Humanomics

If you're considering a PhD in economics, the rank of the school you go to as an undergraduate and familiarity of your professors with good State-side economics programs is important. You will almost surely need to do an MA in economics at one of the better schools in Europe to compete, but I don't have the information to comment on how these undergraduate programs would help your chances of getting in somewhere like Toulouse, Bocconi, or LSE.

Oh and all that stuff about there having been formerly ways to kill-off or export reserve workers, as to keep the army at a steady, manageable 5% of the workforce or so, is just ridiculous. Nutrition has increased at such a rate for two hundred years as to have nearly trebled life expectancy, while per capita death rates have fallen precipitously, and while the world's markets have become increasingly global so that there is no longer any effective "exporting workers outside of the economy," and hasn't been for a very long time.

Marx's reserve army of unemployed workers didn't work in 1848, and it doesn't work now. Unemployment has stayed relatively stable with more than 90%, and usually closer to 95% of the workforce employed, barring recessionary dips and major technological movements requiring labor frictions where workers must learn and adjust, for at least 150 years of modern economic growth (for instance, the learning curve for computers actually caused productivity slow down in the 70's, at their inception). During that period, where a lingering 5/10 percent of workers (of which many ostensibly left their employments voluntarily) remained unemployed, wages have increased right along with national income -- which has grown exponentially, reliably, since the beginning of the 19th century. The reserve army of unemployed do not perpetually bid down wages until everyone is starving. Gans fears that machines displace workers are entirely unfounded, and in fact he himself contradicts the argument later in the piece by noting that innovations will indeed create new employment opportunities, new things to be made or services to be produced. If unemployment increased in direct proportion to the number of machines in the world, the long-term trend of unemployment would be growing. It is not the long term trend, regardless again, occasional slumps. Machines open up opportunities for higher-value propositions for workers -- they make workers richer, not poorer. Retail bank employment, for example, has increased and not decreased since the inception of ATM machines. It's difficult to imagine what "labor-intensive employment" means, or how it would represent an improvement, considering everyone currently operating machines, and providing services for one another, are laboring -- and considering the long-run substitution to those sorts of employments at the hands of technological increase has created on balance exponential gain in income for even and especially the poorest of the world.

