lead to the long term persistence of markets in which people don’t trust each other, and transaction costs are high.

Gambetta is an economic sociologist who likes game theory. His analysis reminds us that from the point of view of economic theory, the state and the Mafia are functional equivalents in several important respects. Both enforce agreements among economic agents in exchange for a slice of the profits. Indeed, the modern state very likely had its origins in Mafia-style protection rackets, a point made eloquently in another classic of the literature, Chuck Tilly’s War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.

January 05, 2004

Social-science parody

Posted by Chris

I’m always keen on parodies of social-scientific writing and this one from John Adams at spiked-online , complete with typologies, weird and complicated diagrams and so on, reminded me of Daniel Bell’s “The Parameters of Social Movements: A Formal Paradigm”, from the Dwight Macdonald collection I mentioned a while back. Great stuff! (via A&L Daily )

December 30, 2003

Gin Lane

Posted by Chris

The image of Hogarth’s Gin Lane comes to mind after reading three pieces on Open Democracy on the booze culture in England , Ireland and Scotland . Central Bristol on a Friday and Saturday night is very much as Ken Worpole describes the centre of many British cities: full of inebriated teenagers, casual violence and, eventually, vomit. Dublin — a destination of choice for young Brits seeking to get smashed out of their brains — also has a big problem:

The results of this behaviour are alarming –- doctors, from a variety of hospitals, estimate that from 15-25% of admissions to accident and emergency units in 2002 were alcohol-related. In March 2003, representatives of the medical profession highlighted some of the horrendous consequences of excessive drinking. Mary Holohan, director of the sexual assault treatment unit at the Rotunda Hospital in central Dublin, said the pattern of alcohol consumption had changed greatly. One shuddering statistic that emerged was that in the past five years there had been a four-fold increase in the number of women who had been so drunk they could not remember if they had been sexually assaulted.

That last could be a dodgy statistic (if the number rose from one to four for example) but it sounds like there’s a serious issue.

December 22, 2003

Le foulard islamique

Posted by Chris

Those following recent French debates about the proposal that the ostentatious display of religious symbols in schools should be banned, may find this article from Le Nouvel Observateur by sociologists Jocelyne Césari et Jean Baubérot enlightening. As they point out, French law is actually rather close to the liberal view of these matters. But there is a mismatch between what French law requires — as reflected in successive decisions of the Conseil D’Etat — and a commonly held view of the principle of secularism which charges the state with the aggressive promotion of Enlightenment rationalism. It all seems a little odd from this side of the English Channel. I had a conversation with a French researcher last year who declared herself shocked to have seen a newsreader on the BBC wearing a small crucifix round her neck. I had to say that I’d never noticed such a thing, wouldn’t have cared if I had, and that I’m sure that most British people wouldn’t notice: in a country with an established church hardly anyone cares about religion.

One oddity of the French media’s representation of this issue: the controversy centres on the common Islamic practice of women covering their hair with a headscarf. Of course, in some Islamic societies rather more is covered: women are veiled or enclosed in outfits like the burqua. The French secularists object to schoolgirls wearing headscarves that cover their hair — and the word “foulard” is appropriate here — but often the press reports refer to the “voile” and sometimes this is absurd. So the the caption to photograph accompanying this article (again from the Nouvel Obs) reads “Lors de la manifestation des femmes voilées” but the women in the picture are not veiled.

December 19, 2003

The Beast with Two Robacks

Posted by Kieran

Jennifer Roback Morse’s views on sex and marriage are worth reading if you are interested in what happens when natural law theory, evolutionary psychology and conservative family values are stewed together and left to simmer in a base of visceral disgust toward homosexuals. I leave it to legal scholars to explain what’s wrong with arguments from “what nature intended.” Feminists can take Morse’s complaint that “we have already redefined the social context of marriage in the name of equality for women” and invite her to pine for the days before the Married Women’s Property Act. And the political theorists amongst us can discuss how Morse manages to get from the premise “Sexual activity and childrearing take place inside the private spaces of the home, far outside the reach of the public-enforcement power of the state,” to the conclusion that it’s “utterly reasonable” for the law to ban homosexual unions.

I confine myself to a sociological observation. Morse claims that a central feature of heterosexual sex within marriage is that it is “an engine of sociability that calls us out of our self-centeredness.” If anything, the opposite seems to be the case. A long-standing idea in sociology is that as you meet someone and later marry and have children, your social network will tend to get smaller. It’s called dyadic withdrawal. The married couple looks within itself for its sociability. Your spouse is usually around and you already have their phone number. Beyond that, kids keep you pretty busy. Recent research confirms the basic tendency. So, natural or not, I wouldn’t rely on the idea that sex within marriage “builds up community, starting with the spousal relationship and adding on from there.”

December 18, 2003

Blasphemy

Posted by Kieran

I just finished a writing up a 500-word entry for a forthcoming Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology, edited by Jens Beckert and Milan Zafiroski. (I was only about a year late. You’d think the blogging would have made 500-word chunks easy to churn out.) While reading the boilerplate in the contributor’s agreement, I came across the following clause:

2 (a) … The Contributor further warrants that the Contribution contains nothing obscene, libellous, blasphemous, in breach of copyright or otherwise unlawful …

All well and good, except that my allocated entry is “Sacred.” As you will all remember from your social theory class, Durkheim’s view is that religion is a collective representation of the social structure. “Society awakens in us the feeling of the divine.” This is not likely to get a nihil obstat from many religions.

December 17, 2003

Famine in Ireland

Posted by Chris

I’ve just reached Amartya Sen’s chapter “Famines and Other Crises” in Development as Freedom . He has some discussion of the great famines that depopulated Ireland from 1845 onwards. The potato blight had destroyed the crop but the Irish peasantry lacked the resources to buy alternative foodstuffs which continued to be exported:

ship after ship — laden with wheat, oats, cattle, pigs, eggs and butter — sailed down the Shannon bound for well-fed England from famine-stricken Ireland. (p.172)

Sen argues that cultural alienation (or even hostility) meant that

very little help was provided by the government of the United Kingdom to alleviate to destitution and starvation of the Irish through the period of the famine. (p. 173)

Interesting, because Natalie Solent , who has been writing about famines recently links to an essay in the National Review Online by the awful John Derbyshire on the subject. Derbyshire asks why the

British government did not organize adequate relief, or prevent the export of foodstuffs from Ireland while Irish people were starving.

and answers

it was not within the nature, philosophy or resources of Anglo-Saxon governments to do such things in the 1840s.

Contrast Sen, who knows the facts:

… by the 1840s, when the Irish famine occurred, an extensive system of poverty relief was fairly well established in Britain, as far as Britain itself was concerned. England too had its share of the poor, and even the life of the employed English worker was far from prosperous …. But there was still some political commitment to prevent open starvation withing England. A similar commitment did not apply to the Empire — not even to Ireland. Even the Poor Laws gave the English destitute substantially more rights than the Irish destitute got from the more anemic Poor Laws that were instituted for Ireland.

So contra Derbyshire, who is probably just making it up as he goes along (but then gets quoted and circulated around the network of misinformation that is the blogosphere) it was “in the nature” of Anglo-Saxon governments, even in the 1840s to do “such things”. Just not for the Irish or the Indians.

Sen also provides us with this striking portrait of Edward Trevelyan

the head of the Treasury during the Irish famines, who saw not much wrong with British economic policy in Ireland (of which he was in charge), point[ing] to Irish habits as part of the explanation of the famines. Chief among the habitual failures was the tendency of the Irish poor to eat only potatoes, which made them dependent on one crop. Indeed, Trevelyan’s view of the causation of the Irish famines permitted him to link them with his analysis of Irish cooking: “There is scarcely a woman of the peasant class in the West of Ireland whose culinary art exceeds the boiling of a potato.” The remark is of interest not just because it is rather rare for an Englishman to find a suitable occasion for making international criticism of culinary art. Rather, the pointing of an accusing finger at the meagreness of the diet of the Irish poor well illustrates the tendency to blame the victim. The victims, in his view, had helped themselves to a disaster, despite the best efforts of the administration in London to prevent it. (p. 175)

Blaming the victim, bad choices, poor diet — I’ve heard those explanations before somewhere. And cultural alienation from those suffering from acute poverty? Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose .

December 12, 2003

Sociology of Cultures

Posted by Kieran

Via Alan Schussman (it’s great when your RAs have blogs) comes an interesting review by Steven Shapin of Camembert: A National Myth by Pierre Boisard. The book shows how there’s rather more — and rather less — to the famous cheese than meets the eye and nose. Unlikely though it may seem, Camembert’s development mirrors the evolution of the French state.

A friend of mine once raised a skeptical eyebrow, and smirked a bit, when I told him about that there was a fascinating subfield on the sociology of food. But one only has to think of the place of food in all parts of life, from daily meals to key events like weddings and wakes, to see how rich a topic it is. My only contribution so far to the field is a 45 second talk occasionally delivered to Americans explaining that Irish people do not, in fact, eat corned beef and cabbage.

December 09, 2003

Islam and Economic Growth

Posted by Kieran

Tyler Cowen thinks that Islam might be bad for economic growth. The relationship between religious beliefs and practices, on the one, hand and economic prosperity, on the other, is a very tricky question. It’s kept comparative sociologists busy for more than a century. Here’s one of the reasons why it’s tricky, pithily expressed.

