Update on the road to sociology

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In September, Jeremy Horpedahl and I wrote,

The topics of gender, race and ethnicity, and inequality are important economic and social issues. In this paper, we analyze how often those topics are addressed in two outlets of the American Economic Association: peer-reviewed papers in the American Economic Review and the conference papers from the AEA’s annual meeting that are published in its Papers and Proceedings. We find that these topics have been increasingly represented in both of these outlets when considered as a group between 1991 and 2020. Published articles and conference papers addressing gender have seen the largest increase, both in absolute numbers and in percent of total papers.

The trend toward obsession with gender and race in economics seems to have accelerated. The recent Papers and Proceedings issue of the American Economic Review has 34 sessions, with 13 of them devoted to gender or ethnicity. If it were not for sessions devoted to COVID, the American Economic Association would now be 50 percent focused on race and gender.

UPDATE: See also John Cochrane’s latest.

8 thoughts on “Update on the road to sociology”

  2. When you can’t just say “its genetics” all of these inequalities between groups do seem like an interesting puzzle to solve with huge potential benefits.

    The problem is that people who accept genetics have an asymmetric insight over those that don’t.

    • And even aside from genetics, if you take non-genetic explanations seriously, a lot of the interventions that would likely help matters would be rejected.

      Discipline in urban schools with large minority populations should be much stricter (for that matter, in all schools). Those who show a pattern of disruptive behavior should be permanently expelled. A culture of indifference to learning and authority will not be tolerated.

      All of the CRT nonsense doesn’t help anyone succeed outside of a DEI career, and it should be eliminated from all curriculums.

      More aggressive policing against those engaged in violent crime, particularly those involved in gangs. Much longer sentences. Don’t let 20-something criminals be the high status people in these communities. Strip them of their ill gotten wealth and lock them up until they are in their 50s. Make them obvious cautionary tales.

      Don’t admit students into academic programs they aren’t prepared for for diversity reasons. There is nothing wrong with earning a living in the trades.

      Restructure the welfare state so that it promotes two parent families. Cover only the most basic needs for unwed mothers in an obviously low status way. Eliminate no fault divorce and child support except in cases where a married father was at fault in the divorce.

  4. They are focused on race and gender because economics, like most of the sciences social or otherwise, have hit a sociological studies wall in how to explain the behavior of both of these groups.

    See, they think that there’s ‘a solution’ out there just waiting to be found, and the discovery might best be obtained by hearing it directly from the subjects of study. They do this because they are very open-minded people, and believe strongly in the fundamental goodness of human beings. They do not believe in trojan horses or the ‘long march through the institutions’, and their belief in the goodness of human beings shields them from a bottomless trough of human experience and evidence of what groups of people are and have been willing to do to gain an advantage, power, or money.

  5. You’d think that with the fairly unprecedented economic experience of 2020 and a fairly dire budget outlook, that economists would have things more interesting to worry about.

    Economists figured out a long time ago that, generally speaking, income levels reflect productivity and skills. It find it almost hard to believe that there are people who believe that corporations are exceedingly greedy but at the same time these same corporations are unwilling to gain a massive competitive advantage by focusing their hiring on the groups allegedly underpaid due to irrational discrimination.

  6. This right here.

    ***

    Lived experiences are often vividly used by progressive activists as evidence of widespread injustice, accompanied with a call for action and social change. Yet basing one’s entire case for widespread injustice and sweeping social change on lived experiences is, quite simply, bad statistical reasoning. Why should one’s personal experience of (say) racism carry any special weight? Should the experience of the smoker who never developed cancer also carry special weight? What about the experience of the unvaccinated person who never got a preventable illness? Or the experience of the chronic gambler who managed to keep his life intact?

    https://quillette.com/2021/05/24/lived-experiences-arent-special/

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