Public intellectuals in France and the US

What is the role of the intellectual in France in 2010?  And has that role declined in the past several decades?  Have the media and the internet profoundly eroded or devalued the voice of the intellectual in public space?  The Nouvel Observateur takes up these questions in a recent issue devoted to "Le pouvoir intellectuel" (link).The line of thought is a complicated one.  Jacques Julliard frames the question by proposing that the public imagination of the intellectual involves a narrative of precipitous decline since the active engagements of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus.  There was a conception of the engaged intellectual who brought his/her ideas and convictions into opposition when state and society were...

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Posted in: CAT_misc,France,intellectuals

Truth and reconciliation commissions

When does a society need a process of "truth and reconciliation" along the lines of such processes in South Africa, El Salvador, and Argentina?  Here are some recent examples of truth and reconciliation processes:  the fate of the "disappeared" in Argentina (link); Indian Residential Schools in Canada (link); Korean War civilian casualties (link); Liberian civil conflict (link); lynchings in the US South (link); and, of course, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa (link).The general theory of TRC is that a society is sometimes grievously divided over events and crimes that have occurred in the past, and that honest recognition of those crimes may lay a foundation for reconciliation within the society. Here...

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Posted in: CAT_Michigan,inequality,justice,race

Concrete sociological knowledge

Is there a place within the social sciences for the representation of concrete, individual-level experience?  Is there a valid kind of knowledge expressed by the descriptions provided by an observant resident of a specific city or an experienced traveler in the American South in the 1940s?  Or does social knowledge need to take the form of some kind of generalization about the social world?  Does sociology require that we go beyond the particulars of specific people and social arrangements?There is certainly a genre of social observation that serves just this intimate descriptive function: an astute, empathetic observer spends time in a location, meeting a number of people and learning a lot about their lives and thoughts.  Studs...

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Posted in: CAT_agency,Goffman,social cognition,social practice,sociology,verstehen

Short thoughts from Clifford Geertz

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 volume, Life among the Anthros and Other Essays, edited by Fred Inglis.  These range from his first contribution to NYRB in 1967, "Under the Mosquito Net," on Malinowski, to his last in 2005, "Very Bad News," a review of Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and Richard Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response.  A common theme across the essays is the often surprising...

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Posted in: CAT_disciplines

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 that the US labor market is fairly well integrated, and an extended period of unemployment and low wages leads workers to seek new opportunities in other regions. (Here is a recent book by Katz and a collaborator; The Race between Education and Technology.)What implications does this have for Michigan? Let's say that Michigan's unemployment rate will adjust to approximately the national rate by 2020, and that...

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Posted in: CAT_Michigan,economic development

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 at night, showing the concentration of lights across the country.  Basically the images correspond to where people live; where they travel; and where they exchange data.  Unsurprisingly, the maps line up very well.The most interesting question to consider is not the structure of the networks represented by air travel and internet activity.  The nodes of both...

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Posted in: CAT_structure,social networks,spatial pattern

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 order to bring the unemployment rate back to the 2002 levels (~6%), roughly 800,000 jobs need to be created; or else the working population needs to decline by about that much.  Assuming one dependent for each worker, that amounts to a loss of about 1.6 million people.  Other combinations are possible; create 400,000 jobs and only 800,000 Michigan residents would leave; etc.So what is...

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Posted in: CAT_Michigan,economic development,employment

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 scientists, or economists of the current generation to absorb from Marx as they construct their own hypotheses about social processes and organizations?Below are the concluding paragraphs of my 1986 book, The Scientific Marx.  Here I tried to assess whether the theories and frameworks that Marx advanced in Capital and his other scientific writings were of continuing relevance...

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Posted in: capitalism,CAT_foundations,Marx

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 seem to be several different lines of thought to pursue.First, we might have a small number of dimensions of goodness in mind -- something like a social welfare function -- and we might understand social progress as aggregate improvement with respect to these dimensions of welfare. Social progress is defined as "aggregate improvement in quality of life for the population" (income, health status, freedom), and it is achieved through a series of steps...

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Posted in: CAT_policy,democracy,justice

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. And solutions and strategies were put forward. Central themes included a range of strategies -- Create more jobs.... Improve K-12 schooling.... Create and retain more college graduates.... Improve the climate for business and entrepreneurs.... So there are ideas about what is needed, and there are organizations investing effort in achieving some of these goals.So why might one board the ferry from the island...

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Posted in: CAT_Michigan,economic development

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 order that does not yet exist.  And there is an implication that this better social order is not simply a marginal improvement over the current world, but rather a sweeping revamping of the institutions and practices that create the social order.  To be a utopian thinker is usually to have an intellectual disposition of impatience for small, gradual change.  Mill was patient and gradualist --...

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Posted in: agency,CAT_institutions,CAT_policy