gilbertrollins

That is because you don't know much about economics. Many of the things I've said here are completely inadmissible in the main stream of economics. I am assured of basic claims I've made on technology, economic history, economic growth, absolute measures of poverty over time, some general demographics, and others -- because they are either 1) foundational data in economics and the rest of social science, or 2) the product of extensive primary and secondary research in economic and historical sociology done over the last two years. Re (1): There is no arguing over the exponential secular rise in national income over the last 200 years. Just like there is no arguing the secular trend toward zero population growth in developed countries. Nor is there any arguing the exponential increase in the productivity of agriculture, measured in output per acre. These are facts -- not socially constructions to be altered by trimming at the margins of them in methodological debates. Re (2): My interpretation of said stylized facts does not come from some forceful imputation of economic modeling on sociological topics -- it comes in fact from a nuanced balancing of economic and sociological models. That nuance has however been completely lost save by a few members on the board, in favor of this eight year-old bitching about my background. I understand economic analysis, and its limitations, better than anyone on this board, my friend. Trust that. Do not advantage my candor about the amount of reading I've done in sociology in order to patronize me when I'm trying to have a mature conversation about the intersection of the disciplines Do you imagine many economists own Gramsci, Simmel, Durkheim, and Foucault, or have even an experience with secondary exposition of those authors? I do. I am well aware that my suggestion that technology solves more social problems than it causes, that economic growth is a good thing, that the quality of food has gotten better over time, and so on are anathema to what many sociologists believe. These, mind, are the usual applications or topics of economic analysis. The methods by which i hope to study them: networks, agent based computation, evolutionary dynamics, discourse analysis, and qualitative historical and organizational studies -- are almost uniformly inadmissible in economics journals. So here I am -- like my politics or not. Everyone on the board is rather assured of their positions on economic history, the progress of organizations for the last 200 years, the welfare effects of markets, the demographic affects of industrial food manufacture, and most incredibly, their assessment of measures of poverty, which are keystone data in sociology, and about which several members of the board have failed even to distinguish between absolute and relative measures of. Most astoundingly, everyone here is rather assured of their opinion of economics, seemingly having read little to none of it. But I don't think anyone here is smug for having their beliefs. I do understand the old stereotype of economists in the sociology department -- that economists are a bunch of arrogant pricks who use a curious set of methodological assumptions to ignore swaths of issues the rest of social science cares about. Note however, that I have not once made the reverse of the argument constantly volleyed at me, that you all are putatively dimly aware of the biases built into your research program, and the stereotypes built against economic scholarship. I think that kind of argument is a stupid excuse for pretentious ad hominem. That sort of "I see through the structural illusion you are a victim of" kind of argument is just the height of obnoxious intellectual pretense. So I don't do it. You, darthvegan, have taken occasion to call me a bigot, call my arguments laughable, and moreover have offered nothing to these discussions other than ad hominem about my training, and vague appeals to the authority of "decades of sociological research," without even paraphrasing it or using it to warrant a positive claim of your own. If that leaves me in the moral and scholastic low-ground, I'm not hopeful for my future in sociology after all.

Not only did you just contradict yourself by saying nobody's attacking my background, and then attacking my background -- you iced the cake with even more ad hominem by calling me smug and arrogant.

I'm aware many of my ideas are anathema to what many sociologists believe, but my theses are not without evidence. The comments coming from the board that I do not understand first-course sociological principles, or properly understand the social-advocacy agenda of sociological research, are on the other hand without evidence of my experience with sociology. I have taken several sociology and political theory courses and read a host of early modern social thought. Indeed one of my main mentors is a Marxian political theorist (that I work with such an individual despite our violently contrasting personal politics should I hope tell you something). I also have a strong reading of the history of economic thought, and therefore how economics relates to sociological and political interlocutors. Notably, it is precisely its failure to respond with sufficient force to many of the results in sociology, political science, and anthropology that motivates my transition away from economics. But if it is easier for some members of the forum to dismiss my arguments out of hand because I "haven't read enough sociology" or "am limited by the narrow frames offered to me by economics," and that hence I ought to brace myself for the "harsh reality" I'll face when I matriculate -- be my guest. That is nice and easy ad hominem, and extraordinarily naive of my background and training. My decision here is not unconsidered, nor are any of the ideas I've discussed.