The comment about Marxian history was intended as a comment on Marxian history, nothing more. Lots of Marxian history is written without reverence to empirical facts -- Polanyi is a great example -- or rather Marx would be even better, as his German romantic reading of history he did from an armchair, and his review of factory life too (he never stepped foot in one). I thought it was germane to mention to an aspiring economic sociologist who might not have read any economic historians: economic historians are in widespread agreement on the point that Marxian histories are wrong. Markets are ancient. We can discuss this further if you're interested. I thought you might be interested, which is why I mentioned it -- it was an aside, yes. You asked me to elaborate on my views on the intersection of economic sociology and economics proper. I did that. How is that me just showboating, or especially taking things "way off point?" You asked me to go off topic of the Roll Call debate. "The disciplines take entirely different subjects as their units of analysis." That is incorrect. Major sub-disciplines of economics, complete with conferences and field journals and graduate field courses, include: economic demography (population, family), economic religion, urban economics (race, real estate, etc), development economics, growth (source of value debate), public choice theory (economics of government), economic history, economics of technology and innovation, and the economics of education. "Also, I've only taken a few courses that touch on the subject, but from what I understand [prior to the public health revolution] ploughing with your own hands, starving in spring, freezing in winter, and dying at 30 was a hell of a lot better than what would happen to you in industrial centers" Cities were filthy, yes. The streets were paved-over completely with horse manure, which created particulate that lingered in the air at all times. Add to that wood-burning stoves, and you've got quite a mess of air and ground pollution. And people still flocked to them because of the income differentials generated by technological improvement, making urban workers more productive than rural counterparts. This is the secular trend of economic growth: one of the gentlemen interviewed during the big rouse over Apple factories reported that he earned in one day what he would have in one month at home. Multiply your stipend by thirty to get some idea of the incentives rural Chinese face, and which rural English and Dutch faced whence flocking to cities during the Industrial Revolution. But you're right: I have a lot more economic sociology to read before I'm qualified to comment at length on the discipline's movements. My point was that less of this work does, or should serve as a substitute to price theory, than some might hope. The results of price theory have been incredibly robust -- that doesn't mean, as most economists might hope, that price theory can explain any and every human behavior. It means we ought to come up with a more complete story of societies, by measuring where price theoretic models fit, and where e.g. cultural models fit. Virgil Storr's forthcoming book on the economics of culture is great. I thought we'd dropped the boohoo-ing (on both sides) and moved on to a scholarly discussion about economics and economic sociology, but since you insist on suggesting I'm some kind of bully with a chip on my shoulder, I'll address it. The first three paragraphs are the only condescending ones from that last post, and their thesis is that someone who hasn't read thoroughly in a discipline doesn't have a foundation to criticize it from. Maybe it wasn't clear what I was responding to -- you had said something about how my references to Bentham and Bacon were obscure and unnecessary. No, they're not nearly obscure in the foundations of social thought, and are entirely necessary to discuss positivism and quantification in social science. You saw, correctly, that i don't have an extremely wide reading in modern economic sociology. Hence I'm not critical of it (though extremely interested). Yet lots and lots of people take liberty to criticize economics without knowing how a supply and demand graph works. I've read some Simmel, and Levi-Strauss, and Granovetter, etc. That is more than we can say for 99% of economics grad students or especially econ undergrads, man. So the point of those three paragraphs was: "I read in sociology and attempt to understand it, and make room for it in my view of phenomena. I don't criticize and dismiss it ignorantly, or crack jokes about it. And no one has the right to do so about economics without knowing how economics proceeds." Maybe I'm naive of customary tone and decorum in the sociology department, but a little bit of bite and condescension seem like the norm to me in most academic comment. And especially when someone feels personally attacked. I felt personally attacked at first. I don't anymore. I'm sorry I pissed on what everyone said -- I felt summarily pissed on by the five comments that followed my OP. I'm not a bully; I don't have a chip on my shoulder. I came here trying to help the forum and myself, to contribute. All I study in economics is cooperation, norms and conventions, welfare questions, preferences, and any number of other concerns that sociology has chiefly taken up in the last 100 years. I didn't come here to masturbate in front of everyone. I came here because one of my long term goals is to build dialogue between economics and sociology -- hence the argument that it's wiser to look for compliments in theory rather than substitutes. The economics forum is very cordial, and extremely helpful. The Roll Call thread is a big part of that. If you don't believe that, fine. Can we drop it and talk about something that actually matters? I'm really tired of being accused of being an asshole every time I try to move this conversation to methodological, philosophy of science, or history of thought debate. Educate me, then. What is the sociological view of markets? What are the units of analysis in sociology that are so markedly different from those in economics? How do Zelizer et. al. have useful alternatives to price theory? There is a theory of price in sociology outside the labor theory of value? Where do sociologists think price comes from? I'll read what you recommended. Thank you.

