Daniel Little
I am pleased at the publication this month of a book I've been working on for quite a long time, New Contributions to the Philosophy of History (Methodos Series). (Here is a link to a digital version of the book on the Springer website.) The title is self-explanatory. The book is intended to jump-start a new …
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Neoclassical economics presents a pretty simple theory of the equilibrium price of a manufactured good. This theory also extends to a theory of the wage for skilled and unskilled labor. We postulate production and demand curves, and the equilibrium price is the point where supply equals demand. The supply curve is influenced by factors governing …
Political philosophers ask a small number of core questions: for example, what constitutes the moral basis of political authority? How should the values of individual liberty and community wellbeing be balanced? And we might imagine that the most insightful political philosophers work on the basis of an astute understanding of the social world. Political philosophy, …
Race has been a fundamental fact in American society for centuries, since the sixteenth century with the arrival of African slaves. And many would observe that racism has been a part of that history from beginning to end. These are distinct statements; it is possible for race to be a factor, without racism being present. …
The concept of proto-industrialization became an influential one in economic history in the 1970s and 1980s. The term refers to a system of rural manufacture that was intermediate between autarchic feudal production and modern urban factory production. Variously described as rural manufacturing, domestic manufacture, cottage industry, and a "putting-out" system, it was a dispersed system …
One of the largest and most interesting processes of change going on in the United States today is the rapid redesign and adjustment of the American healthcare system. A key driver is this spring's passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), but the more fundamental causes are the twin crises we face …
Erving Goffman has had wide influence on American and French sociology, and I find his work highly interesting. But it is hard to characterize, because it doesn't fit easily into the standard categories of sociological research and theory. It studies individuals, but it is not individualist. And it is evidence-based, but it is not empiricist. …
The current issue of Social Science History is devoted to a series of articles in honor of Charles Tilly (link), around the general theme of the "public sphere" (the theme of the Social Science History Association annual meeting in 2007). Tilly was an active presence in the Social Science History Association, and this issue recognizes Tilly's …
Hollis Chenery and T. N. Srinivasan published the Handbook of Development Economics in 1988. It was state-of-the-art in the late 1980s. It is interesting to look back at the Handbook twenty-two years later to see how it stands up today. First, the contributors. The volume is a dream-team of development thinkers from the 1970s and 1980s: Amartya …
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How can we assess the epistemic warrant of an economic model that purports to represent some aspects of economic reality? The general problem of assessing the credibility of an economic model can be broken down into more specific questions concerning the validity, comprehensiveness, robustness, reliability, and autonomy of the model. Here are initial definitions of …
Understanding Society 