{"id":2113,"date":"2017-04-05T09:33:23","date_gmt":"2017-04-05T07:33:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/variances.eu\/?p=2113"},"modified":"2020-05-13T15:11:23","modified_gmt":"2020-05-13T13:11:23","slug":"what-if-sociologists-had-as-much-influence-as-economists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/variances.eu\/?p=2113","title":{"rendered":"What if Sociologists Had as Much Influence as Economists?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Les \u00e9conomistes, n\u00e9cessaires ? oui. Suffisants ? probablement pas. C\u2019est l\u2019angle que d\u00e9veloppe cet article publi\u00e9 dans le New York Times il y a quelques jours. Interrogation pertinente aux lendemains – aux USA -, comme \u00e0 la veille – en Europe – d\u2019\u00e9lections pr\u00e9sidentielles ouvrant, \u00e0 n\u2019en point douter, sur de profondes r\u00e9flexions \u00e9conomiques et sociales.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Un article s\u00e9lectionn\u00e9 par Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Smadja <\/strong>(2000), le correspondant de Variances.eu aux Etats-Unis : l\u2019article, r\u00e9dig\u00e9 par\u00a0<\/em>Neil Irwin<\/a><\/span>, \u00a0a \u00e9t\u00e9 pr\u00e9c\u00e9demment publi\u00e9 dans le\u00a0\u00ab New York Times<\/a><\/span>\u00a0\u00bb<\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Walk half a city block in downtown Washington, and there is a good chance that you will pass an economist. People with advanced training in the field shape policy on subjects as varied as how health care is provided, broadcast licenses auctioned or air pollution regulated.<\/p>\n

Turn on cable news, and the guests who opine on the weighty public policy questions of the day quite often have some title like \u201cchief economist\u201d underneath their name. And there are economists sprinkled throughout the government \u2014 there is an entire council of them advising the president in most administrations, if not yet in this one.<\/p>\n

But as much as we love economics here \u2014 this column is named Economic View, after all \u2014 there just may be a downside to this one academic discipline having such primacy in shaping public policy.<\/p>\n

They say when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. And the risk is that when every policy adviser is an economist, every problem looks like inadequate per-capita gross domestic product.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Another academic discipline may not have the ear of presidents but may actually do a better job of explaining what has gone wrong in large swaths of the United States and other advanced nations in recent years.<\/p>\n

Sociologists<\/a><\/span> spend their careers trying to understand how societies work. And some of the most pressing problems in big chunks of the United States may show up in economic data as low employment levels and stagnant wages but are also evident in elevated rates of depression<\/a>, drug addiction<\/a><\/span> and premature death<\/a><\/span>. In other words, economics is only a piece of a broader, societal problem. So maybe the people who study just that could be worth listening to.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce economists have the ears of people in Washington, they convince them that the only questions worth asking are the questions that economists are equipped to answer,\u201d said Mich\u00e8le Lamont, a Harvard sociologist and president of the American Sociological Association. \u201cThat\u2019s not to take anything away from what they do. It\u2019s just that many of the answers they give are very partial.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a small corrective, I took a dive into some sociological research with particular relevance to the biggest problems facing communities in advanced countries today to understand what kinds of lessons the field can offer. In 1967, Senator Walter Mondale actually proposed a White House Council of Social Advisers<\/a><\/span>; he envisioned it as a counterpart to the well-entrenched Council of Economic Advisers. It was never created, but if it had been, this is the sort of advice it might have been giving recent presidents.<\/p>\n

For starters, while economists tend to view a job as a straightforward exchange of labor for money, a wide body of sociological research shows how tied up work is with a sense of purpose and identity.<\/p>\n

\u201cWages are very important because of course they help people live and provide for their families,\u201d said Herbert Gans, an emeritus professor of sociology at Columbia. \u201cBut what social values can do is say that unemployment isn\u2019t just losing wages, it\u2019s losing dignity and self-respect and a feeling of usefulness and all the things that make human beings happy and able to function.\u201d<\/p>\n

