
If Sociologists Had as Much Influence as Economists - pistachiopro
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/17/upshot/what-if-sociologists-had-as-much-influence-as-economists.html
======
trendia
Rather than ask the question, "What if sociologists had influence?", the
author should ask, "What does sociology need to change as a discipline in
order to earn influence?"

The answer would be rigor. A huge problem with sociology is the dependence on
the story. Unfortunately, since the sociologist is often a human with their
own biases, they are going to see what they want to see.

For example, I purchased the Kindle version of the book the author recommends
("Coming Up Short"). I turned to the appendix, where the author describes her
research methodology. And sure enough, the research involves open-ended
questions ("Walk me through a typical day at work." "Is there a time you lost
a job? Could you describe it?") that could lead the interviewee to respond in
any way they want.

There are _many_ problems with this, such as : 1) the interviewee may
inadvertently invent convenient narratives that provide comfort but aren't
accurate, 2) the interviewer may mis-interpret the answers, etc.

How are we supposed to develop policy off of this? Sure, it's a great starting
point for _starting_ research, but the narrative- or story-based approach
should never be the _conclusion_.

This is why economics is so much more trusted. Although economics has flaws,
and the study of econometrics can sometimes lead to incorrect conclusions, it
at least uses objective data and metrics, which are less susceptible to error,
providing a much more grounded approach to policy decisions.

~~~
jahaja
I think you're giving economics the benefit of the doubt while having a
critical eye towards sociology when they're not much different in regards to
objectivity and being "soft" sciences. In fact I'm not sure sociology would
still have its credibility intact if it were to have as many failures as
economics have had just the latest 20 years or so. Somehow economics manages
this, which leads me to the next point.

I'm surprised that you're speaking with such certainty without mentioning the
rather powerful relationship between economics and finance in a classical
"follow the money" trail of thought.

~~~
1337biz
> In fact I'm not sure sociology would still have its credibility intact if it
> were to have as many failures as economics have had just the latest 20 years
> or so.

We are here back at the fundamental mathification problem. Economists have
understood that as long as their formulas look scientific enough, they can
influence with their results policy makers et al.. Sociology rarely present
their research in terms of the broad and universal truth as the economists do.
So while Economists' results look rigorous on paper, reality still proves it
often wrong.

~~~
kome
That's so true. Economics copies hard science in its methods instead of its
ends...

------
devinhelton
Sociologists have had a very large impact on policy in the last century. For
example, the hundreds of billions spent on public housing was based on ideas
that came out of sociology -- [https://cdn0.vox-
cdn.com/thumbor/dvPJvrleZI_wckWhjsRNPPRl4xU...](https://cdn0.vox-
cdn.com/thumbor/dvPJvrleZI_wckWhjsRNPPRl4xU=/1000x0/filters:no_upscale\(\)/cdn0.vox-
cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4432835/LOC02hr.0.jpg) It just didn't work.

 _And a large body of sociological research touches on the idea of
stigmatization, including of the poor and of racial minorities._

Many school reforms ideas (desegregation, elimination of corporal punishment,
reducing emphasis on rote learning, etc) were based on this theory. The Brown
versus Board of Education decision cited sociological research along these
lines, for example. But the theories were wrong, so the solutions did not
work. Professor Raymond Wolters has two exhaustive (if depressing) histories
of these reforms and their failures. See _The Long Crusade: Profiles in
Education Reform, 1967-2014_ and _The Burden of Brown: Thirty Years of School
Desegregation_

 _It’s one thing, for example, to outlaw housing discrimination based on race.
But if real estate agents and would-be home sellers subtly shun minority
buyers, the effect can be the same. Professor Gans of Columbia has argued for
decades that the stigmatization of poor Americans fuels entrenched, persistent
poverty._

Sociologists haven't been ignored -- this was the theory behind Section 8
Vouchers which is a very large program. But again, the theory was wrong and
the solutions did not work. See
[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/america...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/american-
murder-mystery/306872/) and [http://devinhelton.com/historical-
amnesia.html](http://devinhelton.com/historical-amnesia.html)

~~~
matt4077
There are other countries who went much further in their support for the poor,
with much better outcomes.

...and to argue this along racial lines is simply preposterous. The idea that
allowing businesses to discriminate poor minorities would actually help them
is the worst kind of revisionism. The world has come a long way since the
60ies.

~~~
devinhelton
_There are other countries who went much further in their support for the
poor, with much better outcomes._

This was the line taught in my freshman sociology class, but I have since been
convinced that money spent on social welfare does not explain international
differences in various social ills.

 _The idea that allowing businesses to discriminate poor minorities would
actually help them is the worst kind of revisionism._

That is not what I argued.

------
analog31
_For starters, while economists tend to view a job as a straightforward
exchange of labor for money, a wide body of sociological research shows how
tied up work is with a sense of purpose and identity._

Amusingly, I've noticed that most HR managers have psychology degrees. I've
wondered: What if HR managers had economics degrees. Would we be paid more?

When I was a manager, I received some training from the HR department, and we
were constantly reminded that our employees didn't really want to get paid
more. This was based on "research." I wondered if this was the result of the
researchers simply delivering the result that their patrons wanted to hear.

I've decided to favor an economic view over a psychological one: Be nice to
people, of course, but treat them as _homo economicus,_ behaving rationally in
regard to their own self interest. While this view isn't proven, I think it's
better than making assumptions about their psychological motivations that are
likely to be biased by factors such as social class, age, gender, and possibly
race and ethnicity.

~~~
icelancer
The current hype of not treating people like rational actors - pop-science
people citing Tversky and Kahenman, for example - is rooted in what is not
controversial at all for anyone who truly grasped basic economics, so-called
"behavioral economics."

It is no surprise to any classical economist that actors do not always act
rationally and the foundation of microeconomics is not built on the unstable
platform of assuming that everyone IS rational; but rather that treating
actors AS rational is a just and fair way to act while also removing sources
of bias.

It does not mean that rules on how to approach people should NOT be modified
via analysis of behavior, but rather that a priori we should assume people act
rationally in their own self-interest as a first principle and go from there,
not assume that everyone is irrational and create a ten million line
case/switch statement.

~~~
dragonwriter
> It is no surprise to any classical economist that actors do not always act
> rationally and the foundation of microeconomics is not built on the unstable
> platform of assuming that everyone IS rational; but rather that treating
> actors AS rational is a just and fair way to act while also removing sources
> of bias.

No, economics is a predictive social science, not a system of moral
philosophy; the rational choice model has nothing to do with how it is just
and fair to treat people. It was the dominant model because despite being
self-evidently not fundamentally correct (it assumes a number of things, like
perfect knowledge of future outcomes, that no one believes to be literally
true or even plausible) it was believed to be an approximation that would
predicted results better than any alternative model available at the time, in
general and in a wide array of specific cases.

~~~
icelancer
>economics is a predictive social science

The entirety of it is not. Not by a long shot.

~~~
dragonwriter
The places where the rational choice model has been applied are, because it's
a predictive model; to the extent that there may be things that are properly
called "economics" that are not part of the predictive social science with
that name, they are not relevant to why the rational choice model.has been
used.

------
dvt
I've found sociology and its approaches to be profoundly insightful. Even
though I'm a trained philosopher, one of my favorite thinkers is not a
philosopher, but Max Weber, the founding father of sociology. Economists
probably have more influence due to the fact that economics is perceived to be
a "hard science". The irony, of course, is that it isn't.

~~~
VladKovac
Max Weber's theories on Protestantism being the cause of success in America
have been pretty much thoroughly debunked when you control for differences in
aptitude amongst the religious sects that arrived to America in it's early
history. Not to mention his work led to the founding ideas of the Frankfurt
School lol.

~~~
dvt
This post is just a bunch of nonsense.

His theories on the Protestant ethic are controversial[1], but hardly
"thoroughly debunked." As far as the Frankfurt School, uh, who cares? They
drew from many political and social philosophies (including Marx who we often
find at odds with Weber). It just seems completely uncharitable and tangential
to bring it up.

[1]
[http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_world_/2013/08/29/is_the_prot...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_world_/2013/08/29/is_the_protestant_work_ethic_real_a_new_study_claims_it_can_be_measured.html)

~~~
clydethefrog
Bringing them up in a negative way is usually used as a dogwhistle for people
that believe in the "cultural Marxism" conspiracy.

------
Mikeb85
You're assuming economists have influence. The truth is, the best economic
policy is almost always politically unpopular, and thus never gets realised,
and the most predictive economists often have reason to not share their
opinions. Economics as a science is in fine shape, it's politics which is the
problem.

~~~
dredmorbius
That's a bit of a selection / attribution error.

It's not that most economic policy _isn 't_ adopted (true -- it turns out
there's a whole mess of heterdox economics theory), but that _adopted public
policy_ (or far more significantly: legal doctrine) is justified on the basis
of _some_ economic theory or another.

There's a camp of economists who are particularly capable of developing policy
either specifically to, or which incidentally, supports various viewpoints.

See as a classic instance, what Adam Smith _actually_ wrote, vs. what he's
_presented_ as writing by such influence-peddlers as the Mont Pelerin Society
/ Atlas Network disinformation industrial complex.

------
TheGRS
Both areas of study are basically looking at human nature on the macro level,
it strikes me as interesting that they are different fields of study at all.
While I think they're both worth studying and listening to, neither seem to be
totally correct on any one particular subject since the elusive "average
person" doesn't appear to exist. Take anyone who might fall into an average
category and they will always have outliers in other areas. How many people do
you personally know are just following the average human life pattern and
never do anything outside of it? People are just inherently unpredictable and
irrational.

------
NumberCruncher
In my experience sociologists would like to do the work of the statisticians
without working with big scale data and without understanding even the most
simple statistical models. Thank's god they do not have more influence.

This statement is based on a study I made by myself using a representative
sample: I have 3 sociology PHDs in my team.

------
cs2818
Maybe this is just relative to my area of work, but I often feel that the
sociologists I work/am friends with are in a dangerous balancing act of
attempting to influence policy while also conducting unbiased research
inquiries. While this isn't completely unique to sociology, I would argue that
the area of study can make it difficult to form research questions and studies
which are not confounded by current public policy or personal opinion.

To me it would seem intuitive to have an additional field or area of focus
that emphasizes applying sociological findings to public policy.

~~~
schoen
A particular elephant in the room here might be that economists also not
uncommonly engage in policy advocacy, yet the stereotypical sociologist's
political advocacy is left-wing and the stereotypical economist's political
advocacy is right-wing, at least relative to one another. Maybe one part of
that is that the two have fairly different understandings of what makes human
societies tick.

------
chrismealy
"Economics has gained the title Queen of the Social Sciences by choosing
solved political problems as its domain." \-- Abba Lerner

------
ianai
I think this is a false premise. Politicians/decision makers merely listen to
people they want to listen to speak. There are "schools of thought" in
economics that really only exist because someone wants to hear that viewpoint.

------
camdenlock
> For starters, while economists tend to view a job as a straightforward
> exchange of labor for money, a wide body of sociological research shows how
> tied up work is with a sense of purpose and identity.

This is precisely why handing the reins over to sociologists would be
dangerous. The concept of "identity" is massively over-valued in our society,
with very little coherent critical commentary available. Somehow it's seen as
an unassailable, unquestionable truism: every person has an identity, and they
build on it throughout their entire life. Giving sociologist-types more power
to shape policy will lead to an increase in the acceptance and enforcement of
this erroneous thought process.

Erroneous because one's "identity" is, in reality, of extremely limited
utility and the source of much suffering: does my identity properly reflect
who I really am? Are others being respectful to my identity? Are they behaving
correctly toward me considering my identity? Is my identity subject to
systematic oppression? Should I change my identity or keep it the same? How
many people know about my current identity vs. my precious identity that I
promoted for many years?

Spending time ruminating and basing policy on this concept of identity is a
huge waste of resources, and what's the outcome? Pure, unadulterated
suffering.

Identity has its place as a tool for conducting transactions and working in
groups, but sociologists and their ilk have elevated it to an all-encompassing
life-defining concern, and that's just not reasonable. Given how much we're
already burdening ourselves here in the West with identity politics and other
massive wastes of resources, I cringe at the thought of sociologists having
MORE power over our lives.

~~~
dredmorbius
If you don't mind my asking, what do you do?

~~~
camdenlock
I make music and sell it. Not very lucrative, but it's fulfilling. Do you
think my career choice is relevant to my distrust of the western obsession
with identity? :)

~~~
dredmorbius
How strongly do you identify with the instruments, genres, venues, media,
etc., in which this profession takes you?

~~~
camdenlock
Sorry, I don't understand the question. Are you wondering if I label myself by
the activities I perform while working?

------
ori_b
I find it interesting that the article doesn't mention actions that might be
taken if sociologists had more influence. Not a word about what we might do
differently.

~~~
dredmorbius
There's some indirect references, but yes, a good point: that's a pretty
glaring lack.

The comments about the _social_ interactions of what are perceived as
_economic_ transactions or phenmomena strongly suggests a few differences. The
_social_ dislocations caused by job loss, or housing eviction, are
specifically mentioned. I'd see far more weight and consideration given both
in policy.

------
Mendenhall
Then bad ideas propagated by non replicable "science" would spread even more
rampant.

~~~
dredmorbius
Then bad ideas propagated by non replicable "science" would have a
counterargument.

------
dredmorbius
As someone with a strong background in economics, I think this would be a
wonderful idea (reasons scattered through comments in this thread).

I do have a question though: What is the central organising question or theme
of sociology?

For economics, I would answer "the allocation of scarce resources to greatest
effect". I'm not sure I can come up with a simlar statement for sociology, and
online searches over the past few minutes aren't turning up anything strongly
resembling such a statement.

~~~
icelancer
>"the allocation of scarce resources to greatest effect"

I'd say this is the goal of macroeconomics, not the entire discipline. And the
application of economic public policy tends to be as psuedoscientific and
bias-laden as sociology.

I say this as someone who is strongly educated in economics and worked as a
private economist; I have a lot of love for the field in general.

EDIT: The goal of economics, broadly, I think is simply analyzing the
allocation of scarce resources across a wide variety of market methods and
conditions. Ascribing prescriptive behavior is not something at least half of
the discipline is interested in.

~~~
dredmorbius
The "scarce resources" definition is typical of Samuelson.

I find John Marshall's "ordinary business of life" distressingly vague.

Krugman and Wells (2008) give: "economics is the social science that studies
the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services."

I'll argue you've confused macro with micro: macro deals, generally, with
inflation, money supply, and foreign exchange. Micro with market allocations
and behaviour (under various degrees of competition, monpoly/monopsony, or
oligopoly/oligopsony).

------
strawmart
Given that they weave stories that don't fair much better than religious ones,
please no.

------
dredmorbius
A sampling of comments, by economists, on economics. This is a longish
listing, but I'll point out that there are mentions here from multiple Nobel
prize laureates and from across the spectrum of political inclinations
(Piketty and Galbraith on the left to Hayek and Mises on the right). There's
long been a strong critique of economics from within the profession, and this
listing only _touches_ the surface.

The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made
answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by
economists.

― Joan Robinson

Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.

― John Kenneth Galbraith

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look
respectable.

― John Kenneth Galbraith

…the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for
mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological
speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the
other social sciences.

― Thomas Piketty

Too large a proportion of recent “mathematical” economics are mere
concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow
the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real
world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.

― John Maynard Keynes

We move from more or less plausible but really arbitrary assumptions, to
elegantly demonstrated but irrelevant conclusions.

― Wassily Leontief

Existing economics is a theoretical system which floats in the air and which
bears little relation to what happens in the real world.

― Ronald Coase

The economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook
beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.

― Paul Krugman

Economics has become increasingly an arcane branch of mathematics rather than
dealing with real economic problems.

― Milton Friedman

Modern economics is sick. Economics has increasingly become an intellectual
game played for its own sake and not for its practical consequences for
understanding the economic world. Economists have converted the subject into a
sort of social mathematics in which analytical rigour is everything and
practical relevance is nothing.

― Mark Blaug

Economics has never been a science – and it is even less now than a few years
ago.

― Paul Samuelson

For far too long economists have sought to define themselves in terms of their
supposedly scientific methods. In fact, those methods rely on an immoderate
use of mathematical models, which are frequently no more than an excuse for
occupying the terrain and masking the vacuity of the content.

― Thomas Piketty

In my youth it was said that what was too silly to be said may be sung. In
modern economics it may be put into mathematics.

― Ronald Coase

[https://unlearningeconomics.wordpress.com/tag/economists/](https://unlearningeconomics.wordpress.com/tag/economists/)

If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses.
They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, “what would I do if I were
a horse?

― Ronald Coase

Any man who is only an economist is unlikely to be a good one.

― F. A. Hayek

The study of economics has been again and again led astray by the vain idea
that economics must proceed according to the pattern of other sciences.

― Ludwig von Mises

The use of mathematics has brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it has
also brought mortis.

― Robert Heilbroner

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted
yesterday didn’t happen today.

― Laurence J. Peter

When an economist says the evidence is “mixed,” he or she means that theory
says one thing and data says the opposite.

― Richard Thaler

The First Law of Economists: For every economist, there exists an equal and
opposite economist.

The Second Law of Economists: They’re both wrong.

― David Wildasin

~~~
clydethefrog
>Nobel prize

Might also be good to mention the Nobel prize for economics is given by a
Swedish bank, not by the Nobel committee.

~~~
dredmorbius
I'm not a particular fan of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences
in Memory of Alfred Nobel, and yes, it was created long after the other Nobel
prizes, in 1968, for reasons which are strongly suspect and political. I feel
it's been poorly awarded numerous times, though the selections have improved
in recent decades.

That said, it is administered and nominations / selections go through the
Swedish Academy of Sciences, and it is most certainly considered by the Nobel
Foundation as among its prizes.

I'm using it here to note less an agreement with (all) the economists cited
here, and far more to note that, whether I find their economics advisible or
not (some I do, some I don't), this is a list accepted by both economists and
the general scientific community as exemplars of the field, and they are
exceedingly strongly critical of elements of the orthodoxy.

Not necessarily the same elements. But strongly critical all the same.

If you're looking for a strong criticism of the Nobel Prize in Economics, I
strongly recommend reading F.A. Hayek's acceptance speech on that score, which
manages simultaneously to question economics _and_ the prize itself, whilst
defending it by numerous strongly counterfactual arguments in my view, Hayek
being among those I otherwise have strong reservations for.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Econ...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Economic_Sciences)

[http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-
sciences/lau...](http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-
sciences/laureates/1974/hayek-lecture.html)

------
yummyfajitas
The fact that a field misses one prediction doesn't invalidate the entire
field. Would you declare climate science invalid because it didn't predict the
hiatus?

~~~
pjmorris
The fact that the field ignored a gigantic signal until the world economy had
nearly ground to a halt suggests, to me, that there's more going on than
missing one prediction.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Since the signal was giant, I take it you made a lot of money by betting
against it?

~~~
pjmorris
Some. Not like Michael Burry. Starting with seeing what was going on in my
South Florida neighborhood, and seeing Robert Schiller's graph of house prices
vs. income in the NYT in 2005, I did a bunch of research, leading to selling
one house in 2005, and another in 2007. I made money on both. Those buyers
each later lost money when they sold the houses. On balance, I made some
money, and lost a lifestyle. I don't think of myself as a winner there. There
was plenty of signal. Given the havoc caused in so many people's lives across
the world, and given the documentation now available, I don't think 'No one
could have seen it coming' is a reasonable way to think about what happened.

~~~
davidivadavid
Hindsight is 20/20\. From what I can tell, the Case-Schiller index is back
around 2005 levels, even higher in some cities like LA. [1] Should people
start selling their houses?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Case_Shiller_indice_20_vi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Case_Shiller_indice_20_villes.jpg)

~~~
pjmorris
Could you point out the hindsight? What's different since 2005, in my
perspective, it that it is now clear that there has been no political will to
let bad loans go bad (evidenced by the government's responses since 2009). If
you expect that to remain the case, it makes sense to not sell. If you expect
that to change, and that house prices should go back to their historical
income ratios, then it makes sense to sell.

~~~
davidivadavid
It's always easy to retrofit what can essentially be a lucky guess into a
smart prediction after the fact. Whether you consider that guess to fit a
plausible narrative doesn't always make it any less of a guess.

[http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2014/09/predicting_bubb....](http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2014/09/predicting_bubb.html)

~~~
pjmorris
Fair enough. Maybe a personal anecdote about how a non-economist could find a
housing crash plausible isn't the best evidence for the availability of
signals that something was wrong with the housing market. I can go through the
FCIC report [0] and annotate to demonstrate, but their conclusion was the
crash was avoidable. I can pile on more sources if that's desired. It'd be
more entertaining to watch 'What I Learned and (Un-Learned) at the Financial
Crisis' by Mark Blyth.

I object to Sumner's choice of time points in his blog, as they leave out the
peak, and the historical norm. To observe that an already abnormal market is
only a little bit more abnormal after ten years serves his point, but misses
the story. That might be my meta-critique of economics.

[0] [http://fcic.law.stanford.edu/](http://fcic.law.stanford.edu/) [1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhldDOp77QA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhldDOp77QA)

