gilbertrollins

"You have reached your quota of positive votes for the day" ^I tried.

Sure do. People from the "umbrella discipline" have a curious tendency to approach criticism of the intersection of sociology with anything else with open hostility.

Really? "Boo hoo - you're a bully because you don't agree with me and pointed out the flaws in my reasoning after I called you condescending." I'd love to have you at my defense. I'm looking forward to getting ripped to shreds. I'm certainly not going to storm out of the room sobbing about the level of criticism of my ideas.

Gimme a break. Your intentions as a social advocate are not an ethical defense of your work, and are generally considered by the scientific community to be the primary reason to disregard sociology. You do realize that history is full of people who have been shot because some intellectual thought they were saving the world? I want to save the world too. But I don't run around acting like empirical and theoretical assertions I make deserve some kind of prima facie respect just because my intentions are good. Intentions, especially those infused into scientific policy recommendations, have unintended consequences, often terrible ones. I asked what lifecourse meant and said it sounded like a silly neologism. Every discipline is full of these, and criticism of them is widespread in just about every academic style guide available. Check in for instance with Richard Lanham's Paramedic Method, or Zissner's On Writing. Social science isn't day care. If you can't handle people jabbing at work that you find useful, you're going to have a rough go of it. I still think "lifecourse" sounds silly, at least as silly as the terms "performativity" and "operationalize." But as I said in my follow up post, I have a reasoned interest in the allocation of work and leisure time, career and familial decisions, etc. So I'm not sure what you're concerned about me condescending to, other than a popular name given to demographic research I otherwise have a great deal of respect for and interest in.

Ha. Nope, no Yale or UNC. I've always thought it would be really interesting to see how life expectancy influences the timing of major life decisions. Say people consider the estimated time remaining in their life as currency ("spending time"), then the opportunity cost of making major life decisions goes down as technology and economic growth expand life expectancy (which has trebled in 150 years!), thus "buying" one more time to make major decisions, hence pushing marriage, kids, and college back, and making career changes more common. You could potentially develop indices of variance in those stage-changes, and regress the time series on life expectancy data, all with other controls. Old idea of mine. Probably wrong. Anyway, thanks for the links man. Bump knux.

What are the origins of this term "lifecourse?" It sounds silly and redundant to me. A life by definition follows a course.

Most fields in sociology touch on public policy. If you want to do organizations case studies and such, you'd be well served by a PhD in Business with a specialization in organizations.

My opinion is characteristically not humble, but especially so on this matter. A PhD is emotionally and intellectually brutal, and offers little reward outside the intrinsic satisfaction with one's daily activity -- reading, writing, and discussing ideas. It is also a lonely and unsure experience. If you feel your personality and skill-set is best geared toward business -- then you ought to go into business. There are plenty of intellectually challenging roles in the business world that allow you to think critically, and even do a bit of research. In fact many firms are increasingly research driven.

^If anyone else's heart skipped, followed by a rationalization of why it doesn't matter that you didn't get in -- RiseofthePhoenix is citing University of Washington results. Not Wisconsin.

Emory is shutting down their economics department. I would ask hard questions about where the social sciences stand administratively at Emory before attending.

I don't recommend a PhD for anyone who isn't committed to working at an academic research institution, or doing nearly exclusively research work for a non-academic organization long term. A PhD will leave you with no skills for anything else, and what is quite often perceived as a negative hiring signal for anything else. If you can't picture yourself sitting in front of a computer and/or book all day -- a PhD is not for you.

