Nerd heaven

The tale of a happy internet-based couple in the UK.

Two tasters:

The couple inhabit a topsy-turvy twilight world in which they cook chips or doughnuts at 3am, converse through computers even though they are sitting next to each other, and despite the fact that in theory they have an 'open' relationship, are completely faithful to one another because, as Amy says, somewhat plaintively: 'We literally don't know anyone else.'

...

'Why do you need to go out when you can talk to so many people on the internet? And the good thing is, online, if you don't like someone, you can block them off. But in real life you can't do that. I just have a dislike of the world. People can be annoying. I am happy this way.'

Most excellent. Does this make William Gibson a sociologist rather than a science fiction writer?

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

Book: Living the Drama by David Harding

Harding, David. 2010. Living the Drama: Community, Conflict and Culture Among Inner-City Boys. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

I had the good fortune to receive a free copy of this book via campus mail, courtesy of its author, my UM sociology colleague David Harding. I had the even better fortune to read it.

The book describes the results of David's ethnographic work in three Boston neighborhoods, two of them poor and one of them working class. His focus is on teenage boys, in particular how they think about choices regarding sexual activity and relationships and regarding schooling.

Like many (most? all?) ethnographies, the words of the subjects themselves are the most interesting part. Of course, getting the subjects to say interesting things depends on the skill of the interviewer at designing good questions and building up trust.

Also quite interesting, in this case, is the interpretive framework. David relies on something called the cognitive view of culture. Essentially, basic bits of cognitive science are applied to thinking about culture. Thus, David contrasts the working class neighborhood, where there are standard "frames" or "scripts" for thinking about particular issues related to sex and to schooling, with poor neighborhoods, where multiple ways of thinking about these questions essentially compete, but also coexist, as the subjects sometimes jump from one view to another depending on the details of the issue. While the cognitive view of culture is not original to David's book, this was my first encounter with it and I found it interesting and compelling. The book contrasts, usefully I think, the cognitive view of culture with views in which culture plays little role relative to, essentially, the budget set, and to older views of the "culture of poverty" that posit different, but equally monolithic, cultures in poor and non-poor neighborhoods.

Another bit that I found interesting is David's summary of the literature on how people conceptualize their neighborhood, and its application to his own choice of neighborhoods to study. It turns out that people differ in systematic ways in their definitions of the neighborhood, in particular in how large the area is that they include. Again, this idea is not original to this book, but I had not encountered the related literature before, and enjoyed learning about it.

The part of the book most related to my own work had to do with how the subjects think about higher education. David gets much deeper than the commonplace finding that you can get poor kids to mouth normative platitudes about wanting to go to college in surveys. That is familiar and, I think, pretty much meaningless. Instead, he reveals a great deal of ignorance and confusion about both the higher education process and about the meaning of higher education in the labor market and in life more broadly. Though this is mostly implicit, the subjects do not have a strong sense of quality differences among post-secondary institutions, nor is there often much of a sense that learning more in high school beyond the bare minimum required to get admitted to some college or another might have payoffs of its own both directly and in terms of making success in college more likely. I do not know quite how one conveys these bits of information to kids living in neighborhoods with very few college graduates but it is surely worth thinking about (and will surely take more than a couple of dry presentations in 10th grade).

The writing here is clear, functional and well-organized. It is academic writing, to be sure, but not painfully so. There is some very mild jargon associated with the cognitive view of culture, but it is quickly mastered. The book is very much not a post-modern verbiage festival.

At the end of the day (or, more precisely, the end of the book) David truly won my heart with this bit, which is near the start of the final chapter:

"... the proverbial `policy chapter' that often concludes books like this one typically overreaches and underwhelms"

Having read quite a number of ethnographies in my time, I will confess that I had been nervous as I read along through the book that an otherwise fine volume would be marred by a foolish chapter of policy recommendations largely unrelated to the book's content. That is not the case. David is fully cognizant of what can and cannot be learned from the valuable ethnographic work his book summarizes.

Recommended.