It comes courtesy of Ernest Gellner’s brilliant essay, “Flux and Reflux in the Faith of Men,” which can be found in his book Muslim Society:

I like to imagine what would have happened had the Arabs won at Potiers and gone on to conquer and Islamise Europe. No doubt we should all be admiring Ibn Weber’s The Kharejite Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism which would conclusively demonstrate how the modern rational spirit and its expression in business and bureaucratic organization could only have arisen in consequence of the sixteenth-century neo-Kharejite puritanism in northern Europe. In particular, the work would demonstrate how modern economic and organizational rationality could never have arisen had Europe stayed Christian, given the inveterate proclivity of that faith to a baroque, manipulative, patronage-ridden, quasi-animistic and disorderly vision of the world. A faith so given to seeing the cosmic order as bribable by pious works and donations could never have taught its adherents to rely on faith alone and to produce and accumulate in an orderly, systematic and unwavering manner. Would they not always have blown their profits on purchasing tickets to eternal bliss, rather than going on to accumulate profits and more? … Altogether, from the viewpoint of an elegant philosophy of history, which sees the story of mankind as a sustained build-up to our condition, it would have been far more satisfactory if the Arabs had won. By various obvious criteria — universalism, scripturalism, spiritual egalitarianism, the extension of full participation in the sacred community not to one, or some, but to all, and the rational systematisation of social life — Islam is, of the three great Western Monotheisms, the one closest to modernity.

November 24, 2003

Tenure and Toddlers

Posted by Kieran

I’ve written before about the way debates about work-family conflict are framed. In general, men with children are not thought to face work/family choices. Alternatives to this way of thinking about it — analyzing the institutions that structure people’s choices, for example — are often dismissed as utopian flim-flam. It’s a good example of how social facts are mistaken for natural facts. Quite sensible people — who know that it’s silly to argue that cloning, contraceptives and representative government are wrong because they are “unnatural,” for instance — can often be found insisting that the Pleistocene Savannah has set implacable constraints on the institutional design of work/family policies in postindustrial democracies. This is not in itself a clearly wrong claim, but, oddly, the particular constraints closely approximate the gender division of labor not of the Pleistocene Savannah but of portions of the U.S. middle class between 1945 and 1960.

I bring this up because I read an interesting report on the impact of children on men’s and women’s careers in academia. There are several ways to put the findings, but here’s one:

Twelve to fourteen years out from the Ph.D., 62 percent of tenured women in the humanities and social sciences and 50 percent of those in the sciences do not have children in the household. By contrast, only 39 percent of tenured men in social sciences and humanities and 30 percent of those in the sciences do not have children in the household …

November 23, 2003

Celebrity Tat

Posted by Kieran

I am wondering what sort of person shows up for a Michael Jackson vigil. It seems like the turnout was a little … underwhelming. About the numbers some people had been hoping the London protests would draw. Meanwhile, the celebrity lawyers are on the case. Those guys will need a new angle seeing as the Chewbacca Defense is now a standard Republican talking point.

November 13, 2003

SUV Luv

Posted by Kieran

Jim Henley defends SUVs by comparing them to his recently much-improved level of fitness:

Now consider a common complaint against sport-utility vehicles: Most people who buy them don’t need that much power … A comparison with personal fitness is suggestive: SUVs are anaerobic strength vehicles; high fuel-efficiency cars are aerobic. Vehicle power is like muscle power: When you need it, you need it. Maybe you have to cart a new refrigerator home. Maybe your area reliably gets one bad snowstorm a year. (In the D.C. metro area, whenever a snowstorm hits, the call goes out for SUV and four-wheel drive owners to ferry hospital workers to their jobs.) Maybe you go camping twice a year or once a week transport supplies to your Cub Scout pack.

It’s a nice analogy as far as it goes. The problem with it is that it breaks down once you consider any of the other virtues we might want vehicles to have. Extra weight-training notwithstanding, Jim’s new biceps are unlikley to cause him to flip over onto his side as he jogs round corners. Nor were Jim’s target weight and diet specially designed with the assistance of the government to help keep his employer in business. And even though I don’t read comics much, Jim is not significantly more likely to kill me if I accidentally bump into him in DC. (Max Sawicky might be a different story.) It’s reasonable to say, as he does, that “As with physical fitness, there is value in maintaining the capacity for marginal exertion well beyond the daily norm. And as with physical fitness, having the extra power available may inspire you to change in ways you didn’t anticipate — you do more because, well, you can.” But Jim can have that extra power available without inconveniencing or endangering others, and he won’t accidentally misuse his strength to crash into a snowdrift once a year in DC, either — the only off-road adventure many SUVs ever have. So I don’t think the comparison holds up. And indeed, a quick glance at the new Jim shows that he’s chosen to strike his own aerobic/anerobic balance well towards the aerobic end of things.

November 11, 2003

Solidarity and Hierarchy in Academic Job Markets

Posted by Kieran

Via Brayden King, I’ve come across a nice paper by Shin-Kap Han in the current issue of Social Networks, which my colleague Ron Breiger co-edits. The paper is a network analysis of the exchange of job candidates in a number of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Though academics talk about “the job market,” it will not surprise you that placement is deeply embedded in systems of departmental status that bear little resemblance to a properly functioning market. Indeed, the paper finds that the discipline that makes the study (and promotion) of markets its specialty is the one with the highest degree of elite solidarity and hierarchical control over the placement of its graduate students.

The paper confirms the intuition that there are self-reproducing departmental status systems within disciplines. Job candidates in all disciplines are exchanged in a well-defined manner between three classes of departments. Class I departments, at the top, exchange students amongst themselves and supply lower-tier departments with students but do not hire from them. Class II departments are on the “semi-periphery,” generally exchanging candidates with each other (though there is a hierarchical element to this) and also sending students to Class III departments, which never place students outside of their class and usually do not hire students from within their class.

This broad structure applies to all disciplines, though some draw sharper boundaries than others between Classes I and II. (In Sociology, for instance, the differentiation is particularly strong.) Within Class I departments, there’s a good deal of variation across disciplines in the degree of factionalization within the elite departments and the solidarity of the exchange system, as measured by within-class exchanges of students. Economics has the most cohesive elite faction and its “dominance over the entire discipline is overwhelming.” Class I Psychology departments, by contrast, are considerably more decentralized, with three contending factions. Different measures bring out different aspects of the structure. Economics scores highest on all exchange-based measures of hierarchy and solidarity.

There’s an old article by Arthur Stinchcombe called “A Structural Analysis of Sociology” which, only half-jokingly, treats the exchange of job candidates in sociology from the perspective of Levi-Strauss’s structural anthropology: departments are tribes, graduate students are women to be married off, and areas of specialization are clan-markers that help define which exchanges are appropriate and which are taboo. Han’s paper does a nice job of quantifying the structure of exchange in graduate students and demonstrating how it varies across disciplines. It wouldn’t do prospective graduate students any harm to have a clear picture of this social structure in mind — together with a grasp of their own potential place in it as a unit of exchange — before applying to grad school.

November 10, 2003

For men were born to pray and save

Posted by Kieran

Lisa Keister is a sociologist at Ohio State who is, amongst other things, an expert on wealth inequality. She has a paper in the current issue of Social Forces (available to institutional subscribers on ProQuest) on the role of religion in the accumulation of assets in early adulthood. The main finding of the paper has been attracting some commentary from various quarters. Essentially, after controlling for pretty much everything you might think of, there’s a direct effect of religion on asset accumulation. Jews “enjoy tremendous gains wealth ownership” (about three times the average) while conservative Protestants accumulate “relatively little wealth”. Mainline Protestants and Catholics are indistinguishable from one another and from the general population in this respect.

I heard Lisa present the paper at Princeton a few years ago, and gave her some comments on it. The dataset is good (it’s NLSY data) and the effect is very robust, but it’s very difficult to pin down the causal mechanism with confidence. The paper suggests a few ways in which Jewish beliefs might directly affect wealth, but there’s only so much that an individual-level analysis can tell you. Another problem, of course, is that even talking about this topic tends to make people come out in hives.

October 30, 2003

Interview with the Moor

Posted by Kieran

Via MaxSpeak comes a link to an excellent interview with Karl Marx conducted sometime in the last month, apparently. Karl has lost none of his vitality, despite having been dead for some time. His analysis is as trenchant as his invective is unrelenting. Who is an “insipid, pedantic, leather-tongued oracle of the ordinary bourgeois intelligence” and who is “so easy to comprehend, so stupendously unoriginal, so devastatingly tautological”? Read it and see.

October 19, 2003

Jewish success, Islamic stagnation

Posted by Chris

Unsurprisingly Mahathir Mohamad’s speech to the Islamic summit has met with outrage in the blogosphere. And quite right too, since his remarks about the Jews are pretty vile. But there’s a kernel of interest in what the bigot has to say. He’s worried about the historical transformation of Islam’s fortunes. After all, as he says:

The early Muslims produced great mathematicians and scientists, scholars, physicians and astronomers etc. and they excelled in all the fields of knowledge of their times, besides studying and practising their own religion of Islam. As a result the Muslims were able to develop and extract wealth from their lands and through their world trade, able to strengthen their defences, protect their people and give them the Islamic way of life, Addin, as prescribed by Islam. At the time the Europeans of the Middle Ages were still superstitious and backward, the enlightened Muslims had already built a great Muslim civilisation, respected and powerful, more than able to compete with the rest of the world and able to protect the ummah from foreign aggression. The Europeans had to kneel at the feet of Muslim scholars in order to access their own scholastic heritage.

But that was then, and this is now. And as Mahathir notices and regrets, the Islamic world has been in a pretty miserable intellectual and cultural condition since the Ottomans. He’s obsessed with the contrast between Muslims and Jews. He may not be right that Jews rule the world, but he is right to notice their extraordinary achievements, and especially their intellectual achievements, and the contrast with the miserable contribution of modern Islam.

