Asia Source has “an interview with Amartya Sen”:http://www.asiasource.org/news/special_reports/sen.cfm , which touches on the record of the World Bank and IMF, the evolution of Sen’s ideas on “capabilities”, democracy, the postwar histories of India and China, anticolonialism, and much else. (Found via “INBB”:http://www.inbb.org/ , which looks like a really interesting blog.)
From the category archives:
Social Science
Well, the Lancet study has been out for a while now, and it seems as good a time as any to take stock of the state of the debate and wrap up a few comments which have hitherto been buried in comments threads. Lots of heavy lifting here has been done by Tim Lambert and Chris Lightfoot; I thoroughly recommend both posts, and while I’m recommending things, I also recommend a short statistics course as a useful way to spend one’s evenings (sorry); it really is satisfying to be able to take part in these debates as a participant and I would imagine, pretty embarrassing and frustrating not to be able to. As Tim Lambert commented, this study has been “like flypaper for innumerates”; people have been lining up to take a pop at it despite being manifestly not in possession of the baseline level of knowledge needed to understand what they’re talking about. (Being slightly more cynical, I suggested to Tim that it was more like “litmus paper for hacks”; it’s up to each individual to decide for themselves whether they think a particular argument is an innocent mistake or not). Below the fold, I summarise the various lines of criticism and whether they’re valid or (mostly) not.
Tyler Cowen “had a discussion of this”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/economics/index.html a few days ago, but I think it worth a mention here: tit-for-tat was beaten in a recent iterated PD computer tournament. The winners entered a large number of different strategies programmed to communicate with one another. By signalling their existence to their confederates and adopting master and slave roles, some strategies were able to gain full exploiter’s advantage over many rounds and thereby build up huge scores. Non-confederates were systematically punished by strategies from this stable, thus damaging the scores even of conditionally co-operative rivals. Full details “here”:http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65317,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_6 .
Why are all required statistics courses essentially the same? They start off with bland assurances from the instructor that no knowledge of maths is required and that the concepts involved are pretty easy to grasp – all you need to do is turn up in class and do lots of practice questions. Oh, and have a positive attitude. Yeah, right.
I’m about to take the third stats exam of my life. As with the two before, failure is a barrier to continuing my ‘real’ studies. And, though this is my third tour of duty through histograms to simple regression, failure is a distinct possibility. The null hypothesis, that Maria has sufficient knowledge, nerve and luck to once again pass stats by the skin of her teeth, looks like being rejected. Of course I don’t blame myself, not entirely. I’d rather blame the teachers, or perhaps the subject itself.
Matthew Turner has been reading John Gunther’s _Inside Europe_ , a classic from 1936, and (in “two”:http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/2004/10/british-politics-in-1936.html “posts”:http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/2004/10/more-british-politics-in-1936.html )regales us with some of the facts about Britain contained therein. I particularly liked this one:
bq. * The decline in the birth rate, which, according to competent estimates, will reduce the population to thirty-three million by 1985.
I’ve spent the past couple of days at the latest in a series of conferences under the name “Priority in Practice”:http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uctyjow/September2004.htm , which Jo Wolff has organized at UCL. I don’t think I’d be diminishing the contribution of the other speakers by saying that “Michael Marmot”:http://www.ucl.ac.uk/epidemiology/staff/marmot.html was the real star of the show. He’s well known for the idea that status inequality is directly implicated in health outcomes, a thesis that he promotes in his most recent book “Status Syndrome”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0747570493/junius-21 and which first came to the fore with his Whitehall Study which showed that more highly promoted civil servants live longer even when we control for matters like lifestyle, smoking etc. Even when people have enough, materially speaking, their position in a status hierarchy still impacts upon their longevity. One interesting other finding that he revealed was that being in control at home (as opposed to at work) was massively important in affecting women’s longevity, but didn’t really impact upon men. There’s “an excellent interview of Marmot by Harry Kreisler of Berkeley”:http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people2/Marmot/marmot-con0.html in which he outlines his central claims.
One interesting recent strand of research on justice and human well-being has been that inspired by Amartya Sen’s “capability” approach. There’s now an association dedicated to this, with Sen as its first President and Martha Nussbaum as President-elect. Details “here”:http://www.hd-ca.org/about.php .
Berkeley’s “Mike Hout”:http://sociology.berkeley.edu/faculty/hout/ and my colleague “Fr Andrew Greeley”:http://www.agreeley.com/author.html have an “Op-Ed in the Times today”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/04/opinion/04greeley.html?ex=1252036800&en=76ca9f02982c96ca&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland making some good points about the Republican Party’s support amongst Evangelical Christians. Religious and political conservatism don’t line up as closely as you might think, and certainly not as much as the talking heads assume. The intervening factor is how much money you make:
bq. [N]either region nor religion can override the class divide: if recent patterns hold, a majority (about 52 percent) of poor Southern white evangelicals will vote for Mr. Kerry in November, while only 12 percent of affluent Southern white evangelicals will.
bq. Most poorer Americans of every faith – including evangelical Christians – vote for Democrats. It’s a shame that few pundits, pollsters or politicians seem to notice.
A related point is that the swing to the Republican in the South has not not been a uniform migration. More of the better off have drifted, but not necessarily the poorer Whites. Of course, the claim isn’t that all poorer White Evangelicals vote Democrat — Brayden can testify to that — but rather that a surprisingly large number do, even after the universally acknowledged success of the “Southern Strategy”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy and the long-running tactic (going back to Reagan) of appealing to the Patriotism of poorer Americans in an effort to make them forget about their pocketbooks.
Shameless plug: there is a new book out on Social Inequality edited by Kathryn Neckerman and published by the Russell Sage Foundation. The volume brings together recent research from the various social sciences on the topic of social stratification. I am often frustrated by how common it is for researchers to ignore papers by others on topics relevant to their work simply – or so it seems – because the researchers are in other fields. One nice aspect of this volume is that it features research by sociologists, political scientists, economists and demographers alike. The shameless plug has to do with the fact that I co-authored (with Paul DiMaggio, Coral Celeste and Steven Shafer) one of the chapters called “Digital Inequality: From Unequal Access to Differentiated Use”.