MetaFilter posts tagged with Economics and sociology

Sociology (and other group data) assumptions based on Americans.

aleph — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 13:27:58 -0800

And that's a bad idea. Much of standard group behavior data in Sociology/Economics/Psychology is based on Americans. Which don't seem (contrary to universal assumptions) to be shared by a lot of the World.

Beauty matters. Plainness hurts.

wilful — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 14:37:58 -0800

Unpacking the Beauty Premium , Borland J & Leigh A, unpub., 2013.

The first Australian study of the financial return to physical attractiveness finds its worth an astounding $32,150 in annual salary, with men of above average looks typically commanding $81,750 compared to $49,600 for men with below-average looks.

Men with below-average looks were 15 per cent less likely than normal to be employed and were typically employed for a 9 per cent lower wage. They were also less likely to be married and less likely to married to a woman of high income.

The Empire Is Dead, Long Live the Empire!

-->NMN.80.418 — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 09:56:53 -0800

The Age of Imperialism is over, but its impact remains, leaving behind a long-lasting legacy through cultural norms. Comparing individuals on opposite sides of the long-gone Habsburg Empire border within five countries, it shows that firms and people living in what used to be the empire have higher trust in courts and police.

The State of White America

ob1quixote — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 12:04:26 -0800

In a lecture entitled The State of White America Charles Murray, a W. H. Brady Scholar of the American Enterprise Institute and co-author of the controversial The Bell Curve, details the thesis of his upcoming book Coming Apart: Over the last half century, the United States has developed a new lower class and a new upper class that are different in kind from anything America has ever known. The second contention of the book is that the divergence of America into these separate classes, if it continues, will end what has made America America. It's not the existence of classes that is new, Murray contends, but the emergence of classes that diverge on core behaviors and values. To attempt to forestall misinterpretation and a repeat of previous controversies, Murray studies this divergence in his soi-disant 'Founding Virtues' (viz. Marriage, Industriousness, Honesty, and Religiosity) between upper-middle (top 20%) and working (bottom 30%) class non-Hispanic whites aged 30-49 between 1960 to 2010. He cites evidence showing that where the expression of these virtues among the upper middle class has remained more or less constant over the years, the working class has decreased in them dramatically. For example, in 1960 88% of the upper middle class were married and in 2010 83% were married. For the working class in the same time frame the proportion dropped from 83% to 48%. [This] amounts to a revolution in the separation of classes in this country, Murray says. Above and below these populations are new upper (top 1%) and lower (Pleasant, personally unobjectionable people [… who] have never quite been able to get their act together.) classes, that range even farther afield of the norm. What a picture I am painting. A new lower class whose members are increasingly unsuited for citizenry in a free society. A new upper class that is increasingly isolated from, ignorant of, and something I haven't gone into but is also true, increasingly hostile toward a larger mainstream culture. He concludes, What we have going for us is a reality. From the founding through the first two centuries, the United States fostered a different way for people to live together, unique among the nations of the Earth, that is still immeasurably precious to some very large number of Americans who are determined that this way of living together will endure and prevail.

Four Economic Benchmarks We Need Now

kliuless — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 12:12:39 -0800

With capitalism in crisis, can it be sustained or is it altogether outdated? As Umair Haque asks though, perhaps a better question is: "are organizations and markets making decisions that help make people, communities, and society better off in the long run, by allocating their scarce resources to the most productive uses?"

