Top 5 Unsolved Sociological Questions

Physicists and other natural scientists often spend time specifying and focusing attention on unsolved questions, such as how particles obtain mass, the origins of dark matter, and how time is related to entropy. In general, I think it's a good practice for any field of endeavor to revisit the questions that are stubbornly and perplexing unsolved, including sociology. Thus, in this spirit of refining our ignorance (and clarifying our sociological "known unknowns"), here is my list of the top unsolved sociological questions of the early 21st century:

• What is causing the unprecedented, nearly-monotonic drop in crime rates across the developed world over the last several decades? As the NYT mentions, this question has been perplexing criminologists and sociologists, and everything from changing demographics to the legalization of abortion has been cited (although the latter cause is most probably incorrect, pace Steven Levitt).
• Why are various forms of inequality increasing across the developed world, from Sweden to the United States, since the early 1970s? Although many sociologists and economists have focused on technological change, immigration rates, and de-unionization, deeper causes (such as those related to political institutions or social structures) remain largely unexplored.
• Why do so many cultural and social phenomena (such as the frequency of words in the English language, size of cities across the globe, and amount of wealth across individuals) follow power-law distributions when plotted by size (or frequency) and rank? Explanations have focused on preferential attachment (popularly articulated by Herbert Simon) and information efficiency costs (as outlined by Benoit Mandelbrot), but thus far we have no conclusive evidence for favoring any particular mechanism over others.
• How does culture (defined as values, norms, attitudes, and beliefs) result in different economic and political outcomes across groups? Since the time of Max Weber, the causal effect of culture on human behavior has baffled sociologists and other social scientists, in part because of the apparent intractability of measuring culture and clearly linking it to economic and political outcomes. As a result, answering this question is an open, fertile area of empirical and theoretical exploration.
• Why is the United States unusually politically conservative and religious compared to other developed countries? At least since Tocqueville sociologists, including the late Seymour Martin Lipset, have puzzled over why the United States has exhibited a kind of cultural "exceptionalism" (in the non-normative sense), with relatively high levels of religiosity and political conservatism. Although many explanations have been offered, a satisfactory account has remained stubbornly elusive.

Irving Louis Horowitz

The eminent political sociologist died a few days ago, according to an obit in the NYT. Long ago I read, and took seriously, his book The Decomposition of Sociology, in which he argues (essentially) for more empirical analysis and less left-wing politics in sociology. Reflecting on his book, he neglects a fundamental, possible cultural contradiction: to the extent social reality exhibits facts consistent with liberalism and inconsistent with conservatism, empirical analysis will result in more liberal than conservative belief systems (but not values, since those cannot be proven "right" or "wrong" by scientific analysis). For example, evidence is accumulating that economic inequality (which is of little concern to most conservatives in the United States), has numerous deleterious effects, thus forcing conservatives either to hold beliefs inconsistent with the evidence (i.e., inequality is unrelated to deleterious effects) or alter their values (i.e., it is a "good" thing to have high rates of violence, low social mobility, and so forth).

Inequality: Everyone's Thinking About It

I ran into the following articles on inequality, which has not only been increasing structurally but culturally (in that more policy elites and journalists are discussing the topic openly). Here are some recent posts on inequality:

• Reuters is reporting findings from a group of researchers showing that Sweden has undergone an enormous increase in inequality, especially since the rise of the center-right in the political system. For those of us in the United States who look to Sweden as a model of development, in recent years even this country has regressed from the ideals of social democracy.
• Based on an online survey (with all the caveats about sampling procedures, of course), a group has surveyed wealthy Americans on their views on inequality. The biggest finding, which reinforces the importance of class-based analyses of electoral politics: among the wealthy there is a huge gap between self-identified Republicans and Democrats, with over 84% of the latter favoring policies taxing the rich while around 29% of the former.

Why Inequality Matters

The conservative magazine Commentary has published an article on how social inequality is on the political agenda and on the minds of most Americans, even though many conservatives would prefer the case to be otherwise. The authors argue that, in part, the discussion of inequality should be oriented toward social mobility and poverty, as well as the "injustices" of government policy. What the authors apparently fail to realize is the possibility that inequality causes poverty and immobility, not to mention "unjust" government policies perpetuating inequality. In particular, higher inequality can cause low social mobility by increasing socioeconomic distances between the highest and lowest rungs of society, higher rates of poverty by segregating groups and distorting resource allocations, and inequality-perpetuating government policies by shifting costs from the wealthy to the general population (through, for example, cutting funds for widely-available public services and increasing take-home profits from private organizations).

The Phil Gramm Effect

I recently re-read Andrew Abbott's brilliant article on the problems with classical linear regression. One of the most persuasive criticisms is that statistical models are extremely difficult to use for examining small changes with big effects (but big changes with small effects can be modeled). I like to call this the "Phil Gramm Effect" because arguably one of the most important causes of the 2008 financial crisis (an undoubtedly big effect) was Phil Gramm (a small change), since he was the driving force for gutting the Glass-Steagall Act and shifting government regulations in favor of private companies (often called "deregulation," but more accurately termed "re-regulation").

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).

Why are Professors Liberal?

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