Now maybe there’s a respectable social scientific literature about Jewish success and maybe there isn’t. At any rate, I don’t know of it. So far as I’m aware, the only commentator who gives the matter due attention is Bryan Magee in the context of a rather tortured attempt to explain the anti-semitism of his hero Richard Wagner in his 1968 book Aspects of Wagner . In the process of doing this, Magee discusses the cultural achievements of Jews in the modern word. After mentioning Freud, Marx and Einstein as intellectual giants, he tells us that their success is remarkable

… for many reasons. One is that there had been only one Jew of comparable achievement, Spinoza, in the previous eighteen hundred years. Another is that … these three pioneered a Jewish renaissance of fantastic proportions. Jewish philosophers since Marx include Bergson, Husserl, Wittgenstein and Popper. …. Most of the famous psychoanalysts have been Jews … Nobel prize winners so numerous it would be tedious to list them…. All this is doubly amazing when one remembers that the total number of Jews in the world is only about thirteen million. (p.32)

Magee goes on to reel off equally long lists of names from the field of music. The picture hasn’t really changed much since. Look at the lists of Nobel prize-winners since 1968, or the names of the most-quoted scientists and you’ll find many Jews. Thinking about my own field of political philosophy, there are many Jewish names (Cohen, Steiner, Raz to mention but three), and among political philosophers in the blogosphere (Norman Geras , Jacob Levy ) Jews are very prominent.

This success of Jews in public life and scientific endeavour must really grate with anti-semites. And all the more so because the achievements of many of these individuals are, by any reasonable standards, both objective and of the very greatest excellence. Some mad anti-semitic theory might explain why some politician or banker rose to prominence, but no set of conspirators can elaborate general relativity or write Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. That’s stuff you just can’t fake.

Magee asks two linked questions:

First, why in the modern era did Jews produce scarcely any creative work of the first rank until only the last century? Second, why was there then this amazing harvest of achievement? (p. 33)

Magee claims that he has heard two explanations for Jewish success. The first is that Jews are some kind of innately superior race (this he dismisses as being obvious racist nonsense). The second is that “the cultural distinction of modern Jewry is due to their unique religious and intellectual tradition.” But he rejects this too on the grounds that all the Jews who have attained the highest levels of attainment have rejected Judaism:

Spinoza, Heine and Mendelssohn if anyone wants to include them, Marx, Disraeli, Freud, Mahler, Einstein, Trotsky, Kafka, Wittgenstein, Schoenberg. [Schoenberg went back to Judaism, but as a political statement in the face of the Holocaust.] (p. 34)

Magee’s preferred explanation — to which I attach just about no credence at all — is based in a sort of general law of emancipation. This seems to go something like this: original thought requires the freedom to inquire, to deliberate, to argue and so on. But this can’t happen all at once. Given free institutions, it takes two to three generations for intellectuals to really get cooking, to acquire the right habits, to build the right culture. This all happened in European culture with the reformation, but the full flowering of this culture and its highest achievements didn’t really come until the 17th century and after. The Jews, however, were excluded from this and couldn’t really make their contribution to Western thought until two or three generations after the opening of the ghettoes. So this Jewish renaissance, dating from the middle of the nineteenth century, has reached its peak in our own times. (Magee thinks this Jewish pre-eminence is a temporary thing and won’t last.).

Magee has also has some rumblings about Jews, as persons cast hither and thither by economic and political instability, are, somehow the representative modern individuals. But this is really just an afterthought to the main thesis above.

Now as I mentioned above, Magee’s musings on this topic come as part of a lengthy apologetic for Wagner who, despite being a vile anti-semite, get credited by Magee with great insight into the cultural situation of the Jews. But be that as it may, and despite the general vagueness and feebleness of Magee’s explanation for Jewish success in culture, art, music, mathematics, physics etc etc, the question he raises looks to be a good one. Why were such a small group of people able to achieve such striking success over a shortish stretch of history and why do they continue to be successful today? It sure bugs the hell out of Mahathir Mohamad.

October 07, 2003

All Things Nice

Posted by Kieran

Over at Slate, Steven Landsburg has a piece on the finding that the parents of daughters are more likely to divorce than the parents of sons:

In the United States, the parents of a girl are nearly 5 percent more likely to divorce than the parents of a boy. The more daughters, the bigger the effect: The parents of three girls are almost 10 percent more likely to divorce than the parents of three boys.

The article goes through a number of mechanisms that might explain the difference, though none are entirely convincing. The language of the article is egalitarian, talking mainly about the preferences of parents. But two of the three hypotheses put forward suggest that the preferences of the father drive the outcome rather than those of the mother. More importantly, the emphasis on parental preferences is ultimately a bit restricting.

We don’t have much formal evidence about parents’ actual motives or preferences, so Landsburg suggests three supporting bits of evidence to support the hypothesis that parents do in fact have a preference for sons. First,

divorced women with girls are substantially less likely to remarry than divorced women with boys, suggesting that daughters are a liability in the market for a husband.

This says that fathers don’t like marrying women with daughters. The inference is that fathers prefer to have sons. Second,

parents of girls are quite a bit more likely to try for another child than parents of boys, which suggests that there are more parents hoping for sons than for daughters.

This one could apply to both parents in principle. Finally,

Take a typical unmarried couple who are expecting a child and have an ultrasound, which more often than not reveals the child’s sex. It turns out that such couples are more likely to get married if the child is a boy. Apparently, for unmarried fathers, the prospect of living with a wife and a son is more alluring than the prospect of living with a wife and a daughter.

Here the father’s preference is driving things again. Yet Landsburg concludes:

But the most natural way to interpret their data is that parents, on average, prefer boys to girls.

Two of the three bits of evidence presented concern the choices of fathers. The five per cent difference in divorce rates between the two kinds of families is not huge. The most natural way to interpret the data, it seems to me, is that most American parents manage perfectly well with children of either sex, but there are enough fathers with a sufficiently strong bias against daughters to tip the divorce ratio in the direction shown by the data.

Inferring motives from aggregate patterns is a difficult business. My own bias is against treating explanations of that sort as final. Landsburg himself brings up other countries — like China and India — where the killing of daughters is common. But of course talking in terms of preferences misses the bigger picture. People in these countries don’t just happen to prefer sons so much that they’ll kill their daughters. In these societies, property, status and social mobility are tightly integrated with patriarchal gender relations. Family wealth and position are much more difficult to manage when you have daughters rather than sons. Individual preferences are generated in the context of institutionalized gender relations that are tied to other sources of social power. That’s what patriarchy is all about.[1]

A natural comparative hypothesis, therefore, would be that the divorce rate for parents of daughters tends to converge with that for parents of sons as gender discrimination (e.g., in the labor market) declines. The idea is that there’s no need to have a bias for boys when daughters and sons can do equally well. It’d be tricky to study, because divorce rates differ for other reasons, but I’d say you could at least compare many OECD countries in this way.

A different way to approach the question — restricting ourselves to the narrow question of individual preferences again — would be to allow parents to choose the sex of their babies and see what happens. This may be on the cards, at least if the engagingly-named Microsort Corporation continue to improve their methods. As it happens, most of the people who avail of Microsort’s services want to have a girl. (This may be due to the success rates of the method itself.) I heard about this company at a talk by a biologist who was arguing that in the future, rational parents will invest in the genetic endowment of their children (height, IQ, looks, etc) in the same way they invest in their education today, and for the same reasons — to maximise the return on their investment in terms of the child’s earning potential. I asked him why rational parents would ever choose to have a girl, given what we know about gender and the wage gap but he seemed to have trouble grasping the premise of the question.

[1] If the word “patriarchy” gives you hives, well, tough shite. In any event, go read Gerry Mackie’s “Ending Footbinding and Infibulation: A Convention Account”, American Sociological Review 1996 v.61 pp.999-1017 for an elegant treatment of one issue in this area from a rational-choice perspective. [J-STOR link.]

September 29, 2003

Demographics

Posted by Chris

One of the claims that features in the Legrain piece I mention below is that US-European comparative growth rates give a misleading picture of the relative health of the two economic zones because US population is growing fast (more mouths to feed from that greater output) whereas European population is static. Of course the low population growth in Europe can be looked at the other way: as evidence of Eurosclerosis and the harbinger of a massive pensions-and-health crisis. Now I’ve always been a bit puzzled by the differential demographics. After all, the career pressures are perhaps greater in the US, there’s probably less in the way of subsidized childcare, and access to birth control is similar in both areas. So having children is pretty much elective in both zones and the individual cost-benefit calcultation is probably more favourable to having children in Europe than the US. So I’d predict, if I were just coming at things a priori , a lower birthrate in America than in Europe.

Obviously that’s not what’s happening. So why not? And who is having the kids? After all, the dynamic America/sclerotic Europe claims are usually made by looking at the aggregate statistics. But if middle-class, educated Europeans and middle-class, educated Americans are behaving similarly to one another, but the “excess” children in the US are all being born to impoverished single parents in trailer parks, the aggregate figures may be less favourable to the US. So how do the figures actually break down, by income group, immigrant/non-immigrant, and so on? I’ve no idea what the answer is, and my googling skills haven’t helped here: but maybe someone else does.

September 26, 2003

Boy in the bubble

Posted by Ted

Mark Kleiman noticed that opponents of gay marriage are also opposed to civil unions. He writes, “So the overwhelming majority of people who don’t want to let gays get married also don’t want to recognize their committed relationships in any other way.”

It’s hard for someone like me to keep a realistic perspective about the portion of Americans who don’t approve of gays.

