Now that I've played with the Google Ngrams tool a little, I continue to think it's a powerful window into a lot of interesting questions. But I also see that there are patterns that emerge that are plainly spurious, and surely do not correspond to real changes in language, culture, or collective interest over time. …
A new tool for intellectual history
Google's NGram Viewer is a really amazing new tool for researchers in literature and the humanities (link, link, link). What is perhaps not quite so evident is the power it may have for people interested in the evolution of the social science disciplines. Basically the concept is a simple one. The Google Book project has now scanned …
Hate as a social demographic
Every democracy I can think of has a meaningful (though usually small) proportion of citizens who fall on the extreme right by any standard: racist, White supremacist, hateful, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, nativist, nationalist, or violently anti-government individuals and groups. In the United States we have many, many organizations that are basically racist and potentially violent …
Diagrams and economic thought
source: The Paretian System (link) The most vivid part of any undergraduate student's study of economics is probably the diagrams. Economists since Walras, Pareto, and Marshall have found it useful to express their theories and hypotheses making use of two-axis diagrams, allowing for very economical formulation of fundamental relationships. Supply-demand curves, production functions, and a …
India’s Naxalites
India is the world's largest democracy. It also is home to one of the more persistent and deadly Maoist insurgencies in the world, the Naxalite movement in eastern India (Communist Party of India (Maoist) (CPI/M)). The Naxalites were a splinter group that separated from India's Communist Party in the 1960s, and their hallmarks have been …
Granularity
If we think back over the history of sociology and political science since 1800, one thing that is striking is the trend away from the most macro-level frameworks of thought in the direction of more situated and proximate social and political arrangements. There was a tendency among the founders -- Montesquieu, Spenser, Comte, for example …
Weber in America
Lawrence Scaff offered a fascinating preview of his forthcoming book, Max Weber in America, at a sociology seminar in Ann Arbor this week. Scaff has written extensively on Weber in the past, and this current research is particularly intriguing and stimulating. The book offers a careful reconstruction of Weber's visit to the United States in 1904, …
Re-reading Chalmers Johnson
Chalmers Johnson, one of the key contributors to Asian studies since the early 1960s, died on November 20, 2010. (Here are several notices -- link, link, link.) Johnson has been an important contributor to Asian studies since the appearance of his first book in 1962, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937-1945, based on his …
Marx on a global wage
What is the longterm tendency in the wage for relatively unskilled labor? In the United States we've been thinking about this problem in the past three decades in the context of "outsourcing" and the flight of manufacturing jobs to low-wage countries. Moderate- and high-wage industrial jobs have left the country in large numbers. In the …
Urban and metropolitan problem solving
The issues that almost all large American metropolitan regions and cities are facing are important and messy. Here is a short list: racial segregation, concentration of poverty, poor health and nutrition, poor schools, crime and violence, and disaffection of young people. These problems are important because they hold back the personal lives of millions of …
Understanding Society 