That's a very mature attitude.

Alright look man, I just spent two pages explaining to you the particulars of which economic assumptions I think are good, and which are bad. In particular I discussed in detail that invariant preferences (what you're calling a "durable portfolio") is a bad assumption. I further explained that invariant preferences are not necessary for the derivation of supply and demand curves as is taught in mainstream economics. Pretty sure I cited Walras on that. You're either not listening to, or don't understand some of the arguments I've made, because I'm not arguing from the "lenses than that offered to [me] by economics." I just got done talking about context, macro social influences, cited a collective action model for the origin of technology, and had a nice chat with you about preferences. Let me try to clear things up: I said, "Ideas come from people," to which you reply: "And people tend to live in societies." Precisely, which is why I argue technology emerges from collective action. And why I spent two paragraphs outlining how socially dispersed knowledge advances not just the experience of the individual, but the aggregate as well. "You seem to operating on the assumption that all things work in a rational way. I contend that things are moving toward more uniform order, but that logical order is not an intrinsic quality of all reality. Thus, I believe it is apt to speak of things as more or less rational." I have no idea what this means, but it is not an answer to the original question: what is your definition of rationality? Or a "logical order?" "Increased productivity is not always a positive for workers, for example." Yes it is. Technology may temporarily displace some workers, some of the time. But in the long run it provides an incredible gain to society. The long run secular trend of employment across developed, and now too developing countries, is upwards of 90% employment, with a good portion of unemployment being voluntary and frictional. Screw guns make it easier to turn screws. And Macbooks make it easier to create and disseminate information. Technology makes workers more productive, which makes the economy more productive, which everyone realizes in income gains. (If this is going to turn into a poverty argument -- know that I'm citing absolute wealth -- not relative.) "Each technology is a new object in existence, too. Thus, it is a new temporal means to an ends-in-view, which means it changes the feasible set before a given individual in a given circumstance" That is precisely what I argued., and that it expands the set of such opportunities. "Our production systems produce in more standard ways, at more standard intervals, and demanding more standardized practices of workers." That is empirically not true, but it was the observation of the midcentury social theorists you've been citing, whose exemplar of "worker" was a factory worker. In fact workers have on balance achieved unprecedented autonomy and creativity in their service work, since the machines do the majority of hard labor in our society now (remember services is a generic definition, not an allusion to waiting tables -- lawyers provide services). Of course lots of factory work has gone overseas, but you will see the same substitution away from manufacturing in China eventually too. That is the secular trend. First the machines take care of agriculture, then manufacturing. "Following the definition that you’ve offered here, we can look at how food is produced, distributed, and consumed in modern life – if is produced in more standard ways (i.e. animals moved through an industrial production system), distributed in regular intervals and in standardized ways, and consumed by a population that is unfamiliar with the fact that the uniform slab of whatever is sitting before them used to be a particular organism n – a life process With due respect to your ethics about what you eat -- the Green Revolution, industrial farming, and industrial food processing have improved the diet of the world's people such that the average life expectancy of a human being in a developed country has more than doubled, and is quickly erasing hunger in underdeveloped countries. Five out of six billion people in the world lived on under $1 a day about 50 years ago. That proportion has flipped, so that by the turn of the century five out of six billion people had escaped the fate (Bottom Billion, Paul Collier; and Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, Robert Fogel). "Institutional power is distributed in positions occupied by real people in who perform their duties off of a standardized script" Actually organizational sociology goes to show just how non-standard, tacit, and fluid social roles are in an institution. "although this particular monetary policy did accompany a period of privatization that political leaders exploited in very corrupt ways." ​Exactly. "Privatization" is not "market" reform -- it is plutocrats selling government owned enterprises to their buddies at rock bottom rates. The effect is to just transfer a state-owned monopoly to a private monopolist. There's nothing "free market" about it. I like markets for the same reason you like democracy -- competition -- the antithesis of monopoly. I addressed the impact of stabilizing a currency -- which was the purpose of pegging to the dollar -- not the plutocratic misadventures of Argentinian cronies. "Am I to understand that you believe that capitalism has always existed, that is tantamount to concepts like economic growth and technological innovation" Yes, trade has always existed. Technological increase has only existed since the Industrial Revolution. Trade and innovation/technology are not the same thing -- not by a long shot -- nor does one necessarily imply the other, in either direction. " and that Weber’s argument is really useless because there was no actual change in the social system of production?" Straw man. I conceded the enormous change in technological advance and tried to offer some reasons for it, in detail. My argument here, from the beginning, has been that the advance of technology has not made people more alienated, "rational," calculating, and that on balance and in the long run it has benefitted society enormously. Because of technology we have metropolises with tens of millions of people living in them in relative harmony. "You seem to be arguing that there is no need for a society to adopt new principles, narratives, values, practices, etc." Again, this statement just completely ignores my argument. I said: "[My argument on technology] is very different from a conservative argument that "X social technology (norm) is the best we can do and we should not try to make it progressively better." I merely argue that to-date, many of these social and mechanical technologies, in the form of bureaucracies too, are the result of our best and quite-good efforts so far." "How do you propose to study social mores without studying meaning?" What's the difference? I'm quite sure I made no such proposal. "Again, models are not reality. This can be helpful, but it also distorts understanding of the actual decisions that people make." Do you buy less coffee when the price goes up? And do you change jobs when someone offers you a higher salary elsewhere? Do you prefer to purchase things when they are on sale? Do manufacturers scale back inventories when they're not selling, and lower their prices?

