But still, theories of intent and meaning leave me scratching my head. For example:

1. What if the legislators don’t know the meaning of the law? For example, when big laws are passed, like the Patriot Act or the Affordable Care Act, the text is literally thousands of pages. A lot of folks literally don’t know what they are voting for. What is the “intent” of the law?
2. What if the legislators didn’t write the law? A lot of legislators rely aides and others to actually write the text. Does interpretation of the law rest on what some clerk thinks?
3. If multiple people authored the law, whose meaning or intent takes precedence?
4. What if the law uses really vague words? For example, people argue over “cruel and unusual” punishment. Even back in the day, people must have had differences in opinion. Do you have to somehow go back in time and take a survey to figure out what the average American in 1789 thought was cruel and unusual?
5. What if the original meaning or intent of the law was muddled to start with? Is there an assumption that legislators have a sort of papal infallibility that ensures a clear “intent” that we must discover?

Just curious…

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Lots of interesting topics being discussed today, and the next two days: using twitter as data, visualizing networks, self-organization, dynamics of human proximity.  You can find the conference program here.   You can also follow the conference hashtag on twitter: #compsocsci12. Check it out.

Students of orgtheory should like Philanthropy in America by Olivier Zunz, a well known American historian at the Unviersity of Virginia. PiA is a comprehensive overview of the non-profit sector in America. If I teach a graduate course on the non-profit sector, I’d definitely put this on the reading list. You would be hard pressed to find another  book that so deftly conveys the ups and downs of the non-profit world. It’s a nice compliment to more social science approaches like The Non-Profit Handbook that focus on questions that economists and sociologists would ask.

Much of the material will be familiar to students of the non-profit sector, especially the chapters on post-war philanthropy. We get a chapter on the 1969 tax reform act. The various approaches to philanthropy over the years get a lot of coverage (e.g., civil rights oriented charity vs. Cold War era programs of the 1950s). PiA also has some material on the most recent wave of philanthropy driven by the new superwealthy, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

What orgtheory readers will find most rewarding is the emphasis on the changing nature of the state-non-profit relationship. Zunz correctly points out that Americans have never exactly sorted out how they feel about the non-profits. Sometimes, non-profits are treated as central actors in American social policy. At other time, Americans view philanthropists as wealthy meddlers.

No where is this more apparent than in a highly instructive chapter about the 1920s. Hoover, contrary to popular wisdom, did not respond to the great depression by ignoring people and relying on the free market, though he did engage in laissez-faire rhetoric. Instead, Hoover believed in strong Federal intervention in the economy, but he wanted much of the effort channeled through philanthropic organizations. It’s a view that is not common now, but it might be called “local charities/national direction.” FDR also believed in having a strong welfare state, but his approach was to exclude private third parties and administer relief programs directly through the state.

Overall, a solid book that will lead to more insight into the evolution of the non-profit sector.

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It didn’t start out so bad. In 1948, the first post-war election, the VP nominee was Earl Warren, a California politician, Berkeley graduate, and future Supreme court justice. ’60 wasn’t bad either. Henry Cabot Lodge  was open to civil rights and seemed to have many virtues.

Then, the problems start. Nixon, who was Eisnehower’s #2, was brilliant yet twisted and vengeful. William Miller, who ran with Goldwater, was a rather obscure Congressman who contributed little. The real slide starts with ’68. Agnew was run out of office due to tax evasion. His replacement, Gerald Ford, took over after Nixon (a former VP) resigned. Ford pardoned Nixon and doesn’t have much to show for his short time in the White House.

In my view, Bush I was probably the last respectable GOP VP or nominee. Even though I disagreed with him hugely, he was actually a figure of national prominence and was deeply knowledgeable about important issues. Even when he did things that I thought were immoral, they were relatively contained (e.g., the Gulf War did not turn into an invasion of Iraq).

Then the GOP goes 0-5 in my book. Bush’s VP was Dan Quayle. I don’t think he was a moron. Rather, he was a competent, but undistinguished, Indiana legislator from a political family. The next VP nominee was Jack Kemp. His nomination had no impact on the party, even though he had a passed some notable legislation on taxation earlier in his career.

The real disasters hit in the 2000s. Dick Cheney was hugely instrumental in one of the Republican Party’s biggest policy failures ever – the Iraq War. He also instituted torture. The last VP nominee was Palin, governor of Alaska. In principle, not a crazy pick, but upon closer examination, a disaster as well – a quitter, demagogue, and simply not informed on crucial issues.

Here’s my summary of the Republican vice presidents and nominees:

• Two who helped make the world a better place (Lodge, Warren)
• One who gets my grudging respect (Bush I)
• Three who had little impact (Miller, Quayle, Kemp)
• One who was mildly bad (Ford)
• Three complete disasters (Palin, Cheney, Nixon)

Not a great record, especially since one of them got arrested, another would have been arrested, and a third publicly defends torture. I sure hope Romney exercises better judgment than his predecessors.

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• The gaydar post
• Kieran discusses Tina Fetner’s book on gay politics
• Gay rights and public opinion
• Economist Trevon Logan’s ASR paper on gay sex markets
• Sean Safford on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
• Sean Safford on gay rights and the Nixon in China metaphor
• Commentary on the movie about Harvey Milk
• My original review of Tina’s book
• More on public opinion, social movements, and gay rights
• Gabriel Rossman comments on the Larry Craig scandal
• No, economists are not oppressed like gays. Sorry, guys.

Check it out.

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I suspect Facebook’s strategy is mixed. It’s obviously ads because young people (=discretionary income) love Facebook. But I suspect that Facebook is gearing up to be a major platform, an all purpose social space where people can do things. That leads us into the world of apps and income sharing from apps. Developer Steve Yegge made this distinction in a much hailed rant on Google+. Yegge pointed out that Amazon had built an amazing library of APIs that allowed third parties to collaborate with Amazon and mine its databases. I suspect Facebook is committed to this direction. Ads create enough revenue, but the goal is to create an appapalooza on par with Apple’s App Store. It’ll be interesting to see if that’s worth $125 a user.

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I pitched the idea of putting together an interdisciplinary special issue on collective behavior and social aggregation and the journal Managerial and Decision Economics was willing to take the risk (big-time thanks to the editor Paul Rubin!).  After a couple years of work, the special issue will finally be published this year— it is titled “the emergent nature of organization, markets and wisdom of crowds.”

The set of scholars contributing include folks from political science (Scott Page), physics (Claudio Castellano), mathematics (David Sumpter), sociology (Robb Willer, Siegwart Lindenberg), strategy (Nicolai Foss), economics (Bruno Frey, Bart Wilson, Peter Leeson), psychology (Steve Kozlowski), etc.

