Most American cities commonly look a lot like the poverty map of Cleveland above, when it comes to the spatial distribution of poverty and affluence. There is a high-poverty core, in which residents have low income, poor health, poor education, and poor quality of life; there are rings of moderate income; and there are outer …
Mental models for the social world
What is involved in being prepared to understand what is going on around you? In a sense this is Kant's fundamental question in the Critique of Pure Reason: what intellectual resources (concepts, categories, frameworks) does a cognitive agent need in order to make sense of the contents of consciousness, the fleeting experiences and sensations that …
Outcast London
A city is a complex social agglomeration, and all too often it represents a concentration of social ills that are very difficult to eradicate. Poverty, violence, and poor public health are three social problems that seem to be almost synonymous with "urban." We might ask two rather different sorts of questions about these facts. One …
Revitalizing our cities
It is hard to think of an American city that is doing really well these days. Dense urban poverty in the core, super-high rates of unemployment, failing schools for many urban children, high rates of crime, chronic and overwhelming fiscal crises resulting from too little public revenue for needed public services, and health outcome discrepancies …
Sociology in time: cohorts
What difference does it make to a person's personality, values, agency, or interpretive schemes that she was born in 1950 rather than 1930 or 1970? How does a person's place in time and in a stream of historical events influence the formation of his or her consciousness? (I've raised some of these questions in prior …
Citizens’ assemblies
There is quite a bit of interest today in exploring better mechanisms for implementing the goals of democracy in more effective and broadly legitimate ways than most electoral democracies have succeeded in doing to date. A core democratic goal is to create deliberation and decision mechanisms that permit citizens to become sufficiently educated about the …
UnderstandingSociety Facebook page
You are invited to participate in the new UnderstandingSociety Facebook page. The page has links to recent posts on the blog, news items on recent developments in Burma, Thailand, and China, and updates on earlier topics concerning the social sciences in the blog. Best of all, readers can participate by offering their own observations and …
Ideal types, values, and selectivity
image: cover of Max Weber, The History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle Ages I've never really understood why the exposition of one of Max Weber's most important methodological ideas, his theory of ideal types, occurs in the context of an essay that is primarily about the role of values in the social sciences. This is …
Feyerabend as artisanal scientist
I've generally found Paul Feyerabend's position on science to be a bit too extreme. Here is one provocative statement in the analytical index of Against Method: Thus science is much closer to myth than a scientific philosophy is prepared to admit. It is one of the any forms of thought that have been developed by man, and not …
Marx on Russia
In 1881 Marx wrote a letter to Vera Zasulich, an important Russian follower, that addresses the question of theory and prediction when it comes to thinking about the future course of history. In particular, he denies that his theories have determinate predictive implications for the development of capitalism or socialism in Russia. Here is a link to the …
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