Pony Tail plagiarized some Marxist historian (which most of them are, or at least Polanyian hence economic history had to become its own subdiscipline of economics under auspice of the economics department). So if anyone was mindlessly taking cues from literature he'd read or whispers he'd heard around the department, it was Karlito. I couldn't write with high-school senior grammar when I came to college. Don't compare me to a Harvard snuff. Anyway, let's just leave Karlito out of this -- he made a stupid crack, admitted it, and made no claim to have any basis for the crack. I think I've more than sufficiently made my point concerning his (maybe in his mind playful) attack. Look man, most people's readings of economics whom haven't studied it, yes most undergraduates from social science programs outside the economics program, are taught a Marxian reading of Price Theory. Would you say a majority of sociology undergraduates don't think capitalism engenders selfish behavior, or that economics doesn't systematize that hegemon? Frankly I'm surprised nobody made any cracks about the imperialism of rational choice (ala Ben Fine et. al.) while they were at it. Anyway, I don't give a crap if anyone thinks I was being oversensitive. I'm a nice person -- go over to Urch and look at my posts on the economics PhD forum. Anyone even glancingly interested in the phil of science debate over utility theory and rational choice should know who Jeremy Bentham is, or at least understand how and why counting things got popular on the wave of scientific positivism descended from Hume, Bacon, and Kant. You don't just get to read Marx, Weber, Boas, Simmel, Levi-Strauss . . . and then the postmodern or post-structuralist criticisms of those guys like Foucault as an undergrad, and run around as if you know something about the methodology of economics because you read an Adbusters special issue on it once. Or if one isn't that learned in the first-principles of her own discipline (sociology), having read a couple truncated Goffman and Mill essays in a second-year reader doesn't qualify you to say, well anything really. There are roughly two camps out to try and kick price theory in the knees (Price theory is the correct name for what you know as "neoclassical economics" neoclassical is a historically incorrect term, because Austrians and other now-considered "heterodox" economists helped developed the constrained optimization program. The theory of Price codified in the 1960's at Chicago -- the foundation being that preferences do not matter, or change, and that all behavior comes from agents reacting to fluctuations in the relative prices they face). The first camp would be the journalistic/Occupy/man-in-the-street camp. This crew got a jolt during 2008, but their arguments are old hat "economic models don't look like the real world (neither does a styrofoam model of the solar system, exactly)" "people aren't selfish" blah blah. Then there are legitimate heterodox economists like Steve Keen who really go in and try to level economic theory completely. It's a silly program either way you slice it. Behavioral, evolutionary, Shumpeterian, complex systems, and institutional economists have always tried to come up with addenda to the results of supply and demand, in order to alight empirical situations supply and demand fail to predict well (the standard model succeeds in a variety of situations -- those results aren't going away). And economic sociologists have fallen largely into this camp, giving a nod to the results of price theory. Embeddedness or other cultural-variable arguments are no replacements for price theory, because they merely argue where individual agent's preferences come from -- economics attempts to say nothing about where preferences come from. They are explicitly defined as a given, as manna, from the first chapter of an intermediate microeconomics textbook. We hold preferences constant, and vary prices and budgets -- that tells you where someone's going to vote at the margin. The major split between economics and sociology would be the degree to which one presupposes the agency of the individual. The traditional analysis in sociology is structural - individuals are mere social constructions, and will behave deterministically per the guide of social structures. The traditional analysis in economics is of methodological individuals. Economics takes almost a Hobbesian sovereignty of the individual for granted. The reality is that people often times take social norms and structures as a given and just follow along -- indeed that is what rational choice predicts people will do, as it's too computationally expensive to sit there and contemplate the costs and benefits of every decision as a rational choice model would suggest (Simon, Stigler, Gigerenzer, etc.). Mead and the symbolic interactionists try to strike a nice balance here, attempting to show how purposive, thoughtful people might construct, in the first, the social constructions they're otherwise beholden to. Network, complexity, and game theory are developing (incidentally, as there is little citation or tie in) a mathematical treatment of this approach. Economics treats preferences as a given -- that's a problem, not having any story of how people develop their tastes. Welp, sociology usually treats preferences as a given too, whether given by some hard-to-identify hegemon, an ideological or material dialectic, the power elite, or some other unmeasurable, philosophical boogeyman. Anyway, the point is that the models we're taught as undergraduates, as codified, coherent, received wisdom of the discipline, all came from a critical historical debate over how to figure out where a price comes from, why people prefer apples to oranges, etc. Most all perspectives are useful compliments of one another, not alternatives to one another, and have been mostly treated as such by scholars who read in both traditions. That reading, unfortunately is rare, and the undergraduate impression on both sides of the isle thus is "those dumbfucks over there don't know what the hell they're talking about and aren't real scientists." Mancur Olson's work on collective action assumes rational agents, as does most all of critical mass theory (Rogett, Marwel, and Oliver). Mark Granovetter is largely sympathetic to markets, and his strength of weak ties work poses no alternative to price theoretic labor economics -- indeed much of labor economics imported Granvetter's work, and anyway is one of the strongest alter-ers of the traditional research program, in searching for explanations for unemployment (in frictionless factor markets there should be no unemployment, theoretically). Zelizner's work on the insurance industry serves as a nice compliment to economics, showcasing how an object goes from not a commodity to a commodity (note that fears of neoliberal "commodification" are empirically baseless, as economic growth in fact relies on technological innovation to create new products, processes, and services to buy and sell -- not the steady encroaching on an already-fixed pie of sacred objects in the world). This is my impression from a preliminary reading of seminal economic sociologists. Their foundational antecedents like Simmel, Weber, and Marx were never specifically focused on proffering an alternative to market-approving classical and marginalist economics. Removed at Users Request.

