gilbertrollins

If you want to do decision theory or game theory long run, you'll need much more mathematics than linear algebra. You need to get comfortable with and develop a taste for writing formal proofs. Make sure the linear algebra course you take is not an engineering-student section, which will ignore the proofs. Also, real analysis and calculus-based (or even better measure theoretic) probability. Decision theory is about writing mathematical models. It's not particularly interdisciplinary in methods -- it's applied mathematics. Same with game theory. The other avenues I don't know anything about.

I think everyone's research interests are tied to something personal. You can mention the abuse without going into details, which may come off as a pity sale. The important part of the statement is how the research then motivated your continued interest, which you should discuss in detail.

Absolutely. Much appreciated. I read through a little of the social exchange lit. It's basically microeconomics applied to consumption and exchange of relationships-as-, and people-as-goods. I really like Coleman's rationalism a lot more, using rational choice as a point of departure to demonstrate the importance of norms and structure, rather than cramming social relations into a utility function. Will read further, cheers. The behavior of blades of grass fit an optimization model. They act as if they're optimizing. So do the foraging distances of lizards, sociobiologists have discovered. And of course economists have shown the plethora of conditions under which people's decisions will fit that model too. That says nothing about the agent-level decision heuristics agents are actually using to make choices. Nobody is doing calculus subconsciously. It has been shown computationally that even if it takes a person, say .005 seconds to rank a preference for apples over oranges, and you assume a relatively small population of things one can attach preferences to (an actually enormous set), you easily get a time requirement that's longer than a human life. That's just specifying your utility function. Then you have to go out and get information on the opportunity costs of everything around you, another gigantic set of information. And then subconsciously run the calculus to find globally optimal maxima on your utility function. So at the system level, maybe because of evolutionary complexity or some such, systems establish equilibria. But as I see it we make decisions with a range of heuristics, socially derived, path dependent, and so on -- doing so without a lot of deliberate thinking. I really need to spend less time on the internet.

My reading of Lakoff and in behavioral economic theory and experiments (ultimatum, dictator, and public goods games) are the only thinking on social exchange I've done. Which is admittedly pretty paltry. When I said scarcity creates the tension which breaks down social ties, I had in mind iterated exchanges between trading partners eventually breaking down -- two car dealers who help mitigate each other's inventories say, and eventually get into a fight where the friendship dissolves. Social exchange is obviously a much broader taxa than just "long term tacit negotiations." I suppose I was arguing more against the sort of separate spheres framework Jacib was (only slightly) implying. I think it's just zany to talk about "market and non-market" exchanges. We start to get into Polanyian and Marxian distinctions about instrumental and rational versus intrinsic and altruistic (Compte? shoot me) action that way. As I see it those distinctions pretty well lead to the unproductive split between economics and sociology. So loosely drawn what we have now is one discipline arguing rational action founds all behavior, which the customary normative recommendations fall out of. And the other argues all behavior is social, which the customary normative recommendations fall out of. That analysis pretty well ignores major methodological advances in sociology and economics I understand, but it's not entirely wrong either. So yeah, non-market and market based action are a silly taxonomy I think. Every market transaction is a social transaction, and every social transaction contains "market" elements. People consider their prudential self interest inside the family, as much as their social obligations at the check-out. Thanks for all the recommendations and discussion.