Hi, I'm Tressel

My colleague Charlie Brown suggests an audit pair study for the young men (and women) named Tressel down there in Ohio-land, the better to determine the treatment effect associated with this now unfortunate moniker.

The problem is that N = 20 is a bit low if one sticks to the actual Tressels, though of course one could train auditors to pretend to be Tressels for the sake of science.

Teasing the sociologists

Writing the previous post, it struck that I have never linked on the blog to what is surely my most widely read piece of writing.

Some of the sociology phrases, such as "non-normative family arrangements" are drawn directly from the demography seminar at Chicago, which I would often attend in my pre-Heckman graduate student days.

When I was at the University of Maastricht a few years ago for a seminar visit, one of the people I met with was a sociologist. She had read the phrase book!

Enjoy.

Addendum: the phrase book was written in the late 1980s. The reference to getting engaged to a sociologist was a reference to my co-author, Kermit Daniel, who was at the time in fact engaged to a sociologist.

ASA follies

No need for me to tease the sociologists, or more precisely their professional association, when the nice folks at orgtheory do it so well.

More on the American Sociological Association

Crooked Timber focuses on the ASA's lack of financial transparency.

Like CT I have always found it amusing that the economics job market is so much better institutionalized than those in sociology and political science. One possible explanation is just that economists have a better understanding of Coase's theory of the firm and so have a better sense of which activities should be inside institutions and which things should be outside institutions.

An alternative explanation is that, due to their higher value of time (the implication of higher salaries), economists may be less likely to spend time fighting over trivia, which may make organizing a market easier. An interesting study would examine the amount of time faculty in different disciplines spend in department meetings, conditional on department size and the age distribution of faculty. One would expect a negative relationship with average salaries.

A third explanation is that economists do a lot more hiring than sociology and political science, which means that it is easier to justify the fixed costs of both setting up and operating the job market institutions.

Living together

Hard to imagine, but a new UM study finds important gender differences in perceptions of the costs and benefits of living together. Key bits from the summary in UM Today:

Overall, three key reasons for living together emerged: wanting to spend more time with one's partner, wanting to share life's financial burdens, and wanting to test compatibility. But the way men and women talked about these three broad reasons was very different.

Women volunteered "love" as a reason to live together three times as often as men did, while men cited "sex" as a reason to live together four times as often as women did.

Both men and women saw cohabitation as a temporary state in which to gauge compatibility, but major gender differences emerged in the underlying goals of living together. Women saw it as a transitional arrangement preceding marriage, while men tended to see it as a convenient, low-risk way to see if a relationship had longer-term potential, using terms like "test drive" to describe the arrangement.

But the strongest gender differences emerged in the perceived disadvantages of cohabitation. Women believed that living together meant less commitment and legitimacy than marriage, while men saw the greatest disadvantage as a limitation on their freedom.

Who would have thought? But it is still very useful to quantify, and to show the importance of gender differences relative to other subgroups.

The full text of the article can be found here; it may be gated.

Economists versus climate scientists

This piece compares the reactions - calm, measured economists versus freaked-out climate scientists - between two sets of scholars studying climate change.

The piece argues that climate scientists and economists differ in their beliefs about the adaptability of social and economic institutions to climate change. I think that is correct.

I think there are also likely differences in the process of selection into economics and climate science that feed into these differences in attitudes. A cynic might also argue that the two groups face different elasticities of research funding with respect to predictions of doom.

There is room for some deeper sociology of science in this area.

Oh, and we should have a carbon tax.

Via this Matt Yglesias post.

A spanking for the American Sociological Association

The officers of the American Sociological Association have released an official defense of Frances Fox Piven, who was recently called out as a hypocrite by hyperbolic Glenn Beck. of Fox News.

Lawprof Ann Althouse provides a fisking and a link to the ASA press release.

My thoughts:

First of all, death threats and riots are not reasoned political discourse and are not okay on the left, the right or (what seems to be less of a problem empirically) from (classical) liberals or libertarians.