In Eric Alterman’s What Liberal Media?, he admits that on certain social issues like homosexuality, conservative critics of liberal media bias have a point. If I remember correctly, he says that he doesn’t have anyone in his social circle who personally disapproves of homosexuality. Personally, in my actual life, it doesn’t come up very often. But I think that the last time I heard someone in my presence express their serious personal disapproval of homosexuality was… 1996, maybe? And I live in Texas.

Even the conservative media rarely expresses open disapproval of homosexuality anymore. For the most part, right-wing pundits try to frame their arguments against (say) gay marriage without basing them solely on personal anti-gay animus. Someone like John Derbyshire stands out. I’ve got to credit libertarian pundits and Andrew Sullivan for their willingness to go after people on their side on this issue. However, I don’t think that this apparent consensus reflects broad public opinion. I had some time, so I looked at the General Sociological Survey, a project of the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Council. Every two years they do a rigorous survey of about 3000 adults. The most recent available data is for 1998, unfortunately. I looked at opinions on homosexuality by party affiliation and by political leaning. I was a little surprised by what I found.* Here are responses to the question, “What about sexual relations between two adults of the same sex—do you think it is always wrong, almost always wrong, wrong only sometimes, or not wrong at all?”

Always wrong Almost always wrong Wrong only sometimes Not at all wrong No answer # of respondents
All respondents 45% 4% 5% 19% 26% 2832


Party leaning Always wrong Almost always wrong Wrong only sometimes Not at all wrong No answer # of respondents
Democrat 42% 4% 5% 24% 25% 1316
Independent 43% 4% 5% 19% 29% 477
Republican 51% 5% 6% 13% 26% 967


Political leaning Always wrong Almost always wrong Wrong only sometimes Not at all wrong No answer # of respondents
Liberal 30% 4% 7% 36% 23% 772
Moderate 45% 4% 5% 16% 30% 986
Conservative 56% 5% 5% 11% 24% 933

I expect Democrats to push for gay rights because it’s the right thing to do. But I doubt that they’re much of a political winner. It’s amazing to me that 42% of people who identify as Democrats or lean Democrat, and 30% of people who identify as liberals or lean liberal, thought gay sex was always wrong in 1998.

Incidentally, this is interesting:

Party leaning Conservative Moderate Liberal No answer # of respondents
Democrat 20% 37% 40% 3% 1316
Independent 22% 42% 23% 14% 477
Republican 56% 29% 12% 3% 967

The proportion of self-described Democrats who call themselves liberal is significantly smaller than the portion of self-described Republicans who call themselves conservatives. But even for Republicans, it’s only a little over half.

  • If you want to play along at home, researchers in 1998 asked the same question in a later portion of the test for only a portion of respondents. The variable names are HOMOSEX and HOMOSEX1. I‘ve combined the answers; if a respondent answered one or the other question, If a respondent answered both questions differently, I’ve used the second answer.

On the variables POLVIEWS and PARTYID, I‘ve combined everyone who says “Moderate, lean X” into the X category.

September 23, 2003

The genealogy of morals

Posted by Chris

There’s been much blogospherical and press comment about the recent report that capuchin monkeys have a built-in sense of fairness. In case anyone missed the story here’s Adam Cohen’s summary in the New York Times :

Give a capuchin monkey a cucumber slice, and she will eagerly trade a small pebble for it. But when a second monkey, in an adjoining cage, receives a more-desirable grape for the same pebble, it changes everything. The first monkey will then reject her cucumber, and sometimes throw it out of the cage. Monkeys rarely refuse food, but in this case they appear to be pursuing an even higher value than eating: fairness.

The capuchin monkey study, published last week in Nature, has generated a lot of interest for a scant three-page report buried in the journal’s letters section. There is, certainly, a risk of reading too much into the feeding habits of 10 research monkeys. But in a week when fairness was so evidently on the ropes — from the World Trade Organization meeting in Cancún, which poor nations walked out of in frustration, to the latest issue of Forbes, reporting that the richest 400 Americans are worth $955 billion — the capuchin monkeys offered a glimmer of hope from the primate gene pool.

Interesting, suggesting at least that monkeys on the receiving end of unfairness will would prefer to have nothing than be part of an unjust arrangement. It is a result that is consonant with lots of behavioural experiments involving humans, who will often walk away from a deal rather than maximizing their return. (See lots of places, but Skyrms’s Evolution of the Social Contract has some discussion.) But as Radley Balko points out , we’re a bit short of a true commitment to fairness here. If the monkeys were really into fairness, wouldn’t the one offered the grape spurn it rather than be party to such inequity?

Which brings me in touch with some of Henry’s Hobbesian speculations below, or at least to the subject of weapons. The poor monkey at the sharp end of unfairness in the wild is probably too weak to do much about it except feel grouchy and depressed. Not so, the human hunter gatherer, who, if he (and I’m afraid it is just he at this stage) feels aggrieved, can use language to form coalitions and spears to get his own back. Which provides a pretty good incentive to those with meat or other resources to share (or else). At least that’s the speculation contained in Christopher Boehm’s marvellous Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, which I’ve blogged about before. Principles of justice emerge as the weak use their language skills and weapons to conspire against the strong - a very Nietzschean thought.

It is an odd business, though, how so many people look to primates and hunter gatherers for a vindication of morality: that NYT piece even had the headline “What the Monkeys Can Teach Humans About Making America Fairer.” (Ernest Gellner has a funny, though otherwise misguided chapter lampooning such justificatory attempts in his Plough, Sword, and Book, entitled “Which way will the Stone Age vote swing?”) For whatever our ancestors or evolutionary relatives did or do, their behaviour can’t provide any kind of justification for principles. Still, I suppose there’s comfort to be had in the thought that we might be hard-wired to react against injustice. That fact — if it is a fact — may not justify principles of justice but it does give those of us who believe in them a tiny grain of confidence in the unjust getting their comeuppance … eventually.

September 22, 2003

Inequality, sufficiency and health

Posted by Chris

I’ve been working for a while on a paper that argues for a “sufficientarian” criterion for the problem of global justice. Sufficientarianism (horrible word) is the notion that what matters, normatively speaking, is not the the pattern of distribution of whatever currency we think is important (welfare, resources, capabilities, whatever…) but that everyone gets beyond a certain threshold. Not that inequality of income, say, ceases to be important because once we focus on the dimension in which we want people to achieve sufficiency it often turns out that distributive patterns impact on their ability to meet the relevant threshold.

My focus so far, has been on the capacity to function as a citizen of a democratic polity. That requires adequate levels of health, nutrition, literacy, education and so forth. Within-state income and wealth inequality matters here (and much more than between state inequality) because of the tendency of such inequality to undermine the political equality necessary for democratic citizenship. If the super-rich control much of the mass media and provide the funding that is necessary to run effective political campaigns, then the capacity of others to achieve full citizen functioning is likely to be undermined.

One of the things I didn’t know about but learnt of at the “Priority in Practice” conference at the weekend was that there is research - by Richard Wilkinson and others - that shows that other capabilities (such as for health) have a similar relationship to income and wealth inequality. According to them, to be a poor person in a rich country is to be worse off (from a health perspective) than to be a typical individual with an absolutely lower level of income in a poor country. If true, that’s a pretty striking finding (and ought to worry those who think that to be concerned with income inequality is to focus on something inappropriate ).

One of Wilkinson’s collaborators, Michael Marmot, sets out some of the findings :

Life expectancy in China, Sri Lanka, and Kerala (a sizable state in southern India) exceeds 70 years, despite their having gross national products in 1994 of less than $1,000 per capita. Contrast this with Harlem, where there was a median family income in 1990 of $24,174 yet a probability of only 37 percent that a black man would survive from the age of 15 years to 65 (as compared with the U.S. average of 77 percent for white men ). Poor people in the United States are rich by world standards, but they have worse health than the average in some poor countries.

Marmot explores a variety of explanations of why relative (but not absolute) poverty might have these adverse health effects. I’m not going to jump in and endorse the findings or speculate too much, but this is interesting material and probably some of the more social scientific timberites know more than I do.

(Minor ideological health warning: to those in the know, I’m well aware of the problems with sufficientarianism - see this instructive BEARS symposium that bears on the issue, especially the Arneson paper - and don’t mean to suggest that I endorse it as a complete theory of social justice).

September 11, 2003

Black and white house values

Posted by Ted

In January of this year, there was a short flurry of posts about the incredible discrepancy between the wealth of black households and white households. I had no idea that the median white household has seven times the assets of the median black household. It’s primarily a legacy of history; there’s a gap in wages between white and black workers, but it’s not a 7-1 gap. Black households even save slightly more than white households at the same income level.

This has all sorts of implications, as family wealth (for example) makes higher education and entry into the housing market much easier for a young adult. As Dalton Conley notes, black college students are more likely to drop out than white college students, even if their families have the same incomes. When you control for wealth, however, black and white students perform equally as well.

(My posts on the subject are here, here, and here. Kevin Drum, Kieran Healey (the link is probably not working), and Rob Lyman all had excellent posts on the subject.)

Recently, I got an email from Jonathan Maccabee with more detail about the value of owner-occupied homes, the primary source of wealth for most families. He took a look at the US Census’ American FactFinder, table HCT 66, “Median Value of Owner-Occupied Housing Units.” (I’m restricting this to white and black for the sake of simplicity.)

Total White Black
National $119,600 $122,800 $80,600
California $211,500 $225,500 $164,600
New York $148,700td> $142,500 $163,900
Texas $82,500 $87,600 $62,400

Says Jonathan,

As you can see, the racial gap in housing prices is significant. Though in New York State, to my surprise, the gap works in reverse, as most minorities who own homes live in the very expensive New York City area. The percentage of those who live in owner-occupied housing, of course, is very low in much of New York City and generally lower for minorities than whites; the Census doesn’t calculate the percentages, but the comparison is at Summary File 4, HCT 2 - Tenure (translation: living in owner-occupied housing vs. renter-occupied housing). This is one reason why these numbers enormously understate the wealth gap between whites and minorities.

