Social Science

I’m just back from an excellent Rousseau Association conference at UCLA to find, now I’ve tuned back in to CT, that we’ve been discussing sociology v economics as theories of society. Funny, because one of the the things that came up in LA was the old Robert Nisbet thesis about the conservative origins of sociology. The idea is that sociology has its origins in the counter-enlightenment attempts of Burke, de Maistre, Saint Simon etc to theorize about social order in the light of the Revolution. It turns out that I’ve long since lost or given away my copy of _The Sociological Tradition_, so I haven’t been back to the original, but I’m curious as to what the thinking is on the Nisbet thesis today. I’m perfectly fine with the use of methods drawn from economics in the social sciences (and with other approaches too) but it is worth noting that most economics involves a straighforwardly rationalistic and enlightenement attitude to the social world, one that the Burkean tradition disputes as being inadequate to social understanding.

“Fabio Rojas”:http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2009/06/22/if-sociology-sucks-why-do-economists-keep-on-doing-it/ is annoyed at how economists are not only the unwitting slaves of the ideas of defunct sociologists, but are in denial about it. On the one hand, I think that this is unobjectionably true (and I note in passing that Fabio is notably friendlier than many sociologists to economic theory). I was at a meeting of the International Society of the New Institutional Economics some years ago (which you would _think_ should be as sociology-friendly as an economics gathering could get), where Avner Greif gave a keynote address telling those gathered that game theory really was a subset of sociological inquiry, and that everyone should be reading Durkheim and Weber. The collective response to this claim could not readily have been described as enthusiastic.

But on the other, I find myself equally peeved by the ways in which sociologists react to economics and rational choice theory. [click to continue…]

The news that NICE has put acupuncture and chiropractic on the list of approved therapies for non-specific lower back pain has led to about the reactions you’d expect – back-slapping and high-fiving from the crystals and “life force” crowd, agonised complaining from the professional skeptics. But it’s actually a sign of something that ought to make us worry, not much but at least a little bit, about the way in which we’re doing medical science in this country.
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This is a follow-up to the distinctly non-sober but not wholly unuseful thread attached to my post on the Boston Review piece on Malhotra and Margalit’s survey research on anti-semitism and the financial crisis. The authors have asked for a chance to explain themselves, and their methodology, which has come in for a lot of criticism of an unavoidably speculative sort in comments to my post. Let’s hope this clears a few things up. Let’s try to be civil, shall we? The following is, obviously, not by me but by Malhotra and Margalit. And not edited by me in any way. – John Holbo

We are glad that our article generated thoughtful discussion, and we would be happy to address some of the questions people raised in the comments section. If our responses do not specifically address your particular comment, apologies in advance. Our goal here is to touch on some of the main issues. [click to continue…]

Funny to see the virtues of R extolled in The New York Times. Although I did wonder whether Professor Ripley spilled his tea when he read this effort at introducing Times readers to it:

Some people familiar with R describe it as a supercharged version of Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet software that can help illuminate data trends more clearly than is possible by entering information into rows and columns.

On second thoughts, though, I imagine no tea was spilled. It would take rather more than that. There is the required bit of stuffy huffiness from a spokesperson for the SAS Institute, too:

SAS says it has noticed R’s rising popularity at universities, despite educational discounts on its own software, but it dismisses the technology as being of interest to a limited set of people working on very hard tasks. “I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code,” said Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, “We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.”

R also gets some stick (though not in the article) from the computer science side of things for being fairly slow in comparison to some potential competitors. But it’s an exemplary open-source project and is now the lingua franca of academic statistics, for good reason. In day-to-day use for its designed purpose it’s hard to beat. The commitment of many of the core project contributors is really remarkable. In the social sciences R’s main competitor is Stata, which also has many virtues (including a strong user community) but costs money to own. I like R because it helps keep your data analysis honest, it has very strong graphical capabilities, it’s a gateway to understanding new work in statistics, and it’s free. Just take my advice and be sure to read the Posting Guide before you start asking any questions on r-help.

Over on the Edge of the American West, Eric has been working up some graphs on what the WPA spent its money on. Data visualization nerdery is below the fold. The rest of you can go back to your pie charts, whether in honest ignorance or a spirit of desperate contrarianism.

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I rarely read bestsellers. I’d like to think that it is because I’m a snob, but the truth is that it is mainly because I lack the sense of urgency needed to trigger the purchase/acquisition. They’re bestsellers for goodness sake, which means there are tens of thousands of them around and they’ll be widely reviewed, so if, in a few years time, they still seem good and relevant I can get hold of them then and see what I think. I read two this year. I’ll write about Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), which I loved, later; for now I’ll recommend Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success (UK) (one of my dad’s Christmas presents this year; I’m also getting him Austerity Britain, 1945-1951 and The Complete Ivor The Engine, lucky man — you can tell how confident I am that he never reads anything I write; I’m pretty sure he hasn’t even read my draft of the pamphlet we’re writing together).

