Links for June, 2025
Black's Legacy, Academic Doom, Pseudohistory, Social Segmentation
Welcome to my monthly collection of links to interesting items from the interwebs. Consider becoming a paid subscriber for full access to the archives and my eternal gratitude.
Topic tags: Sociology, History, Academia, Theory
Sociology and its Discontents
The latest issue of The American Sociologist has a symposium, edited by yours truly, on “The Sociology and Legacy of Donald Black.” Here’s the article list:
“Sociological Beauty: The Aesthetics of Donald Black’s Corpus” by Mark Cooney.
“Violent Time, Violent Space: Donald Black and the Behavior of Violence” by Bradley Campbell.
“The Fate of Black’s Theory of Law” by Scott Phillips and Mark Cooney.
“Engineering Pure Sociology” by Daniel J. Boches, Kaiya R. Mayhew and Mark Cooney.
“A Legacy of Scientific Time: Black Swans, Black Holes, and Black Skies in Donald Black’s Social Geometry” by Ellis Godard.
“The Interdisciplinary Potential of Pure Sociology” by Jason Manning.
Though Black is my primary influence in this whacky field, I also have a lot of respect for theorist Jonathan Turner, who recently coauthored an article with Kevin McCaffree in Theory and Society on “A Strategy for Developing Explanatory Theories in Sociology.”
Part of their argument is the utility of making arguments in terms of propositions about the effects of variables on one another. One of Turner’s talents is abstracting such propositions from classical theorists like Spencer, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, and Marx. His book Classical Sociological Theory: A Positivists’ Perspective had a lot of influence on how I taught classical theory.
Turner is now editing Theory and Society, and the quality of the papers has greatly improved. Another item of interest from there is this panel discussion of “Sociology in Crisis.” I posted a podcast version of the discussion before, but if it’s here if you missed it. Here’s one choice quotation from the article version, from Bradley Campbell:
We have to ask ourselves how we can maintain ourselves as a field if we don’t have legitimacy in the larger society. I’m not surprised at all that there has been a turn against sociology and academia and universities from the right and from others. I’m not surprised at all that it happened.
I’m just surprised it took so long.
I mean, I’ve had colleagues who say—this is not a caricature, they explicitly say this—that sociology should be about leftwing activism. Whether it is the ASA talking about “liberatory praxis” or the late Michael Burawoy years ago talking about “public sociology,” through which he wanted the field to advance democratic socialism.
For all the people who wanted it to be activist instead of scientific, why did they expect people to keep funding it?
The Academic Game
They probably don’t want to be lumped in with us sociologists, but also in Theory and Society is this piece by Calvin Isch, Philip E. Tetlock, and “Hardcory” Clark: “Reflections on Adversarial Collaboration from the Adversaries: Was It Worth It?” Adversarial collaborations are when scholars who have opposite theories or claims have to work together to design and implement research on them — something that ought to prevent either from stacking the deck in favor of his ideas. One side effect:
A surprising theme that emerged from many participants was an increase in skepticism toward behavioral science. As one scholar admitted, “I have become more convinced that a considerable number of experiments are designed in ways which are conducive to supporting an argument. It has made me more skeptical about the literature.” This heightened skepticism appears to stem from the process of ACs, which expose scholars to the unstated assumptions underlying research designs and highlight how differing perspectives can lead to contrasting inferences from the same results.
Pointer from Rob Sica.
At The Eternally Radical Idea, Robert Shipley asks “Is Harvard Doomed?” Like many doom and gloom discussions of the academy, it starts from the Replication Crisis and the fact that institutions like Harvard have done little or nothing to combat it. It then goes on to talk about enforcement of orthodoxy, censorship, and blatant racial discrimination.
Harvard’s position as the standard-bearer for higher ed, and therefore for its unpopularity, obviously doesn’t justify the government’s circumvention of the legal process. But the university is also a big enough institution to know that being legally in the right is not an ironclad guarantee that you’re always going to win.
