Rather than ask the question, "What if sociologists had influence?", the author should ask, "What does sociology need to change as a discipline in order to earn influence?"
The answer would be rigor. A huge problem with sociology is the dependence on the story. Unfortunately, since the sociologist is often a human with their own biases, they are going to see what they want to see.
For example, I purchased the Kindle version of the book the author recommends ("Coming Up Short"). I turned to the appendix, where the author describes her research methodology. And sure enough, the research involves open-ended questions ("Walk me through a typical day at work." "Is there a time you lost a job? Could you describe it?") that could lead the interviewee to respond in any way they want.
There are many problems with this, such as : 1) the interviewee may inadvertently invent convenient narratives that provide comfort but aren't accurate, 2) the interviewer may mis-interpret the answers, etc.
How are we supposed to develop policy off of this? Sure, it's a great starting point for starting research, but the narrative- or story-based approach should never be the conclusion.
This is why economics is so much more trusted. Although economics has flaws, and the study of econometrics can sometimes lead to incorrect conclusions, it at least uses objective data and metrics, which are less susceptible to error, providing a much more grounded approach to policy decisions.
By "rigor" you mean "math". But economics itself is the best proof that math can be used to cargo-cult your opinions to fame and fortune.
While there are some attempts with evidence-based policy, these sciences just aren't really at the point where math is useful (yet).
Math mostly requires reducibility: the ability to split it into small parts and look at these individually. That approach worked incredibly well in physics, and with the Manhattan project at the latest, it proved that it was mightier than any human endeavour before it.
But while, theoretically, everything could be reduced to physics, that isn't always the level of abstraction that works best. If you're depressed, a physicist isn't going to help you. Medicine may – but a psychologist, even though the discipline is scientifically flawed - is still an important tool in the set available to us.
Sociology is psychology on a population-scale. In that regard, it may be almost impossible to reduce because of nonlinear effects, chaos etc. That severely limits applying results from prior experiment X,Y,Z to situation B – because what you usually do is split situation B into components (B1=X,B2=Y,B3=Z,...), each of which is quite generic and has been studied in detail. So you'd have to run your own experiment on B, and the questions of sociology would require you to run an A/B experiment, with both A and B being, for example, New York.
I remember coming across this field of study some time ago, along with its psychological counterpart. I'm not trying to argue for or against your point but I thought it might me interesting to us all none the less:
> theoretically, everything could be reduced to physics
Is there a thing as free will, and if so, is it explainable in terms of physics? And with consciousness (if you believe there is such a thing)? Is morality and ethics reducible to physics as well? There's a lot of presuppositions to the statement that everything is reducible to some purely mechanical process.
I have no doubt that many serious people believe as you have stated, but it's not a self evidently true claim.
You seem to be claiming that the results of sociology cannot be predictive, only descriptive.
If so, that makes sociology completely useless for policy. A field which cannot predict what will happen next time can't actually inform a policy maker as to whether their policy is useful.
Math mostly requires reducibility: the ability to split it into small parts and look at these individually.
This is simply false. If this is your criticism of math in economics, it applies equally well to math in geophysics, oceanography, climate science, etc.
> A field which cannot predict what will happen next time can't actually inform a policy maker as to whether their policy is useful.
That charge could reasonably be made against economics. From 2008: 'During a briefing by academics at the London School of Economics on the turmoil on the international markets the Queen asked: "Why did nobody notice it?"' [0]
Economics makes good predictions most of the time. It's a known flaw in the model that the movement of stock prices is fractally distributed. The model assumes normal distribution instead, since it's mathematically much more tractable. This is usually fine, but causes the model to underpredict rare events like the 2008 crash. I don't think this invalidates economics though. That's like saying physics is invalid because the Newtonian model doesn't 100% accurately reflect reality.
> It's a known flaw in the model that the movement of stock prices is fractally distributed.
There's plenty more to the economy, and to economics, and to the crisis than predicting stock prices. Reducing the question to stock prices is avoiding the question, IMO.
> That's like saying physics is invalid because the Newtonian model doesn't 100% accurately reflect reality
Not really. Newtonian physics is inaccurate in ways that are hard to measure at everyday human scale. The 2008 crisis was pretty noticeable, all over the world. I think an apt physics analogy would be something like getting a nuclear explosion out of starting a fire (technically, out of buying a house), something that's been done successfully for millennia without major incident.
> There's plenty more to the economy, and to economics, and to the crisis than predicting stock prices. Reducing the question to stock prices is avoiding the question, IMO.
You're absolutely correct. The point I was trying to make is that the economic model we use drastically under-predicts "rare" events like the 2008 crash. I wasn't trying to make a statement about the "cause" of the crash, so much as state that the model under-predicts such events.
> Not really. Newtonian physics is inaccurate in ways that are hard to measure at everyday human scale. The 2008 crisis was pretty noticeable, all over the world. I think an apt physics analogy would be something like getting a nuclear explosion out of starting a fire (technically, out of buying a house), something that's been done successfully for millennia without major incident.
All theoretical models are based on arbitrary axioms/assumptions. The degree to which they predict reality successfully is largely predicated by the degree to which the underlying axioms correctly reflect reality. I don't think this is a binary thing. I don't think that the field of economics is "invalidated" because it "failed" to predict the 2008 crash. I might argue that it's "less" correct or reflective of reality than Newtonian mechanics is, but again, I don't think the degree to which our predictive systems represent reality is binary. I don't think that they're either right or wrong, only more or less successful.
Yes. And that's one reason why I don't buy arguments about economic 'rigor'. There's a narrative that goes along with the rigor, and the narrative isn't always right.
I don't understand your grievance with the usage of 'rigor'. I think there's a difference in occasionally failing to predict and (almost?) always failing to predict. When the field that consistently fails is often dependent upon autoethnographies and the like, it's hard not to criticize it for lack of rigor. Economics isn't perfect, but economists aren't basing their predictions on how they felt when they interviewed someone either. It seems to me that rigor is a perfectly valid distinguishing characteristic between the fields.
1) How much sense do equilibrium models make when money, and, especially, debt, which functions as money, can be created at the whim of certain participants (central banks, banks, credit-issuing companies) in the 'equilibrium'? It's ironic to me that the logic and analysis of scarcity is associated with the least scarce, most easily created material (money/debt) in the universe. At least with physics, matter can neither be created not destroyed. Feynman: 'There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.'
2) If you put a Keynesian economist, a neoclassical economist, and an Austrian economist (just to pick three flavors) in a room together and ask them to sort out what they agree and disagree on, the assumptions they'll make are more about narrative than about rigor... which would suggest that narrative is more important than the rigor folks give it credit for.
The better critique is that math requires homogenous data points. In sociology, every policy implementation is different in a million ways. A welfare program in Sweden is different than one in Chicago. The charter school program in Boston are different than those in Detroit. So doing statistical studies on a question like "do charter schools work" that treats all these implementations as identical, is often not very useful for actually learning something about policy.
