Murray on Cultural Inequality

The conservative sociologist Charles Murray has written a new book on cultural inequality, and he's written about his main arguments here in the Wall Street Journal. There are two glaring problems with his argument, however. First, although I appreciate his attempts to examine cultural factors of the economy, he frequently conflates behaviors with culture (which consist of values, attitudes, beliefs, not behaviors arising from these symbolic constructs). This muddles his argument, and leads to a profusion of of ad hoc claims that are weakly supported by the data, if at all. Second, his
explanation for cultural inequality falls short: in particular, he ignores how lack of public investments and conservative economic policies (for example, lack of investment in public transportation, public spaces, universal welfare systems, and the growth of car-based urban sprawl based on the profit-making concerns of private developers, among other things) are leading causes of the cultural fragmentation he is concerned about.

Inequality versus Dispersion

I'm glad to see that Alan Krueger, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers (a fancy name for a panel of three economists), discussed the problems with inequality in his address today. You can find his remarks and graphs here. I liked his graphs, and he shows convincingly many of the standard findings in sociology and political science on politics and inequality in the United States. However, I found the following comments puzzling:

Although I have done much research in my career on inequality, I used to have an aversion to using the term inequality. The Wall Street Journal ran an article in the mid-1990s that noted that I prefer to use the term “dispersion.” But the rise in income dispersion – along so many dimensions – has gotten to be so high, that I now think that inequality is a more appropriate term.

The mixing of the statistical concept of dispersion with the sociological concept of inequality muddles the discussion. It's true that any distribution is often described by some measure of dispersion (e.g., standard deviation) and central tendency (e.g., mean or mode). But inequality encompasses a concept of equity, as well as some concept of disparity (or disparities), neither of which is analogous to the statistical concept of dispersion. Moreover, if we use Krueger's logic it's unclear at what threshold "dispersion" is labeled "inequality"; for instance, his comments imply that Sweden currently has dispersion, while the United States has inequality, although many Swedes would probably disagree.

Congratulations to the Digging into Data Recipients

The list of the round two award recipients for the 2011 Digging into Data challenge are listed here.

Upper Class are More Unethical

This is the first study I've seen that explicitly claims that people in higher social classes are more unethical than those from lower classes; furthermore, the authors claim that this tendency is "accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed." Aside from the well-known problems from the so-called "sophomore problem," this is a compelling and disturbing study that warrants replication in other contexts (based on, for instance, observational data from other populations).

Culturomics and the Google Ngram Viewer

In case you've missed it, I highly recommend exploring the Google Ngram Viewer, which allows for basic analysis of 5.2 million books catalogued by Google. The Ngram Viewer is an exemplar tool for what the authors call "cultromics" or the "the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture." For example, the Ngram Viewer is useful for examining over-time changes in concepts used by scholars and others. For anyone doubting the decline of the concept of "social class" in the realm of ideas (but of course not in reality), here is a compelling chart (the most reliability data are from 1800 to 2000):

You can also download the entire data set yourself, but beware: the data set is (ahem) large.

Animating David Harvey

I found the addition of animation a clever way of augmenting the arguments by the sociologist David Harvey, who discusses the crises of capitalism here:

Clearly this was a time-consuming effort, so not many of these videos can be made easily. If there is a way to make animating lectures more automated (through, for instance, computerized animations) it would be very beneficial for helping students learn. You can find additional RSAnimate lectures here.

Cultural Contradictions of Pop Economics

Andy Gelman has a fascinating post on the apparent contradictions of pop micro-economists today. I highly recommend reading it, as well as the comments. In essence, Gelman argues that many pop economists take one of two positions, depending on the circumstance: first, people are rational and respond to incentives (and thus behavior that appears irrational is actually rational once you take the perspective of an economist); second, people are irrational and don't respond to incentives (and thus, they need economists, with their open minds, to show them how to be rational). The problem, argues, Gelman is that these positions are entirely contradictory, and that pop-economics plays hopscotch with these viewpoints, switching from one to the other.

Quantitative Literary Studies

Fascinating article on the attempts by Franco Moretti, a Stanford English professor and member of the Stanford Literary Lab, to create a quantitative literary studies by digitizing and statistically analyzing literary texts.

Daniel Bell, Master Sociologist

The NYT posted an excellent profile of my late friend Dan Bell, the master sociologist (and big thinker). Even though he was a big-thinking social theorist, I remember that Dan told me, emphatically in fact, that he was a quantitative sociologist! This makes sense, since his big books often included quantitative data of trend lines (which is in many ways advantageous over modeling the data and then focusing on the model parameters, such as regression coefficients or standard errors).

Why are Professors Liberal?

Check out this really cool article (okay, so I'm biased) on professorial politics in the New York Times.