The standard of living across time and space

A very basic question for historians is how to measure and compare the standard of living experienced by people in different historical settings. Is it possible to arrive at credible estimates of the standard of living in the Roman Empire, medieval Burgundy, nineteenth-century Britain, and twentieth-century Illinois? Can we say with any confidence that Romans had a higher (or lower) standard of living than a twelfth-century Burgundian?One part of the problem is conceptual. What do we mean by the standard of living? Is there a specific set of characteristics that are constitutive of the standard of living -- say, nutrition, income, access to health remedies and education, quality of housing, personal security? And how should we take account...

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Posted in: CAT_history,China,economic development

Thinking cities darkly

Image: frame from West of the TracksCities capture much of what we mean by "modern," and have done so since Walter Benjamin's writings on Paris (link). But unlike the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, much of our imagining of cities since the early twentieth century has been dark and foreboding. A recent volume edited by Gyan Prakash, Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City, offers a collection of recent work in cultural studies that attempts to decode some of this dark imagery.Several things are particularly interesting about the volume. Most basically, it represents an interesting conjunction of humanities perspectives and sociology. The articles are individually very good. And as a group they pose a series of important questions....

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Posted in: CAT_globalization,China,city,India

Ngram anomalies

Now that I've played with the Google Ngrams tool a little, I continue to think it's a powerful window into a lot of interesting questions. But I also see that there are patterns that emerge that are plainly spurious, and surely do not correspond to real changes in language, culture, or collective interest over time. It is easy to find examples of search terms that very plainly indicate that there is some kind of "instrument error", an observation that emerges because of an artifact of the method rather than a real pattern in the underlying behavior.Fortunately it is possible to probe these areas of anomaly with the goal of figuring out what they mean. So let's see what happens when we pick out a set of common words that are not freighted with...

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Posted in: CAT_misc

A new tool for intellectual history

Google's NGram Viewer is a really amazing new tool for researchers in literature and the humanities (link, link, link, link).  What is perhaps not quite so evident is the power it may have for people interested in the evolution of the social science disciplines. Basically the concept is a simple one.  The Google Book project has now scanned and OCR'd millions of books published over the past several centuries.  With the announcement of NGram Viewer, Google has shared a vast indexed database of words and phrases included in this full corpus.  And its Viewer tool allows users to provide specific phrases and see a graph of the frequency of that phrase over time (1800-2000 by default).  It is important to bear...

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Posted in: CAT_foundations

Hate as a social demographic

Every democracy I can think of has a meaningful (though usually small) proportion of citizens who fall on the extreme right by any standard: racist, White supremacist, hateful, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, nativist, nationalist, or violently anti-government individuals and groups. In the United States we have many, many organizations that are basically racist and potentially violent hate groups. They provide a basis for cultivating, recruiting and mobilizing like-minded followers, and they are sometimes co-opted by opportunistic politicians for their own narrow purposes. The Southern Poverty Law Center (link) and the Anti-Defamation League (link) do a great job and a needed service in tracking many of these organizations. (For...

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Posted in: CAT_collective action,prejudice,race

Diagrams and economic thought

source: The Paretian System (link)The most vivid part of any undergraduate student's study of economics is probably the diagrams.  Economists since Walras, Pareto, and Marshall have found it useful to express their theories and hypotheses making use of two-axis diagrams, allowing for very economical formulation of fundamental relationships. Supply-demand curves, production functions, and a graph of diminishing marginal product all provide a way of making geometrical sense of a given economic principle or hypothesis.  They allow us to visualize the relationships that are postulated among a set of factors.Mark Blaug has made a long and fruitful career out of his remarkable ability of placing economic thought into its context (Economic...

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Posted in: CAT_methodology

India's Naxalites

India is the world's largest democracy.  It also is home to one of the more persistent and deadly Maoist insurgencies in the world, the Naxalite movement in eastern India (Communist Party of India (Maoist) (CPI/M)).  The Naxalites were a splinter group that separated from India's Communist Party in the 1960s, and their hallmarks have been a commitment to violent revolution and a determined effort at mobilizing India's most disadvantaged rural people.  Here is a review article about the movement from The Economist in 2006 and a review in the New York Times in 2009, and here are several updates from The Economist (link, link, link).  (The Hindu provides frequent coverage of the Naxalite insurgency; for example, here.)The...

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Posted in: CAT_collective action,India,revolution

Granularity

If we think back over the history of sociology and political science since 1800, one thing that is striking is the trend away from the most macro-level frameworks of thought in the direction of more situated and proximate social and political arrangements. There was a tendency among the founders -- Montesquieu, Spenser, Comte, for example -- to pose their questions at the civilizational level. The largest social constructs were identified as worthy of study -- religions, kinds of governments, cultures. By the time we get to writers like Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill in mid-nineteenth century, we have thinkers approaching modern social life with a more limited gaze. They are more interested in particular, differentiating social and political...

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Posted in: CAT_foundations,localism