The better critique is that math requires homogenous data points.
This critique is similarly wrong. There's a field called "machine learning" - you might have heard of it - which often uses inhomogeneous data points.
So doing statistical studies on a question like "do charter schools work" that treats all these implementations as identical, is often not very useful for actually learning something about policy.
So instead build a model that understands the important factors which make charter schools work/fail. Then use it.
If you can't do this, don't pretend you have anything to say about whether I should implement charter schools.
Climate science – as one example – uses the thermodynamic properties of CO_2 as a major building block that can be studied extensively on your desk.
And I'm not claiming that sociology cannot predict. I'm just saying that they cannot measure the small (CO_2) and extrapolate to the large to make predictions. Their predictions therefore need other methods.
>If so, that makes sociology completely useless for policy.
Only in as much as one believes that descriptive results are "completely useless" for policy.
For me they are just as important, if not more, than predictive results. Predictive models only tells us what will happen -- not what is going on, if it is any good, ways of thinking about it, and whether we should ask for more or less of it.
"Blacks are humans just like we whites are, not some inferior race that's OK to be exploited".
I'm a policy maker. I put an end to slavery.
No prediction involved.
"X prevents women from getting into IT".
I'm a policy maker. I take steps to help women get into IT.
No prediction involved.
Conditions in prisons are bad because so and so.
I'm a policy maker. Let's change the conditions.
No prediction involved.
Sometimes the prediction is obvious and implied (removing X will allow more women to get into IT), other times it's not needed at all (when the change is about doing what's right, like with slavery, not about doing something that we predict will turn things in some specific way).
Your first example is based on moral philosophy, not sociology.
Your other two examples - as you note - are based on an explicit prediction. Now the question arises - are sociological predictions any good?
You can't simultaneously claim sociology is descriptive, and therefore can't be judged on it's predictions, and then turn around and use it's predictions to describe it as useful.
>Your first example is based on moral philosophy, not sociology.
Sociology is inherently tied with "moral philosophy" and normative ideas about society, and has always been, and it's something sociologists, at least here in Europe, have been perfectly open about (e.g. Foucault Bourdieu, Pierre Bourdieu, Henri Lefebvre and tons of others) It's not, for example, just a positivistic gathering of statistics and a supposedly "neutral" construction of prediction models.
>Your other two examples - as you note - are based on an explicit prediction
No, they are based on observation of existing conditions. No explicit prediction involved, as noted. At best there's an implicit prediction that's an obvious conclusion from the observations (e.g. "if we reduce macho culture, more women will get into IT").
People may be able to make accurate predictions after reading sociology for its qualitative findings, without it being possible to make these predictions formally using our current mathematics.
My fav quote on that: "Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window." (Peter Drucker)
I think you're giving economics the benefit of the doubt while having a critical eye towards sociology when they're not much different in regards to objectivity and being "soft" sciences. In fact I'm not sure sociology would still have its credibility intact if it were to have as many failures as economics have had just the latest 20 years or so. Somehow economics manages this, which leads me to the next point.
I'm surprised that you're speaking with such certainty without mentioning the rather powerful relationship between economics and finance in a classical "follow the money" trail of thought.
> In fact I'm not sure sociology would still have its credibility intact if it were to have as many failures as economics have had just the latest 20 years or so.
We are here back at the fundamental mathification problem. Economists have understood that as long as their formulas look scientific enough, they can influence with their results policy makers et al.. Sociology rarely present their research in terms of the broad and universal truth as the economists do. So while Economists' results look rigorous on paper, reality still proves it often wrong.
Please separate fundamental economic research with political economic decision-making. Good economic research improves tries to model real behavior. This doesn't stop politicians from cherry-picking research articles to verify their sometimes incorrect worldviews.
This is analogous to complaining that climate researchers aren't rigorous because some subset of politicians claim it isn't manmade and point to some articles which support their claims.
That the study of economics has a strong connection to both capital and power while sociology is more academic/institutional and thus less influential.
True dat. Economics has a number of reformers, in endless battle with an elite who make their names and fortunes by telling power what it wants to hear (and dressing it up with shamanistic differential equations to give the appearance of credibility).
> I'm not sure sociology would still have its credibility intact if it were to have as many failures as economics
A lot of sociology is unfalsifiable. However, this is a field in which many people still look up to Marx--a sociologist whose predictions were falsified in a rather spectacular way.
Foundational microeconomic theories, however, are easily verified in many everyday cases and frequently used to make money in practice. Furthermore note that we're pretty sure about when the foundations apply and when they don't. Being able to say "I know when this is true" is a very powerful thing. The non-economic side of sociology can't say anything like that.
Economists, like Sociologists, have trouble predicting the future and the past.
The only thing, in my opinion, that separates Economics from Sociology is that for economic activity to take place there's also a hard substance that can be tracked, eg. money, but also other goods or services. Sociology is the social science that focuses on everything else in the field that isn't that. Sociology is Economics poor cousin, as it were.
You say sociological methodology leads the researcher to project their own biases onto the data, but the method you criticise- open questions - is precisely designed to avoid this. The sociological methodology most focussed on avoiding researcher bias is Grounded Theory[1]. It follows the collection of data via open-ended questions and interviews with further techniques to analyse this unstructured data in a way that avoids introducing preconceived ideas from the researcher (coding, etc).
The problem with pointing to qualitative techniques as more rigorous and less biassed, is that the bias - when it comes to data about people- often lies in the decision what to measure - especially when categorising - and how to interpret the numerical result when you have (rigorously) processed it. That is as susceptible to preconceptions of the researcher. It's just easier for an economist to hide behind the rigour applied to the quantitative part.
Agreed, yes/no questions can often be leading and may come to totally inaccurate conclusions. With open-ended questions you may get a rich answer with a lot of bias, but at least the answer is rich and you can sift through the data gathered. Its just not nearly as efficient as a "rate on a scale of 1-10" or "yes or no" questionnaire. But the devil is always in the details.
In addition, sociology as a practice seems to tie itself deeply to activism. When it does so, the credibility of sociology as a scientific pursuit weakens.
Compare, for example, at Colombia University, the Department of Sociology homepage http://sociology.columbia.edu/ and the Department of Economoics http://econ.columbia.edu/. The sociology page features a huge image of a protest of the recent immigration executive orders. The economics page, on the other hand, features upcoming talks like "Iceland's Road to Recovery" and "Modern Financial Markets: The Role of High-Frequency Trading". The sociology department is signaling that they're passionate about ideological issues, while the economics department is signaling that they're focused on understanding and analyzing.
People trust scientists because people believe they are willing and able to divorce their emotions and vested interests from an objective pursuit of the truth. Sociology seems to fail that test time after time.
> Compare, for example, at Colombia University, the Department of Sociology homepage http://sociology.columbia.edu/ and the Department of Economoics http://econ.columbia.edu/. The sociology page features a huge image of a protest of the recent immigration executive orders. The economics page, on the other hand, features upcoming talks like "Iceland's Road to Recovery" and "Modern Financial Markets: The Role of High-Frequency Trading". The sociology department is signaling that they're passionate about ideological issues, while the economics department is signaling that they're focused on understanding and analyzing.
