orgtheory.net

A number of people have been asking—or asserting—things about the relative cost of membership in the ASA as compared to peer organizations. This post provides some data about comparative membership costs and benefits.

First, a comparison of current and proposed ASA membership fees with peer organizations that also have a sliding scale of membership costs.

How cost of membership compares across selected social science disciplines. Click for a PDF version.

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Without a doubt, the last few months of uprisings and pro-democracy protests in the Middle East will invigorate arguments about the power of the Internet to fuel democratization. Egypt, in particular, stands out. It’s not clear though how much influence the Internet had in encouraging change in these parts of the world. Was Twitter driving additional protests or would agitators have protested anyway? I just don’t think we know at this point. We need more and better research about the role of the Internet, social media, and other technology in fostering social change.

Research about the impact of the Internet on economic productivity may provide some insight. A recent study by my Northwestern colleague, Shane Greenstein, suggests that the Internet’s influence is unevenly distributed, mainly improving the economic productivity of geographical areas with previously high levels of economic development and technological sophistication. The paper is forthcoming in the American Economic Review. Here’s a bit from the press release on the study:

Out of about 3,000 counties in the U.S., in only 163 did business adoption of Internet technologies correlate with wage and employment growth, the study found. All of these counties had populations above 150,000 and were in the top quarter of income and education levels before 1995….

Why did the Internet make such big waves in these few areas? Greenstein believes the reason was that these areas already had sophisticated companies and the communications infrastructure needed to seize on the Internet’s opportunities. But there are other possibilities. The impact could have been due to a well-known phenomenon called “biased technical change,” which means that new technologies can thrive only in places with skilled workers who know how to use them.

This study provides more evidence that technological benefits disproportionately accrue to those who already have economic and educational advantages (for further evidence see the work of another Northwestern colleague, Eszter Hargittai). Could it be that the Internet has a differential effect on social and political change in more developed countries? Or perhaps, if you take the “biased technical change” argument further, you could expect that activists in countries in which there is already a well-established activist infrastructure will be better able to use the Internet to further their political causes. This would essentially be an extension of resource mobilization theory. The Internet’s usefulness for promoting social and political change may be moderated by the availability of preexisting organizational, social and human resources.

Of course, it’s way too early to tell if this is the case or not. However, with the number of pro-democratic movements on the rise, in the future there may be plenty of data to analyze.

Via John Gruber, Philip Greenspun asks how on earth the New York Times spent $40 million on its new paywall:

… my biggest question right now is how the NY Times spent a reported $40-50 million writing the code (Bloomberg; other sources are consistent). Google was financed with $25 million. The New York Times already had a credit card processing system for selling home delivery. It already had a database management system for keeping track of Web site registrants. What did they spend the $40-50 million on?

And what do you get for $40m besides a wall that can be trivially circumvented?
Read the rest of this entry »

Related links:

• NPR story on removing traffic signs in Germany.
• Wired story on ‘Roads Gone Wild.’
• Tom Vanderbilt’s book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)
• And, lets throw this in too — audio of Friedrich Hayek speaking in 1983 on ‘evolution and spontaneous order’

ASA Dues in Comparative Context, using ASA average salary data. Source: http://thedisgruntledsociologist.wordpress.com/2011/03/29/dues-in-context/

As you probably know if you’re a regular reader, the American Sociological Association proposes to hike its already high dues by quite a bit, and the organization is not bothering to explain to its members what it needs the money for. If you’re an ASA member and would would like to have your name added to an upcoming petition about this (draft version here then email Ezra Zuckerman: ewzucker at m i t dot e d u. (The wording is still being finalized: if you want to provide input on that, email him with your comments by by 8am this Thursday, March 31st.) For more on this issue see posts from Jeremy Freese, me, and the disgruntled sociologist.