Collective action.

I don't know what a "rational character" is. Absolutely. But technology is an extension of humanity -- machines are just embedded complexes of ideas. Ideas come from people. Thus technology stores algorithms and "thinks" for people, reducing the cognitive load. It's an efficiency. A massive one in fact, boosting mean national income in developed countries by between an estimated factor of between 10 and 30 in the last 200 years. I don't argue that hasn't changed the way society looks. I'm arguing that it has not fundamentally changed the way people make decisions, and that it certainly hasn't constrained people's choices and abilities -- in fact its effect is the opposite. Now we're getting into some good stuff. Standardized? No. Let's define a standard: a practice or decision rule "do X when Y to achieve Z." So we have machine standards (Microsoft Word) and social standards (Don't let the door slam in someone's face behind you.). To say that we have become more standardized on my reading is to imply that along with the increase in mechanical technology, the increase in social technology means that there are an increasing abundance of rules that delimit behavior and constrain people. I argue in fact, that just like mechanical technologies that help you get up in the morning, or tell you when you're about to mow down a 5 year old by backing up your SUV, social technologies help us make decisions. These get, at some point in their emergence and origin, chosen -- and thus I think it is reasonable to assume they were (locally) welfare enhancing. That is very different from a conservative argument that "X social technology (norm) is the best we can do and we should not try to make it progressively better." I merely argue that to-date, many of these social and mechanical technologies, in the form of bureaucracies too, are the result of our best and quite-good efforts so far -- that the whole False Consciousness and social critique reading of them is often extraordinarily uncharitable, that they are mostly welfare reducing and only got implemented in the first place because the people who volunteered for them are powerless, ignorant, and exploited. So yes, mental toolkits have changed as a result of the environment. That is -- every time I get hot I don't have to sit there and reason through how to cool myself down. I just walk over and turn a $4 fan on. There is a very compelling theory that specialization among people eases the information storage and processing burdens on any individual, allowing that person to become much more adept at her skill and knowledgable, in aggregate increasing the intelligence of our "collective brain," of which the ideas embedded in machines are a nice archaeological record of. These developments therefore increase human scope, and bestow efficiencies such that people have more time for more profound existential relationships with themselves and one another. Wasn't Argentina's currency spinning out of control? Inflations are terrible. Prices are essentially data bits of information that convey a host of information to me. By observing that chewing gum is $1.25 and a mid level sofa is $2,000, I am able to ascertain millions of people's relative valuations of goods -- their tastes and preferences -- without ever talking to them. When hyper inflations happen, I can no longer reliably get that information anymore, and I get scared, terrified in fact to transact for fear of losing on the deal. Businesses raise their prices in order to assure they're beating the rate of inflation, which just keeps going up, in a positive feedback loop that makes actual economic production of goods and services grind to a halt. Pegging currencies to a stable currency like the dollar solves the problem. As does getting the printing press out of the hands of Kings and Legislatures -- who will print money just to fund wars and social programs, causing inflations. I won't get into the international trade arguments -- but a country is not a business, where exports = revenue and imports = costs, and where the goal is to maximize revenues over costs. Mercantilism doesn't work. That is the reading of his thesis that I confronted. It's not a case of "a couple new facts." Hard work and thriftiness are ancient. And anyway, savings and investment and hard work don't create economic growth, which is what Weber was trying to explain. Competition levels profits. Trade alone does not create growth. Technological innovation does. Studying the systematic emergence of guiding mores through language is precisely sociological. Corpus linguistics provides a nice clean method to do it by. No. Prices go up: people buy less. Downward sloping demand curves. Prices go up: firms produce more. Upward sloping supply curves. Markets clear when suppliers and demanders agree on a price. Suppliers and demanders adjust inventories and consumption relative to the prices they observe in the market until the quantity of goods supplied and demanded are in equilibrium.