How can you conjure up this example, and conclude that only sociology is ideological?
> How can you conjure up this example, and conclude that only sociology is ideological?
Would it be better if he had said that the Economics department seems to aspire to centrist technocracy and the Sociology department varies from left wing to far left?
That would be the understatement of the century.
Economics theory decide how to organize society resources, so, it's a very loaded subject with a lot of interests trying to decide what is "reality".
Economics use complicated maths to justify ideologically determined policy.
I propose you a simple exercise. Go to any mainstream economic textbook and read about the fractional reserve system creation of money, that it's supposedly how the system works.
Then go and read what the people that are really in charge say about how money is created (pdf from the Bank of England):
If you read a basic 100-level nutrition textbook, I guarantee you that you'll recant your statement. The problem isn't that the disciplines are disconnected from reality, but that people are treating bleeding-edge research as if it's scientific fact, rather than taking it all with a grain of salt as you would do in another scientific discipline.
What makes you think I haven't read such a textbook? The problem is the insights in economics are either obvious or dubious, save Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage. Which, I should add, doesn't seem to hold up in practice either.
The creation of money is actually among the more sensible elements of economics, though fractional reserve lending may not be the best route to doing that (I'm not sure that it is or isn't, though I'm pretty certain it's not the bugbear people claim it is).
I'd look at economic definitions of cost, value, and price, of ignoring the reality of thermodynamics, and of much of the theology (Thorstein Veblen uses the term "mythology") surrounding supposedly rationally-acting "homo economicus", market failures, and the role of information, amongst many others.
Money is first and principally a mechanism for exchange, and gumming up that role leads to problems. Fractional-reserve and central banking greatly assists in this, and is by and large hugely useful.
>The answer would be rigor. A huge problem with sociology is the dependence on the story. Unfortunately, since the sociologist is often a human with their own biases, they are going to see what they want to see.
This is the exact problem, yet it is hard to get someone in the social sciences to admit it in my experience. For instance, I am a computer science student, and I'm currently taking a political science class as part of my university requirements. A recent exam question was worded in multiple choice format, to the effect that the professor was seeking an exact specific answer to a completely subjective question, such as "What is the most important issue facing China as it's population continues to grow?". It's completely absurd, and you end up with an exam full of questions with one "correct" answer, and a bunch of nonsensical gibberish for the other options.
This lack of imprecision drives me absolutely mad. I understand that social sciences are inherently dealing with subject matter that is harder to quantify than, say, computer science. But the issue is when one asserts that scientific conclusions can be made about these subjects when no formal system of reasoning exists. To quote from a recent article I read,
"Until we have a deep understanding of the brain, we can't shape falsifiable, general theories about it, and mind studies cannot provide a reliable understanding of the brain. In short, no theory, no falsifiability, no science."
In short, if social scientists simply accepted that their fields do not fit the traditional rigors of science, it would do much to alleviate the issue. Studying these things can still provide valuable, actionable insight.
But to treat it on par with the natural sciences is fraudulent.
Rather than ask the question, "What if sociologists had influence?", the author should ask, "What does sociology need to change as a discipline in order to earn influence?"
The answer would be rigor. A huge problem with sociology is the dependence on the story. Unfortunately, since the sociologist is often a human with their own biases, they are going to see what they want to see.
This is exactly it. They can't prove what they know, or make good predictions. When you insert yourself into the story, you can't shake confirmation bias.
Economics is still shaky science, but the economists at least try to get on stronger fundamental footing.
Nonsense. Back to the original question, the reason why economics has influence is because it involves money. The people who hold the purse strings talk in that language, and those people always pay themselves first.
Sociology could have perfect rigor, beyond that of any other disciple, but it would never have the influence of economics.
> Rather than ask the question, "What if sociologists had influence?", the author should ask, "What does sociology need to change as a discipline in order to earn influence?"
Become obsequious towards those in power? Find out rationalizations for our current state of affairs? Come up with reasons why we live in the best of all possible worlds?
Joan Robinson once put it pretty concisely, "The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists."
As someone who got minored in Anthropology in my phd program, I like qualitative because it is descriptive.
Quantitative work are best at telling us what answers people gave or a numerical summary of what people did. It can't tell us why people gave that answer or why they did what they did.
Unfortunately, we can't even trust this qualitative work, because it is produced by an ideologically homogeneous body. It's not possible to remove the confirmation bias. These departments often seem more like clergy than scientists.
In marketing research, the normal approach tends to use sociology type research to generate hypothesis and ideas which you then either test quantitatively with rigor or through in market testing. Sometimes, if the narrative research is convincing enough, you might directly skip to an in market test execution.
Look how much influence the Laffer Curve has had on economic policy, when in fact it is a pretty boring observation that taxation at a rate of 0% produces no income for the government, and taxation at a rate of 100% produces no income for the government (because of the lack of incentive to work), therefore the optimum is somewhere between those two points. That broad idea was enough to argue that the highest tax rates were way too high and had to be cut substantially.
And that is a good example of the disconnect between economics as a social science and politicians instrumentalising some sound bites from economics profs and selling it as "what the economists tell us".
There are numerous economics papers studying exactly what is the shape of the Laffer curve both from historical analysis as well as trying to find natural experiments. (IIRC tax revenue peaks at 50-65% tax rates, at least in the short run.) None of the politicians actually know or care about the results of these studies - as long as the sound bite is convenient as a rhetoric device to support their ideology (cutting taxes or raising taxes or whatever, it gets trotted out by politicians.
Sadly, ex-economists who definitely do know better are instrumental in this as well. People like Krugman, Mankiw or indeed Laffer got a large audience based on genuine rigorous contributions from 10 or 20 years ago - and then promptly ignore all that rigor, uncertainty and intellectual honesty when they get the offer of a $10million/year payday and a chance to mold the world according to their ideology from politicians and media.
It is the same thing with international trade, it is the same thing with state-vs-private ownership and natural monopolies, it is the same thing with costs/benefits of demographic change and migration.
It seems pretty clear that you don't like qualitative sociology, but do you have a problem with the rigor of quantitative sociology, as it is currently practiced?
It reminds me of the often-cited Stanford Prison Experiment. The lack of any rigor during the experiment is usually ignored when the findings are discussed.
The "experiment" had no control group, or even a separation between the observers and the ones involved in the experiment (Zimbardo was both the prison chief and the lead researcher). From an experimental setup point of view, it was just an amateurish mess.
The number of responses to this post broadly implicating macroeconomics as psuedoscience are pounding nails into their own coffins considering macroeconomics and the applications of the study tend to be sociological in nature. There's no psuedoscience behind microeconomic analysis of market interactions at the lower levels; they very well model how markets, businesses, exchanges of value, etc operate.