Ryan Calder, a Berekeley soc grad student, has a new blog called “Revolutionology.” It’s pretty simple. He’s doing field work in Arab Spring nations and his blog records his field work. Now, he’s in Libya (!). Sample posts: Libya’s internal security apparatus, California is just like Libya, and Fast and the Furious: Benghazi Drift (my retitling). Much needed field work, but be safe! (HT: Nicholas Wilson)

The February issue of American Economic Review has a nice feature entitled “100 Years of the American Economic Review: The Top 20 Articles,” where a distinguished committee of scholars (Arrow, Bernheim, Feldstein, McFadden, Poterba and Solow) present what they see as, well, the top 20 articles published in AER in the last 100 years.  One thing to note that these are not the top-20 most heavily cited articles.  The committee followed (ironically) a “qualitative/reputational” approach in which citations were considered but they were not the most important factor.  In addition to the (from my own highly uninformed perspective) obvious papers, (e.g. Cobb and Douglas 1928, Friedman 1968, Krugman 1980, Kuznets 1955, Lucas 1973) orgtheorists and O&Mers would be happy to find Alchian and Demsetz (1972) occupying the top spot and Hayek (1945) somewhere in the middle.

Last year, I blogged about some research that Michael Heaney and I were doing on the anti-Iraq War movement. I found that the antiwar movement quickly collapsed after Obama’s election.  Smaller crowds, less attention. The big finding is that Democrats stopped showing up after Obama’s inauguration. Based  on 5, 398 surveys of street demonstrators, here’s the paper’s key chart:

In other words, once a Democrat gained power, Democrats stopped showing up to antiwar protests. If you want the full write up, read the paper, which has now appeared in Mobilization.

Bottom line: Social movements and parties rely on each other. Movements benefit when partisans appear because they can bolster their numbers. Parties use movements as platform for partisan grievances. But there’s a drawback, electoral victories mean that the rank and file will stop showing up.

Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids is a new book by economist and blogger Bryan Caplan. It makes a simple argument of extreme importance: you should probably have more children. Though this book is written by an economist, it’s not another cute-o-nomics pop text. It’s a serious book about family planning that’s based on his reading of child development, psychology, genetics, economics, and other fields. It’s about one of life’s most important decisions, and this is what social scientsits should be thinking about.

The argument boils down to a simple point. If the evidence shows that you are over estimating the cost of having children, then, on the margin, you should probably have another child. This isn’t to say that everyone should have children, or that you should have lots of children. Rather, if you are indifferent between between having one more and not, the cautious thing to do is have one more.

Let me start with the arguments that I think are strongest. One is that people rarely regret having childen. According to survey data, people who have children rarely say that they wish that they never had children. Childless people are way more likely to say they wish they had children. Another strong argument is that having children makes the world a better place. There’s little evidence that population size by itself leads to poverty, environmental destruction, or what have you. Rather, bad policies and institutions cause these outcomes. More people means more innovators and more customers who will buy stuff from the innovators.

Another sensible argument is that you don’t need to kill yourself parenting. ”The kids will be alright” should be Caplan’s motto. There’s a lot of evidence that all the crazy stuff that people do really doesn’t have much of an overall effect on life course outcomes. The piano lessons, the ballet classes – not needed. Unless the child truly enjoys these activities, and some do, better to save money, time, and stress by dropping them. Once you realize that not most kids do not need expensive inputs, you can save money and time – and have another kid.

Caplan’s biggest detractors will likely focus on his most controversial argument. He argues that you really don’t need to worry about the kids because inherited traits are much more likely to determine life course outcomes, not parenting. He supports his argument with the now voluminous literature on twins and adopted children that shows strong effects of shared parents, not family environment. Many arguments rest on his readings of these twin and adoption studies.

On one level, I agree with this overall point. We often think that we can remake people and ignore the traits, such as personality and cognitive ability, that are tough to change through socialization. As far as I can tell, twin studies do show that there are really poweful inherited traits that affect social behavior. On another level, I feel that twin and adoption studies can be pushed to far because twin and adoption studies have a very powerful, but very specific, research design.

In my view, twin studies tend to have two important limitations. First, there is non-random selection of parents into adoption. Adopters are, by definition, very unlike the rest of the population. Not in income or demographics, but in personality. Adoption is an enormous investment of resources in someone who is not biologically related to you.  In other words, adopters are extraordinarily nice people. Any argument that denies the effect of parenting by appealing to studies with only Very Nice Parents is reaching too far. My hypothesis is that random assignment of twins to randomly selected parents (not just the Very Nice People) will yeild model estimates with bigger family coefficients.

