weight of writing sample

[Palito]

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.

It was totally out of hand, and many previous attempts failed because they were not drastic enough. I am not saying that I don’t think the attempt was an earnest one, although this particular monetary policy did accompany a period of privatization that political leaders exploited in very corrupt ways.

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.

Am I to understand that you believe that capitalism has always existed, that is tantamount to concepts like economic growth and technological innovation, and that Weber’s argument is really useless because there was no actual change in the social system of production? I’m not trying to say that Weber’s argument stands in every way, but you seem to discount it without acknowledging that it runs on a different tract than you understand things. Weber makes an argument for the cultural acceptance for different kind of economic system. You seem to be arguing that there is no need for a society to adopt new principles, narratives, values, practices, etc., as the fundamental behavior that supports capitalism is human nature and can be found in ancient societies.

Studying the systematic emergence of guiding mores through language is precisely sociological. Corpus linguistics provides a nice clean method to do it by.

How do you propose to study social mores without studying meaning?

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.

Again, models are not reality. This can be helpful, but it also distorts understanding of the actual decisions that people make.

[gilbertrollins]

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?

Edited December 8, 2012 by econosocio

[Darth.Vegan]

@Econsocio,

Have fun in sociology programs, I think you're going to hit a harsh reality when you eventually get into one. I would say well over 90% of the discipline would be incredibly disillusioned with the argument you're making here. Your tidbit about the green revolution is even more hilarious to me. I have yet to meet a single environmental sociology scholar who thinks the green revolution had an overall beneficial result, and that includes faculty from all the top programs with such specialities.

[gilbertrollins]

@Econsocio,

Have fun in sociology programs, I think you're going to hit a harsh reality when you eventually get into one. I would say well over 90% of the discipline would be incredibly disillusioned with the argument you're making here. Your tidbit about the green revolution is even more hilarious to me. I have yet to meet a single environmental sociology scholar who thinks the green revolution had an overall beneficial result, and that includes faculty from all the top programs with such specialities.

That's a very mature attitude.

[Darth.Vegan]

That's a very mature attitude.

Consider it friendly advice.

[Lanie]

@Econsocio,

Have fun in sociology programs, I think you're going to hit a harsh reality when you eventually get into one. I would say well over 90% of the discipline would be incredibly disillusioned with the argument you're making here. Your tidbit about the green revolution is even more hilarious to me. I have yet to meet a single environmental sociology scholar who thinks the green revolution had an overall beneficial result, and that includes faculty from all the top programs with such specialities.

Truly.

[gilbertrollins]

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.

Edited December 10, 2012 by econosocio

[Lanie]

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.

To be fair, I don't see anyone "dismissing your arguments out of hand because you haven't read enough sociology." I think you're finding people are either laughing at you because you've come across both smug and ignorant and well, you seem extraordinarily naive of your own background and "training."

[gilbertrollins]

To be fair, I don't see anyone "dismissing your arguments out of hand because you haven't read enough sociology." I think you're finding people are either laughing at you because you've come across both smug and ignorant and well, you seem extraordinarily naive of your own background and "training."

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.

[Darth.Vegan]

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.

Sorry but you do come off as smug sometimes. You've even had the audacity at times to imply that well known scholars (you know, people with PhD's) don't understand their own arguments. You're surely welcome to your opinion, and I was by no means suggesting that it is somehow less than valid. What I am saying is that decades of sociological research is largely in conflict with the points you're making. That's not to say that you're wrong, I honestly am not educated enough at this point to make that claim, but your assuredness of your own position is off putting to say the least. For someone who is disillusioned with economics and switching to sociology, you still sound very much like an economist to me.

Edited December 10, 2012 by xdarthveganx

[gilbertrollins]

you still sound very much like an economist to me.

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.

Edited December 10, 2012 by econosocio

[Darth.Vegan]

Removed to respect the original poster of the quote.

This.

[gilbertrollins]

Lacking a substantive argument, the grasping at personality straws continues.

Edited December 10, 2012 by econosocio

[Darth.Vegan]

When I say that you sound like an economist to me, I am speaking in terms of worldview, not in terms of methodology or whatever way you seem to want to interpret what I am saying.