Some practically useless models of macroeconomics (Real Business Cycle theory) pride themselves in being fully "microfounded", i.e., being based only on the basic assumptions of microeconomics.
The uselessness is then demonstrated by proclamations that the doubling of the unemployment rate in the recent financial crisis is caused by 10s of millions of workers suddenly developing a preference for leisure over work.
Reading the replies you're getting, it seems the average HN commenter:
A. Has never read an economics research paper
B. Only know economics as monetary policy (or macro more broadly), and as a libertarian is inherently skeptical.
Currently, most of the interesting research being done in econ is outside of theoretical macro, so the knee jerk libertarian "economics is broken" meme doesn't hold much water as the topics and methods are pretty dissimilar. A developmental microeconomics field study in rural India is a different beast entirely from a macro theory paper.
For a sample of the diversity of economics research, see here: http://www.nber.org/papersbyprog/
Returning to your comment, the issue of storytelling, in a nutshell, was what drove me crazy when working closely with qualitative sociologists. Trying to discuss falsifiability in their study design was maddening. Sociology doesn't need to adopt the same research model as applied economics but they do need a serious look at their research methods, and I have more respect for those who try to take a quantitative approach. Many of the sociologists I worked with would turn up their noses at the phrase "computational social science" and were loathe to discuss issues like biased sampling, but the best ones (IMO) used qualitative observations to drive later large-scale quantitative study, which I think should be the de-facto standard for social science research.
Their reliance on ethnographic studies can be useful for verifying the existence of some phenomenon you have a hunch exists in some form, but such research is woefully biased and wholly inadequate as a means of measuring the prevalence or magnitude of a phenomenon, which is why economics studies (or quantitative methods more broadly) tend to have more credence when presenting evidence on the same subjects.
"most of the interesting research being done in econ is outside of theoretical macro"
I'm not sure why that save economics from the discussion, when it's the theoretical macro what have a huge influence in the life of billions of persons and the title of the article we are discussing is "If Sociologists Had as Much Influence as Economists".
The libertarian comment is uncalled for, as most of the comments here don't express a political view, only criticism of the discipline.
It's not fair to say that it's theoretical macro that has the major impact on policymakers. Look at the most influential (in a political sense) economists/social scientists these days, and they're advising policymakers about things on a much more granular scale (eg: the particular effects of sub-components of the ACA on consumer behavior, the barriers to equality of opportunity in impoverished areas, etc.). I think the outsider view of economics is stuck in the "schools of thought" era, which has all but vanished from serious economics.
And the libertarian mention is called for when the other comments are using common dog-whistles for libertarian distrust of central banking (via a sort of "fruit of the poisonous tree" argument).
Modern Western society seems to associate quantitative research with "rigor", and to believe that it is more objective than qualitative studies. Rather than take this approach, I believe it would be more worthwhile to say that all research will be influenced by the author's societal positioning. For example, consider how economists choose what metrics to use in their experiments. It seems to me impossible to say that those choices could ever be unbiased, free of influence by external forces.
"Rather than ask the question, "What if sociologists had influence?", the author should ask, "What does sociology need to change as a discipline in order to earn influence?""
It needs to generate 'useful' political recommendations (useful to the 'right' people).
"The answer would be rigor."
No it absolutely would not. The economics profession has been actively resisting rigor. For instance, Neoclassical (still the default in policy circles) still considers private debt to have no significant macroeconomic effect and presumes, religiously, that markets trend towards equilibrium (particularly in employment).
"This is why economics is so much more trusted."
It shouldn't be.
"it at least uses objective data"
Would you have any faith in a model rooted in Newtonian mechanics that assumed away friction just because "it at least uses objective data"?
The use of math in economics is much like the use of Newtonian mechanics to understand elementary particle interactions at the horizons of black holes.
Sociologists have had a very large impact on policy in the last century. For example, the hundreds of billions spent on public housing was based on ideas that came out of sociology -- https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/dvPJvrleZI_wckWhjsRNPPRl4xU... It just didn't work.
And a large body of sociological research touches on the idea of stigmatization, including of the poor and of racial minorities.
Many school reforms ideas (desegregation, elimination of corporal punishment, reducing emphasis on rote learning, etc) were based on this theory. The Brown versus Board of Education decision cited sociological research along these lines, for example. But the theories were wrong, so the solutions did not work. Professor Raymond Wolters has two exhaustive (if depressing) histories of these reforms and their failures. See The Long Crusade: Profiles in Education Reform, 1967-2014 and The Burden of Brown: Thirty Years of School Desegregation
It’s one thing, for example, to outlaw housing discrimination based on race. But if real estate agents and would-be home sellers subtly shun minority buyers, the effect can be the same. Professor Gans of Columbia has argued for decades that the stigmatization of poor Americans fuels entrenched, persistent poverty.
Section 8 might not have the best outcomes, but I recall that economists have shown it to be preferable to public housing.
I don't know if there's any research demonstrating Section 8 is superior to letting people live in abject poverty, but I think it's reasonable to have strong priors about this hypothesis.
Common sense would say that if you give someone money or vouchers, they would be immediately materially better off to the extent that you gave them money. I don't dispute that. Common sense also traditionally held that any public charity needed to be coupled with discipline and oversight to prevent a worsening of social ills.
The claim from mid-century academic sociology was that public housing (and later vouchers) in and of themselves would reduce crime and other social ills. You didn't need punitive work houses -- if you just gave the poor better housing they would start behaving better. I see no evidence that this was the case. And with regards to public housing especially, it seems to have contributed to worsening crime and social ills.
> Common sense would say that if you give someone money or vouchers, they would be immediately materially better off to the extent that you gave them money. I don't dispute that. Common sense also traditionally held that any public charity needed to be coupled with discipline and oversight to prevent a worsening of social ills.
Your definition of "common sense" is strange. You use commonsense and go straight into an elaborate concept.
Also your statement of failure of section 8 is without substance or source.
As a school reform idea, no. Putting blacks into the general vicinity of whites does not appear to cause them to have better educational outcomes.
I don't find this too surprising, actually. It would be pretty strange if white people emitted pheremones (or whatever) that improve the educational performance of people around them.
This is a really strange conversation. Imagine the following conversation: "Ending slavery didn't work?" "As an anti-poverty program, no." So that's technically correct, but one has to be conscious of the implied assumptions about what matters.
Devinhelton explicitly said that sociology made the wrong predictions about desegregation: "Many school reforms ideas (desegregation, ... But the theories were wrong, so the solutions did not work."
I'm in favor of desegregation on capitalist grounds. I think it's unjust to legally force me to discriminate if I don't want to. In much the same way, I think it's unjust to force me to use yellow cabs rather than Uber, or prevent me from purchasing services from an unlicensed barber.
If a theory predicts X, and X doesn't occur, that shows the theory to be wrong. The theory should be discarded even if it supports policies I otherwise favor. That's true even if the predictions are on something that's unimportant.