@splitends Your initial response to my post was relatively innocuous, though you did suggest that I might just be trying to brag. The following posts were increasingly flip and ad hominem. First there was an elaboration on your bragging suggestion. Then there was a misreading about me being all about the numbers, and in turn "dead wrong." Then a nice careless joke to top things off. Yes, I'm going to get angry when five people jump all over something I say to try and help, insinuating all this garbage about my intentions and focus. I'm up to speed on netiquette: I took a condescending, polemical tone when I was angry -- that's the tradition in the academy when one feels attacked on grounds of his intentions and credentials. Frankly I spend most of my time on economics boards defending you guys, and am one of the only young, aspiring economists with enough stones to come out and say I take models of behavior outside Price Theory seriously (though I take Price Theory very seriously). Most of these kids feel like doing so is career suicide. They're not entirely incorrect. The idea that I have some kind of chip on my shoulder towards sociological thinking and disciplinary proceeding that I brought to this board is just insane. I have better things to do than troll, and brag about my penny-ante undergraduate credentials to strangers. I was looking for help, and trying to help, and got railroaded with a bunch of flip and offensive comments. The four of you insinuating that I am or might be a braggart, or naive because of my training, was not a "sincere attempt at dialogue or just honest retort." Should I have replied in kind that you guys might just be pansies who can't handle some competition, which is indicative of the limp nature of sociological training? That would be the reverse set of suspicious, presumptuous, loaded ad hominems. No, instead I argued, rather maturely considering the ridiculous insinuations coming across the table, my defense with warrants about where I in fact am coming from methodologically, and what I had focused on in my OP. Had I shown up on here blasting your board with posts about what a bunch of retarded sociologians you guys are (which you of course, aren't), you might have a point that I have been bullying and trolling. A common criticism of economics is that it promotes capitalism, therefore promoting egoism and individualism, and that it makes such loony normative recommendations because it's numerical, mechanical, and inhumane in its scientific methods. You might imagine how I could thus read that critique from being told my post was an attempt at egoistic bragging, and ill-informed by economic methods. Most economic sociologists don't see economic sociology (unless in Marxian form) as an alternative to Price Theory. They see the embeddedness of preferences in cultural fabric as an addition to price theoretic models, which hold preference-changes constant, not a superior alternative. Lots of the work on collective action assumes purposive, forward-looking agents who calculate costs and benefits, just like economics does. My concerns are obviously sub-field specific, and probably best served elsewhere. Thanks for everyone's time.

I wrote a long reply, but lost it to a refresh -- you're disappointed I'm sure. I'm not a troll, or a jackass. I defended my OP, which I posted in a spirit of generosity and camaraderie, because the idea was attacked as ego-pissing, useless, quantitative nonsense. Review the thread if you're "not sure why think it has anything to do with [the various concerns I replied to]." Roll Call is extremely helpful at Urch, and does nothing but promote an extremely useful and generous exercise where motivated candidates agglomerate the wisdom they've collected individually, and where graduate students actually go out of their way to stay on and give people advice. Yes, if I'm going to apply to a program I would like to know what the competition looks like. http://www.urch.com/.../phd-economics/ I read the people and topics I cite, and my argument is that theory is often purposefully oblique and irrelevant in all social sciences, that in fact that's what economics suffers from methodologically when it uses lots of Greek notation and calls doing so rigor. "Quantitative" work is a mistaken way to talk about mathematical economics, because theorem/proof mathematical economics does not measure anything -- it answers existential questions, i.e. "Does an equilibrium of supply and demand functions exist given XYZ conditions." That's a philosophical exercise, just like symbolic-proving in the phil department. It's a priori, and just as annoying to learn to read and irrelevant to answering most social questions as going back over classical texts for the 8 millionth time. Anyway, the point in this context was to one-up the two, out of five posters who claimed I was numbers-focused because of my background. Economics has very little to do with numbers. Maybe you didn't understand my argument -- but your lack of erudition on methodology and history of thought in social science doesn't give you the right to accuse me of making vapid, name-dropping posts just to troll around.

