At priceonomics, a discussion of a classic psychological experiment goes on to consider the social forces which encourage the work ethic: …when South Korea and China were mired in poverty, Westerners described their people as hopelessly lazy, with a culture that did not value industriousness and taking initiative. As time has shown, however, this is not…
A neat digest from xkcd of worries about the pace of modern life here, including the following from 1907: Our modern family gathering, silent around the fire, each individual with his head buried in his favourite magazine, is the somewhat natural outcome of the banishment of colloquy from the school. Meanwhile, one hundred and four…
Business Insider discusses a recent report from the Pew Research Global Attitudes Project entitled ‘The Global Divide on Homosexuality’ which finds strong links between GDP, religion and tolerance: If you want to be accepted, your best bet is a rich country full of Catholics. Full Business Insider article here.
At ‘Africa Is A Country’, Siddhartha Mitter discusses Max Fisher‘s article ‘A fascinating map of the world’s most and least racially tolerant countries’, derived from World Values Survey data: We are left with a shiny color-coded “fascinating map” on the Washington Post site that sends a strong message of Western, Anglo-Saxon moral superiority, assorted with…
In his ‘Theory of Economic Development’ (1911), Joseph Schumpeter notes the importance of innovation and the role of the entrepreneur in economic growth. Specifically, the importance of carrying out ‘new combinations’ is emphasised, yet whilst the innovative entrepreneur has a creative role here, Schumpeter notes in later work that, I have always emphasized that the…
As the riff from ‘Celebrity Skin’ starts up after Courtney Love shocks the establishment prudes in her recent e-cigarette commercial, thoughts naturally turn to some other work from the late 1990s – Thomas Frank’s ‘Commodify Your Dissent’: Corporate America is not an oppressor but a sponsor of fun, provider of lifestyle accoutrements, facilitator of carnival,…
At thetangential.com, Jay Gabler responds to the recent n+1 editorial ‘Too Much Sociology’: …sociology has provided many explanations for the rise of sociology, among them Émile Durkheim’s theory of functional differentiation and Max Weber’s theory of rationalization. Durkheim and Weber both predicted that as a society, we would increasingly come to see ourselves in rational—that…
In spite of much ado about inaccurate calculations in Reinhart and Rogoff’s influential ‘Growth in a Time of Debt’ (e.g. ‘European austerity programmes based on an excel error?’), Matthew Klein at Bloomberg argues that… When it comes to policymaking, this news changes very little: the Reinhart-Rogoff paper was always a flimsy justification for fiscal austerity.…
At Oxford Sociology, Colin Mills discusses ‘The Great British Class Survey’, and its implications for sociology: I don’t find A New Model of Social Class: Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey Experiment a very impressive piece of work. Its high profile in the media is, I think, not a positive thing for British…
Over at normblog, Norman Geras and Mark Harvey question Marx’s theories regarding where value arises within capitalist systems: Labour-power, cornerstone of his theory of value and exploitation, is not amenable to being described or theorized by reference to some standard, universalizable labouring-situation, which might then be captured in a mathematically expressible schema. For there is…