If the White House Council of Social Advisers did exist, one of its great challenges would be to convert some of these findings into actual policy proposals that might help. Part of the ascendance of economics in the policy-making sphere comes from the fact that economists tend to spend more time looking at specific legislative or regulatory steps that could try to improve conditions.
And trying to solve social problems is a more complex undertaking than working to improve economic outcomes. It’s relatively clear how a change in tax policy or an adjustment to interest rates can make the economy grow faster or slower; it’s less obvious what, if anything, government can do to change forces that are driven by the human psyche.
He is referring to sociological research that shows, for example, that the decline in blue-collar jobs has an effect on men’s sense of identity. In the article, the sociologists come across as jealous of economists, because policy makers respect economists.
I do not think that economic advice is necessarily better than advice based on sociology. I disagree with Irwin that economic issues are more clear-cut.
I do believe that economists have less humility than the sociologists. I would actually score that as a point for sociology.
On the other hand, sociology is blinded by ideology. Sociologists only want to interpret the world through the lens of power and privilege. That is their hammer, and everything looks to them like a nail.
Economists as individuals may be no less ideological. But the profession as a whole has much more ideological diversity than does sociology. That may not last. I believe that the trend is for conservative economists to fall in status, and if this keeps up, academic economics will look like sociology in another decade or two. In the meantime, I hope that economists somehow develop the humility of sociologists, but I fear that may not happen.
This strikes me as overmodest. Economists, if nothing else, have a few laws worthy of the name, and can point to real successes in addition to their failures. Even if we limit ourselves to, say, John Cochrane’s list of what economists know (see: http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2017/03/russ-roberts-on-economic-humility.html), economists have a lot of useful things to say to policymakers, even if most of them are a version of “that probably won’t work the way you want.”
But what, honestly, can sociologists say that’s actionable, on even the basic level of Cochrane’s snake example? Can they produce a similar list to his? I’ve not seen it.
Economics, of course, does have hard-science envy, but it really does have science-like aspects, particularly a set of generally applicable laws that can be discovered and described and used to make useful predictions. But Sociology is pure science envy; an attempt to make a humanistic topic scienc-y without any science-like aspects at all. Real sociology is called history—and policymakers read it.
“It’s relatively clear how a change in tax policy or an adjustment to interest rates can make the economy grow faster or slower; ”
Izzat so?
“On the other hand, sociology is blinded by ideology. Sociologists only want to interpret the world through the lens of power and privilege. That is their hammer, and everything looks to them like a nail.”
The sad part is that this doesn’t necessarily have to be true. There are two other main perspectives in sociology: functionalist, and symbolic interactionist. I rather think you would appreciate these perspectives more (maybe even link them to the 3-axis theory?) But it seems like the majority of modern sociologists are all-in on conflict theory.
If you’re concerned with humility, do consider changing the tagline on this blog. It is hardly charitable to say, for example, that sociology is “blinded by ideology.” It may be a reasonable or fair statement, but that’s not the same thing. You do not take the most charitable view; rather, you try to figure out what the real foundations of various opinions and arguments are, which necessarily involves putting yourself in the place of those holding the opinions or making the arguments. This is certainly a valuable exercise, and you often reach conclusions that are very hard to deny, but the substance of this blog is not charity of viewpoint. To go back to the sociology example, a more charitable view might be that power and privilege really are as fundamental to all social interaction as sociologists seem to think they are. You may believe that view to be unfounded and have plenty with which to support that belief, and thus not want even to mention it in the post, all of which is well and good; but being charitable clearly is not the priority. Or to take a less extreme but more charitable view, rather than making the claim that “Sociologists only want to interpret the world through the lens of power and privilege,” you could acknowledge that not every sociologist has this attitude, even if it is the dominant one in the profession. In fact, your categorical statement about sociologists is patently false as well as unkind. Which is not to say that you shouldn’t say such things, but why maintain the pretense that your view is the most charitable?
I am a geographer by training, and my discipline gets some respect but often not a lot. We geographers are insecure, and perhaps with good reason.
It has often seemed to me that economists in particular have a lot of dislike / disdain / (insert the word) for sociologists in particular.
The exasperation with sociologists is not new. Doonsbury had a cartoon several decades ago where deans dicussed just axing the department.
Similarly, Greg Cochrane at West Hunter (or maybe it was Razib Khan started the assertion) said that sociologists are “inverse weather vanes–what they believe is not just inaccurate but diametrically opposed to observable reality.
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https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/06/22/inverse-weathervanes/
I’m slippping into confirmation bias but here’s a link:
https://www.econjobrumors.com/topic/why-does-everyone-on-this-site-hate-sociology
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I started to become aware of economists’ disdain for sociologists while reading something (don’t remember what) by Richard Vedder, who has the keen analytical mind that typifies economists. I wonder if part of the problem is that sociologists don’t necessarily obsess over processes that lead to patterns of stratification and domination–they just don’t like stratification. Perhaps sociologists are too prone to thinking we can protest and organize our way to a better society. Maybe we can’t.
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The West Hunter post is easy to find but here it is anyway:
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/06/22/inverse-weathervanes/
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For the record, I took a class with a smart sociologist, the late Carl Couch of the University of Iowa. He was a symbolic interactionist. I still think about his book _constructing civilizations_.
Perhaps the problem is that not everyone can be Max Weber, and it’s harder to do so without the gymnasium background.
Since economists revere substitution at the margin, the worst economist still understands the concept. It could be that many sociologists are doing taxonomies of stratification but without enough attention to process.
One of the best books I ever read on social stratification was _Patterns of dominance_ by Philip Mason, who had served a s a district officer in India and under the pseudonym Philip Woodruff wrote _The men who ruled India_. So, “getting out” might help.
Wikipedia says Mason served the Empire in both India and Africa. I’m not certain if he was trained in political science or sociology. Sometimes I think that in the British system it doesn’t matter as such.
As someone at the West Hunter blog noted, sociology does not have a large “applied” field compared to economics. It does have demographers and criminologists–and arguably, social workers.
A little off-topic but I was reading a post on Ada–the Clinton campaign’s AI that was supposed to be it’s high tech weapon, leading it on to victory– and I came upon this:
… What was validated, ultimately, was the internal consistency of the campaign’s initial assumptions. Those assumptions, and Ada’s apparent statistical support for them, caused so much inertia that the Clinton campaign starved Michigan of resources and ignored Wisconsin’s low-enthusiasm Clinton supporters, many of whom ended up not voting. …
This was Ada’s failure: she went wrong early and no one ever noticed. What Ada needed to do was to generate recommendations for collecting new data most likely to falsify her recommendations—like ground-level voter verification throughout Michigan, or interrogating turnout in the “safe” Clinton districts of Pennsylvania. Only an aggressive attempt to falsify would have broken the hermetic seal on Ada’s model.
I couldn’t help thinking of early 2000s macro, with the analog of Clinton’s defeat being the Great Recession.