It’s worth making the point that the proportions of white and black households who own their own homes are very different. According to the Local Initiatives Support Coalition, black home ownership rate was at 46.3% in 2000, while white home ownership was at 73.8%.

I can’t get over it. I finally got Dalton Conley’s book, Being Black, Living in the Red, and I’ll have to report on it later.

September 03, 2003

Minding the Kids

Posted by Kieran

Jane Galt is worried about the economics of childcare and she gives a good account of the hard choices women often feel they must face about bearing and rearing children:

Should we stay home, or shouldn’t we? It’s a difficult question for professional women. … We want to be successful as much as our husbands do. Taking five or eight or ten years off to get the kids started off right before they go to school is going to mean irreperably harming our prospects for advancement. We want very badly to convince ourselves that day care is really just as good, better even — or at the very least, that it is sufficiently not-worse that it’s justified. … And if I am a professional woman, my child is going to be spending ten or more hours a day with [a child-care provider] — more hours than they are with me. … And that’s assuming some hypothetical ideal of day care. Then there’s the actual day care we get, which pays people between $12-20K a year to babysit a large number of children.

Jane’s initial question — “Should we stay home, or shouldn’t we? It’s a difficult question for professional women” — effectively concedes the case as lost from the get-go. It frames the problem as wholly belonging to the prospective mother. Dad has no responsibility towards his potential offspring, is not required to make any work/family tradeoffs, and indeed has so much autonomy that a woman who chooses kids over career is “taking a huge financial bet on her husband’s fidelity.”

Jane’s dilemma is real, but its reality isn’t a necessary fact about the world. Rather, it’s a product of how the institutions of work and family are organized. As she herself says in passing, “society is not set up to allow women to take a break. Jobs aren’t made to accommodate it. And neither is marriage.” She’s right. But instead of framing the question in the terms society hands to you (this is entirely a problem for individual women which necessitates a tradeoff whose costs are borne solely by individual women), we can ask how these institutions might be reconstructed.

Two useful places to begin are Nancy Folbre’s The Invisible Heart and Joan Williams’ Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It. If you’re interested in fresh and practical perspectives on work/family conflicts, I’d recommend both these books, especially Williams’. (Here’s a Q&A with Williams.)

Folbre is very good on the general state of affairs that allows corporations to free-ride on (and profit from) the informal production of care within the household. (This is the much-neglected “invisible heart” of the title.) Williams focuses on the same set of choices that Jane discusses, showing how they are not the unavoidable, individual tradeoffs for women that they may appear. As Williams shows, the problem does not lie with women who want to have it all (and who subsequently can’t decide what to do), but with the “Ideal Worker Norm” built into the structure of professional careers. This is the gendered conception of the good employee, the role that companies want their employees to play. It’s institutionalized in their formal and informal expectations about how workers should behave on the job, in systems of reward and promotion, and in the benefits the state provides to workers and employers. It presupposes, at bottom, that the employee has someone at home to take care of him. It’s what needs to get reconstructed if there’s going to be any real progress on child care in the United States. In the long term, stop-gap solutions of the sort mentioned by Mark Kleiman just continue to let organizations in the formal economy off the hook.

Now, framing the issue this way will not make the problem Jane faces disappear. An individual woman deciding whether to have a child still faces the decisions she describes. But your basic orientation to the problem really does matter. The social world is not natural, which means there’s a sociology and a politics of child care as well as an economics. The institutions that structure people’s career paths may have deep roots, but that’s not because they spring naturally out of the earth. Cross-national comparison shows both that there’s considerable variation in the institutionalization of child care, and that this variation can have odd origins. For example, a very nice paper by Kimberly Morgan shows how working parents in France, Sweden and Germany presently live, for good or bad, with the residue of 19th-centrury conflicts between church and state over children’s education. These institutions aren’t immutable, either. In fact, in the U.S. they’ve changed a great deal since the early 1980s, often in response to surprisingly small shifts in law or policy.

Looking at the problem this way makes one less likely to fatalism about tragic choices, wanting to have it all, and the inevitable clash of work and family. It allows you, as Williams does, to propose some practical social policies — often as simple as changing the tax incentives offered to corporations — designed to shift the balance in favor of families. It won’t solve the problem overnight, but it does offer a more powerful analysis of it. It also has the virtue — as C. Wright Mills put it forty years ago — of letting us “grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society,” rather than forever being stuck at the level of individual women facing insoluble work-family tradeoffs.

August 31, 2003

Get a Lifestyle

Posted by Kieran

In Newspaper Land, Summer is the season of fake lifestyle trends. There’s nothing like a bit of pop sociology to fill the feature pages on those long, hot days. The New York Times has been doing quite well on this front recently. A couple of months ago it was telling us about metrosexuals, the allegedly new breed of straight male who uses Neutrogena products and so on. They also had a story about the rise of the thirtieth birthday party. Today we read about rejuveniles, who are grown-ups with “busy lives with adult responsibilities, respectable jobs and children of their own” but who nevertheless like to play with children’s toys, sing children’s songs and generally make well-functioning adults and children alike feel rather uncomfortable. Here’s the pitch:

From childless fans of kiddie music to the grown-up readers of “Harry Potter,” inner children are having fun all over. Whether they are buying cars marketed to consumers half their age, dressing in baby-doll fashions or bonding over games like Twister and kickball, a new breed of quasi adult is co-opting the culture of children as never before.

The article surveys the kind of consumption choices that these people are supposed to be making, and comes up a little confused. Sometimes it seems like garden-variety mid-life crisis behavior. The Honda Element is supposedly marketed at young buyers spending the weekend mountain biking or surfing, but the average age of Element drivers is 40. “It’s a new definition of the family buyer” says a Honda marketing guy, “someone who doesn’t want to give up their individual character even though they’re getting older.” (Translation: Doesn’t want to admit they’re getting older.) Similarly, whereas signing on to Classmates.com “makes you feel 16 again,” there’s not much new in it: the class reunion is a standard part of American culture and has been so for years. And reading Harry Potter never hurt anyone. Well, nearly anyone.

Buying cars to feel younger, feeling nostalgic for high-school, reading popular children’s literature. So far so blah. On the other hand, I’m less sure what to make of someone described as “an authority on music by Alvin and the Chipmunks.”

“I like Chipmunks records because they’re funny, period,” said Jacob Austen, 34 … “I get the most censure from little kids, definitely,” he said. “I’ll be playing a Chipmunk record in my car, and if a kid hears it, they get seriously weirded out.”

That’s because parents teach their children to run away from people like you, pal. A couple of the people in the article do seem poised at the top of the slippery slope that leads to people like this guy or this sort of thing or, well, sometimes it’s best not to find out more. Suffice to say that everyone should be a little wary of practices that put you at the very bottom even of the geek hierarchy.

Since reading the article I’ve been thinking up names for fictitious lifestyles that would suit an article like this. Between metrosexual and rejuvenile it’s clear that a snappy name is a must for any aspiring imaginary lifestyle. Possibilities so far include

Beautilitarians: “It has become so hard to find Mr or Ms Right these days that many young urban professionals, constantly juggling other demands, have simply given up and decided to take the first half-decent looking candidate who presents themselves. ‘You just can’t put the effort in anymore,’ said Valerie Bentham from her SoHo loft, ‘So you make a beautilitarian trade off — some people think it’s just too calculating, but I say everyone’s happier overall.’”

Neocondominiums: “In response to the constant search for desirable roommates and attractive living spaces, a new trend in semi-suburban living has emerged — the neocondominium. Westchester realtor Kristol Irving says the arrangement is ‘hopeful, not lugubrious; forward-looking, not nostalgic’. You borrow money to pay the rent and, in virtue of your apartment’s ‘incredible military superiority’ over everyone else in the building you and your housemates have considerable freedom to use other units, though maintenance fees often prove higher than anticipated. A reality TV show, set in one of the first Neocondominiums, is planned for the Fall.”

Sindergarten: “In a natural extension of the rejuvenile trend, some firms have begun to …” [fill in the rest yourself].

August 29, 2003

Russia and China

Posted by Kieran

Nick Kristof discusses the economies of Russia and China today in the Times. He wants to stop you from using the phrase “market democracies” quite so freely. China’s economy is doing very well. The centralised and basically despotic communist state has managed to smoothly introduce market-type institutions in the economy. Meanwhile nominally democratic Russia is a disaster. “I wish I could say that free elections pay better dividends than massacres” Kristof says, “But, although it hurts to say so, in this case it looks the other way around.”

He then looks for an answer to this question — why has democratic Russia done so badly economically, while communist China has done so well? — and here’s his answer:

[I]t seems to me that the best explanation for the different paths of China and the former Soviet Union is not policy but culture. I’m sure I’ll regret saying this, but there really is something to the caricature that if you put two Americans in a room together, they’ll sue each other; put two Japanese in a room together, and they’ll start apologizing to each other; two Chinese will do business; and two Ukrainians or Russians will sit down over a bottle of liquor.

I don’t think culture can be the right answer. It’s always tempting to reach for it when we’re faced with a very complex, nationally-bounded problem. But you have to be careful how you think about it. In this case, Kristof clearly thinks of national cultures as being pretty stable. But if they’re stable, how can they explain the huge changes in each country over the past decade? You might think that the shock of the Soviet collapse allowed Russian cultural tendencies to express themselves fully, but that’s not very convincing. Were they not expressing themselves fully between 1917-91? There hasn’t even been a similar shock in the Chinese case, so why all the changes?