It's not clear that market exchanges don't build social capital like trust and shared identity. Reciprocal giving is as I see it inherent in just about any social exchange. You'll like George Lakoff's chapter in Moral Philosophy on ethical exchange. People seem to keep a cognitive balance sheet, and speak this way: "I owe you one." And if I've done something nice for you, even immaterially, you "owe me." In that way people exchange tacit contracts for social deeds. When you run experiments and sit people in front of a computer program where they can "produce" widgets, and no formal rules of the game, they quickly discover the gains to be made from their comparative advantage, and they trade with one another. The most interesting thing about those experiments is the chat dialogues. Subjects frame the market exchanges in terms of "giving." In any case: there are mesopotamian tablets that are several thousand years old which have long-distance contracts on them. Going even further back, you find precious stones at archeological digs which could only have been mined many thousands of miles away -- those stones didn't get there by walking. There is absolutely nothing different between a barter and a trade with money, outside the symbolic attachment of exploitation and other ethical nastiness to monies that scholars like Graeber have been claiming since Plato. This is in fact the biggest point of price theory -- what's being traded are goods for goods and services for services. Money is just a scorekeeping system that helps people communicate one another's values to one another, like language or clothing. Money units are entirely arbitrary measures. What makes a pair of socks worth "5" and a pair of shoes worth "60" are the aggregation of zillions of people's relative values for all of the other goods in the economy. I digress. Essentially, the observation that monied trade is brutish and nasty actually descends from the Western aristocratic and religious traditions, ostensibly because merchants always competed with the aristocracy and clergy throughout history for stature, and for two very different systems of getting wealthy: enslaving people, conquering people, taxing people, and taking the things they produce -- or trading with them. Monied trade builds social capital. Lots of it. Very few business deals go bad, and mostly contribute to long-term bonds which translate into community spillovers. Employees stay at jobs for several years, and build lasting relationships with one another while there. The whole "outsourcing" exemplar of the employment relation is just statistically incorrect. 92% of the country is employed right now, and that is the long run trend. I think people are right to sense some social tension over monied trade -- but that tension is inherent to the scarcity of resources period. And it will have to get mitigated by any system of distribution. Trade happens to be a very good way to resolve that tension. To say that it causes it is to misidentify reverse causation.

My UG adviser is older and said specifically that they're "tired of the games," when I asked to co-author. When you've got people banging down your email asking you to come to their conference and forward contracts signed for your next book, it's difficult to imagine why you would want to jump through R&R hoops for months at a time.

That's a weakness of forum threads -- I end up (probably irresponsibly) arguing several people's posts at the same time. I think you've made some nice clean points. To return to the positive case for or against Occupy as anarchy, I have read almost no history of social movements outside economic history (e.g. American slavery, the emergence of firms, panics, and the Industrial Revolution), so I don't know the comparative history of Occupy v. suffrage, say. I have however anecdotally visited a number of intentional communities which attempt flat organization, and in my experience it never turns out as purported. Organizations sociologists were discovering decades ago that the actual structure of firms hardly followed the flow chart of official titles. Conversley, even though intentional communities like Occupy lack formal titles and formal organization, I am arguing that hierarchy emerges nonetheless. Now I didn't attend any Occupy events, so I can't say on this particular case. What I've observed in intentional communities before is customary distinctions of authority emerging like age, tenure in the organization, education, meritocratic contribution, and so on. Sadly what I see happen to cooperatives and intentional communities is their constant failure, and I conjecture it's because of their lack of regard for institutional forms in the main stream, which carry efficiencies. So I may be reaching to extrapolate to Occupy. But I doubt it. I've been intimately associated with the demographic all my life, understand the ideology rather well, and have seen the effort play out many times. I was arguing alternatively that society is overflowing with examples of anarchy, if we define it in terms of voluntary association, which is I think a more general and accepted definition than organizationally flat. I agree that we need to make a definition of hierarchy precise before we argue about its place in analysis. But OP and the rest of the thread seemed to accept Occupy's definition of anarchy, which encompasses an impossibly broad range of social criticisms mere organizational flatness does not capture. That's what I was responding to. My hobby horse, which I injected into the thread, is that "non-hierarchical structure, lack of directive authority, and diffuse responsibilities for the establishment and maintenance of norms and ideas" characterizes a majority of social organization.

My definition of anarchy is voluntary association. Not an absence of power. Not an absence of hierarchy. Inter- and intra-institutional mobility are as I see it essential to mitigating the corrosive tendencies of hierarchy. But I think on the other side of that continuum, flat organizations are just as corrosive. My intention wasn't to offend anybody. All of the behaviors of movement anarchists I brought up are proud flags these kids wave around. I've eaten dumpstered food. I've been to the Rainbow gatherings. And when I watch videos of college students or high-school dropouts getting pepper sprayed it makes me extremely sad -- sad for the confused ideological motivations of both sides of the fight. I'd rather approach the situation with a critical analysis in hopes that we can better understand social coordination than watch people scream at each other in the street. And yes, I am extremely optimistic about the state of the world and the progress we are making materially and socially. That I think is a necessary dialectical transition in a discipline which has since Compte, Rousseau, and Marx abhorred the social forms it witnesses.

