Uncategorized – Holley Sociology

Why Can’t Experts Understand Wall Street and the Fed? The Missing Sociology

I have just watched Frontline’s “The Power of the Fed” (PBS 13th July 2021) and witnessed interviews with a whole range of financial people, though no politicians, who one might expect to have clear opinions about the money they vote to spend. Here some thoughts.

The Fed (US Federal Reserve, America’s central bank) has spent trillions of dollars, after 2008 (due to the mortgage lending collapse) and again in 2020 (due to the Covid-19 pandemic), on boosting the economy in ways that are utterly new.
Its employees and advisors are evidently incapable of understanding or explaining the Fed’s policies in recent years which are, admittedly, very new.
Some, often older, people inside or close to it, think the Fed is seriously wrong in the effects it is having. e.g. not helping ‘widget’ making (metal bashing) industries, not helping ordinary or low income people.
Most commentators agree that, at present, it is impossible to find the price of a business; a corporation may look overburdened with debt and about to collapse – but suddenly its stock increases hugely in value due to Federal Reserve support.
Commentators confine their analysis to within the United States. They ask ‘Is it good for America?’ But maybe the problem is broader than American markets or whether U.S. politicians can be regulate banking.
With today’s connectedness, shouldn’t we be analyzing New York (‘Wall Street), and London (‘The City’) in the context of the banking needs of the entire World?

As a sociologist, what do I think of this? To me what is obviously missing is the phenomenon of youth. Young people are a whole cluster who are active in society. What is fascinating about this group is that they are simultaneously sociological and economic. Young people are capable of creating shared styles of consumption, so they must be active sociologically to be able to stamp things with their generational mark. At the same time, youth is important for its size and the variety of industries that dependent on its purchasing; these must keep up with youth’s changing demand for new styles and expression though objects. I like to call this combination ‘econo-sociology.’

What follows from this is that sociologists need to rethink youth as a phase of life and conceptualize how it collectively influences society. Economists need to change too. Their explanations of consumption and the economy should include demographics and the innovation that comes from the ‘invisibles’ needed by generations of youth. In my view, the problem of trying to understand ‘The Fed’ means understanding what today’s econo-sociology really is.

First, our economy and polity are not what they were a century ago when central banks and current textbooks about economics came into being. The old thinking saw economic activity as sales on Main Street/ High Street and business responding by making ‘widgets’ in metal bashing factories. And all this happened within one country. So its central bank, a political institution of one country, could control the economy by finding the right policies.

As the documentary, ‘The Power of the Fed,’ showed, old assumptions evidently no longer work. The economy is now international – consider exporters like China, sovereign funds, and global supply lines. Leading economies have earnings from ‘invisibles’ such as finance and banking, youth consumption, and knowledge services. All these require the hiring of talent, not just routine workers. All these show economy now combining itself with sociology. Consider how world-wide consumers of popular culture, smaller family size, parents investing in education and enriching experiences for youth all put new requirement on businesses. They must collect new information, organize talent in new ways, and discover new routes for delivering product. Together, these are enough to explain why prices no longer guide businesses, or the Fed to the right policies.

Current confusion among public policy experts indicates that we need a new social science, an econo-sociology, to show what an old institution like the Fed needs to do. Right now, due to a missing social science of what is actually happening in the world, nobody today can say what the Fed ought to be doing and why. It’s time for this to change!

After a Crisis – What Can We Expect?

Here is a list of things we know about crises that have been observed in the past.

The events of crisis reverse our collective life back to conditions in the past. We start having to live like our ancestors in various stressful, primitive, and diminished ways.
- What gets sacrificed are the higher level needs we love as our quality of life.
- The reported news, expressed by government officials and reported by mainstream media, if it starts out in denial, typically ends up stressing the bad, demanding that people observe rules, deny themselves, and subordinate how they live to the need for getting through the crisis, preventing deaths, etc.
- All this personal sacrifice leads some leaders to demand that a better society should emerge after the crisis. Others expect a return to the old normality just like it was before.
- What does not appear to happen is a permanent collapse; recovery usually happens fast, some of it expressed by exuberance of the survivors.

Why do sudden ‘events,’ however fast happening, violent and dangerous, rarely inflict long term damage? Do we have an explanation for this? Natural disasters and disease are not expressions of society. When these external tragedies pop up, they make society fail. But society comes back as soon as its steady, continuous processes restart; these pick up and revive individuals and quickly aggregate into generating processes within society.