Though economists and management thinkers extolled the virtues of innovation repeatedly, firms were just mastering low-level product, service, and technological innovation. Ironically, it was the most powerful kind of innovation that was left ignored, and so simply stopped happening: institutional innovation.

so how to overcome entrenched interests, political sclerosis, cultural biases and relentless demographics? haque posits new measures of national income, well-being and returns and developing new currencies to use "that are independent of countries and regions; people will [have] the choice to escape..." BONUS A Novel Defense Of Minimum Wage Laws - "Without unions and minimum-wage laws, corporations compete on who can pay the least. With them, they compete on who has the best employees and they invest significantly in those employees. Which is exactly what we want, especially since raising the minimum wage is unlikely in and of itself to increase unemployment visibly." Keynes and Social Democracy Today - "Today, ideas about full employment and equality remain at the heart of social democracy. But the political struggle needs to be conducted along new battle lines. Whereas the front used to run between government and the owners of the means of production – the industrialists, the rentiers – now, it runs between governments and finance... The new focus on the need to tame the power of finance is largely a consequence of globalization. Capital moves across borders more freely and more quickly than goods or people do. Yet, while large global firms habitually use their high concentration of financial resources to press for further de-regulation ('or we will go somewhere else'), the crisis has turned their size into a liability... Rather than securing investment for productive sectors of the economy, the financial industry has become adept at securing investment in itself. This, once again, calls for an activist government policy." cf. markets versus democracy: an EU view & state capitalism - "We're in a race to see whether politics will become the dominant means of allocating financial wealth in this country." The Choices That Pay Us Back - "Of course, any sorts of these plans could only be passed in a nation that was a Democracy. That is a form of government where policies are debated by the populace, then voted on by their elected representatives on behalf of the citizens. That was the form of government the United States was in the earliest portion of its history. No longer. It has since become a Corporatocracy: An elected Parliament of Whores who work on behalf of corporate interests. Any idea that conflict with those corporate interests, regardless of how innovative or potentially useful, don’t stand much of a chance." cf. Slick Justice? More on the Fifth Circuit and Its Ties to Oil & Government for Sale: How Lobbyists Shaped the Financial Reform Bill Slouching Towards Utopia? The Economic History of the Twentieth Century - "A parasitic caste or class existing by virtue of their organized ability to threaten violence and then take a substantial share of the agricultural (and craftwork) producers' crops becomes the rule soon after the coming of agriculture. Such castes and classes live better albeit more dangerously than the peasants. (If they didn't live better, after all, why accept the extra danger?) They live more dangerously because, after all, if they do not their numbers grow until they, once again, are at the Malthusian margin—and what good is being a noble if you have to live like a peasant? Whatever social system they evolve will break down unless it (a) keeps their numbers low enough to maintain an edge in standard-of-living, (b) keeps their lifestyle focused enough that they maintain their edge in violence, (c) keeps their numbers high enough that with their edge in violence they can maintain control, (d) keeps their numbers and their skill high enough to avoid being conquered by neighboring similar groups of thugs-with-spears, and (e) keeps their exactions low enough that they are not destroyed by revolting peasants with nothing to lose anyway. Upper-class social systems that accomplish those five goals tend to be terrifyingly stable in human history since the invention of agriculture. And whenever such a system does collapse another replacement almost invariably soon grows up in its place." Chapter 15: The Knot of War, 1914-1920 - "Hobson is a proto-Keynesian, believing that the major economic problem is the business cycle that causes mass unemployment, and that the business cycle is made much worse by the maldistribution of income. The rich save a lot. Often the investment spending to soak it up is not there. The only potential balance wheels are military spending and exports. Hence empire, militarism, and arms races are a way of boosting exports via captive markets and soaking up savings so that the rich can continue to collect their wealth without triggering enough business cycle instability to bring the system down." Thought and Society - "Not thinking about society, but how society and culture shape thought. Especially collective cognition: accomplishing cognitive taskes en masse." cf. Gabriel Tarde's rediscovery, Protest and the politics of dissent, Feasibility conditions on social reform & Actual letter to a liberal friend Measuring the stock of human capital - "Human Capital Accounting in the United States, 1994–2006" cf. Treating R&D as Investment, Rather Than Expense, Boosts GDP & "Manufacturing" Pricing the environment - "You cannot put a price on the value of a thriving pelican population. And if you could, there would be no one to claim the damages, because wildfowl don't have standing." cf. Socially responsible investors were on to BP for some time & Life matters! The water market: a thousand times bigger than oil by 2030 - "Supply of essential commodities like electricity and water are seen by many as human rights issues to be tackled by governments, rather than price-driven conundrums to be tackled by free markets. Dealing in such commodities can arouse more suspicion than excitement in the public imagination. But can water keep the traders out forever? Seems unlikely if there's supply/demand imbalances to be taken care of, and money to be made from doing so." Acid-Rain Market Collapses - The original U.S. cap-and-trade market, which succeeded in slashing the emissions that cause acid rain, is in disarray following new rules that render polluting allowances virtually worthless. Restaurants Join Bid to Save Fisheries - As the appetite for seafood soars, restaurant companies such as McDonald's are pressed to promote sustainable solutions. A Core Set of Global Environmental Indicators