….Harvard…spent decades burning through the public goodwill that had long made the kind of federal action being taken by the Trump administration unthinkable. And with its years-long and ultimately failed crusade against its fraternities, sororities, and elite “final clubs,” it even managed to alienate many of the elites who might otherwise have its back.
Institutions don’t usually go this far out of their way to make enemies.
I suppose an institution can be so comfortable in its position that any sort of serious damage to reputation or finances is unthinkable. But the unthinkable has precedent. In a piece at Law&Liberty, Helen Dale writes:
I live in a country that once had institutions many times richer (in relative terms) than Harvard, Penn, or MIT. And in four short years—1536 to 1540—all of them had passed into history. Attempts to revive them at the highest level less than 20 years later failed. I speak, of course, of Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries.
She sees analogies between the state of England’s monasteries on the eve of their dissolution and the state of modern universities, and holds out the Dissolution as warning:
There had been monasteries in England since the sixth century. In less than 20 years, the country’s monastic impulse was extinguished. Word to the universities: nothing lasts forever.
There are figures in academia trying to steer the institutions in smarter directions. Over at the Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter, psychologist Steve Stewart-Wiliams responds to his own university’s DEI plans with advice to “avoid the kinds of missteps we’ve seen on some American campuses.” For instance:
One proposal that I think is very reasonable is gender-blind and ethnicity-blind initial screening of CVs during the hiring process. This is a relatively low-cost intervention. And unlike some more heavy-handed approaches, it automatically guards against bias in every direction - e.g., not just bias against female applicants, but also bias against males, which the research shows sometimes happens (see here and here).
He also drags in empirical evidence on the effectiveness of implicit bias trainings and trigger warnings. <irony> I’m sure it will be welcomed. </irony>
History Schmistory
The shortcomings of left-dominated academia shouldn’t lead one to think every right-wing contrarian take is correct. Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) likes to poke holes in institutionalized narratives, such as reminding his readers that a third or more of colonial Americans were against independence from Britain. But he put his foot in it with a recent claim that the US mass murdered thousands of German POWs during World War II. At Not with a Bang, Arctotherium presents the evidence against this “Right-Wing Pseudohistory.”
The US did indeed slap together extremely rough open-air concentration camps for German POWs when the collapse of the Reich, and flight from the Soviets, meant they suddenly had millions of prisoners and no infrastructure for dealing with them.
This legal and logistical context is why German POWs were not classified as POWs and suffered in muddy fields surrounded by barbed wire with inadequate food for several months. This could have ended disastrously. Only timely US intervention saved ~200,000 Germans held in French camps from starving (152), and the annualized death rate for the worst six weeks (May 1 to June 15 1945) in the 16 worst camps (the infamously overcrowded Rhine Meadow Camps) “would have been 35.6 per thousand, or 3.56 percent.” But these conditions did not continue (90). Allied officials fortunately got the situation under control before major disease outbreaks or starvation occurred, and there were no mass deaths.
….Given the known numbers and distribution of unaccounted-for German soldiers above, the highest plausible total death rate of German POWs in American hands during WWII was around 1%, with about 56,000 out of five million dying (20). This is about the same as the American POW death rate in German hands. For context, around 30% of Americans and British in Japanese hands or Germans in Soviet hands died, as did 60% of Soviets in German hands. It’s easy to see why Germans were so desperate to surrender to Yarvin’s genocidal New Deal regime in 1945.
I get the appeal of shaking people out of the simplified kids’ version of WWII where the “good guys” do no wrong. But one should be wary of reflexively contrarian inversions, or of thinking that the darkest story is always the more accurate one.
Arctotherium condemns false atrocity stories from either side of the political spectrum:
I hate historical blood libels with a passion. That applies to fake genocides in Canadian residential schools, absurdly inflated death numbers in King Leopold’s Congo, the $45 trillion not stolen from British India, the elevation of the Tulsa race riot to a massacre, and to this garbage.
