Prelims.

Took my prelims today. Won’t find out the results for a couple weeks. I think they went ok, but we’ll see. During the exam, my computer’s monitor randomly shut itself off four times. The first time I swore rather loudly, thinking my computer had crashed. Oops. Later, I accidentally starting humming loudly and got snapped at (deservedly). Oh well. It’s over now.

Archimedes, McDonough and “Nudge”

Archimedes famously said, “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth.” I think about that quote a lot, along with two or three others, when I think about the problems of standing outside a system and looking down on it, trying to affect it – for example, in thinking about Gramsci and Althusser and the problem of trying to get outside ideology. If only I had a place to stand, then, then, I could See Things As They Really Are ™, and, Archimedes style, move them. The problem, as Althusser and others realized, is that there is nowhere to stand outside of the system, no privileged position or fixed point (to invoke another physics metaphor). Or, to reappropriate a phrase from Cradle to Cradle, “Away has gone away.”

Ok, so where am I going with this? There’s a new line of thinking, derivative from behavioral economics and embodied in the works of Thaler and Sunstein, called “libertarian paternalism”. Libertarian paternalists argue that because humans are prone to make certain decisions not so rationally, it makes sense for governments or other organizational authorities to nudge them in different directions while not actually taking away any formal rights – hence, libertarian but paternalist. The classic example is opt-in vs. opt-out decisions on retirement plans or organ donation (Kieran Healy has written on some of the issues with the organ donation example). Here’s the philosophical/empirical justification for Thaler and Sunstein’s move: 

‘NUDGE – Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness,’ by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein – Review – NYTimes.com:

The main insight from which Thaler and Sunstein proceed is that no decision setting is “neutral.” Whether it’s a restaurant laying out food or a business offering its employees a list of mutual funds in its 401(k) plan or the government presenting different Medicare options, whoever presents choices must frame them in some way. And the framing will affect the decisions. Even “small and apparently insignificant details can have major impacts on people’s behavior,” the authors write. Some ways of presenting the choices may give a gentler “nudge” than others, and we may think some settings are neutral only because we’re so used to them. But whoever is presenting the choices will inevitably bias decisions, in one direction or another.

As a result, Thaler and Sunstein argue, many of the familiar arguments for why people should simply be left to make choices on their own, and especially for why government should stay strictly out of the way, have little practical force. In many important areas of choice that matter both to the individual and to the rest of us (for example, when overuse of medical care drives up our insurance premiums and our taxes), the operative question is not whether to bias people’s decisions, but in which direction.

So, I love the first line – no decision setting is neutral. There’s no away, no outside, no context-free room where the real, underlying abstract preferences can be observed. Every detail has some effect on our choices – even if, in Callon’s terms, we do not actively calculate using those little details.

And yet, the last line bothers me immensely: “the operative question is not whether to bias people’s decisions, but in which direction.” Bias from what? Those abstract, unobservable, cannot exist in any setting, preferences? If something cannot even in theory be observed, then in what sense does it exist? And if stable, abstract preferences don’t exist, then in what sense are you introducing a ‘bias’?

I feel like all of our langauge for talking about these problems is off. The basic realization of “Nudge” is that decision-making (or, better, action at all) is highly interdependent with the environment, and even slight shifts in the environment can lead to very different decisions. So governments and other organizations must ask, what kind of decision-making environments do we want to craft, given some desired outcome? The question is, how do we wish to exercise what Simon and March (I believe) called “unobtrusve control”, since there is no other option.

Ok, so to sum up – you can’t bias something that doesn’t exist. You can exercise power through relationships though, and indeed you have no choice but to do so. All of our actions are consequential for the actions of other actors, although some are more consequential than others. Hooray Foucault.

Obama, Economics and The “Broken” Economy

Ok, there is far too much to talk about in the upcoming NYTimes magazine piece on Obama and Economics: “How Obama Reconciles Dueling Views on Economy”. So, I’ll try to keep the post to a few points ranging from trivial to hopefully interesting.

We’ll start with the trivial: Obama and I love the same RFK quote!

“Two things,” [Obama] said, as we were standing outside the first-class bathroom. “One, just because I think it really captures where I was going with the whole issue of balancing market sensibilities with moral sentiment. One of my favorite quotes is — you know that famous Robert F. Kennedy quote about the measure of our G.D.P.?”

I didn’t, I said.