The other limitation of twin and adoption studies is that they study variation in existing parenting practices. It may be the case that American parents simply don’t know how to correctly socialize a kid to reach some goal. Therefore, variations in family environment are just variations in failed practices.

Here’s a concrete example: child obesity. A hard core twin study advocate would justifiably point to twin studies showing that weight or BMI is more linked to shared parents than shared family environment. However, many Americans eat diets high in carbs, corn syrup and other ingredients. They also seem to consume many more calories than needed. To be blunt, in a world where *everyone* eats bags of twinkies, there won’t be much of an effect of living in a home where people eat a few more or less twinkies.

For that reason, it is too much of a jump to say that family environment can’t possibly affect weight. For example, parents who remove all twinkies and switch to an all broccoli diet will likely affect their children’s weight. In other words, to correctly conclude that family environment has no or little effect on weight, you would need a sample of families that have radically different diets, including at least one option that actually works (e.g., twinkies vs. broccoli). For many important life course outcomes, I am not persuaded that a sample of twins adopted into American or Western families provides enough variation in family environmnents, or that a sample would include enough families who do the practice that research has shown works.

After reading the last passage, you might think I am against genetic explanations of behavior, or that I think that Caplan’s book is fatally flawed. Instead, I see my critique as a qualification of an important argument.  Even if the argument is overstated, and parents in some cases can have a big impact, parenting can be much, much less budrensome becuase the kids will be alright. In end, I find Caplan’s book to be a really humane text. Children aren’t a burden or a problem or an investment. They are to be enjoyed. They are a benefit and we should welcome more them into the world.

A big thanks to Shehzad Nadeem and Steve Borgatti for guest posting at orgtheory! Be sure to continue following their work on their respective web sites.

Go to “google scholar.” Click on “advanced scholar search.” Type “orgtheory.wordpress.com.” We have 17 citations! Who cites orgtheory?

• Ezra Zuckerman, twice
• Charles Perrow, twice (sorry no links working)
• Washington University Law Review
• West Virginia Law Review

There’s also a bunch of working papers and organizational reports. Sure, maybe when you compare the cites/articles ratio it isn’t so impressive. A blog has a lot noise, but we’re actually cited more often than some articles and books from nice presses.

While looking again at the proposed changes to the ASA’s dues, I noticed that, under the new scheme, a few lucky duckies will pay nothing at all. How is this possible, you ask? Consider the table.

Read the rest of this entry »

Jeremy comments on the proposed large increase in ASA dues set out in this month’s Footnotes issue. To be honest, I think the “Rationale” for the increase in terms of fairness and progressivity comes across as a piece of sanctimonious handwaving. To be clear, I am completely in favor of a tiered, progressive system of membership dues for the ASA. The Footnotes article convinced me that the income brackets in the current system are outdated, and that they should be changed. What it did not do, however, was offer any justification for why the ASA’s overall take from its members needs to increase substantially, as opposed to just undergoing a revenue-neutral readjustment. I am quite sure the ASA Council—maybe several Councils over the past few years—have determined the Association really does need the extra money this new system is plainly designed to generate. But there’s nothing in the Footnotes article explaining what those reasons are. It’s insulting not to even attempt to justify this to the people you’re asking to pony up. The closest we get is this:

In a wide variety of ways, ASA provides professional public goods: It organizes key journals in the discipline; gathers and disseminates data on sociologists and academic departments; provides timely information on the job market for sociologists and brings potential employers and employees together; promotes public dissemination of sociological research through the media; facilitates the building of strong networks among sociologists in the different settings in which sociologists work; organizes the annual national meeting of the profession at which new scholarship is shared; represents the discipline of sociology in the activities of many inter-disciplinary scientific and professional organizations; advocates along with those organizations for increased federal funding for social scientific research and graduate training; and has an experienced staff that responds quickly to public issues affecting the discipline, sociology departments, and individual sociologists. These are real public goods for the community of sociologists, and thus the equal burden principle has been relevant to the ASA for decades.