FYI, I classify Yarvin/Moldbug as a conflict theorist, similar to Karl Marx. Judged as theorists, both have interesting ideas but lack testable propositions. (Edit: Maybe Jonathan Turner could extract some.)
Also on the topic of history:
X user Stilicho points out that the classic BBC series “In Search of the Dark Ages” is available on Youtube. The first episode is on Boudica. The old synthesizer soundtrack reminds me of Hitchhiker’s Guide. See also the now-Youtubed BBC series “In Search of Troy.”
Horrid History has a video on the Starving Time in Jamestown: “They Ate the Dead to Survive.” I talk a bit about the Starving Time in the “Bloody Tidewater” episode of my Collective Violence podcast, which covers the period from Jamestown’s founding up through Bacon’s Rebellion. I don’t promote it as often as I should, since I’m a little embarrassed about repeatedly mispronouncing governor Berkeley’s name, but it’s good stuff!
And on X, Phil Metzger has a good thread on the history of numbers, focusing on why the early entries on Sumerian King List are men with impossibly long lives: This doesn’t necessarily mean the early kings were mythical — it’s that early number systems varied across cities and regions, and so Sumerians compiling records from various sources might have been misinterpreting different numerical bases.
Social Segmentation
In the study of social stratification, vertical segmentation exists to the extent the status distribution is less a smooth continuum than distinct ranks. High segmentation tends to go along with low vertical mobility — movement from one rank to another.
Along these lines, Byrne Hobart asks “What Ever Happened to Working Your Way Up from the Mailroom?” He gives some famous accounts of men who started off in menial positions and worked their way up to head of the company, and asks why these stories are mostly old — why isn’t this kind of career path more common nowadays?
His answer is that’s it’s largely a result of greater market efficiency — smart and talented people are less likely to wind up in unskilled, low-value positions in the first place. The kind of guy who in the 1907 be a high-school dropout who worked his way up from the mailroom would nowadays never avoid graduating, going to college, and starting off his career in somewhere higher than the bottom rung.
On X, Chris Arnade — who worked in finance before deciding to walk the earth — adds: “Over my career it went from a healthy dose of back office guys turned MDs running stuff, to entirely MBAs or PhDs.” Megan McArdle also brings up credentials:
When I started in IT consulting in the 1990s, my boss said “on the first six months of this job, all you need to be able to do is breathe and carry a tool bag”. One of our best network engineers had been a porter at a bank where my firm did work, and the best guy I worked with was a former religious studies major from Swarthmore. The best guy *he* had ever worked with was an orthodox guy who had gotten his start at a 47th street camera store. By the time I left we were hiring people with CS degrees, and 10 years later STEM BA was de rigeur. Mobility pipeline had silted up.
More evidence that the great Coming Apart and/or credentialism has increased vertical segmentation and led to less mobility between strata.
You can also get a kind of converging cultural and economic segmentation where one distinct cultural group virtually monopolizes a particular industry or occupation. At Aporia, Arctotherium examines “Non-linear Ethnic Niches.” For examples:
If you want to join Britain’s thriving cocaine smuggling industry, you have to be Albanian. There’s no a priori reason why this should be the case. Albanians do not have a racial, cultural, geographic or political affinity for Colombian narcotics. A reasonable and informed observer in 2000 would not have predicted that they would come to dominate the industry….
This phenomenon isn’t unique to criminal enterprises. Chaldeans control 90% of the grocery stores in Detroit. 40% of the truck drivers in California are Sikh, and about a third of US Sikhs are truck drivers. About 95% of the Dunkin’ Donuts stores in Chicago and the Midwest are owned by Indians, mostly Gujarati Patels. In New England and New York, 60% of Dunkin’ Donuts stores are operated by Portuguese immigrants. 90% of the liquor stores in Baltimore are owned by Koreans.