The question Kristof asks is one of the Very Big Ones in comparative political economy, so it’s not fair to blame him for not solving it in a short column. The depth of the problem isn’t always appreciated. For instance, you might say “Yeah, the Russians were just as lazy and vodka-ridden under Communism, they expected the state to provide for everything and they still do, hence the lack of economic growth.” This vastly underestimates what’s happened to Russia since 1991. A good paper by Ted Gerber and Mike Hout lays out the early evidence of the disaster and shows how little of the “market transition” ever happened. (JSTOR subscription required.) Things have gotten even worse since then. I don’t have the numbers to hand but I think Russia’s GDP fell by about 40% over the 1990s. (I want to believe that it couldn’t be that much, surely, but the number is stuck in my head. Clarifications welcome.) Life expectancy is down by about five or six years. People in the Soviet Union might have gotten used to state provision of services, or have a cultural tendency to sit around the table and drink, but I don’t see how that explains such a gigantic drop in economic output and basic life-chances in a country the size of Russia.

If the macro, long-term “Culture is to Blame” explanation is unconvincing, the micro, short-term “Economists are to Blame” explanation doesn’t work either, and for the same reasons. The neoliberal policies demanded by the IMF and thought up by U.S. economists haven’t done any noticeable good. They’re usually diagnosed (often now by their originators) as having failed because evil crooks got hold of all the assets in the economy. But again, there’s the sheer scale of the problem. Even if this is why the policies failed, it doesn’t seem sufficient to explain the catastrophic outcomes. Especially when you remember that — as Ronald Reagan kept telling us in the 1980s — evil crooks were in charge of all the assets when Russia was still part of the Soviet Union, too.

All of which leaves a non-specialist like me a bit confused and wanting to do more reading that I don’t have time to do. Maybe there’s a good theory out there I don’t know about. Place your plausible explanations of why Russia failed so badly — and here I’m assuming that “National Culture” and “Naughty Economists” are not that plausible — in the comments.

August 27, 2003

Conference Advice

Posted by Kieran

Dan Drezner blogs some advice for attendees of academic conferences. His suggestions are fine, but I have some of my own.

First, some general perspective for those of you who are lucky enough not to have to go to these things. Attending an academic conference is like being a teenager again. This is why they can be so awful. You hang around trying to attach yourself to a group — preferably the cool kids, but in the end any group will do — and then these groups hang around waiting for something to happen. Groups exist in a permanent state of failing to decide what to do. Where should we go to dinner? Are we still waiting for someone? I heard there was a good party in the Berkeley suite. Where’s Ann, wasn’t she here a minute ago? As with teenagers, attendees secretly (and falsely) believe that other groups are having a much better time. Thus, they scan the area (e.g., the hotel lobby) in case the present group needs to be ditched for an apparently more interesting one. Your conference strategies should therefore be geared towards counteracting the tendency to re-live your teenage years. (I think some of the following suggestions come from a forwarded email I read years ago. They’ve stood up to empirical testing.)

  1. Arrange to meet people in advance. Don’t rely entirely on bumping into people by accident.
  2. If you have the option of going to dinner with some people now or hanging around a bit longer in the vague hope of eating with some more famous people later, go to dinner now.
  3. When you have the opportunity to introduce Bigwig A to Nobody B, do it in that order. Say “Bigwig, do you know Nobody?” rather than the other way around, because otherwise Nobody is forced to stammer “Well, uh, yes of course … um…”
  4. When talking to someone you do not know, always assume they are a faculty member, even if they do not look old enough to drive. Grad students will be flattered. Prickly professors will not get in a huff and use you in an anecdote later that evening.
  5. Be careful what you say in elevators. (I find this rule applies in life generally.)

August 26, 2003

Irish prosperity and social networks

Posted by Chris

As I said in an earlier post, I’m a bit reluctant to say much of substance about Ireland because, as a mere ten-day visitor I’m bound to get a lot wrong and there are participants on this blog who will notice! So I’ll just restrict myself to two of the many things I found myself thinking about apart from the extraordinary civility and kindness of the Irish people we encountered (as opposed to the harrassment, hurry and rudeness of normal English life - on the English, see Theodore Dalrymple passim).

The first was just how prosperous the place is. I’m sure it is possible to find places (especially around Dublin) where this isn’t so, but it mas a remarkable strong impression nonetheless. Around the edge of every town were vastish housing estates under construction and “new road layout ahead” signs. Now of course I’d heard of the “Celtic Tiger”, but it is one thing to read reports of a Wirschaftswunder in the Guardian and quite another to see direct evidence of it. Before I went, I chatted to an economist colleague about my forthcoming trip and he told me that when he visited the west of Ireland thiry years ago, the single village shop might stock a few tins of beans and vegetables. Those we visited seemed to contain a remarkable diversity of products (such as many different oils for cooking, salad dressing etc - a good index of prosperity if you ask me). Henry remarked in a post just the other day:

Ireland was then regarded (with some justification) as a bucolic, pre-industrial backwater. Of course, Ireland has since developed a world-class technology manufacturing and software sector, skipping past the industrial revolution without any alien intervention worth talking about ….

So what is the explanation for Ireland’s rapid development? I’m not really competent to say, but I’ve heard two: (a) massive subsidies from the European Union and (b) encouragement of inward investment by multinationals. I guess there’s also, a third possibility, namely a combination of the two. But suppose that aid from the European Union is an important part of the story, that would be an important counterexample to those who say that development aid is just wasted, just provides opportunities for elites to skim off the cash etc. So is EU support part of the explanation? And if so, are there good reasons why such support would work for Ireland and not elsewhere?

The second thing that I’ve found myself musing on is what looked like a civil society that was at the same time both much more alive and much more structured and uniform than is the case in the UK. In the UK, social life for many people is organised by their market relationships (as employee or consumer), their relationship to the state, and whatever ad hoc social networks they happen to be hooked into (I generalise outrageously, of course, but England is much more, for want of a better world, atomised). In Ireland there looked to be far more in the way of institutionalised social life. I’ve only really got two sorts of evidence for this. The first arises from a conversation I had after looking in shop windows in Abbeyleix, Laois (I’m a great reader of notices, lists, private ads etc). In some shop windows there were private advertisments for debutante’s ball-gowns and there was one shop that seemed to specialise in selling them. In England, “debutantes” are high-society girls who are presented at coming out balls (I say “are”, but despite revival attempts, I think this is really a pre-1950s practice). We therefore assumed that Abbeyleix must be a particularly up-market place, but, when we questioned people, we were told that the gowns were just for graduation balls that are common all over Ireland and which everyone takes part in (so no social exclusivism). It is hard to think of an shared rite-of-passage institution at all in England. The second bit of evidence concerns the apparent all-pervasiveness of the Gaelic Athletic Association. Now we were visiting at a time when some important Gaelic football fixtures were coming up, but even so, all over the country seemed to be signs by the roadside (sponsored by small businesses) wishing this or that county team the best of luck. There also seemed to be (small ads and notices again) a very large number of other events, such as raffles and dances organised by or through the GAA. Needless to say, sporting teams and institutions have nothing like this relationship to their public in England: Premier League football (soccer) teams are enterprises selling a product to individualised punters with the aid of Mr Murdoch’s Sky TV.

So am I right about the social networks? Is the GAA as important as it seemed? If so, what are the social and political implications?

August 25, 2003

Take the Money! Open the Box!

Posted by Kieran

Brad DeLong wonders why Dan Weintraub seems least inclined to support the candidate for Governeror of California about whom most is known. On Dan’s own admission, McClintock and Simon are liars, Schwarzenneger is an unknown quantity and Bustamente has a known program that at least holds together. And yet Dan leans towards McClintock (whom he knows is lying) or Arnie (about whom he knows nothing). Brad says:

A normal person, if offered a choice between candidates (McClintock, Simon) who are lying to you, a candidate (Schwarzenegger) who refuses to say what he would do both because he has no clue and because he thinks “people do not care about the numbers and figures,” and a reasonably-smart guy who understands what the tradeoffs are and has a set of ideas about what to do with them—as I said, a normal guy would choose the clued-in candidate who is not lying to him.

But, as I said, Dan Weintraub is strange. The clued-in candidate who is not telling lies is to be avoided at all costs … Anyone have any idea why Dan Weintraub is such a strange guy?

Well, no. But there’s a neat experiment by Eldar Shafir that I want to tell you about, which may possibly be relevant.

I think it appears in Redelmeier, Shafir and Aujla, “The beguiling pursuit of more information,” Medical Decision Making, (2001) 21(5): 376-81, but I’m not sure because Eldar told me about it himself a few years ago, just after he’d run the experiment at Princeton.

You take a bunch of sophomores and tell them they’re going to play the role of Admissions Officer to Princeton. They look at application files, and judge whether an applicant should be admitted. There are several criteria — let’s simplify and say there are only two: GPA and SAT scores. Applicants who score highly on both measures are strong candidates for admission. After having the experimental subjects rate enough files so you know what their standards are, you divide them into two groups and present the first (control) group with a applicant who has a 3.7 GPA (out of 4) and excellent SAT scores. Nearly all the subjects say this student should be admitted. The other (experimental) group gets the same file, except they’re told there seems to be an inconsistency in the application. The school transcript says the student’s GPA is 4.0, but the letter from the Principal says its 3.7. Do you admit, reject or ask for more information to resolve the inconsistency?