^ joke Not a fight at all. I like a nice sharp argument and a bear hug after.

Wanna wrestle?

"My point is more that the narratives people used to deliberate decision were in informed by a different set of beliefs." That's how I read your first statement. After you translated/expounded on your first statement, the second^ seems to submit directly to the counter I made: "I understand this is a common position - and it is the way the history of thought reads, but it's not clear any sort of rationality, instrumentality, or logic disseminated in the material history of people's decision heuristics" ideational framework change in the early modern --> decision criterion, preference sets, or whatever else you wannna call it at the agent level fundamentally changed --> people now more "rational" "If you contend the concept that modern society is progressively more characterized by rational systems, accompanied by a greater acceptance of rational decision making processes and increased utility of technical expertise, I would love to hear a more detailed explanation as to why" Before I do, can you give me a couple examples of "technical expertise," so we're working with the same definitions? Also "rational decision making processes." I haven't read any Weber and need to. From what I understand of expositions of Weber, though -- I largely agree with the compromise he was trying to strike between oh I dunno what you'd call it - ideational structure, culture, symbolic ritual -- and material incentives. What you're probably citing him for though is his treatment of the early modern transition, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It's just incorrect history, though he gets a pass for being a genius with limited scholarly resources at the 1920s? 1930s? Chinese confucianism was pragmatic from the top to the bottom, inspiring meritocratic (rational? <-- such a huge umbrella) government, a proliferation of technology that outpaced the West around 1500, give or take a 100 years of variance, and so on. Haneatic merchants were extraordinary traders. Thrifty. Speculating. The Medici in Italy. It goes on. Polyanian histories, deriving from the tradition lain by Marx down through Weber and the rest of the critics of modernity are histories of thought, and paid very little attention to material fact and actually counting up with primary sources what happened in The Street back then. You can't do history by reading what historical philosophers had to say about their contemporary society -- though we both agree it's an important variable. Like I said - I understand though that this version of economic history is almost unanimously taken for granted in other disciplines. I'm not trying to patronize you by saying that. I'm saying: consider that it's not just a fact of life, considering a critical majority of economic historians think it's rubbish, because they went back and did the counting for those eras. There is nothing to show that people became verifiably more individualistic, selfish, speculating, alienated, concerned with ends as against means, or any of that. Nothing that is, other than arm-chair theory done at the time. Marx was a smart guy, and an atrocious historian. Then again - he gets a free pass considering all of his contemporaries were terrible empiricists as well. "I am most interested in engaging with precisely that which you find useless -- symbols." Not at all. I'd like to map the Oxford English Thesaurus in network software and see what kind of structures emerge, testing evolutionary, cascade, and other hypotheses on the data. Empirical sociolinguistics work is almost entirely devoid of the study of meaning, and lacks any sort of systematic theory of behavior, either agent-, structural-, evolutionary-, or anything-other-based. It also doesn't seem to give a damn about meaning. Phonym changes disseminate from populations of teenage girls in modern America. Neat. What does that say about how culture emerges through purposive speech? Next to nothing. "But philosophy posturing as science does a disservice to both. This is a bit dramatic." I had economic theorists in mind when I said that. Though all the social sciences are guilty of arm-chair temptation. Theory is cheap. Data are expensive. So supply and demand say that . . . . C. Wright Mills was lobbing the same methodological complaints at sociology in the 1950s that modern economic methodologists have been lobbing at their discipline for the last four decades -- enough theory already. Theory without tests is philosophy. "Sociology deals with human meaning because it looks a human relations. This makes it necessarily tied to philosophy. This is why it is often referred to as a pseudo-science." I'm up to date on first-course definitions of sociological theory. I'm down on my knee trying to engage that woman. "The pragmatist school of thought contests the notion that agents make decisions using a durable set or portfolio of preferences." Read the paper. Great stuff. Thanks again for the link. "Cause flows from means to ends, and not the opposite . . . Some have come to capture this with the phrase: “a world of flows." Breh -- I was trying to get at a theory of meta-preferences which derive in social context, last year -- I'm on it "But the point remains that there is a sophisticated argument against the decision making process assumed by all rationalist models." I told you I left it behind. Bringing supply and demand with me, because (as I think I said earlier) supply and demand do not depend on utility maximization and Samuelsonian rationality, price theory, strict methodological individualism, Bayesian Rationality, or whatever particular version you wanna take from the set of the Stricter Theories.