This is what the ASA has done for years. What’s needed is an explanation for which of these professional public goods has gotten so much more expensive that the ASA requires a large net increase in overall revenue from members, or which new ones have been added to its list of activities. Why is the extra money needed? How is it going to be spent? Perhaps it’s needed for all sorts of worthwhile projects and programs. That’s great! Tell me what they are. In the meantime, don’t bullshit me about progressivity and fairness in taxation, as if I—or the ASA membership generally—haven’t already been committed to that idea “for decades” to begin with.

Brian Pitt, at the Sociological Imagination, has an interesting post about family research. The post is short, so I’ll paste it here:

“Blow and Hartnett (2005) define Infidelity as a sexual and/or emotional act engaged in by one person within a committed relationship, where such an act occurs outside the primary relationship and constitutes a breach of trust and/or a violation of agreed-upon norms, or boundaries, (explicit or implicit) by one or both individuals in that relationship in relation to romantic/emotional or sexual exclusivity.

Factoids About Infidelity (Blow and Hartnett, 2005):

1. Infidelity is not correlated with marital unhappiness/dissatisfaction.
2. Opportunity, e.g., the workplace, business trips, professional meetings, and academic conferences, is a significant factor independent of rates of unhappiness.
3. “Personal factors” or vulnerabilities such as “low self-esteem” or generational transmission of tolerance of, and perhaps encouragement of, infidelity.
4. Levels of “sexual satisfaction” do correlate inversely with levels of infidelity.  For example, a high level of sexual satisfaction correlates with a low rate of infidelity, and vice-versa.
5. Female risk for infidelity is highest during the first seven years of marriage.
6. Male risk for infidelity is highest “later” in a marriage.”

If I understand this correctly, infidelity is not primarily an assessment of the relationship. It’s more likely a reflection of opportunity, self-image, sexual satisfaction,  and life course issues. Sounds like a “empty center” theory of sex and marriage. Marital quality doesn’t lead to infidelity. Rather, infidelity is something that happens “around” the marriage.

Since Brian is a PhD student in social work/sociology, I’ll spin out the practice implications. When the therapist is confronted with infidelity, it’s better to focus on the individual’s self-control and self-image rather than the perceived quality of the marriage. Sounds like that self-control and the ability to resist opportunity will lead to better marriages. Probably not so urgent to work on how people view the marriage, unless the perception is really toxic (e.g., one person obviously is not taking it seriously).

The most recent issue of Sociological Theory features an article by Fligstein and McAdam entitled “Towards a General Theory of Strategic Action Fields.”  In this paper F & M, attempt a “grand” conceptual synthesis (and also attempt to draw a systematic outline of the empirical implications of) a series of recent trends towards the integration of organizational, institutional and social movement theories.  This is a place where the literature has been kind of awkwardly moving for a while now (e.g. Scheneiberg and Clemens 2006; Armstrong and Bernstein 2008; Rao 2008; Evans and Kay 2008; King and Pearce 2010), but which is finally given a measure of overall conceptual coherence in this piece.

The theoretical motor of the entire paper is very parsimonious version of field theory.  This is also a place where the literature had been awkwardly moving, with various people inventing and re-inventing a field perspective using all sorts of different language and terms such as ecologies, and multiple institutional logics (e.g. Abbott 2005; see also here).  F & M bring order to what could have been some overwhelmingly complicated proceedings through their economical meta-concept of “strategic action fields” (as well as other secondary and very handy distinctions).  This concept is supposed to subsume older versions (including sectors, movement industries, organizational fields and I would add Abbottian ecologies) of the same general thing; essentially SAFs are sites where collective actors struggle for what is at stake (what Bourdieu referred to as “illusio”), taking each other into account while doing so.  The general dynamics of SAFs can then be described using the combined resources of “French” field theory (e.g. dominated/dominant, doxa, struggle for recognition, etc.), American reconceptualizations thereof (e.g. Fligstein’s theory of social skill) and standard concepts taken from social movement (incumbent/challenger, contention, mobilization, framing, etc.) and organizational theory (institutional logics).

This paper is an absolute must-read.  Easily one of the most important conceptual advances in organizational and social movement theory (in fact one of the  ambitious claims of the paper is that these two realms are empirically co-extensive, so there should be brought under a single conceptual framework) in recent memory.