Most subjects ask for more information. It turns out that the Principal is right and the applicant’s true GPA is 3.7. With this information in hand nearly everyone votes — surprise! — to reject the applicant. The interpretation is that new information is weighted more heavily than it ought to be (in the light of evidence from previous decisions) simply because we have bothered to go and find it out, and not because it’s useful or ought to change our mind.

The link to Dan Weintraub is tenuous. We might say that Dan thinks he already knows all he needs to know about Cruz Bustamente, whereas he knows very little about Arnie. Therefore, the few bits of information he has about Arnie have been weighted far too heavily (and positively). This is consistent with the psychological mechanism identified in the experiment, but on reflection it doesn’t seem to be what’s happening in Dan’s case. Rather, a more severe version of the pathology may be at work. The mere fact of not knowing anything about Arnie makes him a more attractive candidate. Uncertainty about Schwarzenneger not only makes him look good, but it encourages people to discount what they already know about the other candidates. Better the devil you don’t know than the devil you do.

This state of mind is irrational but not uncommon. For instance, it’s widely known that someone who has been teaching in your department for a year or two is much less likely to be offered a tenure-track job than an external candidate, even when their records are basically the same. Familiarity breeds contempt. More severely, a faculty member once told me he would rather hire a candidate with excellent letters and no publications than one with excellent letters and a publication in a good journal, because the latter candidate had already shown what they could do whereas the former was still full of promise.

All of this may be beside the point, especially seeing as Weintraub is the kind of columnist who can write a sentence containing the phrase “turning California around from the ground up.” I’d like to see that happen.

August 22, 2003

France's heatwave

Posted by Chris

The latest figures from France suggest that there were up to 10,000 excess deaths in France’s recent heatwave. Chirac has called an emergency cabinet meeting and there will be an inquiry into the state of France’s medical services. As always, some kinds of people died more than others:

Half the victims are believed to have died in old people’s homes, many operating with fewer staff during the August holidays. Many hospitals had closed complete wards for the month and were unable to offer sophisticated, or sometimes even basic, treatment to victims. About 2,000 people are thought to have died in their homes from the effects of dehydration and other heat- related problems while neighbours and relatives were away.

I’m a bit surprised that no-one covering this in the media has yet called on Eric Klinenberg whose analysis of the Chicago heatwave 1995 - in his book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago - showed that what was at first thought of as a natural disaster had complex social causes. (UPDATE - thanks to Chris K for the link - big media in the form of today’s IHT have a piece by Klinenberg )

Here’s a snippet from an interview with Klinenberg:

The death toll was the result of distinct dangers in Chicago’s social environment: an increased population of isolated seniors who live and die alone; the culture of fear that makes city dwellers reluctant to trust their neighbors or, sometimes, even leave their houses; the abandonment of neighborhoods by businesses, service providers, and most residents, leaving only the most precarious behind; and the isolation and insecurity of single room occupancy dwellings and other last-ditch low-income housing. None of these common urban conditions show up as causes of death in the medical autopsies or political reports that establish the official record for the heat disaster.

Klinenberg found that although, on the basis of the natural-environmental facts more women should have died than men, the opposite happened because old women have better social networks than old men. He also found very significant ethnic and racial differences in mortality, again attributing this largely to social networks. It would be very interesting to see the ethnic and gender breakdowns for France.

(See also an article in the Guardian by Klinenberg, from almost exactly a year ago.)

August 21, 2003

Incarceration and the Labor Market

Posted by Kieran

Devah Pager has won this year’s Dissertation Award from the American Sociological Association. (I wrote about her work last year. It’s worth mentioning again.) Devah studies the effect of incarceration on labor market outcomes. Her approach was to conduct an audit study of employers, sending in applications for real jobs using vitas for matched pairs of black and white men. The abstract of a working paper from the study says, in part:

With over 2 million individuals currently incarcerated, and over half a million prisoners released each year, the large and growing numbers of men being processed through the [U.S.] criminal justice system raises important questions about the consequences of this massive institutional intervention. This paper focuses on the consequences of incarceration for the employment outcomes of black and white job seekers. … By using matched pairs of individuals to apply for real entry- level jobs, it becomes possible to directly measure the extent to which a criminal record in the absence of other disqualifying characteristics serves as a barrier to employment among equally qualified applicants. I find that a criminal record is associated with a 50 percent reduction in employment opportunities for whites and a 64 percent reduction for blacks.

Pager found that blacks “are less than half as likely to receive consideration by employers relative to their white counterparts, and black non-offenders fall behind even whites with prior felony convictions.” In other words, even though being black and having served time both negatively affect one’s employment opportunities, controlling for education and skills you are better off being a white male with a felony conviction than a black male with no criminal record.

To put Devah’s work in context, take a look at Bruce Western’s research in this area. “How Unregulated Is the U.S. Labor Market? The Penal System as a Labor Market Institution” is a good place to start. It’s a comparative macro-sociological account of what’s been happening to the U.S. penal system. A recent working paper co-authored with Becky Pettit, “Inequality in Lifetime Risks of Incarceration” estimates risk of imprisonment by race and education. Here’s the abstract:

Although growth in the U.S. prison population over the last 25 years has been widely discussed, few studies examine changes in inequality in imprisonment. We study penal inequality by estimating lifetime risks of imprisonment for black and white men at di erent levels of education. Combining administrative, survey, and census data, we estimate that among men born 1965–69, 3 percent of whites and 20 percent of blacks will have served time in prison by their early thirties. The risks of incarceration are highly stratified by education. Among black men born 1965–69, 30 percent of those without college education and nearly 60 percent of high school dropouts went to prison by 1999. The novel pervasiveness of imprisonment indicates the emergence of incarceration as a new stage in the life course of young low-skill black men.

August 20, 2003

Cosmic Inevitability

Posted by Kieran

Just read “E.T. and God,” an article by Paul Davies in the current Atlantic Monthly about what would happen to religion if extraterrestrial life of any sort were discovered. The author tends to slide about between that question and the narrower issue of what would happen to the theologies of the major world religions, especially Christianity. As Davies himself notes, the discovery of E.T. would do all kinds of things for groups like the Raelians. (Funny how their clone story dropped off the map, by the way. Whatever happened to the allegedy respectable science journalist who was going to verify their claims, I wonder?)

Davies shows a marked weakness for the argument from design, and in particular its “anthropic principle” subgenus:

If life is found to be widespread in the universe, the new argument goes, then it must emerge rather easily from nonliving chemical mixtures, and thus the laws of nature must be cunningly contrived to unleash this remarkable and very special state of matter, which in turn is a conduit to an even more remarkable and special state: mind.

He also paraphrases a biologist:

Simon Conway Morris, of Cambridge University, makes his own case for a “ladder of progress,” invoking the phenomenon of convergent evolution — the tendency of similar-looking [sic] organisms to evolve independently in similar ecological niches … Conway Morris maintains that the “humanlike niche” is likely to be filled on other planets that have advanced life. He even goes so far as to argue that extraterrestrials would have a humanoid form. It is not a great leap from this conclusion to the belief that extraterrestrials would sin, have consciences, struggle with ethical questions, and fear death.

Hey, why stop there? I bet they also have homologues to non-fat vanilla lattes, frat parties and New Labour. I remember seeing a standup comic do a routine where he said he was an alien from a distant galaxy, where life was wholly different from Earth. “We have no concept of love, and no death,” he said, “and a different-shaped gearstick on the Honda Civic.”

As for the anthropic principle — the idea that the fundamental physical constants of the universe are so tightly calibrated that life could not have happened if any of them were a tiny bit different, and hence that the Universe was waiting for, e.g., Orange County to emerge — well, it’s always seemed like a lot of badly-reasoned old cobblers to me. It’s a bit like wondering how eggs know what shape eggcups are, or feeling pleased that God has organized things in such a way that the sun rises in the morning, just when people are ready to go to work.

July 20, 2003

Shake'n'Bake Social Theory

Posted by Kieran

Real innovation in social theory is hard but brute-force approaches can yield results. Henry’s comments on Public Choice Theory reminded me of a simple way to innovate theory that you’re welcome to apply in various contexts as you please.

Take a few basic kinds of institutions, structures or practices that can be identified across many different social contexts. There are markets, say, and there is politics. There is ritual. There is culture. There are hierarchies. There are networks. And so on. (Not all of these are the same sort of thing; that doesn’t matter at the moment.) Identify the basic features of each. Now, pick one, take its defining features and see if you can find them at work in one the others.

For example, you can say Politics is really Markets. This is Public Choice Theory, waiting to be elaborated. Because the market form is such a dominant feature of contemporary societies and of talk about them, applying the “x is really a market” trick to any given x is by now quite a common trick. It can tell you a lot about what you’re studying, and it can even provoke that “Of course!” experience that Fredrich Blowhard had. It’s important to see, though, that you can do exactly the same thing in reverse, or with other combinations of concept and institution, and to similar effect.

Markets are really Politics. Out of many, Neil Fligstein’s work is a good example.

Markets are really Culture. Viviana Zelizer’s The Social Meaning of Money takes the world of apparently cold-blooded economic exchange and shows how the ritual creation of social ties between people is fundamental to the nature of money. Alternatively, for a comparative approach read Frank Dobbin’s Forging Industrial Policy to see how 19th-century economic policy about Railroads took as its model different conceptions of the polity in each of France, Britain and the United States.

Politics is really Ritual. Meyer and Rowan’s “Institutional organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony” makes this case.

Markets are really Hierarchies. Sounds like a tough one, but Art Stinchcombe has a go in “Contracts as Hierarchical Documents.”

Markets are really Networks. Harrison White. I should say, “Production markets are really self-reproducing interfaces created by the mutual monitoring of firms trying to find a sustainable niche in a production system.”