That seems to be doubly true in the United States. For example, Ofer Sharone, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, studied unemployed white-collar workers<\/a><\/span> and found that in the United States, his subjects viewed their ability to land a job as a personal reflection of their self-worth rather than as an arbitrary matter. They therefore took rejection hard, blaming themselves and in many cases giving up looking for work. In contrast, in Israel similar unemployed workers viewed getting a job as more like winning a lottery, and were less discouraged by rejection.<\/p>\n

It seems plausible that this helps explain why so many Americans who lost jobs in the 2008 recession have never returned to the labor force despite an improved job market. Mr. Sharone is working with career counselors to explore how to put this finding to work to help the long-term unemployed.<\/p>\n

Jennifer M. Silva of Bucknell University has in recent years studied young working-class adults<\/a><\/span> and found a profound sense of economic insecurity in which the traditional markers of reaching adulthood \u2014 buying a house, marrying, landing a steady job \u2014 feel out of reach.<\/p>\n

Put those lessons together, and you may think that the economic nostalgia<\/a><\/span> that fueled Donald J. Trump\u2019s presidential campaign was not so much about the loss of income from vanishing manufacturing jobs. Rather, it may be that the industrial economy offered blue-collar men a sense of identity and purpose that the modern service economy doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Sociology also offers important lessons about poverty that economics alone does not. \u201cEvicted,\u201d a much-heralded book<\/a><\/span> by the Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond, shows how the ever-present risk of losing a home breeds an insecurity and despondency among poor Americans.<\/p>\n

It works against the tendency to think about housing policy as solely a matter of which subsidy goes to whom and what incentives ought to be in place to encourage banks to lend in poor neighborhoods. All that stuff is important, of course, but doesn\u2019t really address the overwhelming challenge of insecurity that affects millions of people.<\/p>\n

And a large body of sociological research touches on the idea of stigmatization, including of the poor<\/a><\/span> and of racial minorities<\/a><\/span>. It makes clear that there are harder problems to solve around these issues than simply eliminating overt discrimination.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s one thing, for example, to outlaw housing discrimination based on race. But if real estate agents and would-be home sellers subtly shun minority buyers, the effect can be the same. Professor Gans of Columbia has argued for decades<\/a><\/span> that the stigmatization of poor Americans fuels entrenched, persistent poverty.<\/p>\n

If the White House Council of Social Advisers did exist, one of its great challenges would be to convert some of these findings into actual policy proposals that might help. Part of the ascendance of economics in the policy-making sphere comes from the fact that economists tend to spend more time looking at specific legislative or regulatory steps that could try to improve conditions.<\/p>\n

And trying to solve social problems is a more complex undertaking than working to improve economic outcomes. It\u2019s relatively clear how a change in tax policy or an adjustment to interest rates can make the economy grow faster or slower. It\u2019s less obvious what, if anything, government can do to change forces that are driven by the human psyche.<\/p>\n

But there is a risk that there is something of a vicious cycle at work. \u201cWhen no one asks us for advice, there\u2019s no incentive to become a policy field,\u201d Professor Gans said.<\/p>\n

It may be true that these lessons on identity and community don\u2019t lend themselves immediately to policy white papers and five-point plans. But a deeper understanding of them sure could help policy makers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Les \u00e9conomistes, n\u00e9cessaires ? oui. Suffisants ? probablement pas. C\u2019est l\u2019angle que d\u00e9veloppe cet article publi\u00e9 dans le New York Times il y a quelques jours. Interrogation pertinente aux lendemains – aux USA -, comme \u00e0 la veille – en Europe – d\u2019\u00e9lections pr\u00e9sidentielles ouvrant, \u00e0 n\u2019en point douter, sur de profondes r\u00e9flexions \u00e9conomiques et […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":2115,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sociologie","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/variances.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/variances.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/variances.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/variances.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/variances.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/variances.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2113\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/variances.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/variances.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/variances.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/variances.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}