“Well, I’ll send it to you, because it’s one of the most beautiful of his speeches,” Obama said.

In it, Kennedy argues that a country’s health can’t be measured simply by its economic output. That output, he said, “counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them” but not “the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play.”

Here’s the full quote, below the cut, along with some other thoughts.

Oh Noes: On Becoming an OrgTheory-ist

This morning I have been going back to some classic OrgTheory posts on classics – the must read list, some reading recommendations, and the 2008 summer reading list. I am now systematically printing out all the articles I haven’t already read for my prelims, and ordering books offline. I could not have told you there were such things as population ecology or contingency theory even 6 months ago. How did this happen?

McCain Was Never “Tortured”

Andrew Sullivan asks and answers a brilliant question today, “Does Bush believe McCain was tortured?” Well, no.

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan:

In all the discussion of John McCain’s recently recovered memory of a religious epiphany in Vietnam, one thing has been missing. The torture that was deployed against McCain emerges in all the various accounts. It involved sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating. Sound familiar?

According to the Bush administration’s definition of torture, McCain was therefore not tortured.
…
Now the kicker: in the Military Commissions Act, McCain acquiesced to the use of these techniques against terror suspects by the CIA. And so the tortured became the enabler of torture. Someone somewhere cried out in pain for the same reasons McCain once did. And McCain let it continue.

These are the prices people pay for power.

So, not only does Bush not think McCain was tortured, McCain voted to allow the same ‘not torture’ that was done to him to be legal when done to others.
Wow.

Pokemon (Sociology Edition)

So, I had one of the nerdiest thoughts of my life the other day: imagining the debates between scholars and scholarly traditions in terms of battling Pokemon* (or maybe Final Fantasy characters). Ok, bear with me.

Imagine, if you will…

(Battle music begins to play, screen cuts to a shot of Marx posing angrily with beard.)
You have encountered MARX.
What Theorist will you use?
* Choose WEBER.
(Weber appears on screen, pen in hand.)
What will WEBER do?
* Choose “Iron Cage”.
MARX uses “Class Struggle”.
WEBER is strong against Historical Materialism! WEBER takes 1 damage.
WEBER uses “Iron Cage”.
MARX is weak against Culture! MARX takes 45 damage.
MARX is defeated!
(Battle music ends, as Marx fades from the screen, beard bloodied.)

Ok, it’d be hokey. But, also, awesome. No? Just me?

Edit: In the comments, Anomie helpfully points to Theory Trading Cards. I am imagining that but with a ccg set of mechanics. We could totally convert them. Hmm.

* I know, you are probably not that interested.

Proposed Rule For Writing

You rarely need to hedge twice in the same sentence.
Thoughts?

The Sociology of Kurt Vonnegut

I don’t know precisely why this blog turned into “fiction authors I like + sociology” all of a sudden, but for the moment I’ll run with it. I was reading the comments to a recent orgtheory post about teaching intro soc* when something in Andrew Perrin’s comment reminded me of a saying of Vonnegut’s. Here’s what Andrew said:

“Most importantly, I drill into their heads that the whole point of the course is to evaluate critically the proposition that “The Fundamental Unit of Human Behavior is the Group.” They need not agree with it but they need to be able to think with it as an approach.”

First, I rather like that as a programmatic statement for Sociology. It certainly beats “the study of modern capitalist society” or “the study of modernity” or especially “the study of society”. It’s a nice little methoodological maxim that is both hard to communicate and essential to understanding much of what sociologists have done and thought. It also reminded me of this oft-repeated (with variations) quote of Vonnegut’s:

Do you know what a Humanist is? I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that functionless capacity. We Humanists try to behave well without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.

I like the idea of “community” as an abstraction with which we have real familiarity and connection, and I think it fits nicely with the idea of the group as the fundamental unity of human behavior. The group is, in a way, both concrete and abstract. I wonder if, having been raised a humanist, I found sociology a nice fit when I finally arrived (late to the party) in graduate school. Of course humans are interdependent. Of course you have to study communities and groups to understand individuals. Who could be so silly as to think otherwise?

Anyway, that’s a tidbit about Vonnegut. It’s strange, his death** last year affected me more than that of any other person I had never met. I spent weeks reading his speeches and essays, and re-reading a few of his books. My friend Kelan suggested at the time a comparison of Foucault and Bokonon, a prophet and religious leader in Cat’s Cradle, which I have still been meaning to look into. Here’s Bokonon on the Quest for Understanding:

Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, ‘Why, why, why?’
Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land,
Man got to tell himself he understand.