Similarly, if I build a stock market prediction model, and it makes me money but incorrectly predicts how I make money, I'm probably switching it off. The reason is that it is clearly wrong, and will likely lose me money next time.
That was never the idea. Desegregation came about because the white schools often had better funding, thus better teachers, better facilities, and an overall better experience.
Seriously, it was never about putting people in "the general vicinity of whites". That statement just makes you look foolish.
That was never the idea. Desegregation came about because the white schools often had better funding, thus better teachers, better facilities, and an overall better experience.
From my reading of a lot of the literature, this was not exactly the case. The gap in teacher quality and facilities was part of the rationale, but not the whole thing. If the gap had just been in facilities or teacher quality, the courts and leadership would have just ordered improving the facilities in the black schools, which would have been politically a lot easier.
The primary theory for desegregation, was that segregated schools inherently lead to stigmatization and that stigmatization lead to lower self-esteem and lower achievement.
Here, for instance is from the conclusions of a committee from the state Board of Education in Massachusetts back in the 1960s ( https://archive.org/details/reportonracialim00unit ): "The experience of Negroes in the United States, from the destruction of their familial and cultural ties in the days of slavery to the demoralizing surroundings of the Negro ghetto and the predominantly Negro school, tends to transmit to each generation of Negro children a lack of self-esteem and a low level of aspiration, which are perpetuated and reinforced by the segregated environment of the public school...children attending racially imbalanced schools are aware of their segregated environment and, from that environment, draw conclusions about their place in American life ..."
From the same document, they site an academic sociologist about the problem of segregated schools: "Teachers expect less of the students, the students expect less of themselves, they are traumatized by the sense of rejection which stems from the segregation, hence academic performance cannot be achieved."
You can find similar quotes in the Brown decision, or the sociological work upon which Brown was based (The Carnegie Corporation's book An American Dilemma).
Now, I think that clearly this theory is wrong on multiple levels. And the solutions based on these theories did not work on any level. These theories seem to me like "just so" stories created for politically motivated reasons. It is especially interesting that discrimination has been cited as a reason for Asian-American academic overachievement. (The theory is that if you are discriminated against, you are going to work extra hard to achieve in areas where there are objective standards, such as math). I suspect that this is also something of a just-so story and that discrimination probably doesn't have much of an impact either way.
>stories created for politically motivated reasons
I think this sums up why sociology should not play any role in policy making, and why its track record is so poor whenever it does.
Sociology is process of rationalizing leftist social policy with the guise of science. In practice, it is just a modern form of Lysenkoism.
There is nothing theoretically wrong with studying human behavior, it is just too easy to always find the answer you are looking for in such an unrigorous environment.
> As far as I know the gap still exists today, 50 years later
Schools have since de facto resegregated due to changes in school districts and disparities in neighborhood demographics. In the aggregate, schools today are actually just as segregated as they were just before the mandatory desegregation, with a few notable exceptions.
Can you link to the part that says the improvements are insignificant? [2] says the opposite. Last week tonight [0] referenced this paper [1], pointing out significant changes when measuring siblings in segregated vs integrated schools.
Fixed isn't the right word, but segregation still exists in many ways and integration isn't the entire plan but rather a significant step towards a solution.
From the wikipedia article you link to: "Desegregation efforts of the 1970s and 1980s led to substantial academic gains for black students; as integration increased, blacks' educational attainment increased while that of whites remained largely unchanged.[17]"
I follow footnote 17 and download the paper, and there is nothing in the paper about academic gains. I think the footnote must be going to the wrong place.
I have heard a similar claims elsewhere, but when I looked at the data it is not at all convincing. Here is Professor David Armor, who researched integration and desegregation for decades analyzing the data (From page 93. of Forced Justice):
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"Figure 2.7 shows black and white reading achievement between 1971 and 1990 for thirteen-year olds (most of whom are eighth-graders). In 1971, when most blacks in this age group had been educated in segregated schools, black thirteen-year-olds trailed whites by 39 points. Over the next two decades, white scores remained virtually constant, starting at 261 and ending the period at 262 points. In contrast, black scores rose steadily for most of the period, starting at 222 and ending at 242 points (following a drop of a point in the latest assessment)..."
"A number of studies and several noted educators have invoked the harm and benefit thesis by suggesting that black achievement gains observed in the NAEP might be attributed in part to school desegregation....Ironically, the desegregation explanation has never been tested by examining the relationship between achievement and racial composition of schools using the most appropriate source of data, the NAEP itself. Since the NAEP established achievement trends for blacks in the first place, it makes sense to test the desegregation theory by comparing achievement trends for blacks in segregated versus desegregated schools. If the desegregation theory is correct, larger achievement gains would be expected for blacks in desegregated schools than for blacks in segregated schools..."
"Achievement trends for blacks in desegregated versus segregated schools has only recently become available for NAEP data. ...Figure 2.9 shows trends in reading achievement for black thirteen-year-olds according to the racial composition of their schools. The desegregation theory is clearly not supported by the NAEP data. While blacks in majority-white schools generally score somewhat higher than blacks in predominantly minority schools (although not in every year), the trend in reading between 1975 and 1988- when the largest black gains occurred-shows that thirteen-year-old blacks in predominantly minority schools have gained virtually the same as blacks in majority-white schools. In the case of math trends, blacks in predominantly minority schools actually gain 10 points mare than blacks in majority-white schools. By 1990 there was only a 2-point difference between the math scores of segregated and desegregated black students....This pattern of gains for segregated versus desegregated black students in the NAEP is replicated for other age groups as well."
---------------
That was from 1995. More recent NAEP scores show the same thing -- https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/subject/studies/pdf/sc... The racial achievement gap is the same size no matter the school composition. Black students do little better in schools that are more white. (And that little difference is probably correlation not causation -- higher achieving black parents both have higher achieving kids and are able to afford schools in more white areas, when you control for socioeconomic status the correlation almost disappears).
One of the few John Oliver segments that I actually liked was his one on how so many academic studies are bogus ( http://fortune.com/2016/05/09/john-oliver-scientific-studies... ). There are all sorts of problems with confounding variables, p-value hacking, cherry-picking data, etc. But what he missed is that all the problems he criticizes about health studies also plague the social science literature. And then he does exactly what he complains about when he cites that Rucker Johnson paper. You need to look at the entire literature not just one paper. And you need to put much more weight on papers with clear and straightforward methodology and where other people have checked the math and replicated the results. Rucker Johnson's paper fails on all accounts. It strikes me that Rucker may have made some obvious mistakes, but I cannot tell for certain because he has not published his data and calculations.
To the extent that I myself have looked over the entire literature, my conclusions are in line with these conclusions that were made when the U. S. Department of Education did a review in the 1980s of all the case studies of integration (From David Armor's Forced Justice, page 91):
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"Desegregation did not cause any decrease in black achievement. On the average, desegregation did not cause an increase in achievement in mathematics. Desegregation increased mean reading levels. The gain reliably differed from zero and was estimated to be between two and six weeks [of a school year] across the studies examined.