Graeber's political advocacy may or may not have had anything to do with his tenure decision. I didn't create the hypothesis -- his defenders did. I attacked Graeber's scholarly work on the warrants he avers. How does that make me a bigot? Does reading economic history make me a bigot? Does considering his argument in comparison to widely accepted, primary-sourced research that is decades old in economic history make me a bigot? Personally I consider myself an anarchist. I used to live in a truck, slice. I'm not the Harvard conservative you're picturing. Frankly I'd love to argue with Graeber, and want to do much more work in historical sociology to get the Scientific Creation Stories about ancient trade and states straight. Obviously not enough work has been done here. I might point out that you responded to one of my earlier posts with "yawn." I think it's clear who came to the table married to his priors and ready to dismiss. ^though not nearly the sort of anarchist who goes to Occupy rallies. Just a guy with profound faith in voluntary association, for economic and sociological reasons

That's well argued and organized. I'm not sure if I have the energy to respond well. "that a majority of anarchists are under-read extremists with incoherent ideas and no working alternative to current-form institutions" Self-identifying anarchists on the radical left wear black to protests, bring lemon juice in spritz bottles to neutralize the tear gas, are the ones who break Nike town windows, and actually fight the cops. They are also the gutter punks you see camping out on the street, wasted, begging for money to feed their dog. They hop trains. They dumpster dive. And a couple few of them have written poorly-conceived rationalizations of social parasitism as "anarchy." See "Evasion" and "Days of War Nights of Love" published by the Crimethinc. collective. I grew up with these people. Most of them have hepatitis infections and are on methadone now. Add to these suburban lackies college students like the NYU undergraduates who "occupied" their cafeteria sobbing about tuition rates, an amalgam of social movements waving a mish mash of signs about oil, whales, gender, and whatever other injustice can be loosely associated with some form of social power, give them all a two-week old comprehension of the word "hegemony," and there you go. Occupy: the most impotent and incoherent protest to have ever happened in America, which had the gall to proclaim its association with Tunesians and Libyans getting shot for wanting electoral politics. So I've pretty well shown my cards on that front. As far as the theory of anarchy goes, and of the inevitability of hierarchy, I just read a very good working paper on an experimental public goods game, where subjects were willing to pay money to appoint a "punisher" (leader) who only had to punish the worst cases of free-riding in the game (defection) in order to maintain cooperation. It was a bargain to everyone involved, increasing the product and trust of the entire group. http://econ.ucsd.edu/~l1gee/pdfs/Gun_For_Hire_Combined.pdf You've got Coase's theory of institutional hierarchy too. Mitigating all behavior through market exchanges would be inefficient in the costs accruing to all the negotiation, so people rationally submit to command hierarchies. It's not a perfect theory, but it helps us along. From the sociological side, you have ideology and social norms, and culture. These are all necessarily a hegemony. I have no power over large scale social forms. The French structuralist idea that they need to be therefore deconstructed by a specialized class of philosophers is pretentious, and an impossible task anyway. Social norms coordinate behavior. Bosses coordinate behavior. You and I have little to no control over these forces individually -- in aggregate we all affect their outcome with purposive action though. That's symbolic interactionism, Mead etc. I'm saying that recognizing the ubiquity of bosses, norms, and other hierarchies in social organization shouldn't depress us, because we all volunteer to such a system, which coordinates a wealth of positive outcomes, in the market, on little league teams, in Church, and even (shiver) probably in government. Organizational flatness is a 21st century organizational consultant's daydream. Also read a paper by Kieran Healy on open source software development illustrating it's decidedly hierarchical. http://kieranhealy.org/files/drafts/oss-activity.pdf And you can consult Mark Neuman's book on Networks: there's a chapter at the end where he explains preferential attachment. Academic citation networks, the distribution of wealth, and a myriad of other social networks follow a power law distribution. Hierarchy is a fact of social organization, and we would do better to at least entertain the idea that it's on some margin a beneficent social structure. That's after all how one tests a hypothesis -- by leaning hard against it. If you believe hierarchy is a bad thing: examine the case for it. Lean against it. My point on anarchy is that social institutions are self-sustaining. Laissez faire does not require general equilibrium theory and Pareto-improving trades for ethical justification. People take care of themselves and one another. States have a bad track record of doing precisely the opposite, especially in their recent (and historically more common) aristocratic and totalitarian incarnations -- which created abysmally more stratification and oppression than anything going on in a modern market democracy.