After the worst of the crisis is over, people start rethinking about it more calmly. What do we personally, and social collectively, want to prioritized next? Is there a take away lesson to be learnt from the crisis? At such a moment in time, people will bring to mind their varied experiences. Many will have things to grieve, the crisis having forced some people to suffer loss and others to be denied things that couldn’t happen. During the crisis, the immediate stress raised antagonisms: those who wanted lockdown demanded everyone conform as a matter of continuing to breathe, as a issue of life and death; those who bore the loss of higher level need for relationships met in contravention of some these official rules. The details of which public policies were efficacious, by how much, and whether something entirely different can be done next time, will be debated as long as this particular crisis is discussed.

After a disaster, Rosling’s advice is helpful; we should keep two contrasting ideas in our minds at the same time. People didn’t all suffer the same way, but all real experiences should be recognized and validated. Multiple ways of looking at what went on will continue to be needed. At the same time, around us, we will see societies rebuilding themselves. Modern countries don’t depend on the political. Society is resilient; the pop-ups of crisis are event driven and disappear fast. As a crisis ends, our sociology, economy, and popular culture provide many routes back into sustainable and supportive life. This rapid revival reminds us how resilient and constructive our underlying shared progress really is. But because of what people suffered, the crisis must not be forgotten. Those losses sustained during the disaster will later be able to be discussed more sympathetically and constructively. In the end, I remain optimistic that a catastrophe can be overcome, first by the rapid reappearance of society, second, by a sustained reflection on what different kinds of people suffered.

Goodbye to 2020 and the Trump Years

I’m not a specialist in politics, but 2020 is being characterized as the end of some highly political years, terminating in the departure of President Trump. Today (30^th December, 2020) BBC World News on APM Radio interviewed a couple of reporters on how they had been covering the news. To my disappointment, this whole discussion was dismally narrow – filled with serious misconceptions about politics and ignoring the most relevant facts about wider society. I thought to myself, social science hasn’t done a good job if this is how it is being presented by a leading news organization. Even as a non-specialist, I feel compelled to point out some ways that politics, an older part of society, can be better framed and understood more clearly.

Current events have again reminded me that the most relevant feature of politics is its evident long term decline. The political power of states has been in relative decline for centuries, as the economy and, later, our collective sociology have increased their own importance. The Trump years have simply made this decline more obvious. In this context, defining Trump as ‘populist’ and and his term in office as ‘a bid for power by a dangerous man’ misses the broader context of increasing irrelevance of the state. This analysis can be illustrated by recalling that his initial electoral claim to build a border wall amounted, in practice, to nothing and yet this didn’t hurt his support base. Trumpism is better understood as a desperate and narrowly party political effort to rally votes and stay in office by creating endless publicity stunts that entertained his known audience – those who ‘don’t care’ and feel ‘left out of progress.’ This demographic has been pretty clearly identified and is widely recognized. The narrowness of this gambit is easy to see.

Far from being a grab for state power, Trump’s rapid rise and fall reveals a pathetic and doomed effort to retain the appearance of the long vanished strong state. Anyone aware of history can see that the real mechanisms of progress today include the economy and, more so, our shared sociology. (I am aware that a few die hard political academics still cling to the quaint notion that politics is ‘society’s one and only expression of collective purpose.’ While this was plausible in Ancient Athens, most thinkers accept that modern society relies on its economy – and its sociology.)

So my dismay at hearing the BBC tell me that two reporters thought the Trump White House was a fun gig for reporters to cover was disappointingly narrow. It told me that journalism really doesn’t understand what is important. Twenty four hour coverage of elected leaders and, with a straight face, tirelessly reporting their mendacities and stunts was not a helpful contribution to public knowledge. It exaggerated the trivial and offered no understanding of either the limits of central government or the real sources of economic and social change. Actual governments today have to listen; all their lower branches – legislative, state, municipal, and civil service – have to reconcile multiple conflicting interests. The populace, rallied at intervals to become an electorate, doesn’t spend most of its time thinking politically – whatever the Twitter and news reports say. People correctly spend most of their time following other sources of information and entertainment. Better illustrations of men’s collective efforts in teams can be found in professional sports leagues, and go to video blogs if you want to discover new trends – you’ll find reports on consumables and personal relationships. These entertainments are where we find today’s the real ‘influencers.’ The occasional loud-mouthed bully who, for a few years, occupies some buildings of faded power is rightly seen as irrelevant, as evidenced by how quickly after an election both the population’s opposition to and support for a politician disappear.