Yeah a lot of what he wrote is very psychological. I'm reading the famous essay on cities before bed, in bits. He updates the Marxian idea that cities and money are congruent to rationality/calculativeness, which all of them depersonalize people. I think that's totally incorrect, but the guy's got an incredible way of weaving the relevant intuitions together formally. He draws on Frued some in Philosophy of Money, I think. Not sure how much. Freud had some crazy idea about money being archetypal of the infant's fascination with its own shit: "I made this!" Greed is I think in his view a fixation with our own creativity -- money is indeed "filthy lucre." Or something like that. It's just amazing how deeply just about every social thinker after 1860 was influenced by Marx. Such a big mess to clean up! Ha! I don't dislike sociological literature. I'm taking a grad poly theory course at my home school this semester, where we're going through all of Capital V1 and other essays (going to be lots of fights, can't wait). I like Goffman a lot. I like the agency/structure debate. I'm in love with Victor Nee's work at Cornell on Chinese growth and institutions. Most everything I've read on institutions in sociology actually anticipates the thinking I was doing on them as I worked through what was wrong with the new institutional account in economics -- it's like reading people who finally agree with me. I like tons of sociology. I just think tons of it is wrong. Same evaluation applies to economics.

you'll have better results at http://urch.com/forums/phd-economics/

Ohio Economics has sent out a couple few offers as well. I bet the Graduate School at Ohio has leaned on departments to make decisions earlier than usual for some administrative reason. I wouldn't let what's going on at Ohio freak you out too bad. Most programs should roll out decisions on the usual distribution they do, which is a couple few weeks out. Good luck everyone!

If you agree with me, I have no reason to be obnoxiously polemical and long in response, and I won't know what to do with myself in that case. I'm reading Simmel's old essay on urbanization right now. That guy was prescient. His whole idea that the mind searches for changes in patterns and conventions, has a limited budget of attention/energy to process those, etc is a page right out of modern cognitive psych and behavioral econ. I don't agree with a lot of what he's saying, but he's got that knack for articulating social intuitions really well. He was pretty heavily influenced by Freud and nascent psychology, no?

South Loop is pretty douchey, but it's come up fast. I haven't seen any stats for Chicago or especially cross sections of other cities -- but the idea that white=rich seems pretty outdated to me. There are tons of colors with money in Chicago: Yellow, Brown, Black, Mocha, Mochiatto, Skinny Tall Late with Soy, etc. Nobody pushes the poor, except for the government when they, say, make having a home contingent on forfeiting rights to the privacy of one's own blood samples for drug tests. If people in a voluntary market move to different locations, we're talking about a considerably different process than government-imposed housing plans, and even a different process than deliberate exclusion of minorities from markets through red-lining. The important point about urban development is that the poor benefit most from it -- because they value the next margin of consumption more than the wealthy -- the next pair of shoes a poor guy buys means more to him than the next (10th? 15th?) pair of shoes a rich guy buys. And urban development has in the long ran increased the absolute income of the urban poor for two centuries. I don't see a great deal of empirical support for the romantic idea that modern cities are progressively corrosive socially and economically. Black and brown neighborhoods aren't poor because there are no white people there. They are poor because of the economic-growth stunting crime that's endemic to taking people's property rights away and forcing them into a situation where they have to form quasi-militaristic organizations just to do business.

PS -- white flight is reversing -- and in a magnitude that would make you pass out. Nobody lived in downtown Chicago twenty years ago, because of white flight. They add thousands of units down there every year. If you want to enrich the ghetto -- legalize drugs. Until then not an army of social workers and social planners triple its current size will change a thing.

I never said gentrification was a product of supply and demand -- I said (not very clearly, and definitely polemically) that rent controls increase discrimination and incidentally corruption as well. By imposing an artificial price ceiling, you incentivize landlords to accept payments to make up that differential in other forms. The apartment is worth $1,200 market value. The Committee for the End of Gentrification sets the rent at $500 and goes home satisfied they've made life better for poor black and brown people. Mr. Poor And Black was willing to pay $1,200 with his three roommates for the apartment. Mr. White And Affluent would have paid $1,000 to live there alone. In a market without controls -- Mr. Black gets the apartment. But now the racist landlord is indifferent between getting $500 from Mr. Black or Mr. White -- she is not indifferent between renting to black versus white people. Mr. White gets the apartment. This sort of thing has been documented in New York in excruciating detail since the 1950s. The same social forces that corral people together in bins of preferences, mores, and structures that create fashionable restaurants where everyone is dressed curiously alike are the same social forces that corral people into segregated neighborhoods. The best we can do is encourage social mobility. The economic version is "entry and exit." And it works. Encouraging people to respect competition and variety among social institutions, and movement of individuals among them and within them, is the best way to encourage social innovation. It keeps social institutions from forming monopolies, and keeps them fluid and dynamic in form. We're not going to end hierarchy, nor are we going to end people saying, "Which Joe?" "Black Joe." "Oh, right yeah. Call Joe, he'll love this." I have no problem with people in a free society persuading one another to respect, tolerate, and live next to other races. Let's have more of that. I have a problem with rent controls and the state of the current welfare system broadly. The three most salient historical instances of institutional racism -- slavery, the war on drugs, and housing projects -- were all sold on the premise of "protecting" someone. And all three of them worked directly to exclude black and brown people from legitimate markets. And that's what you get with "protection," just about every time -- the exclusion and oppression of one group at the expense of another. I find it incredible that otherwise wicked smart academics often espouse the belief, against such staggering evidence, that government "protection" of black and brown people will "protect" them from the detriment of the market.