"First, I said horizontal, not egalitarian, and I was referring to its organizational structure, not the distribution of wealth among those involved." Most sociologists would argue the distribution of wealth in any organization correlates rather tightly with its structure. "It seems like you've mixed up anarchist with concepts like working-class, popular, egalitarian, anti-corporate. While these concepts do commonly figure into anarchistic conversations, they are not inherent to anarchism" That would be true of Occupy kids who have no idea what they're screaming about, but I am not confused on my definition of anarchy. I'm glad we agree though that that a majority of anarchists are under-read extremists with incoherent ideas and no working alternative to current-form institutions other than to camp out in public parks, pick dinner out of a dumpster behind Domino's, and use Starbucks bathrooms without buying anything. "Corporations can exist under anarchy (as some libertarian-type anarchists might tell you)." Indeed. That's why they call it anarcho-capitalism. In most academic parlance anarchy means the absence of the State. The State is currently and has always been absent from a majority of social organization. Anyway, if large voluntary associations of people frighten you, note that more than half of GDP accrues to workers, a long-run stable trend. And note that a majority of businesses are small, with no discernible uptick in the size or prevalence of publicly traded companies. "I don't see how magazine sales exclude an organization from acting in an anarchistic fashion or moving toward anarchy." I don't either. I see a whopping contradiction in such a market organization consistently publishing vitriolic criticisms of market organizations, and suggesting that anarchic organizations, like those it would hope to inspire, are non-market. "Third, while Adbusters was of course an initiating organization, the extent to which it lead or leads Occupy is unclear at most and, in my estimation, probably very minimal." I seem to remember Adbusters and affiliate websites publishing twitter feeds and otherwise acting as information clearinghouses for reports on the activities. My point is not that Occupy, and even Adbusters aren't emergent, anarchic social phenomena. My point is that their self-styled definition of anarchy as anti-market, anti-government, anti-hierarchy, and anti-everything-else denies the facts of the hierarchy which allows them to set and agree on institutional standards and conventions, coordinating action. Nobody bought tickets to fly to NY and scream at bankers with use-value. "Second, you've referred to Occupy as an organization. It's better understood as a loose coalition of organizations" Combinations of organizations are not organizations? That flies in the face of organizational theory from modern network theory all the way back to the Federalist papers, at least, and probably before. I would argue that the sort of organic emergence of social structure is in fact how all social structure emerges at first. Hierarchy emerges from that process because ideology and leadership help coordinate action. It's not clear that anything like organizational flatness does or can exist, or that such a situation is ethically or materially desirable. The alternative extreme, monopoly, certainly isn't desirable. The best solution seems to be something in between, with organizations allowing enough vertical mobility internally, and competition internally and externally, to prevent hierarchy from ossifying into the sort of conservative dominion you're rightly worried about.

Hugs.

My DGS said keeping in touch with schools and negotiating politely is important to do - as they're assembling cohorts and people are accepting and rejecting offers right up until April 15. He's in economics: customs may be slightly different, but not a ton (institutional ecology is not terribly different in the different departments).

I fail to see what is particularly egalitarian about an organization of people lead by Adbusters, the world's best-selling counter culture magazine produced by well-to-do Canadian art directors, a very loud and upset assistant professor from America's ivy league.

