Dlittle30

LATEST ARTICLES ( 899 )

• Life-course Histories and Methods

  

  source: G. Alter, "Completing Life Histories with Imputed Exit Dates" (link) I talked recently with George Alter, a leading historical demographer at the... Read more

  Posted on 12 July 2013 SOCIETY

• Graphing Metadata

  

  One element of the NSA revelations of the past month is the apparent fact that the NSA's PRISM program enables the agency to collect wholesale the transactions... Read more

  Posted on 07 July 2013 SOCIETY

• Marx's Thinking About Technology

  

  It sometimes seems as though there isn't much new to say about Marx and his theories. But, like any rich and prolific thinker, that's not actually true. Read more

  Posted on 05 July 2013 SOCIETY

• Causal Concepts

  

  source: D. Little, “Causal Explanation in the Social Sciences,” Southern Journal of Philosophy (1995) (link) It may be useful to provide a brief account of... Read more

  Posted on 04 July 2013 SOCIETY

• Social Causation

  

  The idea of social causation is a difficult one, as we dig more deeply into it. What does it mean to say that "poor education causes increased risk of... Read more

  Posted on 01 July 2013 SOCIETY

• Institutional Design for Democracies

  

  How can we design practical, effective, and fair institutions for making the basic decisions that are needed within a democratic government? Read more

  Posted on 27 June 2013 SOCIETY

• Institutional Designs for Progressive Reform

  

  One place where Jon Elster's philosophical thinking intersects with empirical social science is in the field of institutional design. Read more

  Posted on 22 June 2013 SOCIETY

• Alford Young on Race and Sociology

  

  Alford Young is professor of sociology at the University of Michigan and an expert on the life experience of inner-city African-American men. He is also chair o... Read more

  Posted on 20 June 2013 SOCIETY

• Causal Inference and Random Trials

  

  image: Tamil Nadu nutrition study Nancy Cartwright has spent much of her career probing the assumptions scientists make about causation. Read more

  Posted on 16 June 2013 SOCIETY

• Hacking on Kuhn

  

  The fourth edition of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions appeared in 2012, fifty years after its original appearance in 1962. Read more

  Posted on 13 June 2013 SOCIETY

• Change in Peasant China

  

  Image: Shanxi countryside In 1978 China's government initiated a major change in the agricultural economy. It began a rapid transition from communal... Read more

  Posted on 10 June 2013 SOCIETY

• Total Information Awareness?

  

  I'm finding myself increasingly distressed at this week's revelations about government surveillance of citizens' communications and Internet activity. Read more

  Posted on 07 June 2013 SOCIETY

• Lack of Character?

  

  image: Stanford prison experiment John Doris argues in Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior that the basic theory of action associated with virtue... Read more

  Posted on 02 June 2013 SOCIETY

• Unexpected Linkages

  One of the things that I find most interesting in social development is the discovery of unexpected linkages between innovations in one field and outcomes in... Read more

  Posted on 01 June 2013 SOCIETY

• Forum on Rural Areas and Peasants

  

  I've just spent an interesting several days in Wuhan at a conference on China's rural transformation. It was a genuinely productive conference, involving expert... Read more

  Posted on 29 May 2013 SOCIETY

• Levels of the Social

  

  We can examine social life at many levels of granularity -- from ordinary individual social behavior to small groups to cities and regions to the global system... Read more

  Posted on 20 May 2013 SOCIETY

• Observing Character Traits

  

  The key idea of moral character is that the actions individuals choose are influenced by enduring features of their mentality. Read more

  Posted on 19 May 2013 SOCIETY

• What About Marx?

  

  At various points since the death of Karl Marx in 1883 his work has been regarded as a dead issue -- no longer relevant, too ideological, methodologically... Read more

  Posted on 16 May 2013 SOCIETY

• RFP: Research on "understanding"

  

  Here is an exciting RFP for researchers in psychology, philosophy, and religious studies who are interested in "understanding". Read more

  Posted on 16 May 2013 SOCIETY

• Hirschman on the Passions

  

  Numerous previous posts have emphasized the importance of having a theory of the actor when we do social science or history. Are people impulsive, emotional,... Read more

  Posted on 15 May 2013 SOCIETY