The median gains were almost always greater than zero but were lower than the means and did not reliably differ from zero."
"Studies with the largest reading gains can be tentatively characterized [as having] small sample sizes two or more years of desegregation, desegregated children who outperformed their segregated counterparts even before desegregation began, and desegregation that occurred earlier in time, involved younger students, was voluntary, had larger percentages of whites per school, and was associated with enrichment programs. None of the above factors can be isolated, singly or in combination, as causes of any of the typically large achievement gains."
"Because of the small samples and apparently non-normal distributions, little confidence should be placed in any of the mean results presented earlier. I have little confidence that we know much about how desegregation affects reading "on the average" and, across the few studies examined, I find the variability in effect sizes more striking and less well understood than any measure of central tendency."
---
My take is that if desegregation has any impact on achievement, it is small and drowned out by other factors.
There are other countries who went much further in their support for the poor, with much better outcomes.
...and to argue this along racial lines is simply preposterous. The idea that allowing businesses to discriminate poor minorities would actually help them is the worst kind of revisionism. The world has come a long way since the 60ies.
There are other countries who went much further in their support for the poor, with much better outcomes.
This was the line taught in my freshman sociology class, but I have since been convinced that money spent on social welfare does not explain international differences in various social ills.
The idea that allowing businesses to discriminate poor minorities would actually help them is the worst kind of revisionism.
> There are other countries who went much further in their support for the poor, with much better outcomes.
Examples please. It's not true of Sweden or the rest of the Nordic countries and if anywhere has a more extensive system of social welfare I'm unfamiliar with it.
For starters, while economists tend to view a job as a straightforward exchange of labor for money, a wide body of sociological research shows how tied up work is with a sense of purpose and identity.
Amusingly, I've noticed that most HR managers have psychology degrees. I've wondered: What if HR managers had economics degrees. Would we be paid more?
When I was a manager, I received some training from the HR department, and we were constantly reminded that our employees didn't really want to get paid more. This was based on "research." I wondered if this was the result of the researchers simply delivering the result that their patrons wanted to hear.
I've decided to favor an economic view over a psychological one: Be nice to people, of course, but treat them as homo economicus, behaving rationally in regard to their own self interest. While this view isn't proven, I think it's better than making assumptions about their psychological motivations that are likely to be biased by factors such as social class, age, gender, and possibly race and ethnicity.
The current hype of not treating people like rational actors - pop-science people citing Tversky and Kahenman, for example - is rooted in what is not controversial at all for anyone who truly grasped basic economics, so-called "behavioral economics."
It is no surprise to any classical economist that actors do not always act rationally and the foundation of microeconomics is not built on the unstable platform of assuming that everyone IS rational; but rather that treating actors AS rational is a just and fair way to act while also removing sources of bias.
It does not mean that rules on how to approach people should NOT be modified via analysis of behavior, but rather that a priori we should assume people act rationally in their own self-interest as a first principle and go from there, not assume that everyone is irrational and create a ten million line case/switch statement.
> It is no surprise to any classical economist that actors do not always act rationally and the foundation of microeconomics is not built on the unstable platform of assuming that everyone IS rational; but rather that treating actors AS rational is a just and fair way to act while also removing sources of bias.
No, economics is a predictive social science, not a system of moral philosophy; the rational choice model has nothing to do with how it is just and fair to treat people. It was the dominant model because despite being self-evidently not fundamentally correct (it assumes a number of things, like perfect knowledge of future outcomes, that no one believes to be literally true or even plausible) it was believed to be an approximation that would predicted results better than any alternative model available at the time, in general and in a wide array of specific cases.
The places where the rational choice model has been applied are, because it's a predictive model; to the extent that there may be things that are properly called "economics" that are not part of the predictive social science with that name, they are not relevant to why the rational choice model.has been used.
Indeed, I consider people as rational actors, not because I believe it to be a tested hypothesis, but because it seems to be a workable rule of thumb for treating people with respect and avoiding bias.
It's also been my experience that when I hear people talking about one another as irrational, it's never because they're trying to be more respectful, but is invariably in support of patronizing or manipulating people. Nobody has ever used an irrational actor hypothesis to justify paying someone more, or giving them more authority and autonomy.
I've found sociology and its approaches to be profoundly insightful. Even though I'm a trained philosopher, one of my favorite thinkers is not a philosopher, but Max Weber, the founding father of sociology. Economists probably have more influence due to the fact that economics is perceived to be a "hard science". The irony, of course, is that it isn't.
The irony is that economics is merely a highly-specialised branch of sociology. Economies are part of how our societies work.
I remember my high-school chemistry teacher saying "don't tell the physics teacher that chemistry is just a highly specialised branch of physics!". It's the same with economics and sociology.
Max Weber's theories on Protestantism being the cause of success in America have been pretty much thoroughly debunked when you control for differences in aptitude amongst the religious sects that arrived to America in it's early history. Not to mention his work led to the founding ideas of the Frankfurt School lol.
His theories on the Protestant ethic are controversial[1], but hardly "thoroughly debunked." As far as the Frankfurt School, uh, who cares? They drew from many political and social philosophies (including Marx who we often find at odds with Weber). It just seems completely uncharitable and tangential to bring it up.
While Weber over-stated his case, he has definitely not been "debunked". Check out _Causes and Consequences of the Protestant Reformation_ by Becker et al[0], it's a survey of the literature and contains a lot of empirical evidence in support of the Weberian view of the Reformation.
You're assuming economists have influence. The truth is, the best economic policy is almost always politically unpopular, and thus never gets realised, and the most predictive economists often have reason to not share their opinions. Economics as a science is in fine shape, it's politics which is the problem.
It's not that most economic policy isn't adopted (true -- it turns out there's a whole mess of heterdox economics theory), but that adopted public policy (or far more significantly: legal doctrine) is justified on the basis of some economic theory or another.
There's a camp of economists who are particularly capable of developing policy either specifically to, or which incidentally, supports various viewpoints.
See as a classic instance, what Adam Smith actually wrote, vs. what he's presented as writing by such influence-peddlers as the Mont Pelerin Society / Atlas Network disinformation industrial complex.
Both areas of study are basically looking at human nature on the macro level, it strikes me as interesting that they are different fields of study at all. While I think they're both worth studying and listening to, neither seem to be totally correct on any one particular subject since the elusive "average person" doesn't appear to exist. Take anyone who might fall into an average category and they will always have outliers in other areas. How many people do you personally know are just following the average human life pattern and never do anything outside of it? People are just inherently unpredictable and irrational.
In my experience sociologists would like to do the work of the statisticians without working with big scale data and without understanding even the most simple statistical models. Thank's god they do not have more influence.
This statement is based on a study I made by myself using a representative sample: I have 3 sociology PHDs in my team.
Maybe this is just relative to my area of work, but I often feel that the sociologists I work/am friends with are in a dangerous balancing act of attempting to influence policy while also conducting unbiased research inquiries. While this isn't completely unique to sociology, I would argue that the area of study can make it difficult to form research questions and studies which are not confounded by current public policy or personal opinion.