After hearing reporters describe their political tunnel vision, what is most seriously disappointing is that, in fact, some very interesting social movements did arise, mostly in opposition to the Trump rhetoric and its implications. The #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter had huge influence, not just in the US but world wide; these present challenges for all people to understand and respond to, including us social scientists. How nice it would have been to have a report on these, the unintended effects of the Trump movement. How much more practical it would have been for news organizations to send well-informed reporters to cover ordinary people’s protests and seek out what galvanized them into action.

Instead, what we got was narrow political coverage and this tells me that news reporting hasn’t caught up with how society has changed. The myth of state power lingers on, despite the evidence that ordinary people now make the crucial judgements about where society is going. Where are people expressing these critical desires and aspirations? The answer will take serious effort in studying people’s economic and sociological action. When will such valuable studies of society be undertaken and reported helpfully? We don’t know, but what the year 2020 has proved again is that the answers won’t be found in the press conferences and Tweets of one elected official.

Health Care versus Society

The present corona virus crisis gives us lots to think about. Lessons will be learned when it is all over. But right now, why is there no discussion of the “lockdown” policy now used by most countries, including the ones I know best, the US and the UK?

What happens when we ask people to give up their ordinary lives? And is this really the best approach? In hindsight we may know the answer, but shouldn’t we be asking right now if this is really the way we want to go?

Different countries show us alternatives. Ordinary life is still going on in the streets of Singapore; the only people quarantined are those who test positive for the virus. The Netherlands keeps life’s sociology going by letting this virus run its course just as the seasonal flu does. Here are two countries that preserve the precious relationships that wrap around private life and make possible modern society.

So why have so many countries sacrificed social activities in the name of health? And why has questioning of this policy been unreported? Lockdown means putting everybody’s needs beneath those of hospitals. This is a truly weird reversal. The usual purpose of health care is to put people first and ask health care providers to help the sick. Lockdown reverses this logic. It asks all people, healthy and potentially sick alike, to give up their normal lives and rescue hospitals from an embarrassing flood of patients, who in reality need only minimal care.

How did the medical professionals around hospitals, win the policy battle? The university medical reports that turned Prime Minister Johnson around give us a clue. The medical profession’s own sense of prestige, I suggest, is opposed to turning the pinnacle of scientific medicine, the hospital, into what is essentially a medieval fever house. Waiting for patients’ fevers to pass, with a little oxygen to help breathing, adds nothing to a hospital in terms of science, research, grants, publications, professional prestige, and its reputation with the public. It seems to me that the corona virus threatens the hospitals with a return to medieval medicine – before there was science, pharmaceuticals, and technology.

Did America, the UK, and other countries throw their sociological lives into lockdown for this reason? And has the cost of suppressing every single person actually been measured? Let’s look at what is being destroyed here. Stripped away from everybody are their birthdays, weddings, funerals, entertainments, travel, education, examinations, admission to careers, working lives, businesses, the national economy and world trade. From this list of ill effects, those that are economic may be recognized first. But underlying these, and carrying their own hazards and losses, are what we should understand as the living web of sociology – people’s careers, creativity, physical and mental health, life plans, intimate relationships, and happiness in the long term. In a weird reversal, our nations prioritized the prestige of high tech medicine over the needs of ordinary people. And, in the end, will this lockdown prove to have been really necessary? Let’s hope that critical thinkers will look back at this moment in history and find ways for future societies to value their collective sociology.

Getting Your Theory Paper Published

As someone who works on theory myself and would love to have my own articles published, I was excited to read a recent Twitter thread by a journal reviewer who tells us how to correct common faults. Cite previous publications, help build theory, add only one or two new things, and include the empirical evidence that your ideas explain – these are some of the big do’s. This advice is practical, straight forward, and shows us how to give journal editors what they are looking for. So, maybe, all we have to do is follow the rules. But strangely, it seems that authors of papers keep repeating the errors; they start afresh, ignore past theory, are too complicated, and don’t include empirical evidence. Something strange is clearly bedeviling sociological theory.

Could the persistent failures of theory authors be telling us that educated sociologists cannot keep it simple? Why can’t they build on past sociologists? Is there a deeper problem here? Are sociologists wrongly trained or is it just that existing theory is impossible to build on? To me, this situation looks like it needs a ‘reverse hermeneutic’ analysis.