I understand this is a common position - and it is the way the history of thought reads, but it's not clear any sort of rationality, instrumentality, or logic disseminated in the material history of people's decision heuristics, in the early modern period, or anywhere else since. Been working on precisely that problem for about a year now. Yep. Models are just models. And you can make take that argument to a nice fancy meta level and show that all human cognition is a mere framework of metaphorical relations evolving dynamically, etc. But then we're into a level of abstraction I don't think is really useful. Not putting up a straw man -- that's just where the comment took me. If you're alluding to economics-as-neoliberal ideology, I don't buy that. If only for the massive mis-reading of price theory in the street. Your garden variety conservative doesn't know what a demand curve or positive sum trade is, and thinks about trade in zero sum terms just like the left -- the only difference is they don't call zero sum transactions "exploitation," they call it "winning," and deservedly, in their minds, at that. If anything that, and a limp extrapolation of it to "as long as government lets the winners collect the spoils" is a good working definition of neoliberalism. And that framework, I'm sure you know, misses just about every first principle taught in a freshman year economics course. So mathematical models as rationality and instrumentality inducing normative tools of hegemony? No. (again not a straw man; I just love to vent -- reading people like Chris Hedges leaves me with very hurted feels taht I have to vent somewhere) Outside of experiments, surveys, and ethnographies - endogeneity, priming, cueing, etc not really a problem. Meh. I'm 29. I've done enough "looking at my invisible backpack of priviledge and unexamined cultural frames dictating my priors, etc. Pretty square here. I think it's something useful to keep in mind, but not important enough to worry a ton about. I'm going to regress quantitative language data, do some experiments, examine historical documents. Anyway, even if I do come off the arm's length observational analysis - I think these kinds of "inherently dynamic and recursive effects" concerns are the broken shin-bone of anthropology, and should stay there and die. Why? Because it becomes an excuse to do theory. Lots and lots and lots and lots of theory. And say nothing about society. We already have philosophers. And I'm all for it. But philosophy posturing as science does a disservice to both. Oh I'll resolve it alright. Take a dose of agency and bounded rationality, add a network, show the emergence of the network feeding back on the decision heuristics of agents on the network, tie it all back to the bits of definitions lying around like "social norms" "conventions" "choice" and so on -- and you've got a real shot at a generalizable micro-to-macro-to-micro social theory. Another thing I'm all for: generalizable models. Paying due to context does not imply ad hoc hypothesis testing. Consistent assumptions are a beautiful thing. Until they ossify. Then you switch departments as an undergrad and go start fights on sociology boards.