To me it would seem intuitive to have an additional field or area of focus that emphasizes applying sociological findings to public policy.
A particular elephant in the room here might be that economists also not uncommonly engage in policy advocacy, yet the stereotypical sociologist's political advocacy is left-wing and the stereotypical economist's political advocacy is right-wing, at least relative to one another. Maybe one part of that is that the two have fairly different understandings of what makes human societies tick.
Economics has avoided this dilemma by disposing of unbiased research.
W. Brian Arthur has pointed out that virtually all significant economic research explores specific policy questions of the day. Usually with a particular point of view in mind.
I think this is a false premise. Politicians/decision makers merely listen to people they want to listen to speak. There are "schools of thought" in economics that really only exist because someone wants to hear that viewpoint.
> For starters, while economists tend to view a job as a straightforward exchange of labor for money, a wide body of sociological research shows how tied up work is with a sense of purpose and identity.
This is precisely why handing the reins over to sociologists would be dangerous. The concept of "identity" is massively over-valued in our society, with very little coherent critical commentary available. Somehow it's seen as an unassailable, unquestionable truism: every person has an identity, and they build on it throughout their entire life. Giving sociologist-types more power to shape policy will lead to an increase in the acceptance and enforcement of this erroneous thought process.
Erroneous because one's "identity" is, in reality, of extremely limited utility and the source of much suffering: does my identity properly reflect who I really am? Are others being respectful to my identity? Are they behaving correctly toward me considering my identity? Is my identity subject to systematic oppression? Should I change my identity or keep it the same? How many people know about my current identity vs. my precious identity that I promoted for many years?
Spending time ruminating and basing policy on this concept of identity is a huge waste of resources, and what's the outcome? Pure, unadulterated suffering.
Identity has its place as a tool for conducting transactions and working in groups, but sociologists and their ilk have elevated it to an all-encompassing life-defining concern, and that's just not reasonable. Given how much we're already burdening ourselves here in the West with identity politics and other massive wastes of resources, I cringe at the thought of sociologists having MORE power over our lives.
I make music and sell it. Not very lucrative, but it's fulfilling. Do you think my career choice is relevant to my distrust of the western obsession with identity? :)
I find it interesting that the article doesn't mention actions that might be taken if sociologists had more influence. Not a word about what we might do differently.
There's some indirect references, but yes, a good point: that's a pretty glaring lack.
The comments about the social interactions of what are perceived as economic transactions or phenmomena strongly suggests a few differences. The social dislocations caused by job loss, or housing eviction, are specifically mentioned. I'd see far more weight and consideration given both in policy.
I find it interesting because one could argue that you should be able to apply a sort of success filter to either discipline to see who is skilled at what they do. For example:
How many rich economists are there?
How many influential sociologists are there?
As someone with a strong background in economics, I think this would be a wonderful idea (reasons scattered through comments in this thread).
I do have a question though: What is the central organising question or theme of sociology?
For economics, I would answer "the allocation of scarce resources to greatest effect". I'm not sure I can come up with a simlar statement for sociology, and online searches over the past few minutes aren't turning up anything strongly resembling such a statement.
>"the allocation of scarce resources to greatest effect"
I'd say this is the goal of macroeconomics, not the entire discipline. And the application of economic public policy tends to be as psuedoscientific and bias-laden as sociology.
I say this as someone who is strongly educated in economics and worked as a private economist; I have a lot of love for the field in general.
EDIT: The goal of economics, broadly, I think is simply analyzing the allocation of scarce resources across a wide variety of market methods and conditions. Ascribing prescriptive behavior is not something at least half of the discipline is interested in.
The "scarce resources" definition is typical of Samuelson.
I find John Marshall's "ordinary business of life" distressingly vague.
Krugman and Wells (2008) give: "economics is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services."
I'll argue you've confused macro with micro: macro deals, generally, with inflation, money supply, and foreign exchange. Micro with market allocations and behaviour (under various degrees of competition, monpoly/monopsony, or oligopoly/oligopsony).
A sampling of comments, by economists, on economics. This is a longish listing, but I'll point out that there are mentions here from multiple Nobel prize laureates and from across the spectrum of political inclinations (Piketty and Galbraith on the left to Hayek and Mises on the right). There's long been a strong critique of economics from within the profession, and this listing only touches the surface.
The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.
― Joan Robinson
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
― John Kenneth Galbraith
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
― John Kenneth Galbraith
…the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences.
― Thomas Piketty
Too large a proportion of recent “mathematical” economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.
― John Maynard Keynes
We move from more or less plausible but really arbitrary assumptions, to elegantly demonstrated but irrelevant conclusions.
― Wassily Leontief
Existing economics is a theoretical system which floats in the air and which bears little relation to what happens in the real world.
― Ronald Coase
The economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.
― Paul Krugman
Economics has become increasingly an arcane branch of mathematics rather than dealing with real economic problems.
― Milton Friedman
Modern economics is sick. Economics has increasingly become an intellectual game played for its own sake and not for its practical consequences for understanding the economic world. Economists have converted the subject into a sort of social mathematics in which analytical rigour is everything and practical relevance is nothing.
― Mark Blaug
Economics has never been a science – and it is even less now than a few years ago.
― Paul Samuelson
For far too long economists have sought to define themselves in terms of their supposedly scientific methods. In fact, those methods rely on an immoderate use of mathematical models, which are frequently no more than an excuse for occupying the terrain and masking the vacuity of the content.
― Thomas Piketty
In my youth it was said that what was too silly to be said may be sung. In modern economics it may be put into mathematics.
If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, “what would I do if I were a horse?
― Ronald Coase
Any man who is only an economist is unlikely to be a good one.
― F. A. Hayek
The study of economics has been again and again led astray by the vain idea that economics must proceed according to the pattern of other sciences.
― Ludwig von Mises
The use of mathematics has brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it has also brought mortis.
― Robert Heilbroner
An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.
― Laurence J. Peter
When an economist says the evidence is “mixed,” he or she means that theory says one thing and data says the opposite.
― Richard Thaler
The First Law of Economists: For every economist, there exists an equal and opposite economist.
I'm not a particular fan of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, and yes, it was created long after the other Nobel prizes, in 1968, for reasons which are strongly suspect and political. I feel it's been poorly awarded numerous times, though the selections have improved in recent decades.
That said, it is administered and nominations / selections go through the Swedish Academy of Sciences, and it is most certainly considered by the Nobel Foundation as among its prizes.
I'm using it here to note less an agreement with (all) the economists cited here, and far more to note that, whether I find their economics advisible or not (some I do, some I don't), this is a list accepted by both economists and the general scientific community as exemplars of the field, and they are exceedingly strongly critical of elements of the orthodoxy.
Not necessarily the same elements. But strongly critical all the same.