‘Building on past work,’ I twist the ideas of Habermas (1970) and Giddens (1982) around and run the hermeneutic in the opposite direction. Sociologists should not assume that the clients of any institution, in this case the publisher of a journal, are simply stubborn and resistant to learning. ‘Using the empirical evidence’ that writers get things wrong, we can draw a reverse inference. Perhaps theorists, and sociologists generally, cannot get from current theory what they really need. Maybe popular ‘ignorance’ is telling us that current theory, even when added to bit by bit, isn’t delivering for them? Isn’t the real problem that aspiring sociologists need practical explanations of society and how its people connect with it? If adding ‘itty bitty’ to theory is itself the problem, because it doesn’t weave society together conceptually, this may explain why every new article attempts to create, de novo, what is currently absent from theory.

I sympathize with these struggling theorists. I too want to work in a discipline that can define its main macro concept, society. I’m working on the answer myself but I would love to discover that someone else has done the hard work and put together a connected theory. What I am sure of is that this won’t happen by adding a few bite-sized concepts to existing theorists. So, while the reviewer offers us practical advice for getting published, my bet is that authors will continue to submit awkward, complex and non-incremental theory manuscripts. Sociologists evidently want something better from their theory; let’s hope we can soon explain society’s big questions in a conceptually connected way. On that day, authors, journal editors, reviewers, and practical sociologists will all be happier.

Unpaid Work in the Future

Two interesting cases of unpaid creative work have recently come to my attention. CBS News reports that Steven Pruit has contributed three million edits to Wikipedia, all unpaid since he is not their employee. Around the same time, I read that 19 year-old Rachel McMahon has created hundreds of quizzes for BuzzFeed, also unpaid and largely unrecognized (intelligencer, 1 January 2019). For me, these cases highlight a puzzling contradiction about creative work and paid employment.

My first question was how these people manage to support themselves. Pruit is reported to have a day job and McMahon is still a teenager and presumably supported by public investment in education and her parents. My next thought was that surely millions of people also want to be creative, are inspired by voluntary action and can contribute enormously to society. So why is work currently organized in the form known to sociologists as the Weberian formal organization?

Today’s businesses want their employees to be enthusiastic; they search for this when they interview job candidates. Employers know they need the creativity and passion of those they hire. For their part, young people now talk about ‘their dream job,’ which means work they also want work that is interesting and pays enough. But the business firm coerces its employees, for example by bribing them with pay incentives and threatening them with dismissal. These produce internal distortions and inflexibility. For example, people hang on to their money and then cannot move to the work that most attracts them. Individual firms become less creative and society as a whole cannot use all its available talent. Beyond this, a large part of the population isn’t in the paid labour force at all.

Thinking about the future, how can society escape the limitations of the business organization? Can we do better than the ‘labour contract’ as a way of mobilizing people? Could people use other ways to express their creativity and aggregate their ability to cooperate? We sociologists should be able to imagine better ways to organize people’s work. Any solution seems to me to require the separation of livelihood income from the locations where people express their creativity. This is what both Pruit and McMahon do, by different means. Both sides of this problem need rethinking. Perhaps informal and transient associations can be more effective than formal organizations. And income sufficient for a decent living could come other than from wages – we need to think about micro-payments, ownership and taxation as possible sources of economic livelihood. The first society that can free creativity from subsistence will surely benefit everyone.

Do We Live in the Dark Ages of Social Science?

Society holds a strange ontological status. People know it exists but no-one can define it.

Margaret Thatcher’s famous comment, that “there is no such thing as society,” appears to address the first statement but is actually an affirmation of the second. We cannot collectively explain anything, blame or praise, by using a concept we cannot define. The notorious student essay, that beings ‘In today’s society,’ we know is off to a bad start because it’s going to try to explain our shared life from a causal force, society, which lacks any agreed definition. So this attempt at explanation simply cherry picks some favourite attributes to explain everything … or, more likely, the phrase ‘in today’s society’ is a discursive way to avoid the fact that we know nothing about what our collective life really is.

This is a serious problem for everyone. It puts social science in its own Dark Ages, a place where academic studies go on but nobody can explain the past, act in the present, or predict the future. For studying society, current social science is the equivalent of living in a climate without having any weather forecasting service. We record past weather statistics; we report on what is actually happening; and we make guesses about the future. But in no way can current social science venture any ‘societal weather forecast’ – however close in the near future or unreliable. We currently live in a social science Dark Age because this kind of prediction cannot be attempted at all.

The reason for this is that we don’t know where to begin. With what facts could we start to build a model of social life? We don’t know what our subject matter is. Progress is confounded by the lack of any working definition of ‘society.’ Meteorology has air, humidity, temperature, pressure, and the surface of the Earth. These result in very complex effects but at least weather forecasters know what they are dealing with. It’s not magic being released out of a bottle; the problem of prediction is limited to forces they already know about. Weather scientists are able to move on to the next step which is lots of time-contingent data collection, followed by modeling of this data by computer algorithms.