A friend once pointed out that the percentage of Catholics on the Supreme Court was triple the percentage for the US population, and that these sorts of specializations are just the sort of thing that happens in a free and diverse society. And as with vertical segmentation, the upside in many cases is that it’s an outcome of society funneling talent efficiently — if the best math students skew Asian, having a mostly Asian math Olympiad team just means you’re selecting your team well.
But Arctotherium is arguing that in many other cases ethnic specializations are orthogonal to talent distributions and can result in tipping points where ethnic outsiders have difficulty breaking into the occupation regardless of their own talent. It’s the sort of complaint people have made in the past about White Anglo-Saxon Protestants having a lock on Ivy League schools or high-status professions. But Arcto (who I’d never heard of prior to citing him twice in this roundup) is pointing out that this can occur with minorities in a pluralistic society as well. Focusing on the downsides, he writes:
The key point is that immigration fractures national markets. Once a niche is taken over, outsiders can no longer compete in that niche…..
What this means is that in vocations taken over by non-linear ethnic niches, modern-day multi-ethnic Chicago has a smaller talent pool to draw from than the smaller but more homogenous4 Chicago of generations past, and the same goes for many American cities.
Whether you focus on the downsides or not, it’s a fascinating post with many examples. For instance, I was vaguely aware that Indians had largely taken over the hotel industry in many areas, but I was being far too general: 42% of US hotels and motels are owned specially by Gujaratis, mostly with the surname Patel.
The Patel motel cartel got its start with an illegal immigrant, Kanjibhai Desai, in the 1940s. The initial attraction for Patels was that motel ownership did not require English proficiency, and as with the Cambodians, Patel motel owners were able to use informal ethnic loan networks and immigrant family labor brought in via family reunification to undercut their American competitors.
Vertical segmentation and horizontal segmentation might converge in something like a caste system:
The extreme example of non-linear ethnic niches20 is India, where practically every economic niche is locked down by an endogamous caste, a system that is thousands of years old.
Interesting throughout.
The Miscellaneous Remainder
Blackshoe’s Book Dumpster reviews the memoir of a merchant mariner.
I haven’t yet processed this interview between Peter Thiel and Ross Douthat, but it’s self-recommending.
Steve Stewart-Williams talks about the psychology of victimhood. As a sociologist who cowrote a book on victimhood culture, I find it notable that psychologists have run with the topic a lot more than sociologists have.
Speaking of my books: I guess I’m not above continuing to hawk Working on the Water, a book aimed at younger readers that explains the work of commercial fishermen on Chincoteague Island, the Delmarva Peninsula, and the Chesapeake Bay: It’s available from Amazon in hardcover and paperback!
I think it’s of broader interest, but I did write the book mainly to educate my kids. At the Art of Manliness, Brett McKay discusses “The Dad Instinct: How Fathers Prepare Kids for the Wider World.”
Adam Strandberg searches for the origin of the implausible claim that chess grandmaster’s burn 6,000 calories per day during tournaments and concludes that primatologist Robert Sapolsky made it up.
I know Sapolsky from his work on baboons and liked his book A Primate’s Memoir, so I have no urge to beat up on him. But it looks like he’s a bit sloppy and credulous when it comes to claims about humans. On X, science critic Literal Banana complains of Sapolsky continuing to cite victims of the replication crisis and studies exposed as fraudulent:
I'm reading Robert Sapolsky's Determined: Life Without Free Will as a mild form of self harm and here are two perfect pages - ego depletion, surgeon's birthdays, Francesca Gino/Dan Ariely study, implicit bias, hungry judges - all on the same page!!!
The final note: I haven’t had a new song stuck in my head for a long time, so I might as well share this one with you: “Glorious Death” by Norfrica, the collaboration of Dan Vasc and Eric July based on a fictional band in July’s comics.
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Substacks cited in this post:
; ; (Steve Stewart-Williams); (Not With a Bang) ;