Graeber got denied tenure at Yale. To conspiracy theorists, the rejection of their theory is prima facie, sufficient evidence to support the claim: "You're lying because you're a conspirator!" "No, I am not lying and not a conspirator." "Precisely! I'm posting that on the internet." It is a really empty way to reason, but persists. Notably the entire theory of false consciousness seems to rest on the same foundation. If your research looks to your colleagues more like political advocacy than professional research, you're not going to get tenure.

And while we're at it -- Polanyi's Great Transformation has been shown to be wrong in empirical fact by economic historians for the last four decades, though his insights on embeddedness are obviously important.

Also -- Mauss' ethnography is wrong, though intuitively appealing to modern scholars who would like to look back on indigenous origins and attach noble savage daydreams to "original" commerce. Malinowski, an equally if not more notable anthropologist than Mauss visited the same Trobriand islanders and showed that there was a decided organization of property, exchange, and division of labor among fishing parties. I'm not saying reciprocity is not a form of social exchange, and it would be ridiculous to claim its not a centerpiece of the foundation of ethics and trust in social structure -- but an substitute for monied arbitrage it is not.

Graeber's economic history is wrong. We have evidence of trade going back to about the beginning of language, millennia before anything even resembling a state pops up. The settled agriculture --> states --> trade --> hierarchy and social decay idea is a myth. Money was made to facilitate exchange. That's not an economics textbook fantasy -- its an empirically verified phenomenon. Natural monopolies accrue to units of account and stores of value (money) because they load onto networks. Microsoft Office becomes a standard, and national languages for the same reason -- the utility of using such a good increases in the number of people adopting the technology. Such a monopoly lends itself to State control (as do other goods accruing network externalities), but there is a gigantic difference between states capturing a monopoly and abusing it, like say debasing coin to pay for arrows to fight wars with, which causes inflations which disrupt commerce and make everyone poorer (and is why central banks are now independent -- not because of a monetary conspiracy), and the State creating money, or highways in the first place (also originally privately, and locally owned and taken care of well into the late 19th century). OP: If you're interested in anarchy I'd suggest some work by Elinor Ostrom on stateless coordination of market failures, and an intermediate microeconomics textbook. Occupy is not anarchism. Squatting is not anarchism. Dumpster diving is not anarchism. It's confused teenage rebellion. Getting along with people without central authority and violent enforcement is anarchism -- and the remarkable thing about prosocial mores is just how much anarchy we witness in societies with enormous states.

What is the best way to approach the question: "What other programs are you applying to?" What are adcomms after here? Should you list schools that are similar in rank and fit your interests well? Your whole list of schools?

Maybe I should add, in case the above sounds like a pretentious justification of an unfortunate hierarchical arrangement, that I think the reality of tenure and publishing incentives mean we ought to pay adjuncts more, let them take up the first 60 hours of instruction, and leave Professors to research, and do so in a competitive environment. That way you get better instruction for younger kids, and eliminate tenured professors coasting on a pub every five years while he teaches introductory courses. Let genius brains who love teaching teach. The current arrangement mixes the cohorts of teaching and research preferences up, and makes everyone worse off.

The person I quoted is 65 years old, and has worked at three different universities, including a T10 where they sat the adcomm for several years. Many graduate students, especially older ones, end up teaching a lot of comm college courses and such trying to support themselves through graduate school. It gets in the way of their research, they decide making $50,000 a year and actually having a social life are worth being ABD for life, and the prestige of their graduate program drops. Until tenure and other institutional incentives change, research will be 1st-5th priority of any graduate program. The best students in graduate programs will be afforded fellowships and other opportunities, either internally or externally, to allow them to not teach and focus on research.

That's essentially fungible with a highest honors scholarship -- the signal is what your mentors thought of your abilities, not the substance of the teaching.

My adviser said, "Graduate programs hate to see students who like teaching. It's crazy, and socially disastrous because it's what most of their graduates will do for a lifetime. But there you go."

Nobody cares about your misdemeanors. But economics involves lots of proofs, not calculations like in calculus and linear algebra courses. check out urch.com/forums/phd-economics/

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