I am perfectly aware that human beings are different from the planetary atmosphere and that modeling human behaviour is different from natural science. Human beings can do things that are entirely new; this makes prediction of social phenomena harder. On the other hand, social scientists get information from their subject matter; human beings communicate about what they are planning and this makes social prediction easier than that faced by natural scientists. So, overall, which is easier to predict, the natural or the social? Nobody today knows the answer to this question for one simple reason. Social scientists haven’t even tried to do their part.

The social cannot become a science until its subject matter is defined. Professional social scientists still haven’t discovered what society is. Data could be collected but we are not doing this on the scale and in time-sensitive speed needed because we do not know what we are looking for. And we aren’t continuously running predictive models on our computers because we haven’t collected the relevant data about society. So we truly are in the Dark Ages of social science. We haven’t reached the starting point of being a science.

This is not because nothing is going on. Social scientists are working hard at researching and publishing. The problem is that their work is scattered into various mutually incomprehensible disciplines. We do not know whether these various fields are the cause or the symptom of not knowing how to collect together the information from different academic professions.

Let’s return to the fundamental challenge of defining society. The professions cannot agree on what society is as a whole thing; but they do provide plenty of components they believe exist within society.

Everyone agrees that society has, within it, a ‘polity’; we can all see government.

And we know that society has an economy. We know this because we measure the GDP and we can add in government expenditures – all using money currency. So we can know that US GDP is a bit over $18 trillion and that of China about $11 trillion. The economy is an illuminating example of what social science can do. Collectively, we have put the money and effort into continuous collection of economic data and whole industries are devoted to analyzing this information and predicting the future. In contrast, it is clear that an equivalent effort has not been put into studying society’s non-economic features.

And third, we know that society contains other areas of life that are outside both polity and economy. These are various and lack any unifying feature. As a result, various academic disciplines look at them, usually with unique approaches. Psychology looks a feelings but typically ignores other people and rejects the idea of studying people’s social roles in society. Demography looks quantitatively at populations as defined by biology and institutions; this means reporting fertility, nuptuality, morbidity, mortality and migration. Ethnographers ignore this and describe small pieces of current living with lots of descriptive detail. Unfortunately, this ignores all the big features of society such as its historical evolution, polity, economy, demographics and popular culture.

So, in this chaos of non-communicating disciplines, academic social scientists live in little villages ignoring each other and occasionally vying for dominion over others … which is exactly what we would expect to find in the Dark Ages. Nothing has risen up to the level of a unifying civilization. This is how far social science is behind the times.

The fact is that I, personally, have, for many years, been working on a definition of society. I’ve created one now which could be neater and appears rather complex. This is because it describes society in term of four sub-concepts that themselves need explanation to sociologists and to other social scientists. These new concepts still need defining and a lot of explaining to others will be needed. I am still optimistic that I can provide a good working definition of today’s society.

Does this mean progress is near at hand? Other social scientists, in their various fields, are no more aware of the missing definition than are lay people in the general public. In fact, non-professionals are, in many ways, ahead of what academic social scientists are able to acknowledge. This is the problem of ‘academic professional lag’ by which professors, in their private lives, are doing things that orient themselves to society which they cannot acknowledge in their professional writing and teaching. Currently, much that is practiced as part of society is inadmissible as professional social scientific truth. Consider marriage. Most educated people do marry in their private lives but nothing about this exists in social scientific publications. Again, consider generations. Academics are as ready as any lay person to recall what it meant to be ‘a child of the 90s.’ And they identify their formative decade as using Myspace before Facebook existed. But none of this time-contingent object-based knowledge will appear in their publications. As yet, key elements of social life cannot be connected, by any disciplinary field, with social scientific concepts of society.

This is why, officially speaking, society still does not exist. Still today, no academic sociologist can give you a definition of society that could be recognized as ‘American society,’ for example. Here’s a checklist of what such a definition should include to distinguish it from cave dwellers or ancient Babylon; polity, economy, ethnography, demographics, media culture and all the other unnamed stuff that holds large complex societies together. The presence, in the mind of one isolated speculative thinker, of a plausible definition of modern society isn’t going to lift social science out of its Dark Ages any time soon. Something big will have to come along to shake up a lot of people’s ways of thinking – not least within the walls of academia where science is supposed to dwell.