This is as I understand it (which is not very well) the now more widely used definition of rationality in economic theory -- Bayesian rationality. Agents update not their preferences, as this avoids the intransitivity issue that follows, but their beliefs about the world based on passed experience. You can model such a situation rather neatly mathematically using conditional probability. Anyway, it's an effort to keep everything which actually dictates behavior exogenous to the agent's motivations -- which again their choices ought to reveal as long as their preferences are consistent. I don't find the argument particularly compelling, but it should be noted that it iw a way to salvage formal rationality and give it more texture. And it should be acknowledged as one of many, many successful attempts economists have made to incorporate greater and more realistic descriptive accuracy into their models. Outside my particular dissatisfaction with certain fields in economics which I would have otherwise pursued (economic history, behavioral economics, growth theory, experiments), I think economists do deserve a lot of the credit they've gotten, and think the vitriolic attacks on the discipline are completely unproductive. Of course there is plenty that comes from the other side of the fence -- but two wrongs don't make a right. Importantly one should note that Marshal's derivation of supply and demand do not rely on preference axioms and utility maximization to derive demand and supply curves -- though that is the dominant treatment in economics at the graduate and undergraduate level now. Not a year and a half ago I thought I was a registered genius for discovering and defining the structure/agency dichotomy in some detail independently while going through economic literature for my research. So I'm embarrassingly new to the astounding maturity of its exposition in sociology, and appreciate the links. As I've moved into the literature on social norms and economic sociology, I've found papers that anticipated and covered in much better exposition ideas that it took me months to derive on my own. Most recently I read Granovetter (1989) where he notes the automata that both hyper structuralism and hyper rationalism both imply. I noted to my adviser last year that both sociology and economics suffer from "given-ness," that is looking for data or givens in the actor's (agent's) environment which necessarily imply his behavior -- in economics you have the ecology of supply and demand (firms constrained by prices, and consumers too) -- and in sociology you have the cultural framework. What I really enjoyed about economics at first was that it seemed to reify agency, and imply a dignity about humans that structural and false consciousness theories I was used to thinking in terms of strip of the individual. Turns out once you go deep enough into the details of economic rationality - agency altogether disappears again. So I'm not happy with either approach at all. Their is no human being. Rojas just posted something about this on his blog. Everyone should know that this is a very old problem in the methodological and philosophy of science literature in economics, dating back to at least Friedman (1952) (all the stuff about assumptions not mattering, only predictions -- as if modeling, etc) Herbert Gintis argued sometime in the last ten years that economics ought to give up on prediction and focus on explanation. Unfortunately "prediction" is a philosophical criterion imported from the hard sciences into economics which it is not likely to give up any time soon (even though the vast majority of theoretical papers in economics, which have incredible influence, turn on illustrative anecdotes to motivate whatever mathematical model will follow -- as much is an exercise in blackboard description, and just as ad hoc as sociological efforts have been accused of being). If I remember right, the economists whom have explored evolutionary theories have argued pretty strongly that description is what's important -- as evolutionary theory even in biology is strikingly not a predictive theory. The difference between explanation and prediction is that prediction is an ex ante criterion and description an ex post criterion. Prediction seems at first blush to have a little more power and magic in it I suppose because describing something that's already happened feels a lot like story telling. Unfortunately for this debate -- story telling is about as good as anyone's going to get in any science. The task is to come up with stories about motivations and behavior that seem warranted within reasonable tolerances, and consistently play out. Supply and demand are one such story. Cascades are too. Etc.

A lot of behavioral economics is essentially sociology. New institutional economics too. What you see happen with these programs though, is that someone comes along and points out with a series of empirical situations that cannot be ignored that context matters, preferences change, institutions matter to markets, etc. And immediately the micro theorists go to work trying to put it back into the theories of games and optimization - which often times don't offer up testable predictions as claimed. Then the questions stagnate. As a result, the modern games literature on institutions (see Acemoglu, currently the top cited economist in the discipline and author of the popular and astoundingly poorly done and incorrect Why Nations Fail) and the modern behavioral literature are rather immature. Frankly, a lot of the fight between economics and the rest of social science is just political, re whether or not markets are great or a perverse travesty. But as both economics and sociology have shown respectively for the last four decades -- structural theories do not in any way imply markets are garbage -- and utility maximization in no way ensures markets are incredible. Frankly, my fascination is with social coordination -- Pareto improving trades are merely one subset of mechanisms I think make that happen. Through a combination of norms, institutions, trades, technology, and so on nearly 7 billion people in the world on balance cooperate and benefit one another daily. That, if there is a reason to be ideologically motivated toward social science, is I think a good one. And economists and sociologists would seem to share the same fundamental fascination to some degree. That is, except for cranky scholars who will find a way to argue the sky is falling no matter the facts they're presented with.

