gilbertrollins

I just called around. Michigan is already slash has already done round one -- the grad secretary is updating the files with the loose ends that have come in late right now.

I understand you're good an confused about your future, and I've been there, with lots of big dreams of influencing the world socially etc. At this stage your goals are diffuse enough that a PhD is not for you though. It is not a booster credential to writing op-eds and eventually common-press books. Very few people finish the PhD. Very few of those land tenure track jobs at R1's. And an even smaller subset of that set become successful public intellectuals. Since you're in education and considering community engagement, I'm not entirely surprised you find the prospect of counseling college kids uninspiring and not-world-changing. Go volunteer at an alternative high-school in a major city. Or you could Teach for America (though that program has gotten extremely competitive, and they're not going to want theoretical aphorisms in the application -- they want hardened dedication and realistic teaching plans). "Community Engagement" is in most respects disheartening, obnoxious, impoverished (for the client and the practitioner both), and generally depressing. Most of my friends are social workers, teachers, etc. These people make about $25,000 a year dealing with nearly insurmountable social problems, bureaucracies and bosses that are a constant uphill battle, and often times completely ungrateful clients -- in usually decrepit facilities. Teaching at alternative schools can be inspiring (and so can social work), but more often than you would like, the job will be getting the students to treat you and one another with a modicum of respect, and kicking the smartest kids out of the school because they're the ones leading the gangs and selling the most drugs. At the end of the day most of these people would give their left arm to continue doing the work, or do it for free. Add to that, that a lot of this work is not especially high-skilled, and that therefore there are a lot of people flooding the market -- and you see where the wage comes from. I don't want to discourage you from trying to impact the world around you. I would suggest you get a slightly more focused idea of which social issue is the most important to you, and how you think you can influence the most people regarding it, and give that path a try. What you're discussing as "community engagement," and a PhD are mutually exclusive paths. And journalism is just about disjoint from getting a PhD as well.

I accidentally submitted to (Removed at Users Request) late (the pay screen was apparently not the *submit* screen), and contacted them asking to have them replace my writing sample with an updated version of it (added an abstract; corrected some mechanical errors). They were totally cool about both. And all of the other admissions secretaries I've talked to have been totally helpful. (Removed at Users Request)

If this still characterizes your goals: "though it seems that completing a PhD in Sociology might help me share my ideas more widely, I am primarily interested in independent scholarship and community engagement rather than working toward a tenure-track professorship," I would advise against getting a PhD. A PhD will in most scenarios actually only help you share your ideas more narrowly -- that is with your subfield colleagues. To many of us that is a Pareto improvement over not sharing them at all.

This brings up something I'm interested in. Economics got really excited about B.F Skinner behaviorism, along with the psychologists, after about the 1950's. That's why there's such a huge emphasis on "revealed preferences" in economics -- agents vote with their feet, and through those choices we can infer their beliefs/desires ex post as long as we keep a couple axioms about preferences straight. So there are no surveys in economics. Who in sociology has defended surveys and studying stated-preferences, or human science "at the lip," from the behaviorists? Is this a common methodological issue? We learn in economics some nominal things about how crappy people's reports are of what they're willing to pay for things (it often differs wildly from what they actually will pay), and we learn fun facts like men on average report having something like twenty sexual partners and women report something like ten (it's a statistical identity that should match). There's also a long line of reasoning coming down from Hobbes in economics, that talk is cheap, commitments aren't credible unless people dedicate resources to them, etc. Where can I get the sociological side of this story? What devices are used in survey methods in order to control for biased reporting (I know the basics of randomization and blinding, and a little bit about confusing people so they don't know what's being studied and game their responses, but that's about it). Also, since multivariate regressions are getting more common in sociology, how do you get enough variation with 1-5 discreet scale responses to questions, in order to really decipher the relative magnitudes of X and Y variables on the dependent variable? It seems like you'd really want to get data with continuous variables, and have as few discreet measures as possible.

Not sure, but the offering of Alien Interview and 9/11 conspiracy videos on Youtube is totally enthralling. Highly recommended.