If you're looking for a strong criticism of the Nobel Prize in Economics, I strongly recommend reading F.A. Hayek's acceptance speech on that score, which manages simultaneously to question economics and the prize itself, whilst defending it by numerous strongly counterfactual arguments in my view, Hayek being among those I otherwise have strong reservations for.
Might be good not to mention that, because it is wrong.
* The Nobel memorial prize for economics is indeed given by a Nobel Committee[1] of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, just like the natural science and medicine prizes.
* It has been endowed by the Swedish Riksbank, which is a central bank and part of the Swedish government equivalent to the Federal Reserve in the US. If the importance of the difference between "a Swedish bank" and "the Swedish central bank" is not apparent to you, you should read up on it.
The vast majority of these quotes are discussing what is basically a psuedoscience - and no better than sociology - which is macroeconomics. There is little to complain about when discussing and analyzing the science of economics as it regards market analysis and deconstruction of how people trade stores of value. It is in the application of public policy and cherry-picked public analysis that it tends to become nonsense.
Both macro and microeconomic theory contain plenty of holes.
Critiques of efficient and rationale markets by Arrow and Stiglitz come to mind in the latter, as well as much to call into question rational actor theories. There's been significant work since the 1950s on information in economics, mostly concerning risks and asymmetries. I'm seeing a further area that may be available for development by finding an underlying mechanism to Gresham's Law, which seems to me to underly a number of further interesting phenomena.
There's also the fundamental misallocation of true and real costs in natural resource economics, based on a series of decisions tacitly made in the period 1880 - 1940, roughly, many of which turn out to have little bearing on reality.
The failure of economics to account properly for the role of energy (there are those who have: R.U. Ayres and Charles A.S. Hall among them), combined with the misattribution of fossil energy costs, is particularly pronounced and makes a mockery of virtually all present pricing models.
These all fall within the domain of micro.
Problems within energy, healthcare, housing, education, and manufacturing sectors are all concerned with microeconomic factors.
Philip Mirowski's More Heat than Light and numerous of Ha-Joon Chang's works address microeconomic conundrums.
The fact that a field misses one prediction doesn't invalidate the entire field. Would you declare climate science invalid because it didn't predict the hiatus?
The fact that the field ignored a gigantic signal until the world economy had nearly ground to a halt suggests, to me, that there's more going on than missing one prediction.
Some. Not like Michael Burry. Starting with seeing what was going on in my South Florida neighborhood, and seeing Robert Schiller's graph of house prices vs. income in the NYT in 2005, I did a bunch of research, leading to selling one house in 2005, and another in 2007. I made money on both. Those buyers each later lost money when they sold the houses. On balance, I made some money, and lost a lifestyle. I don't think of myself as a winner there. There was plenty of signal. Given the havoc caused in so many people's lives across the world, and given the documentation now available, I don't think 'No one could have seen it coming' is a reasonable way to think about what happened.
Hindsight is 20/20. From what I can tell, the Case-Schiller index is back around 2005 levels, even higher in some cities like LA. [1] Should people start selling their houses?
Could you point out the hindsight? What's different since 2005, in my perspective, it that it is now clear that there has been no political will to let bad loans go bad (evidenced by the government's responses since 2009). If you expect that to remain the case, it makes sense to not sell. If you expect that to change, and that house prices should go back to their historical income ratios, then it makes sense to sell.
It's always easy to retrofit what can essentially be a lucky guess into a smart prediction after the fact. Whether you consider that guess to fit a plausible narrative doesn't always make it any less of a guess.
Fair enough. Maybe a personal anecdote about how a non-economist could find a housing crash plausible isn't the best evidence for the availability of signals that something was wrong with the housing market. I can go through the FCIC report [0] and annotate to demonstrate, but their conclusion was the crash was avoidable. I can pile on more sources if that's desired. It'd be more entertaining to watch 'What I Learned and (Un-Learned) at the Financial Crisis' by Mark Blyth.
I object to Sumner's choice of time points in his blog, as they leave out the peak, and the historical norm. To observe that an already abnormal market is only a little bit more abnormal after ten years serves his point, but misses the story. That might be my meta-critique of economics.
The 2007-8 financial crisis is the most significant economic event of the preceeding 78 years. And it was virtually completely unanticipated by mainstream economists. Alan Greenspan, head of the world's most significant central bank, has conceeded his worldview was deeply flawed.
Call it what you will - I know the word "hiatus" puts people in a tizzy - the predictions made in the 90's did not correspond to the graph of what actually happened.
I have no idea how you would describe 2007-2008 as the most significant economic event of the previous years. It's a minor blip at most.
Maybe it's just because I'm not in the US right now, but to me this seems far more significant:
The financial crisis of 2007–2008, also known as the global financial crisis and the 2008 financial crisis, is considered by many economists to have been the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Given that Wikipedia is not in fact a primary source, that's backed with a primary source. Oh, I'm sorry, four:
ReferencesEdit
"Two top economists agree 2009 worst financial crisis since great depression; risks increase if right steps are not taken". Reuters. 27 February 2009. Retrieved 10 November 2015.
Eigner, Peter; Umlauft, Thomas S. (2015-07-01). "The Great Depression(s) of 1929–1933 and 2007–2009? Parallels, Differences and Policy Lessons". MTA-ELTE Crisis History
Working Paper No. 2: Hungarian Academy of Science. SSRN 2612243Freely accessible.
Eichengreen; O'Rourke. "A tale of two depressions: What do the new data tell us?". VoxEU.org. Retrieved 2016-02-22.
Temin, Peter (2010-01-01). "The Great Recession and the Great Depression". National Bureau of Economic Research.
Warming happened. It didn't happen where it was initially predicted
I'm glad we agree that the prediction was wrong. I guess ignore climate science since it made one bad prediction? (Note that I don't advocate this, but if we hold climate science to the same standard some good econ to, we should.)
"Worst financial crisis" and "most significant economic effect" are not the same thing. The graphs I've cited illustrate events of far larger significance than the financial crisis, namely bringing billions out of poverty. That was due mainly to trade liberalization, as predicted by economics.
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The answer would be rigor. A huge problem with sociology is the dependence on the story. Unfortunately, since the sociologist is often a human with their own biases, they are going to see what they want to see.
For example, I purchased the Kindle version of the book the author recommends ("Coming Up Short"). I turned to the appendix, where the author describes her research methodology. And sure enough, the research involves open-ended questions ("Walk me through a typical day at work." "Is there a time you lost a job? Could you describe it?") that could lead the interviewee to respond in any way they want.
There are many problems with this, such as : 1) the interviewee may inadvertently invent convenient narratives that provide comfort but aren't accurate, 2) the interviewer may mis-interpret the answers, etc.
How are we supposed to develop policy off of this? Sure, it's a great starting point for starting research, but the narrative- or story-based approach should never be the conclusion.
This is why economics is so much more trusted. Although economics has flaws, and the study of econometrics can sometimes lead to incorrect conclusions, it at least uses objective data and metrics, which are less susceptible to error, providing a much more grounded approach to policy decisions.