And so on. The “x is really y” approach to explanatory theory can be very productive, especially if you can come up with a comparison that hasn’t been done before. There are other tricks to try when looking for a good explanation to some empirical problem — or when looking for a good problem in search of an explanation. Howie Becker’s book Tricks of the Trade: How to Think About Your Research While You’re Doing It has a bunch of useful heuristics.

July 14, 2003

Crime and Punishment

Posted by Daniel

This series of reports in the Guardian is incredibly worthwhile, not just as an insightful piece of reporting on crime in the UK, but as a general example of what goes wrong when you try to manage things “by the numbers”. In general, if business school taught me anything it’s that companies with no strategy process of their own end up being managed by their most junior budget analyst (because he’s the one who writes the report and therefore picks the ratios to concentrate on), and it appears that something similar goes on in the public sector. While we’re on the topic, a couple of other fun facts for UK criminology nerds:

1. A prize for the first confirmed sighting this week of a report on the Home Office crime figures which attempts to find an explanation for the “massive increase” in the murder rate in the UK without the author realising that all 215 of the murders attributed to Dr Harold Shipman over a fifteen year period were booked in the 2002/3 numbers because that’s when the total was finally established.

2. One of the big driving forces behind the misbegotten policing “reforms” detailed in the Guardian article above was an “epidemic” of street crime in last year’s figures. It was particularly noted at the time that thefts of mobile phones had gone through the roof …. oh dear. It appears that more than half of reported mobile phone thefts and up to 10% of the total reported street crime in London is the result of people claiming to have had their telephones stolen in order to claim on the insurance. It gets worse … there is a distinct suspicion that some of the less reputable mobile phone shops are encouraging people to do this, in order to get the insurance companies to unwittingly subsidise upgrades in an increasingly competitive phone market. I’d always wondered how the industry was going to finance the transition to 3G handsets …

Both of the anomalies above, by the way (as well as the fact that, after a few years’ campaign to improve reporting levels, it is now the case that domestic violence accounts for a quarter of the violent crime in England and Wales, much more than anywhere else), can be avoided by serious researchers by always using victimisation survey data wherever possible.

July 13, 2003

Bright is as Bright Does

Posted by Kieran

Via Kevin Drum and an Op-Ed piece by Daniel Dennett comes word of The Brights. A “Bright” is someone with a “naturalistic worldview … free of supernatural and mystical elements.” (E.g., consciousness.) You can meet them, learn about what it’s like to be them and even sign up. They have helpful tips on how to engage your Inner Bright (sorry, that sounds a little mystical). For instance:

The most valuable contribution current Brights can make to the BrightS’ Movement is simply to “be the Brights they are” in their everyday interactions with others, keeping the most positive (Bright) shine they can on the endeavor.

This sounds like it’s being spoken by the bastard child of Buckminster Fuller and Norman Vincent Peale. It gets worse.

With the new noun, it’s rather easy to respond to queries as to your religion (“I am a Bright”) and also, as you may wish, to freely present yourself as a Bright in varied settings.

Scenario.  Suppose you are in a discussion with someone and the question of religion comes up. If someone inquires about your own religion, you can pop up with “Well, actually, I am a Bright.” The other person’s curiosity will probably take hold: “A Bright? What is that?”

If you ask me, the interaction is more likely to go like this:

Bright: Did you just ask me what my religion was?
Victim: No. I said “Do you have the correct time?”
Bright: Well, actually, I am a Bright.
Victim: You’re a pillock is what you are.

The Brights make excessive use of the word “meme” which also annoys me. But they are vaguely aware of some of the problems with their idea:

A Hint.  For reasons we hope are obvious, we would in fact recommend to Brights a bit of caution when discussing worldviews to practice avoiding adjective uses that could be readily misconstrued as arrogance until such time as the term’s new meaning takes hold in mainstream society…20 years?

Never, mate. Nev. Ver.

Who is this reminding me of, anyway? There’s more:

An Example.  Perhaps you’d like to think of the “constituency of Brights” as a community of fellow travelers in life. If so, then you will refer to us all together as a community.  How best to describe that community?  We suggest that, while “The Community of Brights” or “the Brights’ Community” are appropriate, “the Bright Community” is problematic.  In the last reference, “bright” is an adjective, and so it can have dual meaning.  The plural form helps to delineate the term as a noun.

I know. It’s the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. “You may join my organization, but first you must answer me these questions three.” It’s almost as bad as the dreaded Mensa, the organization for highly intelligent people who are nevertheless not quite intelligent enough not to belong to it. I imagine the next Mensa convention will be filled with people itching to say “I’m a Bright!” over a game of three-dimensional scrabble and a cup of Ovaltine.

July 11, 2003

Moving Images of Society

Posted by Kieran

I teach a course on 19th Century Social Theory [pdf] at the University of Arizona, of the kind often required of Sociology majors around the world. I usually begin with the question “How can there be a city as big as Tucson in the middle of the desert?” and go on to give them a sense of the differences between Europe around 1800 and the society they’re used to. Then we trace the development of the idea of the division of labor in the writings of each of the theorists.

There are other ways to approach a class like this. Rather than focusing on the authors, you can look at different images of society, basic metaphors or pictures of what the social world is like or how bits of it work. Thinking of how to build a course along these lines, I began to wonder what films could I show as part of the class to illustrate these images and processes?

We already watch two films in class, A Job At Ford’s and The Saturday Night Massacre. The former is about life at Ford’s River Rouge plant in the 1920s and ’30s and is great for getting a grip on Marx. The latter is about Richard Nixon’s efforts to get rid of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, and we watch it when we read Weber on Bureaucracy and the pure types of legitimate authority.

But what about other movies? Not just documentaries, not just closely tied to a particular social theorist, either. For instance, you can draw a strong contrast between images of society that emphasize the fluidity and open-endedness of individual agency and those that emphasize the robustness and durability of social structures. Run Lola Run is almost a reductio of the former vision. In it, tiny decisions or accidents of timing involving the characters have enormous ramifications for their lives, though the characters themselves are unaware of this. Everyone is fully in the grip of contingent circumstances. It’s hard to think of a complementary film, one where, ideally, people think of themselves as making all their own choices but in fact are highly constrained by structural circumstances. (Perhaps the demands of cinema militate against this sort of film.)

Other basic images or mechanisms surely also show up in film: self-fulfilling or self-defeating prophecies; the rapidity of modernizing social change; the potentially nightmarish qualities of rationalized bureaucracies (Brazil?); how status hierarchies and systems of power work; and so on. Suggestions are welcome.

July 08, 2003

Household Hub

Posted by Kieran

I’m in the process of moving house. While packing up the kitchen last night, it occurred to me that the moral center of many houses (in the Durkheimian sense) is not the living room fireplace or even the TV. It’s the fridge. The Romans had their lares and penates, the ancestral spirits and household gods who kept an eye on everyone. We have the fridge and its family photos, magnets, possibly poetry, timetables, assorted cards, drawings and the like. Together the accumulated stuff represents the social world of the household’s inhabitants.

Surely someone has written a bit of amateur (or professional?) cultural anthropology about this before. For instance, given that there’s a fridge in the house, will it always be co-opted as the moral focus of daily life? Does this vary by class? Ethnicity? Has the shift away from homecooked family meals increased the practical — and by implication cultural — importance of the fridge in everyday life?

I see a short New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell or Adam Gopnik. A few well-chosen illustrations. An amusing fridge story. Historical speculation. (What was the functional substitute for the fridge in Victorian households?) The whole held together by an aphorism just plausible enough to be believed for as long as it takes to read the article. If it works out, they could spin the thing out into one of those “A Cultural History of x” books (watches, pencils, mauve, cod, etc), making sure to point out that x changed the world. As fridges undoubtedly did.

Invisibility

Posted by Chris

A common device in the broad-canvassed social-realist novel is to have events throw together people who don’t seem to belong in the same universe, in such a way as to reveal the deeper social reality. Bonfire of the Vanities is a good modern example (why was the film so bad?). Such a real-life even occurred yesterday when an express train hit a minibus in central England. On the train were the Bishop of Hereford and a Tory MP, in the minibus were men variously described as arabs and as Iraqi Kurds. Several of those in the bus were killed and the TV news thought the incident sufficiently serious to send crews to the scene. They interviewed some young women who had east European accents and probably came from Poland or the Baltics.

These people had all been drawn to Worcestershire by the promise of work. The agribusiness that hired them obtained their labour from gangmasters based in cities like Birmingham. Perhaps some of the shoppers who bought their broccoli or cabbages did so because they had a preference for “English produce” over the sugar-snap peas flown from Zambia. Who knows? Anyway, those fields are not tilled by cap-tipping yokels with pieces of straw between their teeth living in tied cottages.

The Times report of the incident blames the supermarkets for forcing low prices on producers. Certainly the domination of the British food market by a very few small chains - Sainsbury, Tesco, Walmart - puts the squeeze on farmers, but the firms who employed these Kurds and Poles would surely be trying to minimize costs anyway. These new migrants are, in any case, just the functional descendants of the Irish who built the railways and roads, the West Indians who drove the buses and the Pakistanis who worked in the textile trade.

I’m surely not writing this to say that it is bad that Latvians and Iraqis are here (though the ways they get treated may often be very bad indeed.) I want, rather, just to notice, that, though yesterday’s incident exposed something of the real workings of Britain and the world, that won’t prevent most of us (me included, unless I think about it) slipping back into a false and illusory view of the English countryside. Afghans, Poles and Estonians who keep us fed are usually invisible - and they will be again.