It's well documented that economics students give lower-than-modal offers in Dictator and Ultimatum games, because of course the ostensibly positive education in human decision making translates into normative prescriptions for behavior. That says nothing about kids with greed-is-good priors self selecting for the discipline. Sociology of science studies will in general I don't think be well received in economics, or at least have very little impact on methodology etc. if carried out because generally economists and economics students are of the opinion economics is wholly positive. Heterodox and other people have been picking at economics for a long time about how it is inherently political, about how any science is inherently socially and ethically constructed and rhetorical (Michael Polanyi, Deirdre McCloskey, Philip Mirowski, etc). There is enough of a history of heterodox economists, Wall Street Journal op-ed people, sociologists, and philosophers of science making this complaint that there are enormous defenses built up to it in economics by now. All of that and the above said -- I do not believe a critical majority of advanced economics students or especially professional economists maintain a "Greed is Good" ethical philosophy, nor do they vote in such a manner. A majority of economists vote democrat in fact, and get really annoyed with the stupid Ayn Rand interpretation of economic theory. Posted the above cuz I wanted to give people a better idea of what team I'm playing for since I'd picked so many fights defending selective portions of the discipline.

I listed non-academic work very briefly at the end, because I did not want it to get lost that I had supported myself throughout college. This is of course increasingly common and less of a "wow he still got As while holding down a job," but I something I wanted on the table. Keep in mind I only spent 4 lines doing it though, with none of these ridiculous descriptions like "waiter -- folded napkins and other preparatory work; served customers in a fast paced environment."

I'm in the same boat as magicunicorn. If I haven't shown my cards enough already, here goes nothing. (Removed at Users Request) I have said and believed a mountain of unbelievably stupid and misinformed things in my life*. And getting It Right is, ethically, Job Number One for me -- becoming a competent professional academic is my way to do that. There's no guarantee I won't still end up a partisan hack; lots of older scholars when making their foray into policy entrepreneurship and op-editorial land end up reaching way outside of their expertise and saying stupid things. But I'm at least going to amass serious evidence for my arguments before turning them into kitschy popular press books (but I think like a lot of people, I'm already writing chapters of those books in the back of my head). *Edit: hell - even last week!

Oh yeah, for sure. I didn't mean to say it's impossible. It's just that, I find that most people who don't have a strong interdisciplinary reading, or strong mentors and colleagues actually traversing the boundaries, have an unbelievably naive few of how interdisciplinarity actually works. Unfortunately most of those people, are most people (and especially undergraduates and administrators). I am ALL FOR good interdisciplinarity, and think we should have much, much more of it.

The point was to introduce the paper, which shows that people who have ethical priors that greed is ok, or a good thing, are more likely to self-select into economics programs. The kid I tutored is a walking contradiction, because he basically owes his entire existence to rampant altruism (including several of his internal organs), yet basically signed up for economics to reify the ethical positions batted around on Fox News (which isn't the point of a more sophisticated economics, but unfortunately programs have to teach who signs up, which includes a lot of "this is another business major, right?" kids). Self-interested exchange isn't a terrible bane, and you do get what economists would call marginal allocation from it -- the invisible hand postulate isn't entirely mistaken. But very little of what goes on in the economy actually represents textbook, self-interested trades. Most of it is highly cooperative and organized behavior, motivated by institutional rules and decision heuristics.

(Removed at Users Request) economics has normative implications, how an old-school reading of it promotes and legitimates self interest, and how that idea is not a necessary theoretical consequence of economic assumptions, and that it is empirically incorrect that self interest leads to economic growth (you can't get cooperative organizations [firms] that way, nor technological increase). (Removed at Users Request)

