There is a pervasive feature of modern economic life that never entered into the theories of the economists in the first century of the discipline: marketing, advertising, and the shaping of consumer desires. And yet this activity is itself a trillion-dollar industry, and arguably has greater effect on social values and consciousness than religion, politics, …
Social things, kinds, and meso causes
Consider a social entity -- say the IBM corporation -- and consider the group of individuals who currently make up the entity. What is the relation between the social entity and the individuals? There are several things that are plainly true: the entity is composed of the individuals. The behavior of the entity supervenes upon …
A jobless future?
Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio wrote a pretty gloomy book in 1994 with the striking title, The Jobless Future. Here is a Harvard Educational Review discussion of the book (link). What is most discomforting in reading the book today is the degree to which the factors they identify seem to be today's headlines. What does jobless mean …
More on meso causation
A recent post considered the question, do organizations have causal powers? There I argued that they do, in a number of ways. Here I'd like to return to these claims and see how they disaggregate onto subvening circumstances, including especially patterns of individual and group activity. The italicized phrases are extracted from the earlier post. First, the …
Assessment of economic models
Science is generally concerned with two central semantic features of theories: truth of theoretical hypotheses and reliability of observational predictions. Truth involves a correspondence between hypothesis and the world; while predictions involve statements about the future behavior of a real system. Science is also concerned with epistemic values: warrant and justification. The warrant of a …
Low income and wellbeing
source: J. G. Speth, The Bridge at the End of the World A recent post on Rawls's critique of capitalism closed with an intriguing mention of a contrast Rawls draws between economic growth and human wellbeing. He is particularly critical of the consumerism that is enmeshed in the social psychology of a growth-oriented market system. This point …
Rawls on the EU
During the final preparation of The Law of Peoples: with "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited" John Rawls had extensive interaction with Philippe van Parijs. Van Parijs was particularly interested in the political and legal circumstances surrounding the establishment of the legal structure of the European Union and the obligations states and their citizens would have …
Do organizations have causal powers?
An organization is a meso-level social structure. It is a structured group of individuals, often hierarchically organized, pursuing a relatively clearly defined set of tasks. In the abstract, it is a set of rules and procedures that regulate and motive the behavior of the individuals who function within the organization. There are also a set …
The moral basis for an extensive state
A recent post focused on the conception of society involved in seventeenth and eighteenth English political thinking, the theory of possessive individualism. The post suggested that this conception has a lot of resonance with the ideas and rhetoric of the Tea Party today. I've also posted a number of discussions of the social ideals of John …
Causal narratives about historical actors
A common kind of causal narrative employed by historians is to identify a set of key actors, key circumstances, and key resources; and then to treat a period of time as a flow of actions by the actors in response to each other and changing circumstances. We might describe this as "explanation of an outcome …
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Understanding Society 