planning a revolution? contribute to greater net good by doing better

kliuless — Sun, 16 May 2010 08:42:46 -0800

Moving beyond GDP for an information-based society - If indeed^[1,2] "A 'Quantum Leap' in Governance" is needed^[3] then, as part of the solution,^[4] we might start looking past GDP^[5,6] and perhaps more toward "betterness instead of business, pursue awesomeness instead of innovation — and maximize good, instead of quarterly profits..." intent on building your own franchulate? please keep in mind that "economic globalization, political democracy, and the nation-state are mutually irreconcilable."

The Woman Who Just Might Save the Planet and Our Pocketbooks

kliuless — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 09:41:13 -0800

What if our economy was not built on competition? Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom talks about her work on cooperation in economics. No Funny Business: Social Norms and Joke Theft

Rules are ideas about how people interact with each other. They are the formal laws and social norms that govern daily life. The legitimacy of formal laws often depends on their compatibility with social norms. Social norms can complement formal laws and, in some cases, stand in when formal legal enforcement is absent or inefficient. In a guest post for the Freakonomics blog, Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman write about social norms among stand-up comedians... In a related post, Rajiv Sethi explores other situations in which social norms operate as substitutes for formal laws. He points to Elinor Ostrom's work on self-governance among groups of people with collective rights to natural resources... Sethi also points out that social norms can enforce bad equilibria, citing oppressive attitudes about race, gender, or caste. A related issue is the extent to which formal laws and enforcement can change social norms about acceptable attitudes and behavior.

Social Capital and Community Governance

Social capital generally refers to trust, concern for one's associates, a willingness to live by the norms of one's community, and to punish those who do not. While essential to good governance, these behaviors and dispositions appear to conflict with the fundamental behavioral assumptions of economics whose archetypal individual--"Homo economicus"--is entirely self-regarding. We regard these behaviors and dispositions as aspects of what we term community governance. We suggest that (i) community governance addresses some common market and state failures but typically relies on insider-outsider distinctions that may be morally repugnant; (ii) the individual motivations supporting community governance are not captured by either the conventional self-interested preferences of "Homo economicus" or by unconditional altruism towards one's fellow community members; (iii) well-designed institutions make communities, markets, and states complements, not substitutes; (iv) with poorly designed institutions, markets and states can crowd out community governance; (v) some distributions of property rights are better than others at fostering community governance and assuring complementarity among communities, states, and markets; and (vi) far from representing holdovers from a premodern era, the small-scale local interactions that characterize communities are likely to increase in importance as the economic problems that community governance handles relatively well become more important.

To come up with new policies aimed at widely shared prosperity

His academic work is focused on identifying government's appropriate role — through regulations, taxes, or spending — in a market economy. He is currently engaged in a project to estimate the economic costs of climate change and has worked extensively on the Clean Air Act. He argues that government environmental regulation has improved air quality, leading to reductions in infant mortality rates and higher housing values, while also imposing costs through reducing the scale of manufacturing activity. Greenstone also has done research on topics ranging from the beneficial impacts of mandatory disclosure laws on stock prices to the role of antidiscrimination laws in reducing African-American infant mortality rates.