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Can’t imagine “how we missed this”:http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/02/16/summers_should_go_ex_harvard_dean_says/ the first time around …

Over lunch not long after Summers took over the presidency in 2001, Ellison said, Summers suggested that some funds should be moved from a sociology program to the Kennedy School, home to many economists and political scientists. ”President Summers asked me, didn’t I agree that, in general, economists are smarter than political scientists, and political scientists are smarter than sociologists?” Ellison said. ”To which I laughed nervously and didn’t reply.”

Via “Josep Colomer”:http://jcolomer.blogspot.com/2008/11/normal-0-21-false-false-false.html.

As part of a minor project aimed at eliminating the cliche “the very real concerns of the white working class” (the latest weaselly codeword for people who want to gain the political benefits[1] of playing anti-immigrant politics while avoiding any of the costs) from British political life through a campaign of sustained mockery and invective, I had an article up on the Guardian blog last week. A digression that I probably should have edited out of it, but in fact liked so much that I not only left it in but am posting it here now, concerned the sunset of what was once an important subsector of the British social work profession in places like Kilburn and Camden Town:
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The Spencer Foundation has just announced the second of its major strategic initiatives: on civic learning and civic action. Here’s the announcement, and here are the application guidelines. Please direct queries to the program administrator (whose contact details are at the bottom of the guidelines page).

And, if you missed it, the first strategic initiative is on Philosophy in Educational Policy and Practice; I am happy to entertain queries on that one.

While you are at their fantastic new website, check out the page devoted to papers resulting from Foundation grants: two interesting papers, one by Eric Hanushek on policy analysis, the other by Helen Ladd on accountability.

You only have to hang around the world of social science research- or policy-related blogging for a few hours before you come across someone willing to snottily inform you, or some other luckless interlocutor, that although the finding of this or that paper may appeal to you, nevertheless don’t you know that Correlation Is Not Causation. Often this seems to be the only thing they know about statistics.

I grudgingly admit that it’s a plausible-sounding rule, and in the textbooks and stuff. But, to be honest, I read it too many times in various posts and comments threads the other day, and in my raging pique I found myself thinking that the next time it happened I would say, “That’s completely backwards: in fact, causation is just correlation” and fling a copy of Hume’s first Enquiry at their head. Or at the screen, I suppose, but that image is less satisfying, because now who’s the crank on the internet, etc.

This Halloween when we take the kids Trick-or-Treating, I will dress up as Correlation, as befits a social scientist. My wife will of course be Causation.

Amartya Sen turns 75 later this year (on November 3rd, to be precise), and we are going to celebrate this. In academic style, of course. “Kaushik Basu”:http://people.cornell.edu/pages/kb40/ and “Ravi Kanbur”:http://people.cornell.edu/pages/sk145/ have edited a 2-volume Festschrift, aptly called “Arguments for a Better World“:http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780199239993. I am not sure when Sen is going to read those 1400 pages, but that detail shouldn’t spoil the party. And Basu and Kanbur are also organising, together with the Institute for Human Development “a conference”:http://amartyasenconference.net/ to celebrate his birthday. That event will take place in New Delhi on the 19th and 20th of December. “The Call for Papers”:http://amartyasenconference.net/call-4-paper.asp, which so far I haven’t seen circulating, is only open to young economists and social scientists, with ‘young’ being defined as those under 40. It’s a pity, though, that political philosophers are not invited to submit papers, given Sen’s important contributions to that field.

While at a conference in Germany over the weekend, I was initially quite chuffed by the greeting on my hotel-room TV:

But I quickly learned I am quite unable to compete on this front:

Somewhat more substantively, the conference, on norms and values, was attended by a bunch of interesting philosophers and political science types of a generally soft rat-choice disposition. As it happens, this week Aaron Swartz is writing about Jon Elster’s recent book, Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences. Aaron likes the book a lot. I haven’t read it, but now I’m curious to do so. Elster’s early work laid out an ambitious agenda for social science and its critical edge did a lot to kill off some styles of social explanation that were prevalent at the time. But then the prospects for achieving the more positive side of the research program seemed to recede in the face of efforts to achieve it, to the point where Elster became highly critical of work that might well have been inspired by Ulysses and the Sirens or Sour Grapes. The most recent book seems to be a comprehensive expression of late-Elsterian pessimism about the possibility of a general science of social explanation.

By Kathy G.

The results of this new study on pain assessment by Princeton’s Alan Krueger and SUNY Stony Brook’s Arthur Stone are for the most part not particularly surprising. As it turns out, economic inequality impacts practically every dimension of human existence; even physical pain is unequally shared. For example, the Krueger/Stone study found that respondents with low socio-economic status experienced “significantly higher pain occurrences and severity.” For instance:

The average pain rating is twice as high for those in households with annual incomes below $30,000 as for those in households with incomes above $100,000.

And

Participants with less than a high school degree reported twice the average pain rating as did college graduates.

Occupational status seems to play an important role, given that

the average pain rating for blue collar workers is 1.00 during work and 0.84 during nonwork, and for white collar workers it is 0.61 during both work and non-work episodes.

And in an interview, Krueger said, “Those with higher incomes welcome pain almost by choice, usually through exercise,” he says. “At lower incomes, pain comes as the result of work.” [click to continue…]