[mbrown0315]

Speaking of economics, I'd like to call attention to the concept of opportunity cost. Don't you guys have better things to do?

[gilbertrollins]

Others might. For me, the benefit of the next margin of discovering to what degree sociologists' political priors will influence the reception of my research interests is huge. I suppose I could have just taken the fact that north of 90% of the discipline votes democrat, and stayed away. But I'm interested in understanding the texture of sociology. These debates aren't a bad start.

@darthvegan: Palito's discussion with me was largely about methodology, and ostensibly at least, the division between social sciences happens more over methodological approaches than over topics studied and the normative conclusions about them. For instance, about 60% of economists are center left democrats, regardless their professional methods. But if you meant exclusively to provoke my personal/political worldview, then I apologize for misinterpreting you.

Edited December 10, 2012 by econosocio

[mbrown0315]

So now let's talk about diminishing marginal utility.

[gilbertrollins]

Alright fine, since I'm hitting diminishing returns, I'll substitute some real work.

[AaronM]

so....writing samples, right?!

[gilbertrollins]

I'm scratching my draft. I'm just going to copy pasta this thread and tack a picture of myself flipping the camera off at the end. See where that lands me.

[gilbertrollins]

And for the record - I was interested in deer hunting when I was a kid, but my mom wouldn't let me.

[Lanie]

[gilbertrollins]

That was not me. I might get testy when attacked personally, but I don't sockpuppet accounts on webforums to defend myself like some psychopath. If there is a moderator available - do check the IPs for correspondence. There is none, I guarantee.

Edited December 11, 2012 by econosocio

[jacib]

On 12/10/2012 at 9:29 PM, Josefmoore said:

That's exactly the kind of intellectual response I was looking for. "You criticize my ad hominems? Well, our job market is better than your fucking job market! Ha!"

I mean to be fair, xDarthVeganx's response was at least as substantive as:

On 12/10/2012 at 8:10 PM, Josefmoore said:

The last two pages of this thread shows why sociology is a marginalized and disrespected discipline pretty much everywhere in the world.

and certainly more substantive than:

On 12/10/2012 at 9:36 PM, Josefmoore said:

Ha. Thankfully, unlike econsocio, I have no intention of ever touching this putrid waste of a discipline. Have fun being the butt of every joke in academia and the rest of society. Learning to become less pathetic, vicious personalities might help.

The actual story of WashU's disbanding is fascinating and more complicated than "sociology suxx"! One of the things that really tore the department apart was apparently Laud Humphrey's Tearoom Trade. There's a famous story of one of the senior professors throwing Laud Humphrey's typewriter out a window saying something like, "You're not writing sociology, you're writing pornography!" It was, apparently, that kind of department, torn apart by the 60's and it never recovered. But you're right in a way: the 70's and the 80's were certainly hard on sociology, but (I think) widespread computing really helped put sociology back on track (we could have been like anthropology!)--and I don't just mean "sociology that uses numbers", I mean all of it. While still it can be the red-headed step-child in a lot of venues, economists and political scientists don't write sociology off--org theory and network analysis in particular are used across the social sciences (except, of course, in anthropology) but are still based in sociology. But in this JosefMoore's defense, seriously, has anyone else tried to read sociology from 60's to the 80's that's not famous? Goffman and Garfinkle, of course, we keep in our bag of tricks, but a lot of it is awful. Like really awful. Like, bad bad. Seriously, last year I read the best selling sociology book ever (the Lonely Crowd) and it is pretty worthless. Of course, Merton and STS kept somethings fresh. Some of the community studies were, you know, solid community studies if that's what you're into. Some the inequality/statification stuff was important (and cited by economists and political scientists, of course) as were a few urban ethnographies. There were other decent pockets, but for a long time, yeah it was kind of bad. There's a reason we read the big three plus Simmel, and then skip to the Chicago School, and then skip to Goffman, and then skip to contemporary stuff (via Foucault and Bourdieu, if you're into the theory thing). Sociology could have easily gone the way of anthropology (everyone should read Ortners "Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties" [ungated link] to understand what happened there).

The NY Times article that Josefmoore linked to bemoans the loss of all the "cultural studies" programs, but I don't really bemoan the "loss" of navel gazing "cult studs" and I can't think of anyone in my department who would. While there are still solid chunks of sociology I don't like or read, the vast majority of the work produced by junior faculty at top places (with a particularly notable exception of a scholar who got in hot water over the summer) is really good.