A few weeks ago, Mikalia wrote:

“Movements in universities” and “student movements” are not exactly the same thing. In the cases I’ve studied, students are sometimes distinctly in the minority in terms of movement participants, as compared to faculty/staff.

But as for the follow vs. lead question, my supposition would be that it depends quite heavily on the topic in question. Clearly, there are some issues that are more likely to come to the fore in an environment in which young people are considering questions of social justice/etc.; there are other issues (labor rights, for instance) where young people are unlikely to think about it first.

I agree. One of the goals of a recent edited volume chapter I wrote is to disentangle the multiple processes behind movements in universities. I make the following distinctions:

• Insiders vs. outsiders: Some movements seem to be driven by students or professors. Other movements just happen to be around universities.
• Academic vs. non-academic goals: Movements may have educational goals in mind (e.g. ethnic studies) or not (e.g., antiwar movements).
• Outcomes: Some movements target universities and their practices, others target non-educational targets, other movements just spill over into the wider society.

The question for research is then to use these distinctions to develop more systematic hypotheses about the range of movements in/around universities and how they are connected to other social processes.

Fabio asked about the latest and greatest in social psychology.  Here’s Robb Willer’s UC Berkeley intro to social psychology class, Sociology 150A:

Lecture 2: Experiments

Lecture 3: Cognitive Biases 1

Lecture 4: Cognitive Biases 2

The rest of the lectures (on conformity, norms etc) are here.

Does anyone have an update on the whole ASA-K street office-debt swap story? Anything from the ASA that they’d like to share?

G.A. Cohen on the German Ideal of Freedom:

If logic is more your thing, there is also a lecture by Alfred Tarski, a tutorial with Gilbert Ryle, or a boxing match between John Roemer and Jurgen Habermas.

The ASA recently released a report claiming that minority PhD students had better job placements if their adviser was White. They analyzed data from students who received MFP awards, fellowships aimed at under represented students to encourage research careers. They found that 37% of MFP recipients got research jobs, while 7% got research jobs if they had a minority adviser. And if you don’t know, a 37% placement rate in research schools is phenomenal and higher than just about any PhD program I know of.

These findings raise an important sociological question. Why? The more generous explanation is that White faculty simply have more clout to start with. There are other explanations. Perhaps White faculty mentors are correlated with more mainstream topics, or  White mentors are better at pushing their students to develop marketable or high quality dissertation topics. There might even be a form of signaling. The minority student might be seen as especially strong if they associate themselves with an out-group person.

In my own case, my advisers were White (Charles Bidwell and Rafe Stolzenberg). I don’t think that was deliberate on my part. I thought they did good work and they were supportive of me. But I can see a little of these explanations in my own case. Using organizational sociology to analyze the institutionalization of social movements is a way to mainstream what might be a tough topic. I doubt my committee would have accepted a critical race theory dissertation had I wanted to write one. These scholars have a great deal of respect in the profession, so I certainly benefited from their shadow.

Finally, let me conclude with a comment about teaching. I’m now at a stage of my career where I am attracting graduate students. How do I help my students? My tendency is to be highly supportive, but I also try to give the right advice. “You must show the ability to publish.” “This work has to be grounded in a real sociological question.” “Don’t write like Bourdieu, write clearly.” And so forth. I can’t control the clout I have, but at least I can be honest and prepare people for the market.

My other goal is not to discourage innovative thought. Instead, if a student of color has a wacky idea, I try to see if there is something in there that can speak to the core of the discipline. Can they address a long standing issue in a new way? The answer is usually yes. If they are successful, they’ll advance sociology and their careers, and that’s a good thing.

I am not a social psychologist. So I was not prepared when someone asked me: what are the most important accomplishments of social psychology? I could point to something like framing theory, but that’s literally decades old. That’s my question for you: what are the biggest theoretical or empirical accomplishments of recent social psychology?

There is a disconnect between how some social scientists see themselves versus how they see their subjects.  Scientists theorize about the world — they develop hypotheses, models, they reason, imagine, simulate, then test and revise, etc — and regular folks, well, learn more myopically via observation and experience. Behaviorism of course represented an extreme case of the latter – a stimulus-driven, passive view of human behavior.