Ha. Zing! It's funny, really. People act as if supply and demand diagrams are a convenient illusion. During the French Revolution bread prices went up. The Jacobines in populist fervor put a ceiling on bread prices in response -- because the bread was too damned high. Bread supplies diminished and more people starved. Another example of how price controls help the poor.

I thought of critical theory earlier today when I read this. The Law of Intention and Desire Inherent in every intention and desire is the mechanics for its fulfillment . . . intention and desire in the field of pure pure potentiality have infinite organizing power. And when we introduce an intention in the fertile ground of pure potentiality, we put this infinite organizing power to work for us. Now that is some idiotic new agey spiritualist stuff that a large cohort of my friends post to Facebook every day. So of course in that context it jumps right out at you as circularly-argued, meaningless assertions made in abstract language to overawe the reader and make them feel like the very act of reading it is per se spiritual. But note how closely it mimics the style of the French structuralists. Yet French structuralism is girded by academic hierarchy, so everyone fawns after it like it's prophesy, even though a room full of people doing critical theory are never sure if they're even talking about the same thing. This is where theory/philosophy go wrong. When the very ritual of theorizing itself becomes the goal -- it predictably serves only theorists, and any sort of symbolic exchange will allow the theorist to feel like he is in the very act of theorizing incanting valid, privileged totems (closed-form existence theorems in mathematical syntax; vocabulary pushups and 8-adjective-strings in English syntax). Meaningless gibberish is meaningless gibberish, whether the syntax is logically and symbolically consistent among a tiny group of people or not. Amazingly, after participating in this pseudo-religious theoretical circle jerk, critical theorists have the gall to point the finger and call everything except their own theory "ideological." Critical theory suspiciously never criticizes anything except the same hobby horses it's been criticizing since the beginning, and rarely if ever criticizes (much less tests against evidence) itself.

University professors constantly complain about the way things are run, and in fact in recent news have begun forming Unions to protect their salaries.

Well, sure. Marx is at least decipherable.

They only get really annoyed if you ask questions that are directly addressed on the webpage somewhere, or if you pester about a particular issues more so because you don't like the answer you got than because it doesn't address your question. And you'd have to crank pretty hard on both (1) or (2) to get noticed around the department. At the end of the day secretaries answer a lot of dumb questions and pick up everyone's stupidity slack all day - from all levels. That's why they're such an incredible species. That they still have any faith in anyone's intelligence, and haven't developed a large community online commiserating about everyone's stupidity yet, is amazing.

Secretaries aren't gossiping to the committees about who's calling up with dumb questions. You'd have to work pretty hard (unless it comes naturally to you) to make a bad enough impression for her to say something to the committee. I've had wonderful experiences with these women so far -- they've all been in my corner and extremely helpful. As with anyone in a "customer service" sort of role -- being extra nice and talking to them like a real person will take you a long way.

In my experience there are very few fat people who dance well. It is however a sight to behold when one does. You can almost see the precision and regularity of their bones moving underneath all that blubber. The way the fat itself moves is like an elegant metaphor for the bones themselves. Truly amazing.