For anyone interested, the list of all the paper titles and contributors can also be found below the fold.  The final papers will be available on MDE’s early view over the next couple weeks.  One of the special issue papers is already there: Pete Leeson, of pirate political economy fame, and Chris Coyne’s paper on “Wisdom, Alterability and Social Rules.”

I’m still quite enamored by the possibilities of more systematically looking at comparative similarities and differences across disciplines (issues of collectives, behavior and aggregation – as well as comparative methodological and epistemological matters), so if anyone is interested in these issues, please send me a note.  I’m entertaining the idea of putting together a conference in the future.

EMERGENT NATURE OF ORGANIZATION, MARKETS AND WISDOM OF CROWDS

2012 Special Issue of

Managerial and Decision Economics

Contributors from physics, economics, organization theory,
psychology, sociology, political science and biology

The purpose of this special issue is to bring together an interdisciplinary set of scholars to address questions related to collective behavior, social aggregation and emergence.

Introduction and Agenda

The nature of capabilities, markets and wisdom of crowds: a comparative agenda.
Felin, T. (Organization Theory, BYU)

Special Issue Papers

Social influence and the dynamics of opinions: the approach of statistical physics.
Castellano, C. (Physics, University of Rome)

Incentives, information and emergent collective accuracy.
Hong, L., Page, S. (Political Science, University of Michigan), Riolo, M.

Six predictions about the decision-making of animal and human groups.
Sumpter, D.J.T. (Mathematics, Uppsala University), Zabzina, N., Nicolis, S.C.

Wisdom, alterability, and social rules.
Leeson, P.T., and Coyne, C.J. (Economics, George Mason University)

The dynamics of emergence: cognition and cohesion in work teams.
Kozlowski, S. (Psychology, Michigan State University), Chao, G.T.

Teams, team motivation, and the theory of the firm.
Foss, N. (Organizational Economics, CBS), Lindenberg, S. (Cognitive Sociology, Groningen)

A theory of nascent organizing: on the emergence of collective beliefs and strategy.
Felin, T. (Organization Theory, BYU), Knudsen, T. (Organization Theory, SDU)

The primacy of entrepreneurs in exploiting long-distance exchange.
Kimbrough, E., Wilson, B. (Economics, Chapman University)

Community enterprises – aliens under attack.
Frey, B.S. (Economics, University of Zurich), Luthi, R., Osterloh, M.

How do the powerful attain status? The roots of legitimate power inequalities.
Willer, R. (Sociology, UC Berkeley), Youngreen, R., Troyer, L., and Lovaglia, M.

Critically, understand that the long-term poor are a small minority of a minority. Most of those counted as poor in a given year are poor temporarily because of setbacks such as layoffs, family break-ups, car breakdowns, or medical emergencies. (Note, too, that we are not talking about the severely physically or mentally disabled; the controversy is about the able-bodied.) Social welfare scholar Mark Rank estimates that about half of all Americans will be poor sometime between the ages of 25 and 75, and perhaps a fifth will go through both poverty and affluence. Only about 2 percent, perhaps even less, will be poor most of their lives from 25 to 60 years of age.

This by itself has an important policy implication. The lion’s share of poverty policy should be about helping people protect themselves from temporary income drops or helping people get satisfactory job/income levels after a recession.

Fischer then approaches poverty from a cultural toolkit perspective. If you are middle class, you demand things. If you are poor, you know your place and keep your head down:

In their [poor people's] worlds, staying humble is usually the best way to keep their jobs or their kids in school. Sharing what money they have rather than saving it, or risking a job to drive a friend, increases the odds that they will be helped when the inevitable crisis hits. And where there are many predators, it makes sense to be distrustful or even predatory in turn.

In other words, being middle class involves a balance of professional cooperation and conflict. Being poor is about avoiding workplace conflict and inefficient handling of personal relationships.

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The new study tries to figure out what facial figures trigger accurate attributions of sexual orientation. An experiment demonstrates that homosexuality in women is easier to guess because the facial features correlated with sexual orientation are more exaggerated in women. I’d be interested in what sociologists of gender and sexuality think of such experiments.

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Agreeing to be an adviser: Overall, my opinion is that every student who can demonstrate that they can finish a dissertation should have an adviser. The student needs to show an ability to independently generate competent work. If the student can’t do that, the department needs some clear signals early on – a failed qualifying exam, strong criticism of the master’s thesis, and so forth.

If a student is in good standing, then you should accept a student as long as you aren’t overburdened. Even though I am still early in my career, I feel no problem accepting any student who asks for help. My belief is that as long as I am qualified and not overextended, I have an obligation to help a student complete their degree.

Even though I have an open policy, that doesn’t mean that just anyone can sign up. I expect students to treat their doctoral dissertation seriously. So I usually make most students do some task, like a literature review, or prepare some of their own data for analysis before I officially sign up. My experience is that if you can’t do that simple task in a timely fashion, it’s unlikely that you can finish the degree.

Technique: I train graduate students in the way that we would train anyone else: repetition. I encourage frequent meetings that are focused on doing specific tasks, like prepping data, making a table, or writing up field notes. I also encourage the completion of concrete tasks like preparing a paper for journal submission.

Philosophically, I believe that a lot of doctoral training is ritualistic. The real test of academia is blind peer review. The faster you get to it, the better. The implication is that I place little weight on proposals, defenses, and so forth. If a student can push a paper through the arduous publication process, the dissertation and its rituals will take care of themselves. This doesn’t mean that I’ll accept a junky dissertation. What it does mean is that I encourage publication first because it is the core skill of the academic profession.

Finally, I make sure to have a constant, non-stop, conversation with students about their career goals. If they are interested in a teaching intensive career, then I don’t worry too much about journal placement. If they want to compete for research or elite liberal arts positions, they’ll need to focus early and hard on publication.

That’s my formula: focus on publication quality research from the get go; constant interaction; and pegging outputs to career goals.

Experienced advisers are encouraged to relate their training strategies in the comments.

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The big savings come from going to tiny schools (e.g. Coe charges $33k a year, or Notre Dame of California charges $24k a year). Why is the price/prestige curve flat except for tiny liberal arts colleges? If you believe the Dale/Krueger paper on college choice and income (e.g., doesn’t matter which college you go to, for the most part), then these prices merely reflect that colleges are just selling a generic job market certification that any institution can provide. Other explanations?

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Performing at Euclid Records in Chicago this April.

A few years ago, we discussed Chicago alt-marching/punk band Mucca Pazza. They continue to make music and were recently featured on NPR’s blog “All Songs Considered.” Congratulations!