Caltech's department isn't interdisciplinary and is precisely an example of how stupid of a label "interdisciplinary" is. Caltech's program, just like decision sciences programs, merely apply the theories of games and optimization to non-traditional topics outside of economics. The only thing going on at Caltech is some positive political theory (read -- mathematical political theory), and economics. Most students who apply to Caltech also apply to a range of economics programs as well. Unless you want to do economic experiments, write agent-level decision theory, work on formal models of voting, or other established mathematical tracks in poly sci or econ, Caltech's program is not for you. And there are a lot of these programs everywhere. Business schools talk about interdisciplinarity. I spoke with several business PhDs at Wharton and Fuqua -- these "interdisciplinarians" are just as focused on writing cool models and getting them published in the American Economic Review as anyone else in economics is. Interdisciplinary studies like those at Great Books programs are truly interdisciplinary. And every once and a while you find someone like Herbert Simon or John von Neuman who can have huge impacts on computer science and economics simultaneously. Or Elinor Ostrom, influencing political scientists, sociologists, and economists at the same time. Otherwise interdisciplinarity is an administrative buzz word meant to make campuses sound progressive, and is nearly meaningless.

Indeed, it can, which is why the unabashed social advocacy in many social sciences scares the shit out of me. Logical positivism can go too far -- where you get a situation like that in economics where scholars can't face that the work de facto implies normative and ethical conclusions. But having little to none of it creates a situation like that in development policy research, where people refuse to accept that foreign aid has done more to prop up dictators and promote centrally planned economies that keep people without lights and starving, than it has to help the poor -- though giving it without paying any attention to its results sure makes the occident feel warm. Ignorance is like Christmas every day.

Interdisciplinarity is a sham. There is no umbrella discipline, and every social science sells itself as if a training in its core of first principles allows one to study virtually any human phenomena. Every discipline accrues fashions of analysis and topics which, for otherwise arbitrary, socially constructed, and relativistic reasons get labeled "analytically meaningful." Out of that process comes a lot of insight and constructive thought. And also a good deal of pandering, repetition, and dogma. It is what it is. Personally I think dogma is a good thing -- it forces someone who wants to say something new to amass an enormous body of evidence to do so (that thought isn't original to me, but I forget who to cite). People who do successfully traverse disciplinary boundaries have to do so over some sort of established bridge, and even when making some headway end up stepping on tons of toes anyway and usually draw incredible criticism from the main stream. On my reading, anyone going this route has to develop core competency in established methods and intuitions in their home discipline, and amend from there. Practically speaking, that means going through the first and second year gauntlet. I don't think you're going to get a great deal of credit among potential academic advisors, even in a Policy PhD program, for your professional experience. Your prior research, however remarkable, was not done in an academic setting, and to most academics is thus merely fancy sounding Man In the Street pontificating. Intellectual pretense is unfortunate, but a reality, even if you showed up at a Policy PhD program with your papers. I would give it another semester before you do anything, and definitely try and take the free masters if you can get through quals, if your primary objective is to get back to private research.

The main argument for negative-interest money suffers from the naturalistic fallacy, that money should "rot" or "rust" in storage just like other commodities. The rest of the argument is that negative interest rates force money into circulation and defeat the alleged tendency for money to get invested more and more into financial markets and away from the "real" economy. These sorts of arguments are neither explored nor respected in economics, because they deny basic economic realities -- for instance, that the financial sector, even after a recent explosion in growth in the last couple of decades, still takes up only a few percent of national income. That is, briefly, why the idea will sound zany to economists and likely count against you. As far as dissertation proposals in economics SOPs go, cherub is correctly identifying the advice for social sciences *outside* economics. It is not customary in economics to pitch anything more than broad research interests in an economics SOP. Most of them are barely read. In fact they are read, in the words of my (economics) adviser, "to see if you're crazy or not." And on another occasion, "to see if you think you're going to solve world poverty by turning ice cream into money."

^Fair enough. Is there any push to get some uniformity of definitions among theorists?