S’all I got for now. Prelim studying beckons, along with a silly banquet.

* I, too, never took an intro soc class, or really any undergrad soc classes, so I have nothing to add to that conversation, but found it interesting.
**“Kurt is up in Heaven now.” Haha!

The Analytical Language of the American Sociological Association

In a comment to a post re: Borges being the best over on Union Street, Andrew suggested the creation of what would truly be the most excellent* section of asa: “Borgesian Sociology”. This truly inspired suggestion led me back to a discussion at ASA about sections and section identities.

First, to Borges. In the oft-cited, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”, Borges discusses the elimination from the Encyclopedia Britannica of the entry concerning John Wilkins**, a sad oversight given his pioneering attempt to create an analytical language whose structure held within it the definitions of its words:

He divided the universe in forty categories or classes, these being further subdivided into differences, which was then subdivided into species. He assigned to each class a monosyllable of two letters; to each difference, a consonant; to each species, a vowel. For example: de, which means an element; deb, the first of the elements, fire; deba, a part of the element fire, a flame.

Borges notes the difficulties in such an endeavor and goes on to tell us of other attempts at classification:

These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies remind us of those which doctor Franz Kuhn attributes to a certain Chinese encyclopaedia entitled ‘Celestial Empire of benevolent Knowledge’. In its remote pages it is written that the animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.

A few things to note about this: first, I love how we do not have the encyclopedia itself, only a second hand account. Second, note the inclusion of “(h) included in the present classification”, a hat-tip to paradoxes in the style of Bertrand Russell (e.g. “If the town barber shaves every man who does not shave himself, who shaves the barber?”). Lastly, some of the categories are just neat.

When Life Feels Like a Borges Story

This post has nothing to do with Sociology, but everything to do with my favorite author – J.L. Borges. Borges is sort of the best, and this best-ness has been recognized by Sociological authors as diverse as Goffman (in a footnote in Frame Analysis), Foucault (in the motivation for the Order of Things) and Hirschman* as well as others on the outside.

Today’s Borgesian moment comes from the NYTimes book review section, by way of Ammon Shea, who is perhaps one of the coolest people I’ve ever read about. Shea decided to read the entire O.E.D. end to end, skipping nothing, and write a book about it. Here’s a bit of the review:

Book Review – ‘Reading the OED,’ by Ammon Shea – Review – NYTimes.com:

And the lovely-ugly words, words that Shea didn’t know existed, leap up to his hand. Acnestis – the part of an animal’s back that the animal can’t reach to scratch. And bespawl – to splatter with saliva. In Chapter D, Shea encounters deipnophobia, the fear of dinner parties; Chapter K brings kankedort, an awkward situation.

Months in, Shea arrives – back-aching, crabby, page-blind – at Chapter N. “Some days I feel as if I do not actually speak the English language,” he writes, his verbal cortex overflowing. “It is,” he observes, “like trying to remember all the trees one sees through the window of a train.” Once he stares for a while, amazed, at the word glove. “I find myself wondering why I’ve never seen this odd term that describes such a common article of clothing.”

By Chapter O there is evidence of further disintegration. Is he turning into, he wonders, one of the “Library People”? The bag-toters and mutterers who spend all their time there? “Sometimes I get angry at the dictionary and let loose with a muffled yell.” At night he hears a deep, disembodied voice slowly intoning definitions.

“A deep disembodied voice slowly intoning definition” sounds like a situation/character straight out of Borges’ central casting, so to speak. I also love the way in which the familiar can be seemingly strange, and also the idea of finding more and more specific words for things. It’s like an inductive version of the analytical language of John Wilkins.

I especially love that Shea is not trying particularly to get much out of reading the OED – he’s not trying to become a better poet or writer of fictions, but rather “He just wants to identify and savor, for their own sweet sakes, malocclusive Greek and Latin hybrids that are difficult to figure out how to pronounce. He is fond of polysyllabic near-homonyms — words like incompetible (outside the range of competency) and repertitious (found accidentally), which are quickly swallowed up in the sonic gravitation of familiar words.”

*See what I did there? I actually did cite Borges in at least two papers, both times citing “Of Exactitude in Science”, a short story that deserves more acclaim in academia, I think. Umberto Eco wrote a 20 page essay just trying to explain, understand and carry through with this one paragraph story.