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From CNN. In response to a scheduled Lady Gaga concert in Indonesia:

There has been an outcry against Lady Gaga performing among Islamists and conservative Muslims, who say her revealing costumes and sensual dance moves are “haram,” an Arabic term that means “forbidden by Islamic law.”

The chairman of the Islamic Defenders Front, Habib Rizieq, said his group could not guarantee what might happen, as far as security goes, if the concert were held.

The pop star was given a thumbs-down in March by a “high-ranking member” of the country’s highest Islamic authority, according to The Jakarta Globe.

The report said that Indonesian Council of Ulema chairman Cholil Ridwan was urging Muslims not to attend the overtly sexy and controversial singer’s upcoming concert in Jakarta.

“[The concert is] intended to destroy the nation’s morality,” Ridwan told the Globe.

Turns out that anti-Gagismo is a transantional movement with branches in Korea:

Yoon Jung-hoon, a reverend who helped organize the “Civilians Network against the Lady Gaga Concert” movement, told the Chicago Tribune that his group collected 5,000 supporters on Facebook. He also advocated a boycott of the show’s sponsor, Hyundai Card, in addition to Hyundai Motor Co., Korea’s largest automaker.

The dynamics of Gagention?

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Interesting paper.  The paper also raises questions about whether in-group bias is learned (“enculturation,” Spielman, 2000), or whether it perhaps is an evolutionary-survival-type thing, or something driven by expectations of reciprocity or competition. Or something else.

Here’s the abstract:

Three experiments (total N = 140) tested the hypothesis that 5-year-old children’s membership in randomly assigned ‘‘minimal’’ groups would be sufficient to induce intergroup bias. Children were randomly assigned to groups and engaged in tasks involving judgments of unfamiliar in-group or out-group children. Despite an absence of information regarding the relative status of groups or any competitive context, in-group preferences were observed on explicit and implicit measures of attitude and resource allocation (Experiment 1), behavioral attribution, and expectations of reciprocity, with preferences persisting when groups were not described via a noun label (Experiment 2). In addition, children systematically distorted incoming information by preferentially encoding positive information about in-group members (Experiment 3). Implications for the developmental origins of intergroup bias are discussed.

Here’s how I’d describe it. There are three stages to being a tenure track professor professor: trainee (grad  student), probate (tenure track), and zombie (tenured prof). It’s important to recognize that this does not describe the majority of academics. These days, the average college instructor is an adjunct (part time) instructor). Some people like this arrangement, especially clinical faculty, such as lawyers, who are hired to teach the occasional course in a professional school. For most, however, the adjunct career track is low paid work that requires “freeway flying” between far flung campuses.

But let’s stick to the tenure track because that’s what Ben is shooting for:

• Trainee: Graduate school is uneven. The first two years are courses, then you have an extended period of self-directed study and research. You also have to learn to be an adult. Learn to do your work without a boss or deadline. Don’t get published and you’ll get a career failure. Don’t do your dissertation and you have nothing to show for your work.
• Probate: Assistant profs are paid and have a high stress level. It usually takes a long time to execute a project and get it published. You may have five or six years, but it goes by quickly as you work on these big projects. The difference between trainee and probate is quality. The dissertation is a student exercise, so a competent work will get approved. In contrast, the competition is tough for journals and publishers. Top publishers routinely reject 90%+ of submissions. The other big difference is teaching. Research faulty teach 4 courses a year, though they can buy some out. Liberal arts faculty do more.
• Zombie: You have enough experience with publishing and you’ve managed to balance teaching and research demands. The killer here is committee work. If you are in a research department, you also have graduate student training.

My days are usually divided into teaching days and research days. Personally, I try to cram all classroom time, office hours, and grading into a few long days. It’s about minimizing transaction costs. So a few days a week, I roll into campus late in the morning and teach these long seminars and meet with students. Since I pack a lot into a few days, this may go into the evening, especially if I have afternoon/night classes.

Research is a bit different. Since I am a multi-method researcher, doing research can mean very different things. Currently, I am involved in some surveys. So I spend time writing grants. At other times, I do ethnography. So it’s about making travel arrangements or deciphering field notes. Then, at other times, I may be programming. But unless I am traveling, research usually means reading current research,,working with data, and writing papers/book manuscripts. That entails sitting in front of computers for a long time.

Teaching and research are interrupted by committee meetings. This is utterly boring. Sometimes the meetings are boring and crucial (like hiring or promotion), or boring and not crucial (listening to an administrator tell us about the latest mission statement). Regardless, they are a necessary evil of the academic profession. I am lucky to be in a program where meetings are kept to a minimum.

At the zombie level, you also do a lot of evaluation. Senior professors are asked to review papers for publication, book manuscripts and write letters of recommendation, including tenure letters.

Finally, Ben asked about research topics. This is easy. Just pick up the journals, books, and recent dissertations in your area. Read them and see if they inspire you. If they leave you cold, then academia probably isn’t for you.

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Dig deeper. There’s a case to be made that the age of the establishment Republicans is finally over. In my state, Dick Lugar, the stately older conservative got bumped by a Tea Party upstart in a primary. The two candidates who won states in the presidential primary, Santorum and Gingrich, are social conservatives who grabbed the Tea Party label. Gingrich’s career is over, but Santorum is still quite young. Most of the Republicans who seem influential, from Sarah Palin to Chris Christie, are riding the Tea Party label. There are no Bushes, or Doles, or old Nixonites left.

My prediction: This is the last presidential election cycle where establishment Republicans are in charge of the ship. The establishment’s “bench” has been decimated by defections and primary bump-offs. Those who remain are probably cowed by the Tea Party. In other words, if Romney loses, the successors will be Tea Party adherents. In a system where power see-saws between parties, that means were going to have a Tea Party president within the decade. Start preparing now.

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According to the article, this picture presents the largest component of reference class session co-listings. “Nodes represent references, node size reflects degree centrality, and more orange nodes reflect higher degree centrality. A tie between two nodes signals that two nodes have been co-listed in the same class session on at least two separate syllabi. Tie thickness reflects the number of syllabi on which two references were co-listed in the same class session.” Note that the unit here is articles, so authors may appear in different places in the figure based on different works of theirs.