Complexity and doom

Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn't these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn't because they don't want to, it's because they can't. In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change. Tainter doesn't regard the sudden decoherence of these societies as either a tragedy or a mistake—"[U]nder a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response", to use his pitiless phrase. Furthermore, even when moderate adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification discomfits elites.

Do we need a bubble? There are two sorts of world. In a normal world, the equilibrium rate of interest is above the growth rate of the economy. In a weird world, the equilibrium rate of interest is below the growth rate of the economy. What's weird about a weird world is that it needs a bubble, a Ponzi scheme, a chain-letter swindle, for the economy to work well. Utility, The Deus Ex Machina of Economics Nicholas Bernoulli came up with the St. Petersburg Paradox, a position that stands in stark contradiction to Pascal's Wager, arguing that there is no limit to the amount you should be prepared to gamble in quest of a greater fortune... The classical solution to the paradox was proposed by Daniel Bernoulli who argued that the problem was that a dollar isn't a dollar for everyone. What he suggested was that the value of any given amount of money reduced as you became richer... He called this relative value 'utility'. Taking Hope in the Long View For the first time, more than half of the world will have enough food not to be hungry, enough shelter not to be wet, enough clothing not to be cold, and enough medical care not to be worried that they and most of their children will die prematurely of micro-parasites. The big problems for most of humanity will be to find enough conceptual puzzles and diversions in their work and leisure lives to avoid being bored, and enough relative status not to be green with envy of their fellows... How did this miracle come about? The World's Free Virtual School: an interview with Salman Khan Salman Khan is the man behind Khan Academy, a 2009 Tech Award winning site with 12+ million views and 1200+ 10-minute "videos on YouTube covering everything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, chemistry, biology and finance". We talked with him about building "the world's free virtual school", the potential of open-access learning, using the format for sustainability debates, and challenges in growing a non-profit from zero to global impact. A Short Survey of Network Economics This paper surveys a variety of topics related to network economics. Topics covered include: consumer demand under network effects, compatibility decisions and standardization, technology advances in network industries, two-sided markets, information networks and intellectual property, and social influence. Trust networks The general idea is that there are numerous examples of networks of people who share substantial interests in common, and who have a high level of trust in one another that permits them to undertake risky joint activities. Privilege Is Driving a Smooth Road And Not Even Knowing It People with more privilege, in contrast, can easily imagine that they are independent. A big mark of privilege is that social and economic networks tend to facilitate goals, rather than block them. This makes it easier to ignore the social and economic networks around us; and it makes it easier for the privileged to imagine their accomplishments are the result of their own pure merit... No one is independent; we all rely on a network of social and economic ties to tens of thousands of strangers, just to get through a single day. What the Founding Fathers Really Thought About Corporations Brian Murphy, a history professor at Baruch College in New York, knows a whole lot about corporations in the early days of the American republic. When the Supreme Court struck down restrictions on political spending by corporations in January, the ruling struck him as dramatically at odds with how the Founding Fathers saw the role of the corporation. Objects into people, people into objects, business value That is: your species has another skill. Just like you're good at turning objects into people, you're good at turning people into objects. It's easy for you to subordinate actual humans to the beauty of a System. You're terribly prone to slip into ideology, to elevate objects to totems-to-be-deferred-to. "Business Value" is, I fear, becoming one such totem. The Natural World Vanishes: How Species Cease To Matter Once, on both sides of the Atlantic, fish such as salmon, eels, and, shad were abundant and played an important role in society, feeding millions and providing a livelihood for tens of thousands. But as these fish have steadily dwindled, humans have lost sight of their significance, with each generation accepting a diminished environment as the new norm. The Future of Cities We live in an urban age. The Future of Cities is a series in which the FT explores the appeal of the city and the problems that come with rapid urbanisation, such as health challenges, conflict, development and conservation. The determinants of state fragility The causes and implications of state fragility – also known as state failure – are not yet well understood. This column explores the determinants of state fragility in sub-Saharan Africa and finds that institutions – as measured by civil liberties and the number of revolutions – are the main drivers. It says institutions trump economic, geographic, and historical factors.