But I’ll go on a limb and say that I think that the “scientist model” is a far better conception of all human activity.  Everyday living and interaction is scientific activity of a sort: we have models of the world that we constantly update and revise.  Importantly, these models have an a priori nature, decoupled from experience.  Does experience matter?  Sure.  But, I think the a priori factors matter just as much, even more.  How one conceptualizes the a priori depends on one’s field and purposes, but it includes the following types of things – human nature, choice, reason, imagination, intention, conjectures, hypotheses and theories and so forth.

Readers will of course recognize the above dichotomy as the rationalism versus empiricism debate: reason versus experience.  Empiricism, very often, looks deceptively scientific.  After all, it’s easy to count things that we can observe.  Experience and history are master mechanisms behind gobs of theories — tracing, counting what happened in the past appears scientific.  In some cases it is.   But, the stuff that we observe and perceive is heavily theory-laden (no, not in that sense), and observations and perceptions might simply be epiphenomena of a priori “stuff.”  And, experience might simply “trigger” rather than cause outcomes.  Furthermore, experience and history are only one of many, possible worlds.

The “poverty of stimulus” argument relates to this.  Varieties of the poverty of stimulus argument show up in developmental psychology, linguistics, philosophy, ethology and other areas.  In short, the upshot of the poverty of stimulus argument is that outputs and capabilities manifest by organisms far outstrip inputs such as experiences and stimuli. The work on infants, by folks like Elizabeth Spelke and Alison Gopnik, highlights this point: children have clear, a priori conceptions of their surroundings.  Wilhelm Von Humboldt’s notion of language capabilities as the “infinite use of finite means” relates to the poverty of stimulus argument.  Some varieties of decision-making models (depending on what types of “priors” they allow) also fit.  Ned Block’s “productivity argument” fits into this.  As does, perhaps, Charles Peirce’s notion of “abduction.” Etc.

The above discussion of course is a very Chomskyan view of human nature and science.  But, this tradition goes back much further (well, to Plato).  In my mind, one of the best, historical primers on some of these issues is Chomsky’s Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought (be sure to get the 2003 edition, with McGilvray’s excellent introduction).  A very, very under-rated book.

Overall — I’ll go out on a limb, again (no one reads the last paragraph of loose, jargon-laden rants/posts like this anyways) — I don’t think the social sciences have come to terms with the scientific problems associated with experience-heavy arguments and the crucial importance of the a priori (however conceived).  I think there are lots of research opportunities in this space.

Yesterday I was on Radio-Canada’s “Dispatches” to talk about outsourcing to India. Below is the description and a link to the segment. (Last radio plug I promise!)

India’s out-caste achievers take your calls

Outsourcing call centres and tech support shops to India has created an affluent new generation of young Indians.  But other disturbing truths are beginning to emerge.

And they’re in a new book: Dead Ringers: How Outsourcing Is Changing The Way Indians Understand Themselves (Princeton University Press).

The author is sociologist Shehzad Nadeem, an American, from City University of New York

Shehzad spoke with Rick from New York

For the full program: http://www.cbc.ca/video/news/audioplayer.html?clipid=1846190801

A colleague forwarded this to me — a New York Times piece on Project Oxygen, Google’s effort to build a better boss.

Drum roll…the “eight good behaviors” of a boss are below the fold. Read the rest of this entry »

Opening day of the major league baseball season is almost upon us. Some of you are poring over tables of data, examining the nuances of players’ performance and getting ready for your upcoming fantasy baseball draft. I won’t point fingers. You know who you are.

I recently watched the clever ESPN 30 for 30 documentary on the origin of fantasy baseball (or rotisserie baseball, as it was called then) and was surprised to learn that the first fantasy league was inspired by none other than William Gamson.* Many readers of this blog know Gamson for his work on collective action and social movement outcomes or as a past president of the American Sociological Association. But Gamson is also a pioneer in the world of fantasy sports. In 1960  Gamson formed a forerunner of the fantasy baseball league that he called The Baseball Seminar.  The book, Fantasyland, described how it got started:

It was April, 1960. It could have been a weekday or a weekend—hell, it might have been March for all the principals can remember. At  the time it was just three shlumpy guys, all about twenty-six, getting together to try some half-baked contest the host had thought up. If you’d told Bill Gamson he was about to become the Thomas Edison of a worldwide sports movement, he would have assumed you were making fun of him …

Under the rules of Gamson’s game, each player anted up $10, which would translate into an imaginary budget of $100,000 to be used to bid on the services of real major leaguers. Armed with a copy of The Sporting News, Gamson and his friends, Dick Snyder and Marty Greenberg, ran through the rosters of each team until somebody threw a playing card on the coffee table, indicating they wanted to bid. This continued until everyone was out of money. The idea was that during the season, each of the ‘‘teams’’ would be measured by eight handpicked statistics, though Gamson can’t remember them all. By the time they were finished, midnight had come and Zelda, pregnant with the couple’s first child, was feeling sorry for the neighbors. ‘‘The whole thing was pretty raucous,’’ she remembers (59-60).

Anyone who’s played fantasy baseball will recognize its distinctive traits in Gamson’s early game. Moreover, there is a direct connection from Gamson’s game to the rotisserie leagues that took hold in the 1980s. Dan Okrent, who proposed the rules for a league to his friends in a New York City restaurant La Rotisserie Francaise in 1980, came up with the idea after talking to the Michigan historian Robert Sklar, a regular participant in Gamson’s Seminar. Okrent’s league became the model for future leagues and initiated widespread interest in fantasy sports, partly because the league was made up by a bunch of journalists who proselytized fantasy baseball to the nation, but the basic idea and rules stem from Gamson.

Fantasy baseball is now a huge industry. Moreover, it’s the way that many contemporary fans of baseball make their connection to the sport. Millions of fans are also fantasy owners. Fantasy baseball also introduced the world of statistics and analysis to the casual sports fan. Now you can’t really talk about the merits of a pitcher without getting into a discussion of WHIP versus ERA, the first of which was a statistic invented for fantasy baseball. It’s literally changed the language we use to talk about baseball.

Forget the Nobel Prize, I think we have a legitimate reason to get a sociologist into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. William Gamson, along with Okrent and Bill James, deserve to be Hall of Famers.

*Gamson talks about his affinity for games in this fun essay in the Sociological Forum.

I watched one of my kids play the game “Mao” (also called Mü, Maw, Chairman Mao, etc) with her friends the other day.  Fascinating.  In the game players develop unspoken, secret rules that others have to figure out — the rules are emergent and evolve.  Fun stuff.

Interested in playing (but don’t have any friends)?  Well, of course there’s a MaoBot that you can play against online.

Another game, roughly in the same family (but even more fascinating), is Nomic – developed by Peter Suber.  Here’s the premise:

Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect it differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it. Even this core of the game, of course, can be changed.

First, congratulations to co-blogger Kieran Healy. His political philosophy group blog, Crooked Timber, was mentioned in the NY Times by Paul Krugman. Now, I want to focus on what Krugman wrote in that post after he praised Crooked Timber:

Some have asked if there aren’t conservative sites I read regularly. Well, no. I will read anything I’ve been informed about that’s either interesting or revealing; but I don’t know of any economics or politics sites on that side that regularly provide analysis or information I need to take seriously. I know we’re supposed to pretend that both sides always have a point; but the truth is that most of the time they don’t. The parties are not equally irresponsible; Rachel Maddow isn’t Glenn Beck; and a conservative blog, almost by definition, is a blog written by someone who chooses not to notice that asymmetry. And life is short …

I am agreement with Krugman’s point. I really don’t feel any need to analyze what Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh say. And sometimes being “open minded” turns you into this guy. They’re entertainers and not serious thinkers. Also, they spew garbage.

But hold on, let’s apply the economic way of thinking here. Not everyone who disagrees with me is Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin. Also, I am not infallible. So it seems that the optimal amount of listening to people who disagree with me is somewhere between 0% and 100%. What’s the percentage? How do I optimize input from people who appear to be wrong?