Two things struck me about this. First was that the visualization is consistent with the field characterization in Marion Fourcade’s ABS piece from a few years ago—you’ve got the structural/embeddedness people and the broadly cultural/Zelizerian work forming one large group, and then (disconnected from both) the insurgent social studies of science/finance people. Second, though, was that the network is quite fragile. But, second, the big component in the network is fragile. If you deleted Geertz (1978), Granovetter (2005), and Swedberg (2001), then you’d have four separate components which you might crudely characterize as soc of finance, culture/Zelizer, Granovetter/network embeddedness/social capital, and Polanyi/political embeddedness. Moreover, two of the bridge pieces are more reviews than research pieces: the Granovetter 2005 is his JEP piece, I think, and the Swedberg piece is his “Sociology and Game Theory” paper, I believe. The Geertz paper (the Bazaar one) is a surprisingly tenuous bridge between the structural and the cultural approaches.

Another thing I’d be interested in seeing is the list of actual works the labels refer to—most of them I know unambiguously, but there are a few that are ambiguous (because the author published more than one thing that year) and I’d be interested in seeing which one is being counted.

Update: As Omar points out below, this fragility interpretation is all wrong, because I failed to notice the tie is defined by whether the readings are assigned in the same week or not. As you were.

She [Michelle Alexopoulous] found that books really do predict booms. In her paper looking at new books from 1955-1997, she found that new technical books predicted between 1/6 and 1/5 of all medium-term changes in business capital investment.  Total GDP and (to a more modest extent) hours of work moved together with new tech books, usually with a lag of a couple of years.

Further, she found that a good economy didn’t predict more tech books, and a bad economy didn’t predict fewer.  So reverse causation isn’t the story.

Finally, as a placebo, she checked to see whether years when lots of history books were published tended to precede economic booms. They didn’t. Alexopoulos made a good effort of kicking the tires on this hypothesis.  And remember: She only looked at technical books: There are surely a lot of other new ideas in fields like management, biotech, and accounting that matter for business productivity, and they also seem to come in waves.

In other words, as people get ready to create wealth, they require new knowledge, a search indicated by book sales. Nice paper.

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How, in less than a decade, did America go from being a country in which some states punished gay sex with criminal penalties to one in which the highest elected official in the land now champions the right of same-sex couples to marry? The answer can be found in the interaction between supporters of marriage equality and the Christian conservative movement over the past few decades. As late as the 1980s, same-sex marriage was on virtually no one’s radar screen. … It happened like this: In 1993, in the case of Baehr v. Lewin, the Hawaii Supreme Court decided that the state’s prohibition on same-sex marriage was discriminatory. In 1998, Hawaii’s voters passed a referendum giving the legislature the right to declare same-sex marriage illegal, but in the meantime, social conservatives had taken the issue to the national stage, where it promised to pay handsome dividends. Same-sex marriage was still so unpopular that in 1996, tremulous Democrats joined Republicans in overwhelmingly passing the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, signed by President Bill Clinton. … DOMA was thus a preemptive strike by the opponents of marriage equality.

But the act helped to call into being the very marriage equality movement it aimed to combat. Encouraged by their surprising, if temporary, success in Hawaii, and outraged by the blatantly homophobic arguments that had been made in favor of DOMA, the lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender movement reluctantly began to turn its energy and resources toward the goal of marriage equality.

This was a fundamental shift, not made without controversy within the movement, where many worried that calling for marriage equality would unleash the fury of the Christian Right. Whereas many activists had given higher priority to such issues as employment discrimination, HIV/AIDS education and protection against hate crimes, the denial of marriage equality now came to be seen as a broad symbol of second-class citizenship for LGBT Americans.

And thus did we start down the road toward the unlikely spectacle of a Black President endorsing gay marriage. Nice—counterintuitive, compelling, and more than a little ironic. But while I was reading this it struck me that I had heard this argument made somewhere before. Where? Oh yeah.

In her 2008 book, helpfully titled How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism, Tina Fetner argues, in part:

To many, it may have appeared that the push for legislation on same-sex marriage was driven largely by the lesbian and gay movement, but in the early 1990s few lesbian and gay movement organizations were engaged in activism around this issue. There had been a few unsuccessful court cases in which same-sex couples challenged marriage-licensing practices, when one case in Hawaii caught the nation’s attention, as well as that of the lesbian and gay movement. In Baehr v. Lewin … the Hawaiian state supreme court ruled that the practice of denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples would be unconstitutional unless the state could provide a “compelling state interest” for it … Up to this point, same-sex marriage had not been a top priority for the lesbian and gay movement. Many in the lesbian and gay community oppose same-sex marriage as a patriarchal, heterosexual institution … Others saw [it] as an equal rights issue and, indeed, supported an assimilationist tack … Rather than spark a major internal debate … most lesbian and gay movement organizations simply ignored the issue putting it on the back burner in light of other priorities such as non-discrimination ordinances and anti-gay violence. …

Religious right activists, on the other hand, saw their opposition to same-sex marriage as an issue with strong cultural resonance and popular support. Many leaders in the religious right considered marriage to be a tipping point for conservatives who had not yet joined the movement. … From this perspective, to allow two men to marry would trample upon a holy gift. The idea of two women or two men marrying each other evoked such passion among conservative, evangelical Christians that the religious right considered this to be an issue worth pursuing.

Pursue it they did, in a massive grassroots mobilization throughout the country. At the federal level the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was quickly passed by the Senate and House and signed into law by President Clinton. … Leaders in the religious right may have thought that this issue would be an easy victory, given how important the symbolic aspects of marriage are to many people. … However, perhaps unexpectedly, this issue has also mobilized the lesbian and gay movement in response, including many lesbian and gay people who had not previously been involved in activism (Pinello 2006).

Dozens of new lesbian and gay movement organizations emerged to fight for same-sex marriage. National organizations began to devote resources to the marriage issue and, to varying degrees, to partnership issues more generally. To a greater extent than ever before, lesbian and gay movement organizations began to frame lesbian and gay rights in terms of relationships and families, rather than just individuals.

And thus did we start down the road toward the unlikely spectacle of a Black President endorsing gay marriage.

Of course, Dorf and Tarrow might have come up with this idea themselves: they’re smart people. If they did, I can see why they might want to claim it as their own—it’s a good idea! Too bad. It seems to me they were scooped fair and square by someone writing five years ago, and they should have acknowledged it. I suppose it’s not outside the realm of possibility that while researching the question of how the religious right shaped lesbian and gay activism they never came across How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism. Either way, it looks like a case of credit where credit’s due. I’m well aware that the literary conventions of Op-Eds do not accommodate the tedious mechanics of scholarly attribution. But there’s plenty of room for a single “As sociologist Tina Fetner has argued in her book …” —if not in this particular Op-Ed, then at least next time round.

I just love Astronomy magazine and its website. They have a cool photo feature called “Picture of the Day.” This one was contributed by reader by Kfir Simon from Gan Yavne, Israel.

