How much inequality is too much? Answers range from Gracchus Babeuf (all inequalities are unjust) to Ayn Rand (there is no moral limit on the extent of inequalities a society can embody). Is there any reasoned basis for answering the question? What kinds of criteria might we use to try to answer this kind of …
Ostrom’s central idea
Elinor Ostrom was a very important contributor to the theory of public rationality and the institutions that underlie cooperation, and she was most deserving of the recognition that accompanied her receipt of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009. Her passing today is a sad loss for the academic world. Her key contributions were included …
Organizations and the Chicago School
Andrew Abbott is a fascinating sociologist, and he is an expert on the Chicago School. His book Department and Discipline: Chicago Sociology at One Hundred provides an excellent analytical discussion of the theories and people of the school. So his contribution to The Oxford Handbook of Sociology and Organization Studies: Classical Foundations, "Organizations and the Chicago School," on the …
Priorities for tax dollars
There is a very strong impulse in many state legislatures to cut taxes, no matter what the cost is to the state's ability to provide essential services for its citizens. The Michigan League for Human Services draws attention to the consequences of this impulse when it comes to the welfare of the children of Michigan. …
Mark Blaug, John Rawls, and the history of political economy
In an earlier post I spent some time trying to determine what the major sources were of Rawls's knowledge of the history of classical political economy. I noted that Rawls refers several times in A Theory of Justice to Mark Blaug's important history of economic thought, Economic Theory in Retrospect , and speculated that this might have been an important source of …
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Rawls on a property-owning democracy
John Rawls's critique of capitalism was deeper than has been commonly recognized -- this is a central thrust of quite a bit of important recent work on Rawls's theory of justice. Much of this recent discussion focuses on Rawls's idea of a "property-owning democracy" as an alternative to both laissez-faire and welfare-state capitalism. This more disruptive reading …
Where is poverty on the national agenda?
Our elected officials are charged to do their best to create legislation and policies that work best to secure the important life interests of all citizens. Can we take that as a shared assumption? This is how we want it to work, and we feel morally offended when legislators substitute their own wants and opinions …
Michigan’s recovery?
The Mackinac Policy Conference brings forward something new this year -- optimism. The state of Michigan has been hammered in the past eight years by the upheaval of the auto industry and the national trauma of the global financial meltdown. Unemployment has been substantially higher than the national average, the city of Detroit has hemmorhaged …
Power within organizations
Sociologists have been thinking about organizations in a careful, empirical way for decades. Here is a volume edited by Mayer Zald that results from a 1969 conference at Vanderbilt on the topic of "Power in Organizations" (Power in Organizations). The cross-section of sociologists represented here provides a good snapshot of the ways that organizations were …
Are there meso-level social causes?
Social structures and other social "things" are ontologically peculiar in some ways. Most especially, they are abstract, distributed, and non-material. We can't put a culturally dominant food aversion or a group prejudice in a box and weigh it. And yet many of us want to say that social structures are "real", not merely theoretical constructs. …
Understanding Society 