I guess we have to define what a "rationalist model of behavior" is. Coming from economics, then, my definition is one where agents beyond childhood have fixed and complete preferences (that is, you know what you want, and have a complete ordering in mind i.e. apples>oranges>bananas>etc), and that you thus maximize those relative to the costs and benefits you face, which do vary. The assumptions about preferences can be translated into axioms about the Real line (the real number line), which means that you can do calculus on them, and once you can do calculus on them, you can find maxima and minima of functions. If you vary preferences (i.e. I like apples>oranges today and oranges>apples tomorrow), or if there are holes in your preferences (i.e. I don't know if I like box fans or not, so apples>?>oranges>?>?), then the maximization problem falls apart. But if you assume those axioms, you're golden -- because you can study people's preferences based on their choices alone. Most economists are willing to consider some version of context and all kinds of sociological concepts like cooperation. But those necessarily get subsumed back into that mathematical model one way or another, because again you cannot do the calculus otherwise (game theory assumes the same axioms, though is slightly different from traditional optimization). I think those are good assumptions most of the time. For most situations people encounter they do have a relatively complete set of preferences defined ex ante, and they do order them consistently. So you get demand curves popping up everywhere. But preferences do vary, sometimes in appreciable ways that economic theory cannot explain. Like the mass cessation of smoking after the Surgeon General's announcement it was bad for you decades ago. It wasn't just that people's estimates of the cost of smoking went up, affecting their "budget constraint" subject to the same preferences they'd had when they were smokers. A new social norm emerged where it was considered unaccetable to smoke any more -- and many people stopped preferring cigarettes. Since the agency/structure debate is so old by now in the social sciences, I'd really like to see some unity of analysis emerge by compromising the two perspectives in some systematic way. But it's a dogged fight by now. Sad.

Thanks!

With due respect to Professor Rojas, who is an extremely smart guy. There is more than a small caveat in leveraging 3rd-year UG statistics correlation coefficients reported in a management journal, done on private industry letters, to extrapolate that academic letters are worthless. I understand he is very tired of reading generic tripe about students. Most academics have gone out of their way, in fact, publishing scholarly comments on how to write letters - in order to stop that nonsense. And those who've given it a moments thought or two dramatically discount a letter like that anyway. That is why, for the two advisers I hadn't done independent research with; I gave them a file with my NSF proposal and statements, a recent summary/review I did for a class of a scholarly paper, my personal statement, and otherwise annoyed them to death with substance (dramatic polemics: do not annoy your advisers). Letters are a poor predictor of performance in the settings where they have been studied. Here’s a clip from an article in the journal Public Personnel Management : “Even though references are commonly used to screen and select employees, they have not been successful in predicting future employee success (Muchinsky, 1979). In fact, the average validity coefficient for references is only .13 (Browning, 1968; Mosel & Goheen, 1959). This low validity is due mostly to four main problems found with references and letters of recommendation: Leniency, knowledge of the applicant, low reliability, and extraneous factors involved in the writing and reading of letters of recommendation.” There’s a number of studies in psychology and medicine about letters and future perfomance. The studies show letters aren’t very good. They’re glorified junk _____________________ Rojas ends that comment with a reference to psychology and medicine letters - where UG RA's often - maybe nearly exclusively work on lab teams where they Pivot Table in Excel and point out spelling errors during research meetings if they're lucky. People used to working with lab teams of graduate students -- psychologists and medical researchers, say -- have no time for undergraduates, often have their graduate students vet and train UG research assistants. In these circumstances I've seen at least one academic have her UG RA write the letter for her, and in such circumstances a reference letter written by a graduate-student supervisor would be more substantive. If you have made a substantive theoretical or empirical contribution to your adviser's project, potentially over many months or more, and they have advised your independent research as well, your letter counts for something. Disclaimer: I am 100% defending my adviser right now whom has invested an unparalleled amount of time in me, and whose letter I hope will push my applications into the offer pile.