To the wandering political scientist specifically: a lot of really well respected political science work (I'm thinking works like Lily Tsai's Accountability Without Democracy and Varshney's Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life and Anthony Marx's work and obviously Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone) could easily have been done in a sociology department, with only slightly different vocabulary and lit reviews but the exact same results. I hope you realize that. All of those are firmly based in previous sociological research. After sociologists, the people I have the most in common with are political scientists and a little over a fifth of my total graduate credits will be in my school's (top ten) political science department. If we're putrid waste, we're brothers in it because it's not like political scientists don't read Charles Tilly, or Rogers Brubaker, or all the social movements literature to come out of sociology. The political sciencist who taught my nationalism class (if you do IR or Comparative Politics, you'd know his name) said the best general book on nationalism was Containing Nationalism by Michael Hechter (a sociologist). It's not like top network analysis people in political science (think John Padgett from Chicago) don't work mostly with sociologists because sociologists are [edit: generally] better at network analysis than political scientists. There's a reason the article you linked to is twenty years old: it's really out of date. We're way closer now than ever before. My work will honestly probably be read by more political scientists than sociologists.

Edit: I got to stop these massive walls of text.

[gilbertrollins]

Jacib is an especially incisive student of the fashions and inside-baseball in sociology, and his contributions to the forum are uniformly positive. While I suspect our politics disagree sharply on a few matters, he has engaged thoughtful discussions, where he cites a competent reading of classical and contemporary scholarship. While he seems to share a motivation for social advocacy with many members of the board, he never pretends that motivation is a substitute for reasoned intellectual curiosity and a thorough consideration of counters to his points. That, I think is an example social scientists broadly can benefit from, including in economics. There is no excuse in this discipline or any other for letting ethical outrage discourage an honest evaluation of evidence and argument.

Re Goffman, I'd like to point out that his model of actors on a social stage is not altogether different from that in economics -- both posit that people (agents in economics; actors in sociology) behave strategically given the constraints they face (roles in sociology; incentives in economics), in order to advantage favorable outcomes. And both of those frames presuppose a good deal of cynicism about human behavior. That theme is common throughout the behavioral sciences in fact. You see it in psychology too, where a good deal of action is supposed to come from either biological determinants (stripping people of dignified agency), or from the pathological compensation of anxieties and suppression of the ID. Add to that the focus on Power, capital P, in political science, and it starts to look like economics is not nearly the only or chiefly Dismal Science. Reductionistic accounts are the contrarian favorite of social scientists. In this view -- just about any proposition that counters the ethical intuitions of what people would otherwise like to believe about their own motivations receives a rubber stamp, merely for being contrarian and cynical.

Re: Bowling Alone, it's not clear that communities have continued to lose straightforward social associations like bowling leagues without substituting other associations in their place. Social Capital, after receiving some initial excitement, has been largely abandoned because of the exceptionally poor job the collection of researchers first attempting it did of defining it and measuring it. See Ben Fine's book on the matter. Whether the progress of modern organizations and the market has degraded social space is an open question -- not a trivial axiom of social analysis. Violent crime per capita rates, for instance, have been on the decline for most of the world's history, and recent data show that the drop observed in the 90s in Urban violence that everyone was so amazed with, has continued. There are of course other measures here, but it is a particularly salient example.

I don't lack an appreciation for the study of Social Problems, and in fact aced my social problems course. There is a quote about economics that it has enjoyed the privilege it has because it chooses for its unit of analysis solved political problems -- i.e. social transactions where volunteering agents agree and shake hands. I'm not naive that there are other ways to mitigate social exchange than market trades, but I do think the obsession with social problems in sociology can neglect those problems that people have collectively invented to solve already, generating the impression at times that the sky is falling. My focus thus on the benefits that XYZ institution or social process has brought to society might be read as a careless dismissal of the many problems we have yet to solve. But I don't see why it should be. I'm just extra interested in social coordination, as against social frictions. That we've come as far as we have in society is fascinating to me. Figuring out how to keep a good thing going is I think broadly speaking, the objective of most social scientists.