\ I dropped out of one high-school and got kicked out of the next. Your joke was a piggy-back on Ladril first alleging that the profile information I suggested was only or even mostly quantitative, and then insinuating that I was "dead-wrong." Set all of that against the larger background where cross-talk between the disciplines is actively discouraged by senior scholars in both disciplines, hung up on the political/welfare/normative implications of structural models v. rational choice models, where sneering gets passed off as a scientific standard, and I missed the humor. Nothing in your comment indicated that you were trying to laugh with, and not at me.

That's cute, though presumably naive of the actual amount of numbers involved in economics (very few), and especially naive of the history of thought in social science that gives you such a sophomoric reading of 17th and 18th century political economy -- the origins of the numbers boogeyman you're concerned about (Re: Bentham on quantifiable, or cardinal utility, or Hume on positivism, or we could go back to Bacon). To the degree economics uses statistics, it is no more a sinner than any other human science (though maybe sometimes less so, for requiring graduate students to understand the theory behind metrics before plunking around on STATA). Beyond stats (and increasingly since the 60's -- lab and field experiments), there are no numbers in economics, just lots of a priori pontificating -- a problem endemic to political science, sociology, and anthropology as well. The temptation away from scientifically rigorous empiricism is a big one, a snake economists are no-worse charmed by than runaway armchair theorists in any other discipline. Game theoretic proofs etc. are as useless as the 1,485th exegesis of Marx or Weber or Mead -- if we don't test these models. And frankly, that is what "qualitative" work gets criticized for, whether the theory is structural functionalism, intransitive aggregate voting preferences, or double-outcry auction design. No, just because a conversation proceeds in Greek notation rather than purposefully obfuscatory English doesn't make it "quantitative," as theorem/proof mathematics has almost nothing to do with numbers. I suppose we could go on with a methodological debate, but considering you misapprehended my OP, and set up a straw man that my perspective was numbers-only (while more than half of the bullet points were qualitative questions), and considering you took a stupid, ad hominem cheap shot at economics without any warrant (while misspelling condescendence), I'm afraid you might not be prepared for that debate. Further comments are however welcome. Thanks.

There is indeed an enormous amount of noise and randomness in this signaling process -- the listing of credentials is designed precisely to reduce this noise for applicants, who are the ones who possess dramatically less information than adcomms.

And I quote from the entire bottom half of the credentials list, which obviously take greater weight in sociology: Other Courses: Letters of Recommendation: Research Experience: Teaching Experience: Research Interests: SOP: Concerns: Applying To:

The process is nerve-wracking regardless. Having a good idea of the mean credentials accruing to various ranks of programs helps one avoid making ridiculous errors in applying. The modal user on this forum seems to have relatively mature research interests and relationships with very helpful professors. Do not expect that the sample here is representative of the population. Economics departments post absolute minimum standards for acceptance on their websites -- that gives one a lower bound and absolutely no insight into the mean or shape of distributions of various qualifications. The listing mechanism helps one look at a cross-section of the applying cohort more easily -- it's meant to be helpful guide for prospective students who are trying to build their credentials and not waste time and money applying to programs they have no chance at getting into. I wonder if the suggestion wasn't met with immediate suspicion because there are numbers (gasp) and competition (falls down) involved, even more -- hierarchy (passes out). Economics admits and sociology admits alike suffer those demons. Everyone on here is talking about grades, GRE's, ranks, and application packages anyway. I was suggesting that proceed in some kind of tidy way, in addition to the more-textured discussion that's going on. Instead the effort seems to have been read as potentially corrupting simply because of my user name and that it's popular with economics applicants.

I think letters signal your prospective quality as a researcher more than your grasp of your field research interests. As long as one or more of your recommenders can attest that you're capable of graduate level coursework in economics, people from poly sci etc should be able to attest work ethic, orignality, creativity, etc -- which are more important to the dissertation and long-term career prospects.

The moderators of the Urch forum for economics applications start a thread every year called "Roll Call" where everyone posts their stats and prospective schools. Then acceptances get posted. It's an extremely useful way to measure one's chances. Is there a thread like it here? If not, the form on Urch goes: Profile Type of Undergrad: Undergrad GPA: Type of Grad: Grad GPA: GRE: Math Courses: (not as relevant here?) Other Courses: Letters of Recommendation: Research Experience: Teaching Experience: Research Interests: SOP: Concerns: Applying To: