Daniel Little
What is the relationship between the history of economic thought and contemporary economics? There are polar views on this issue. At one extreme, it is sometimes held that the history of economics, like the history of physics, is irrelevant to contemporary theory and analysis. Alfred North Whitehead is quoted with approval: "A science which hesitates to …
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image: Emile Zola, 1902 How can sociology treat "culture" as an object of study and as an influence on other sociological processes? This is, of course, two separate questions. First, internally, is it possible to treat philosophy or literature as an embedded sociological process (a point raised by Jean-Louis Fabiani in his treatment of French …
Historian Thomas Sugrue is a national expert on the state of persistent racial inequalities in our nation today. His The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit set the standard for the field of recent urban history when it appeared in 1996. His most recent book, Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden …
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source: The Financial Ninja (link) How should we make intelligent decisions in contexts in which the object of choice involves the actions of other agents whose choices jointly determine the outcome and where the outcome is unpredictable? Robert Axelrod and Michael Cohen address these issues in Harnessing Complexity: Organizational Implications of a Scientific Frontier. They define …
Herbert Simon was a remarkably fertile thinker in the social and "artificial" sciences (The Sciences of the Artificial - 3rd Edition (1969, first edition)). His most celebrated idea was the notion of "satisficing" rather than "optimizing" or "maximizing" in decision-making; he put forward a theory of ordinary decision-making that conformed more closely to the ways …
The last century gave us far too many examples of the rise of extremism in mass societies -- both democratic and authoritarian. Some of the political mechanisms of extremist seizure of power are well known -- paramilitary force, extremist organizations, demogogic leaders, hyper-heated rhetoric, appeals to nationalism and racism, and inflammatory mass media. But it's …
The structure of the tax code in France is getting new attention these days. President Sarkozy has made fiscal reform a key issue in the run-up to the presidential elections in 2012. The Nouvel Obs has a very good section this week on a recent book by Camille Landais, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez, economists …
Is there a possible causal relationship between an increasing occurrence of violent political rhetoric in broadly available media channels and the occurrence of violent political behavior? How would a social scientist investigate this hypothetical relationship? (Here is a pretty worrisome timeline of events, statements, and actions over the past several years involving violent rhetoric …
Today the country celebrates the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Most of us think of Dr. King as a genuinely important American thinker, and one whose life and actions permanently changed some important values and thought processes in this country when it came to racial equality and affirming communities in the United States. …
Long after the transformative impact Rawls brought to social and political philosophy with A Theory of Justice: Original Edition (1971), Rawls continued to wrestle with the question of how a just society ought to work. One major part of this question is how a just society ought to encompass major disagreements among its citizens about values …
Understanding Society 