I don’t know, but maybe it helps to provide a checklist:

1. Experts. If you have spent the time mastering a topic, maybe I should listen to you.
2. Truth seeking. If you seem to care about logic and evidence, maybe I should listen to you. I should not listen to you if you ignore evidence, fabricate it, or distort it to suit yourself
3. Clear comminication. If you can transalte your ideas into terms I can understand, maybe I should listen.
4. Novelty. If you satisfy #1-3 and you can show me a new way of looking at something, I might listen.

I should not pay attention if:

1. You know almost nothing about the topic and yet pontificate.
2. You engage in ad-hominem attacks.
3. Your point is entertainment rather than communication.
4. Repitition. If I’ve heard it before, I can tune out.

Using these rules of thumb, I can probably tune out most mass media. It clearly doesn’t exist to transmit knowledge. I can also tune out much political discourse as it repeats, it is ad-hominem, and not truth seeking. Blogs are probably out, including this one when it veers into fun topics that aren’t management or sociology. And of course, I should definitely pay attention to Kieran when he explains the subtleties of organ donation.

From NYT: ”A small crew of technicians, braving radiation and fire, became the only people remaining at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station on Tuesday — and perhaps Japan’s last chance of preventing a broader nuclear catastrophe.

They crawl through labyrinths of equipment in utter darkness pierced only by their flashlights, listening for periodic explosions as hydrogen gas escaping from crippled reactors ignites on contact with air.

They breathe through uncomfortable respirators or carry heavy oxygen tanks on their backs. They wear white, full-body jumpsuits with snug-fitting hoods that provide scant protection from the invisible radiation sleeting through their bodies.

They are the faceless 50, the unnamed operators who stayed behind. They have volunteered, or been assigned, to pump seawater on dangerously exposed nuclear fuel, already thought to be partly melting and spewing radioactive material, to prevent full meltdowns that could throw thousands of tons of radioactive dust high into the air and imperil millions of their compatriots… Read the rest of this entry »

Guest blogger emeritus Nick Rowland has joined a new group blog, Installing (Social) Order, run by Antonia Langhof, Jan-Hendrik Passoth, and Hendrik Vollmer. The purpose is to explore emerging themes in social studies of technology and science. Ezra, please sit down.

Is Durkheim’s Suicide (1897) the first sociological study to use statistics? I do not know the answer.

CNBC’s Larry Kudlow on Japan: “The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we can be grateful for that.” (Skip to 0:35 on the video) .

Again, a list of organizations accepting donations for the Japanese recovery effort. And another.

The odds of a perfect NCAA bracket are slim, 9.2+ quintillion (2^63) to one.

Of course, not all brackets are equally likely.  For example, the likelihood of, say, a 16th seed beating a number 1 seed is quite low.  In fact, it has never happened.  So if you’re filling out a bracket, then sticking with the extant seedings might be a solid way to go.  Here’s a table that shows the seed of the winners since 1985.

For more, computer scientist Sheldon Jacobson (University of Illinois) maintains a web site, Bracket Odds, with all kinds of bracketology calculators, trivia and statistics.  Here’s a short piece on (pdf) “March Madness Math.”

As an aside —- schools represented by orgtheory bloggers did quite well in the tournament seeding: Duke (30-4) received a #1 seed, Notre Dame (26-6) a #2 seed, and BYU (30-4) a #3 seed.

1. This Huffington Post page lists organizations that will accept money for the Japanese recovery effort.

2. Blogger emeritus, Mito Akiyoshi, is doing well in Tokyo, but reports that life is very disrupted.

As a social theory teacher, I often peruse wiki. Just for kicks, but also to see what students might be reading about the course materials. In the Max Weber wiki, I found an interesting claim. According to wiki, Max Weber originated the socialist calculation argument. In socialist economics, the calculation argument is a criticism of economies lacking a price mechanism. The issue is coordination. In a market economy, you have prices. Producers make stuff in response to prices. Imperfect, but it’s a plausible mechanism for making sure that people get what they want. But in a socialist economy, state committees have to decide what to make in the absence of prices that reflect how badly people want goods and services. How does that happen? Unclear. This criticism has been a core argument against socialist economies for decades.

My question to historians of social and economic thought – is the wiki correct? Did Weber innovate the socialist calculation argument? The wiki cites an interview with Hayek, but I think I’d rely on some gold ol’ fashioned intellectual history.

Thinking about life, below the fold.

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