In essence, he argues that success needs to be rethought using insights
from sociology, including an understanding of the limits of the ideal of
a meritocratic society (since there is always random chance involved in social mobility), a deeper awareness of how failure as a concept
involves particular beliefs and values (so that we can conclude that
Hamlet is not a "loser" even though he "lost"), and a sensitivity to the fact
that even when particular social and cultural distinctions appear to be irrelevant economic differences certainly are not (so that comparing oneself to Bill Gates rather than the Queen of England is just as absurd, even though the former wears "business casual").
Blog Archive
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2012
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- Physics Envy
- Irving Louis Horowitz
- MyPersonality
- Why are Economists so (Consistently) Led Astray Ab...
- Popularity of Programming Languages
- Big Science and Sociology
- Statistical Lexicon
- McKinsey on Big Data
- Inequality: Everyone's Thinking About It
- Universal Limits in High-Dimensional Statistics
- Rethinking Tragedy and Success
- Why Inequality Matters
- Inequality "Crisis" of Marriage
- Corporate Culture Revisited
- Misc. Links
- MIT Inequality Talk
- Scatter Plot Matrix in R
- Taxes and Inequality
- 3-D Scatter Plots Redux
- Checking Weather in Stata
- Is Everything Culture?
- Ternary (or Triaxial) Plots
- Causality and Ethnography
- The Mystery of Power-Law Distributions
- Visualizing a Correlation Table
- Why Models are Not Data
- R versus Stata Redux
- Culture and Poverty
- Values and Politics
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