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While there is sometimes a counter-majoritarian pro-gay bias, there is more often a much larger counter-majoritarian anti-gay bias. This anti-gay bias appears to have grown over time. The ideological direction of incongruence varies by legislator characteristics such as race. Black congressman are more likely to vote against their constituents’ preferences in favor of gay rights, relative to white (Democratic) congressman. This has important implications not only for congressional politics and democratic representation, but also judicial treatment of gay rights issues.

Bottom line: Gay rights are delayed because politicians are too scared to vote the way we want them to.

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My friend Michael Bastedo at Michigan recently published a new collection of essays called The Organization of Higher Education: Managing Colleges for a New Era. The book introduces the reader to cutting edge research in universities, strategy, and organizational behavior.

Chapters include Brian Pusser and Simon Marginson on global rankings, J. Douglas Toma on strategy and Anna Neuman on organizational cognition in higher education. Social movement fans should check out my chapter on movements and higher education.

Recommended!

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Although risk assessments are critical inputs to economic and organizational decisionmaking, we lack a good understanding of the social  and political causes of shifts in risk perceptions and the consequences of those changes. This article uses social movement theory to explain the effect of environmental activism on corporations’ perceived environmental risk and actual financial performance. We  define environmental risk as audiences’ perceptions that a firm’s practices or policies will lead to greater potential for an environmental  failure or crisis that would expose it to financial decline. Using data on environmental activism targeting U.S. firms between 2004 and  2008, we examine variation in the effectiveness of secondary and primary stakeholder activism in shaping perceptions about  environmental risk. Our empirical analysis demonstrates that primary stakeholder activism against a firm affects its perceived environmental risk, which subsequently has a negative effect on the firm’s financial performance.

If you’re interested in reading more, here is the paper.

Although the discipline of economics has many valuable things to teach us about how markets work, especially in the long-run, the subjective experience of someone bargaining does not necessarily reflect thinking through how a rational actor would apply price theory (competitive markets) or game theory (monopolistic markets) to the situation. Rather people take moralized approaches to exchange and seem to apply various relational models to exchange, which includes not only market exchange but also gift exchange, patron-client ties, and primitive communism. Moreover, even when people accept that a situation is one of market exchange it does not come naturally to think of price like modern economists think of it, as “market clearing.” Rather much as people intuitively expect physical objects to behave by Buridan’s impetus rather than Newton’s inertia, people’s intuitive notions about price can have less to do with how economics thinks of it than how Aristotle, Aquinas, and Marx thought of it, as “just price” or “fair price.”

Recommended.

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In disgust research, there is shit, and then there is bullshit. Colin McGinn’s book belongs to the latter category.

It gets better:

The sad fact is the reader would learn more about disgust by reading Mad magazine.

For the rest of us—those who actually care about disgust, or aesthetic emotions, or scholarship at all— the book is bound to disappoint. “Who can deny the mood-destroying effect of an errant flatus just at the moment of erotic fervor?” he writes. McGinn’s book is just such a flatus, threatening to spoil an exciting intellectual moment for the rest of us. Sometimes with books, as with farts, it’s better to just hold it in.

Nina, don’t damage the fine reputation of Mad magazine.

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Even though I’ve spent my career analyzing the discipline of Black Studies, I’ve been slow to respond for a few reasons. I was traveling while this broke out last week. Scholars within Black Studies are perfectly capable of defending themselves. Also, I didn’t want to comment while people slinging mud back and forth. Instead, I’m writing a detailed commentary for the Teachers College Record that will appear next month.

Probably the most important reason that I didn’t rush to respond is that I’ve heard this before, many times. While doing the research for my book on Black Studies’ history, I read many, many calls for the elimination of Black Studies from conservative pundits.* The roster of conservative Black Studies haters is a long one: San Francisco State’s John Bunzel (1969), Martin Kilson at Harvard (1970s), Charles Sykes’ Profscam (1988), Dinesh D’Souza Illiberal Education (1991), John Derbyshire in National Review Online (2002), Robin Wilson in the Chronicle of Higher Education (2005), and now we have Naomi Schaefer (2012). There are so many, I’m sure I’ve missed some good ones.

The pattern goes something like this. A conservative writer will get an op-ed, or blog post in modern times, and call for the elimination of the field. Sometimes, it’s part of a book attacking higher education for being too liberal. Then, liberals will jump into the fray. There are charges and counter charges of racism. Then, silence for a few years and the whole pattern starts over. It’s an academic Seinfeld episode. No hugging, no learning.

When I read Schaefer’s criticism, I just said to myself, in a Reaganesque tone, “There you go again.” It becomes so predictable after a while, so bland. Even within the history of Black Studies skepticism, Schaefer’s screed isn’t that insightful. Basically, the entire blog post is simply picking a few unfinished dissertations and mocking them. Dissertations certainly deserve criticism, but Schaefer even admits that she hasn’t read them. She just hates the concept of the dissertations. For example, one mocked dissertation addresses the role of Blacks among midwives. Schaefer finds this to be a silly topic. All I can say is that a conservative who thinks childbirth to be unworthy of scholarly attention reveals an epic smallness of mind.

That’s why I didn’t rush into this. No need to jump into a predictable fight that I’ve seen too many times before. Instead, I’ll slow down and write a detailed commentary on a question that I wish that Schaefer had addressed: who gets their own their own discipline? In the mean time, I’ll be happy to watch from the sidelines. Maybe, if Schaefer decides to explore the field of Black Studies and do the readings, I’d be happy to send her a copy of my book and we could have an extended discussion about Black Studies’ history and its scholarly contributions.

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* And yes, Schaefer fits the mold. She’s given a two week journalism seminar at Hillsdale College, which is a well known conservative liberal arts college.  She also writes for publications with conservative editorial boards such as the Wall Street Journal. Being conservative neither qualifies or disqualifies you from commenting on Black Studies, but it does fit the broader pattern of conservative attacks on the discipline.

Primarily, the Tea Party is flushing out older Republicans like Dick Lugar and replace them younger folks. Mourdock is not noticeably more conservative, nor is he especially skilled as a politician. He’s a moderately skilled politician riding the wave of a movement. In 2010, the Tea Party has nominated people with very limited political skills like Joe Miller of Alaska (zero electoral wins & two years as a judge), Sharron Angle of Nevada (five years as a state assembly member, 0-1 at the state level), and Christine O’Donnell of Delaware (no elected experience, 1-2 in the primaries, 0-3 in the general).

The result of this purge? First, you will have a generation of Republicans with relatively little experience governing. We’ve already seen this in Congress, where freshman Representatives simply don’t know the mechanics of how to get things done.

Second, as a my student Joe DiGrazia pointed out, extreme partisanship entails the evisceration of Republican policies. For example, healthcare reform via mandates became the baseline for reform because it was the only version of health care reform that Republicans in the 1990s would seriously consider because they were the ones that came up with it. Once the other party appropriated it, that policy became illegitimate. The result is the bizarre situation of Republicans fighting the policies that they created and promoted for almost two decades.

A democracy is a place where progress occurs when people swallow their pride. Policy gets made and the people who invented it often have to share the credit. By promoting inexperience and extreme partisanship, the Tea Party is fusing stubbornness with historical amnesia.

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[M]uch like how most people who haven’t studied statistics balk at the idea that the ratio of sample size to population size is irrelevant to statistical inference, people seem to have a strong intuition that the “market price” is relevant to a bilateral monopoly even though the whole idea of a bilateral monopoly is that there is not really a market but only a series of discrete one-off transactions. In the absence of substitutability, “comparable” transactions are irrelevant as they don’t imply opportunity cost. This is the main thing I found so fascinating about the Planet Money episode, over and over again the hostage’s party balked at the pirates demands as unreasonable in being out of line with the “market price.” We only get the pirates’ story second hand, but apparently at no point did they explain to the hostage’s party that “market price” doesn’t really exist in a bilateral monopoly. (Maybe Mogadishu University needs a better econ department).

There are two ways, which are only partially incompatible, to look at why people insist that there is a market price. The simple model is to see us as making Bayesian inferences about the price the other party is willing to accept. If a pirate asks me for $10 million when I know that previous ransoms for similar hostages from similar pirates were about $1 million, I face two possibilities. It may be that I’m facing an usually greedy or unreasonable pirate and $10 million really is the price from which he will not budge. However it seems more likely that I’m dealing with a regular pirate, who like most pirates in the past will ultimately settle for about $1 million but who is just floating a high initial figure in case I’m especially bad at this. In this sense the distribution of prices for similar transactions may not be directly relevant in the sense of providing opportunities for substitution (or the credible threat to avail myself of them) but it is still relevant as information about the zone of possible agreement. This is consistent with the Planet Money story in that Filipinos are cheaper to ransom than Europeans by an order of magnitude.

I’m amazed that pirates negotiate at all. Doesn’t this diminish their control? Do kidnappers do the same thing? Given that all of my knowledge of kidnapping scenarios is based on movies, my sense is that kidnappers try to avoid negotiation as this just seems to be a tactic used by law enforcement to ferret out their position. Why wouldn’t pirates operate by the same code?

Let’s start with the Bay Area’s unique geography. It’s a ring shaped community that stretches from Silicon Valley, up through Richmond, around Marin, into San Francisco and then down into the peninsula. Each area represents a different type of community. In Silicon Valley, you are at the commanding heights of the world economy, while in Richmond you have the remnants of the Black working class. In Berkeley and Stanford, you have intellect and high culture. San Francisco is a petri dish of grungy subcultures. There’s also the Bay Area’s place in the global economy. It’s a compact metropolitan area perched between the American West and the Pacific.

This helps us flesh out the Bay Area ethos. It’s intellectual, multicultural, and highly liberal. It’s ambitious and extremely competitive, while being precious and a bit snooty. It’s also grungy and alternative. Appearing effete from the outside, but up close, it’s a culture based on hard work. As my spouse likes to say, Danville is where you live if you’ve earned your money. You’ll see a lot of Asian engineers and managers in Danville.

There’s one aspect of the Bay Area ethos that deserves mention – its heterogeneous pragmatism. People will bring together all kinds of different skills and life experiences in their work. For example, I recently met a man who was in the army, studies circus art, like juggling, and now does traditional healing like shiatsu. This man exposed his son to many of these skills, which helped the son excel in high school athletics and earn a scholarship at a leading university.

It’s this ability to successfully bring together seemingly unrelated skills is very Bay Area. Perhaps the most remarkable example is Steve Jobs, who brought a love of calligraphy and design to the staid hobby of home computing. It’s not surprising that Jobs grew up in the Bay Area. In contrast, most of the other Silicon Valley moguls built their fortunes by exploiting a single idea (e.g., DOS or social networking), often hatched in other places.

The Bay Area ethos is a rare conglomerate of things that don’t normally go together. It should be enjoyed.

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Humans are thinkers, and humans are doers. There is a natural temptation to view these activities as requiring distinct capacities. When we reflect, we are guided by our knowledge of truths about the world. By contrast, when we act, we are guided by our knowledge of how to perform various actions. If these are distinct cognitive capacities, then knowing how to do something is not knowledge of a fact — that is, there is a distinction between practical and theoretical knowledge. …

Most of us are inclined immediately to classify activities like repairing a car, riding a bicycle, hitting a jump shot, taking care of a baby or cooking a risotto as exercises of practical knowledge. And we are inclined to classify proving a theorem in algebra, testing a hypothesis in physics and constructing an argument in philosophy as exercises of the capacity to operate with knowledge of truths. The cliché of the learned professor, as inept in practical tasks as he is skilled in theoretical reasoning, is just as much a leitmotif of popular culture as that of the dumb jock. The folk idea that skill at action is not a manifestation of intellectual knowledge is also entrenched in contemporary philosophy, though it has antecedents dating back to the ancients.

According to the model suggested by this supposed dichotomy, exercises of theoretical knowledge involve active reflection, engagement with the propositions or rules of the theory in question that guides the subsequent exercise of the knowledge. Think of the chess player following an instruction she has learned for an opening move in chess. In contrast, practical knowledge is exercised automatically and without reflection. The skilled tennis player does not reflect on instructions before returning a volley — she exercises her knowledge of how to return a volley automatically. Additionally, the fact that exercises of theoretical knowledge are guided by propositions or rules seems to entail that they involve instructions that are universally applicable — the person acting on theoretical knowledge has an instruction booklet, which she reflects upon before acting. In contrast, part of the skill that constitutes skill at tennis involves reacting to situations for which no instruction manual can prepare you. The skilled tennis player is skilled in part because she knows how to adjust her game to a novel serve, behavior that does not seem consistent with following a rule book.

… But once one begins to bear down upon the supposed distinction between the practical and the theoretical, cracks appear. When one acquires a practical skill, one learns how to do something. But when one acquires knowledge of a scientific proposition, that too is an instance of learning. In many (though not all) of the world’s languages, the same verb is used for practical as well as theoretical knowledge (for example, “know” in English, “savoir” in French). More important, when one reflects upon any exercise of knowledge, whether practical or theoretical, it appears to have the characteristics that would naïvely be ascribed to the exercise of both practical and intellectual capacities. A mathematician’s proof of a theorem is the ideal example of the exercise of theoretical knowledge. Yet in order to count as skilled at math, the mathematician’s training — like that of the tennis player — must render her adept in reacting to novel difficulties she may encounter in navigating mathematical reality. Nor does exercising one’s knowledge of truths require active reflection. I routinely exercise my knowledge that one operates an elevator by depressing a button, without giving the slightest thought to the matter. From the other direction, stock examples of supposedly merely practical knowledge are acquired in apparently theoretical ways. People can and often do learn how to cook a risotto by reading recipes in cookbooks.

Jason develops the point a bit more in his post and rather more rigorously in recent book, which I haven’t read in any detail as of yet. I won’t say that I’m entirely convinced, and in particular I wonder whether the argument he’s making is going to turn on some very fine-grained aspects of technical philosophy of language which I’m not really in a position to assess. However, the strong division between practical and theoretical knowledge is such a shibboleth in social theory—variously entrenched in Wittgensteinian, phenomenological and cognitive versions—and such a great deal rests on it, that it’s worth taking the time to think against it once in a while to see where that goes.

I don’t prune my friendship network on Facebook. I friend just about anyone and this is what I get. What does yours look like?

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Could a similar normalization of extreme ideas be underway in the United States? Even as poll after poll documents a liberalization in American attitudes with regard to controversial issues such as gay marriage, medical marijuana, extramarital sex and intellectual property, conservatives in the country’s smaller, more rural states have managed to pass a range of measures that would turn back the clock fifty years or more. And this legislative push is no haphazard affair, but the result of careful planning by right-wing groups who have been greatly dissatisfied with the pace of “progress” at the national level.

What makes Arizona particularly significant in this context is that, unlike states like Alabama, Kansas or South Dakota, the population is much larger and located predominantly in two large metropolitan centers. Despite its large number of retirees, the state looks a lot more like the future of the United States — or at least how that future looked in the recent past, before the global recession — than the other states at the vanguard of the conservative backlash against the depravities of postmodernity.

I’m not a populist and I think anti-immigration sentiment in Arizona is profoundly bad. But I’ll disagree with Charlie a little on the meaning of Arizona.

Arizona is a state that has had a long history of white privilege. A lot of it has to do with the fact that White settlers could prosper while Mexican migrants were ping-ponged by the Mexican and American governments. Thus, I’ve viewed Arizona’s strident race and immigration politics as reactionary but specific. These conditions don’t exist to the same degree in other nearby states, such as Colorado or New Mexico.

We should definitely be on the watch for populism and its extreme cousin, fascism. But maybe the message of Arizona isn’t that it’s the future. Rather, as Charlie suggests in other parts of his essay, the lesson is that a place with a lot of White resentment of migrants is a great incubator for policies that can be copied by racial demagogues in other places.

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Until then, I was hoping participants in the conference could tell me if any of the following questions were addressed:

1. Temple University began its doctoral program in 1983. Has there been any comprehensive analysis of the graduates of that program? How many graduates? Where do they teach? Do they produce well cited scholarship?
2. Any evidence that the afrocentric approach incubated at Temple is being transmitted through its PhD graduates? Or is this a dead issue in the field?
3. Imbalance: Numerous observers have noted that Africana doctoral programs have done well and they’ve expanded in elite research institutions, but Africana Studies remains an embattled field of study in other institutional contexts. Is this claim true? If so, how can the recent growth of Africana Studies be translated to liberal arts colleges and regional universities?
4. PhD Careers: Africana Studies units tend to be small in size. Is there enough room to absorb the PhD graduates? Or is the Africana Studies PhD more like an interdisciplinary degree that allows you to teach in a range of social science and humanities programs?

Any insights into these questions, or other comments on the conference welcome.

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2. The ASA Section on movements/collective behavior needs old tenured people. Seriously. The section has a mentoring program where we match older scholars with folks on the tenure track. It’s easy – just a phone call or two a year or some email. Contact me if you can help. The future social movement scholars need you, Brayden.

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Josh Brennan, a fellow bleeding heart libertarian, offers a definition of social justice that focuses on helping the poor and the vulnerable (e.g., markets are just only if they help low income people). Such definitions leave a bleeding heart like me cold because they don’t capture an important dimension of bleeding heart-ism, the fact that societies have groups that have been screwed over and that we have some duty to help history’s losers or at least not make their live worse. I’d start my discussion of social justice by making the following statements, which underwrite the bleeding heart view, and then think about whether other ideas are compatible:

1. Complex societies have status groups, they are stratified. These status groups aren’t  always based on merit, but based on custom and tradition. In many cases, they are based on violence and warfare.
2. These status differences matter a lot. Material and symbolic goods are often handed out based on these group memberships. Group membership entails deference and privilege.
3. The benefits and disadvantages of status group membership are enforced in multiple ways. It can be legal, social, or even tacit.

If you start with these statements, you can have productive discussion about how social justice fits in various political philosophies. Conservatives often celebrate #1, defend #2 and deny #3. That is, the conservative response to status group inequality is often to accept it and say it is natural, defend the rewards bases on status, and refuse to change law or custom in ways that would challenge the dominant. In contrast, liberals reject #1, challenge #2, and attack #3. The combined liberal response to status-based inequality might be termed “social justice.” What liberals mean is that the institutions that support sorting people into groups based on ascribed status are illegitimate. The just thing is for some person or some organization (e.g., the state) to eliminate, or ameliorate, these types of status groups and their privileges.

Once you lay it out, one can see how libertarians don’t quite fit in either box, which is why Zwolinski and his fellow travelers are angling for a libertarian/liberal meeting point. As hard core individualists, libertarians are pretty comfortable with rejecting #1. They don’t believe that the state should make distinctions among people based on social class, race, gender, tribe, religion, caste, or what have you. So they do share something very important with liberals. The extreme skepticism of existing group structures creates a real rift, in theory at least, with conservatives, who have usually been on the side of defending law and customs that benefit the dominant status group.

The libertarian divergence with liberals comes with #2 and #3.  A lot of libertarians, for example, believe status groups are manifestations of underlying differences in skill and ability. Racial differences in, say, educational attainment really do reflect underlying talent and work patterns. Libertarians also have a tough time believing that status groups are unfair unless they are created by the state. Finally, libertarians have a really hard time believing that people can benefit from their group status in the absence of legal sanctions. The concept of white privilege, for example, is one that they strongly resist.