So lemme get a poll from everyone, then. This is the second time, to my amazement, someone on the forum has agreed with me on or argued vociferously from a rationalist model. Maybe that is not surprising in that functionalism agrees in many ways with other models of interests and incentives. To what degree are sociologists (controlling for sub-field variation -- just looking for quick-glance estimates here) do sociologists argue from incentives, costs, and benefits? To extrapolate a bit on the costly-signaling argument: institutions seem to abound with these sorts of initiatory rituals. And at first glance, the social scientist might think since they have no immediate material value, they are just vapid rituals. Yet we understand there is no such thing as a vapid ritual -- we might suppose any myth-made conveys social freight. Since being a part of one network or another is so valuable, networks may "charge" a loading fee one must "pay" to join. A golfing group for corporate executives, and the country club dues and social dances they do to join would be an obvious and possibly infuriating example, but groups down to the level of the family, bowling league, and friend network confer enormous material and immaterial benefits in sharing and creating information, spreading risk, etc. So I see that these intiatory rituals are everywhere. Four years of college to obtain a certain stratum of employment, long courting periods and rituals to marry (including dowry), gang rapes and murders and beat-ins to join, and even early modern dueling has been shown to be a costly-signaling device to demonstrate loyalty and commitment to the aristocracy. If anyone has thoughts or further reading that would be as the kids say, "hella."

^That is diametrically opposite to everything and everyone I've ever talked to about letters. Beyond GRE (which isn't even itself totally unbiased toward say a native English speaker with articulate parents like myself who can take the verbal cold and get a relatively high score), every evaluation in the package is biased, including your transcript (the wealth of grading rubrics makes comparing "As" across large populations a really imperfect exercise -- though I don't mean to patronize you with things you already understand. Faculty recommendations are the most credible signal in your package. Faculty have to control for their own reputation and maintain their own integrity when they evaluate students; not to mention it is a confidential process so there is absolutely no guarantee a letter will glow. Indeed "damning one with faint praise," is it seems in the academy a polite way to say "I do not recommend X for graduate study." Letters often do highlight candidate's weaknesses. And in fact letters that do not address them are not taken seriously. I got roasted a little at a banquet with a quotation from a letter someone wrote for an award I got once: "_________ came to me a very bright, and very ignorant young man." I've given my advisers, I think, more than enough material about my faults (which are many) to write an honest letter. And I would be disappointed if they did not feel comfortable discussing them in a dignified way, conveying that on net their belief is that I am capable of overcoming them. Then again, I might be living in Neverland daydreaming about how my letter writers approach the task.

I mean -- those are around the 80th percentile. Thanks for the information and support. Economics minimum Q is about 164, and T20 will want to see 166+. Technically it's high-school math. One of the reasons they changed the test was that fields like economics, physics, and engineering did not present enough variation at the top: note that an old 800 only translates to (I think) a 164 or 166 now. I don't think it's a great system, GRE, but economically speaking it makes sense as a costly signaling device. One "pays" to have one's application looked at by sacrificing inane hours getting good at solving tricky math and verbal problems quickly. When I took the GRE I was still equivocating about economics or sociology, and didn't study at all for the verbal because that month, I was going to be an economist. In retrospect I wish I had, but it is what it is now.

Also pages say 10-30 pages. Double or single spaced? And I'm using ASA citation detailed on Purdue Owl. Is that going to fly?

Thanks again for the cites. The philosophy of science I have read highlights that insularity and the attending field-specific jargon are problems across the academy. I am not merely extrapolating from my (limited) experience in economics.

Cool thanks for the recommendations.

If you get into PAM -- spend the summer working with Chiang and other mathematical economics and econometrics texts. Their PhD economics program is T20 - and not a joke. Those are your 1st year courses. My friend, with an economics undergrad and mathematics minor went to PAM this year and has been at the bottom of her class the entire time. The math is extraordinarily difficult.

You should post some titles of demographers and family sociologists you like. There is an opinion in economics that this sort of thing (in poly sci too) is "econowannabe." But I haven't read enough to know. Nancy Folbre's work is very good. And of course some of the basic out line of it makes quite a bit of sense -- technology makes income go up, makes time more valuable, raising the opportunity cost to having children, and increasing their marginal productivity in a "family production function" -- hence population growth nearing zero. But outside that I don't see how economics has a lot to say about the family, which a social psychology that respects a wider diversity of behavioral heuristics than utility maximization probably does.

^frankly I think coining neologisms and using elegant variation in prose just makes scholars feel unique, and important -- without adding anything to discourse -- one sees the effect similarly in economics, where over a couple decades a litany of mathematical models can pile up on one very narrow topic, all using in fact novel mathematical techniques, but few of them adding any substantive insight into the question at hand -- which may be very simple -- like the elasticity of substitution between immigrant and domestic workers.