Clifford Geertz was a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, and he succeeded remarkably well in bridging the gap between the university and the public in many of his "postings." (I think of these contributions as a pre-web version of a blog.) Many of these contributions are collected in a superb recent …
More on jobs and people in Michigan
Olivier Blanchard and Lawrence Katz did an important empirical study of regional adjustment to employment shock in 1992 (link). Here is their central conclusion: "We have shown that most of the adjustment of states to shocks is through movements of labor, rather than through job creation or job migration." (54) In other words, they find …
Spatial patterns in the US
Here are four interesting graphics representing different kinds of activity in the United States. The top panel represents population concentrations across the United State. The second image is air traffic across the country, and the third image is internet traffic across the country. The final image is a photograph of the United States from space …
Michigan’s population loss
Earlier posts have raised the possibility that Michigan's jobs crisis will lead to significant population loss (link, link, link). The basic idea is this: Michigan has lost more than 800,000 jobs since 2002. Its population in 2002 was about 10 million. The current unemployment rate in the state is about 15%, or just under. In …
Marx’s relevance as a social scientist
What was Karl Marx's enduring contribution to the social sciences? Does he deserve the status of being one of the founders of sociology, along with Durkheim and Weber? Did he put forward substantive hypotheses about the workings of the modern world that continue to illuminate our social world? Is there anything important for sociologists, political …
Social progress
What is involved in "making society better"? What do we have in mind when we aspire to improving society? I suppose there are several things we might mean by this idea. Superficially we might say that a society is better off when its members are better off; but is there more to the story? There …
What now for Michigan?
The Detroit Regional Chamber Leadership Conference at Mackinac has come and gone. Leaders from all sectors in Southeast Michigan participated in discussions about how the state might move forward and regain the vitality and quality of life that the state has lost in the past decade. All agree that the state faces very tough challenges. …
Real Utopias
It is worth thinking a bit about the intellectual project of envisioning a utopia. By definition, a utopia is a vision of a social order that is profoundly different from the real historical circumstances and institutions in which we live. It would correct important flaws in the social world we currently inhabit. It is a social …
Prosperity based on commodities
An earlier post looked at economic prosperity and standard of living from the point of view of a grain-based agricultural economy. There I singled out intensive, extensive, and technology-based growth, and the effects these scenarios had on the standard of living for a farming population. This is a particularly simple case, since it equates standard …
Varieties of economic progress
The study of economic history reveals a number of different patterns when it comes to agricultural production and the standard of living of a given population in a region. Let's think about the issue in very simple terms. Imagine that the standard of living for a population in a region is determined by the amount …
Understanding Society 