Thanks for coming through Jacib -- if anyone else can help, that'd be great. Norms and conventions are derived almost precisely the same way in economics -- as what you call "coordinated equilibria." Basically, if any of you have ever seen the basic prisoner's dilemma payoff matrix - imagine that but with the deck stacked so that *both* strategies get *both* parties the equivalent payoff. The classic example is two people meeting on a narrow road with no established drive-on-right-side norm. In some of these games a third-party "judge" enforces a rule of behavior. In some of them an equilibrium can involved without third party enforcement (particularly attractive reasoning for the anarchists, emergent-institutions, and social movements theorists among us). None of these games (theories) satisfy me. At all. I see absolutely no reason to demand that norms and conventions be derived from strict rational action. It's important to note that an economist's conception of a norm, convention, or institution is extraordinarily different than a sociologists -- these are mere "constraints" to economists. To a sociologist, people "adopt" norms and conventions, right? Incorporate them into their "portfolio of preferences" or their identity, or social script. They're recommendations and encouragements as much as they are constraints. The economic view of them is profoundly immature, because it denies that social location within frameworks of norms and institutions actually influence the agent, affecting her tastes and desires. Norms and conventions and institutions are to an economist the same thing as a price -- something that delimits behavior -- still holding desires and goals constant and irrelevant (well, it's not that they think tastes and desires are irrelevant - it's just that under standard assumptions people will reveal their desires through their choices - so the researcher need not look at their desires directly [by say, asking them how they feel, or observing their dialogue]). I read the Bordeiu wiki, and Fligstein's '98 paper (earlier?). Here's what I've picked up so far: Whether you derive them from utility maximization or not, norms, conventions, and "rules" are just social instructions "do X when Y." So in the sociological lingo, you've got a collection of them providing a "script" for a Goffmanian "actor," and in the economic lingo you've got a "decision rule" guiding an "agent." Now, how do institutions, culture, and fields factor in? I'm thinking these are made-up of norms, conventions, and rules. Culture, institutions, and fields are the house; norms, conventions, and rules are the 2X4s. Building from micro to macro - it seems like we might start, at the agent level, with a portfolio of preferences, or an identity, which is made up of norms, conventions, and rules, which are dictated by fields, institutions and culture. Usually when we talk about a convention or norm, we're talking about a rather specific and local behavioral guide. So these seem "smaller" than institutions. When we talk about an institution, we're usually talking about a mental hospital, or a "set" of norms/expectations like a marriage. Fields seem bigger yet - sets of institutions. And culture people usually assign to diffuse and enormous things like huge regions, ethnicities, very-long-run traditions, etc. As far as I can tell, then, "networks," have come out of the attempt to physically measure social structures *materially,* in terms of actual reported connections between people. So we can use network theory to measure any level of the "russian dolls" sets of social structure -- frameworks of norms, local institutions / organizations like a little league, national or international religious cultures. I really think a strong-form taxonomy is necessary for subfields to talk to one another. I'm not arguing a strict division of labor. I'm saying there will be gains from trade if people are speaking the same language. Some of these papers I'm reading are impossibly obtuse.

Alright yawl -- I've been going through the history of thought and theory here. I do not understand how the taxonomy of "social objects" works. Here are some objects I see used sometimes interchangeably, sometimes not. Norms = Conventions. But then not. Institutions = Fields? Surely not. Institutions are a subset of fields - i.e. institutions make up fields? Culture differs from fields how? Networks fit into this taxonomy how? I understand that the boundaries are loose here on purpose - action is dynamic, ends become means, change is constant, embeddedness laid upon embeddedness, and all that. But there can't seriously be no delineation among these concepts.

*stands again, shoulders back, ready to argue from newly-discovered privileged perspective*

Single tear.

There it is ladies, smug white smile and all. Disregard the graffiti in the background - I've since realized the errors in my ways and now only hang out to plan the systematic oppression of marginalized groups -- English Lit discussants working on gender issues, mainly.

Can I get an amen? "AMEN!" Can I get a hallelujah? "Hallelujah!" I mean, really folks. When it comes down to it, outside all of our careful pretentious language -- a substantial portion of people I've been arguing with here are upset that a man has called into question the salience of male professor / female student relationships, assumed that I make the points I do merely because I'm a man, and have for the last four pages attacked my position solely on that. I mean, seriously. Grow up.

Elevated hand slap.

= I propose that we have sexual intercourse in the near future.