Eros Kapital

chavenet — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 03:43:34 -0800

This recent academic article [PDF] by Catherine Hakim presents "a new theory of erotic capital as a fourth personal asset, an important addition to economic, cultural, and social capital," and proposes "a new agenda for sociological (and feminist) research and theory." Here's a stripped-down magazine version. The theory is controversial and thought-provoking, sure, and there are counter-arguments. The Financial Times notes the obvious: If eroticism is indeed a kind of capital, then there is a market in it. Meanwhile, newspapers get yet another reason to print pictures of sexy people. [All links are SFW]

Whence Altruism?

zarq — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 12:43:13 -0800

A new study suggests that humanity's sense of fair play and kindness towards strangers is determined by culture, not genetics. Speculation: the finding may be directly related to the rise of religion in human history, as well as more complex economies. (Via). On the other hand, perhaps we learned it from dogs. :)

funemployment

kliuless — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 13:49:10 -0800

How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America
The Great Recession may be over, but this era of high joblessness is probably just beginning. Before it ends, it will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar men. It could cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a despair not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years to come. (via rw)

The Gervais Principle

East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 09:47:36 -0800

The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to “The Office”. Warning: link may evoke baleful despair!

Austrian school do it better

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 21:04:38 -0800

The Austrian school of economics try to explain what's wrong with our money.

The ties that bind

blahblahblah — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 12:12:13 -0800

The International Networks Archive is an effort by a group of sociologists to understand 2,000 years of globalization through mapping the network of transactions that link the world, rather than geography. The project is still ongoing, but you can see some of the results: an interactive map that uses travel time to visualize the world; a graphic of the growth of Starbucks and McDonalds; the distribution of government jobs (apparently the 3,412 postal inspectors can carry firearms); the cashflows of movies and tobacco; and, of course, the world at night. There is also access to a lot of detailed data, as well as more maps and information at the Mapping Globalization wiki.

Dr. Schelling's neighborhood

scalefree — Sun, 09 Jul 2006 13:37:59 -0800

Dr. Schelling's neighborhood. Is segregation the holdover of a racist past or an inevitable result of simple mathematical processes? After you've read the theory, try it for yourself here, here & here. Dr. Thomas Schelling won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics for developing these ideas, but not everybody agrees that he deserved to.

Sociology

semmi — Thu, 09 Dec 2004 22:53:51 -0800

A hundred years of “The Protestant Ethic.” Elizabeth Kolbert on Max Weber in The New Yorker.

A Science of Social Prediction?

weston — Wed, 24 Sep 2003 15:24:13 -0800

"You'd think that predicting human behavior would be easy ...everyone should be a rational economizer, busy calculating their individual costs and benefits, and acting accordingly. Right?" So begins the review of Socionomics: The Science of History and Social Prediction on slashdot. I've always thought the Elliot Wave Theory sounded like psuedoscience, but found the rational choice theory problematic as well, even ridiculous at times. What's voodoo, and what's promising in advancing predictive social sciences?

ed — Sun, 20 Oct 2002 13:28:14 -0800

For Richer: the first in a New York Times series on class in the United States. Princeton economics professor Paul Krugman declares the death of the middle class, pointing out disparities between the rich and the poor, examining efforts to cover up class makeup with quantile data, and probing the transformation of corporate executive ethics and influence. Even Glenn Reynolds is taken to task for his Sweden-Mississippi per capita GDP comparison. Krugman's sources are on the slim side, but the question must be asked: Are we living in a new Gilded Age? And, if so, how can citizens and government work to change things?