Second, the ASA is generating a negative externality here by feeding the view among the public that academic social scientists are really just ideologically motivated social activists who happen to work at universities and not really serious scientists at all. Thanks for nothing on that one, ASA officers.

Third, why should the officers of a professional association of academics be making political pronouncements? Is there not enough for the officers to do with running the annual meetings? Are there no data to collect, students to supervise or papers to write? What special expertise do they have? Presumably there are many sociologists who do not agree with the political pronouncements that the ASA makes in their name. Why not just let individual sociologists make their own political announcements? I am very glad indeed that the American Economic Association keeps to its knitting in this regard and recommend this worthy behavior to the ASA.

Finally, here is the list of ASA officers. I recognize only one name: Mario Small at Chicago. He is a serious guy who does good work. I'll assume that he got outvoted on this one.

On White Castle

This bit from the Utne Reader is simultaneously patronizing and interesting.

White Castle was not around in Seattle when I was growing up. I first encountered it in Chicago when I was in gradual school. It's persistence remains a puzzle to me given the awfulness of the food on offer.

Institutional holiday greetings

For some years now it has been the case that I have reached an odd stage in life in which I receive more holiday greetings (physical cards or electronic cards) from institutions than from actual people.

So far this month I have received exactly zero holiday greetings from actual people - still a bit early for them - but three from institutions:

Intellectual (always!) greetings from the University of Chicago
Diverse and enthusiastic greetings from the University of Washington
Resolutely generic greetings from Delta Airlines.

One wonders if anyone has ever evaluated the effectiveness of expenditures on such efforts on profits / donations. The UW video, in particular, took some real resources to put together.

Oh, and of course, no mention of Christmas anywhere, ever. I'm compeltely fine with that, but it is nonetheless an interesting social phenomenon.

Economics of Evite

A fine way to add additional stress to your party planning from the gents at Cheap Talk.

My favorite Evite story has to do with a former colleague at Maryland, who shall remain nameless, who did not realize that the comments that you leave there can be read not only by the host of the event but by everyone else who was invited to it. This colleague replied to a party invitation with "should I bring the funny stuff?", which was later claimed to be a reference to Whoopie cushions.

A Useful Theorem

I learned this today from my colleague Charlie Brown:

The Fundamental Theorem of Demography:

The derivative of age with respect to time equals one.

Social capital inside the beltway

The Atlantic provides a brief meditation on the fact that lots of folks in Georgetown (one of the older and more expensive parts of DC) do not bother to shovel the snow on their sidewalks, despite a law requiring them to do so and despite the costs this imposes on pedestrians, most of whom are presumably their neighbors.

The author of the Atlantic piece reaches a different implicit conclusion about the cause of this behavior than I do, as she emphasizes car ownership and high incomes.

In contrast, my sense is that the behavior she complains of is merely a special case of the general observation that DC does not have a lot of what sociologists call social capital. If you drive in DC, you will observe that the locals pass up pretty much every opportunity to improve the lives of other drivers, or of pedestrians, even when the cost to them would be quite low.

Why might this be, in the city famously said to combine northern charm and southern efficiency? One good candidate is high population turnover. Relative to other cities, a lot of people live in the DC area only for a short time. High house prices and bad schools also encourage a lifecycle pattern of coming to DC single, horny and full of idealism in one's 20s and then leaving for somewhere with lower house prices and better schools in one's 30s with a spouse, some kids, and a lot less idealism. Others come for a few years to serve in government.

I think an explanation based on low social capital resulting from high population turnover fits the data better, where data here means casual observations by me and by the author of the magazine article, but someone should collect some real data and do a serious study.

Tom Lehrer on Sociology

This has more of a tough edge to it than most of the Lehrer stuff I have heard.

Hat tip: Fred Feinberg

Status relationships on facebook

This is both quite funny and quite true.

And there is no well-developed facebook etiquette yet. Is it better to post more interesting information from exciting locations or less interesting information from home?

Refridgerator voyeurism

Are you what you eat, or what you leave to spoil in the fridge?

Hat tip: Good s**t blog