tech support?

Jeremy used to maintain the look of this blog. Is there anybody with admin privileges who can figure out why the format went wonky and fix it? I think this involves knowing things about WordPress. If you know how to fix it but don’t have admin privileges, let me know and I can fix your permissions.

“the history and politics of public finance” grad student workshop at ssha

Are you a graduate student interested in the history of public finance and all things tax-related? Are you free on Wednesday, November 16th? If so, you should apply to the 8th Annual Graduate Student Workshop on The History and Politics of Public Finance, taking place the day before the Social Science History Association’s annual meeting in Chicago. It’s a great event, and a wonderful group of scholars. The details are below. There will also be many panels related to public finance at SSHA, organized by the new Public Finance network. Non-graduate students interested in participating in those should contact the organizers as well.

“the big short” and the most ironic quote misattribution ever

I really enjoyed The Big Short. It’s totally entertaining, and captures some hard to explain and very interesting dynamics in the lead-up to the housing crisis and the eventual bursting of the bubble. That said, the movie had some significant issues. For example, it overstates how few people saw the crash coming. Many people were aware of the housing bubble, but only a few were able to figure out how to make money off of it – and just had bad it was going to get. Michael Grunwald has a new piece that does a nice job pointing to three other problems: the movie overstates the importance of complex derivatives, understates the role of stupidity vs. evil, and downplays the significance of post-crisis reforms.

These are all good points, though not completely without controversy. I think an economic sociology class that spent several weeks on the crisis could usefully watch this movie and read some of the criticisms and have a very healthy discussion of crises, responsibility, and how we narrate the past (and maybe maybe throw in a discussion of sexism in both the financial industry and in Hollywood).

All of that’s really just setup though, to my biggest pet peeve about the movie.

morris, the scholar denied

I read Aldon Morris’s much-anticipated book, The Scholar Denied, with great interest. I heard Morris talk about the book when he visited UNC last year, and have read and taught some shorter work he’s published from this project. I was not disappointed – it’s a great book, meticulously documented, passionately argued, and sure to correct many important parts of the historical record on the development of American sociology. I learned quite a bit about W. E. B. du Bois’s life and intellectual productivity. Separating the book’s argument into three related claims, I find the first two fully demonstrated. However, I remain unsure of the third, most ambitious, case the book tries to defend.

they like us, they really like us! hoff and stiglitz on sociology

Karla Hoff of the World Bank and Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia have a new working paper out, Striving for Balance in Economics: Towards a Theory of the Social Determination of Behavior. The paper is an attempt to convince economists to go beyond the psychologically-informed actor of behavioral economics and embrace an “enculturated actor”, rooted in research from social psychology and even our own sociology. I found the table on page 10 especially useful as a summary one could share with students of the contrast between the “standard” economics of perfect rationality to the now-traditional behavioral economics actor of imperfect rationality and the enculturated actor informed by sociology.

online student evaluations?

The topic here is online vs. paper evaluations of course by students. I’m a department chair. The staff person who handles our paper evaluations (mandatory for instructors to administer) says we’d save a lot of labor with online evaluations, agrees that the problem with online evaluations is low response rates, and asks whether this could be solved by not releasing a student’s grade until they have done the evaluation. What is the experience on other campuses? What are response rates to online evaluations? Are there any systems in place to require that students evaluate? NOTE: Students can turn in a blank evaluation form or refuse to fill it out, and the staff member proposes that the student’s right not to respond could be coupled with mandatory evaluation by having the first question be “I prefer not to answer” which would get credit for doing the evaluation. What are your campus’s policies?