Still, there is some room for Zwolinski’s bleeding heart libertarianism, but it’s not something that is highly compatible with liberal political theory. The key issue is that the libertarian skepticism toward claims of status group inequality does not necessarily follow from individualist theory. In other words, a belief in individual rights does not preclude someone from believing that males or whites benefit from their status, even in the absence of legalized segregation. It’s plausible to say that you believe in individual rights and market institutions and admit they are imperfect and that some people are disadvantaged because they belong to a group that has successfully created some rules or customs that benefit them.

This version of libertarianism, which is rare since I can’t think of any figure who articulates it except Zwolinski and Brennan,  is somewhat close in spirit to what liberals believe with regard to social justice.  Both parties agree on the problem. The issue that really splits the bleeding heart libertarian and the standard issue liberal is the solution. Liberals have a lot of confidence that democratic states have the potential to address status group inequality. Libertarians, not surprisingly, have the opposite view. They tend to see the state as a blunt instrument at best, or exacerbating the problem at worst. And of course, natural rights libertarians view just about all state action as suspect because it is based on the monopoly of force.

Even here, though, the liberal and bleeding heart libertarian could find points of agreement and cooperation. They agree that group based discrimination, status privilege, and oppression are real and bad. They disagree on the state as a solution. That doesn’t mean that liberals and libertarians can’t fight status inequality in other ways. There’s a side to modern liberalism that believes in the grassroots and local action. For example, there are lots of non-profits that work to help poor people and minorities get housing. No reason a libertarian couldn’t volunteer to help out. Similarly, a lot of liberals believe that immigration law is harsh and creates a status divide between citizens and non-citizens. There are lots of voluntary organizations that help immigrants and they are a context where liberals and bleeding heart libertarians could agree.

Social justice, as it is often understood, is hard to square with libertarian theory and culture. Zwolinski’s views will find a limited audience. But that doesn’t mean the bleeding heart libertarian is out of luck. There’s a lot of ways libertarians can pursue social justice can be pursued if they took the time to hang with the local immigrant rights groups or housing non-profit.

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The keynote speaker at this spring’s South-by-Southwest festival, the Boss himself Bruce Springsteen, challenged the idea that genres should be an essential element to the way musicians create music. In his incredibly thoughtful remarks, Springsteen suggested that we live in an era in which musicians can be free to be themselves simply by creating the music that is inside them without feeling constrained by the conventions of genre.

I’d like to talk about the one thing that’s been consistent over the years, the genesis and power of creativity, the power of the songwriter, or let’s say, composer, or just creator. So whether you’re making dance music, Americana, rap music, electronica, it’s all about how you are putting what you do together. The elements you’re using don’t matter. Purity of human expression and experience is not confined to guitars, to tubes, to turntables, to microchips. There is no right way, no pure way, of doing it. There’s just doing it.

We live in a post–authentic world. And today authenticity is a house of mirrors. It’s all just what you’re bringing when the lights go down. It’s your teachers, your influences, your personal history; and at the end of the day, it’s the power and purpose of your music that still matters (emphasis added).

It’s not as if Springsteen isn’t aware of the genres that form the backbone of the music industry. A few minutes earlier in his talk, Springsteen jokingly went through a short list of the various genres that categorized the bands wandering the streets of Austin that week, stopping to note that he had no idea what “Nintendo core” is. He added, “Just add neo– and post– to everything I said, and mention them all again.”

I think Springsteen’s main point is that it’s no longer necessary for artists to play by the rules of a specific genre to make music that resonates with a crowd.  You don’t need to strive for authenticity in the same way that artists of a previous generation did because the rules for what it means to be authentic don’t apply anymore. The proliferation of new genres has, in a sense, freed musicians to do whatever the hell they want. An artist doing his version of classic blues on a synthesizer is just as authentic as is a folk artist doing an an acoustic cover of “Robot Rock.”  What counts more than one’s inclusion in a genre subcategory is an artist’s workmanship and basic creative impulse.

Of course Springsteen can say this because he is The Boss. He sells out stadiums night after night. He no longer plays by the rules or conventions because of his success and popularity. But is there an element of truth to it? Do genres matter as much as they once did? I see a couple of reasons to give his argument merit. The first is that the Internet really does seem to have freed artists to “remix” and hybridize musical genres more than was done in the past. The Internet has become its own scene, reducing the importance of old geographic-based scenes, which in turn makes it more likely that people working in different genres or subgenres will be aware of and influence each other.  And I also think there is some truth to the idea that precisely subdividing subgenres has the ironic effect of making those subgenres less meaningful and less constraining.  Sub-subgenres are usually just hybrids of two or more genres anyway, and so what difference does it make to layer on a third or fourth genre? Melding together 4-5 new genres subsequently decreases the social distance between you and every other artist working in the space of popular music and simultaneously opens the possibility of bringing in old genres in your next creative moment. Suddenly the idea that Texas polka has real combinatorial potential for rap seems possible. I think this is what it means to say we live in a post-authentic world.

Duncan Watts, the social science researcher who has been at Yahoo since 2007, has left the company.

Yahoo confirmed the departure. Watts has reportedly joined Microsoft’s research organization, but the software company declined to comment.

Comments? I’m excited to see what he does at his new job.

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Andrew Gelman wrote a simple response, which is that I am hanging around with the wrong people. There is some truth. The last time I had the “n–>00″ argument was with a visitor. Indiana has hired some exceptional applied statisticians, like Stanley Wasserman. The program has also hired people with non-statistics PhDs, like sociology and economics. I have consulted with these folks and it is easier to get concrete guidance on statistical practice.

But still, as multiple comments noted at orgtheory and Gelman’s blog, there are a lot of people with the title “statistician” who do treat issues of model estimation with small samples as an afterthought. This does happen, though maybe not as much as it used to.

Let me conclude this post with a comment about the sociology of the statistics profession. Statistics is a discipline that is analogous to computer science. Computer science can be math, engineering, applied science, or even philosophy (think artificial intelligence). Statistics is the same way. It can be mathematical, applied, or even visual. Consequently, there is no standardized cultural template for what a statistics department is.

Sometimes, statistics lives inside a math department. Sometimes it is distinct. At Indiana, they are trying an interdisciplinary approach where you have stat, math, and social science PhDs in the same unit. Each organizational environment creates pressures for different research.

If you live in a math department, you almost certainly can’t get promoted unless you study functional analysis or numerical analysis as applied to statistical issues. That produces people who are probably incapable of interacting with others who aren’t interested in the mathematics. Once you have your own department, you diverge from this model. Some statisticians are highly applied and many PhD graduates get jobs in professional schools and social science programs. These multiple pressures mean that you probably get a wide range of people, some of whom think statistics is just a field of mathematics while other can actually help people with real world statistical problems.

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