Month: July 2018

How good are the social science disciplines? – 3 Psychology

My overview of social sciences concludes with academic psychology.

Lay people suppose that psychologists study human motivation. If they did, we would know a lot more about modern people. Lay people want to know how their future-orientated outlook will take them through their lifetime. Unfortunately for them and for social science, decades ago academic psychology turned instead to studying lab rats, then fruit flies and, currently, brain scans. Confining itself to short term effects, psychology has been criticized for small sample sizes, statistically non-significant findings and non-replicability. Its switch to natural science might be okay if psychologists had given up trying to explain society. But they still try to. Developmental psychology inexplicably stops studying children when they reach some unspecified ‘adulthood.’ Modern people assume that we all grow and continue to learn throughout life. But psychologists can’t study this because they are averse to ‘roles’ because those things are created by society. This leads to the absurdity that children and youth are studied without society but then, suddenly and inexplicably, it’s okay for adults to relate to the people and associations of society! The public, like other social scientists, aren’t going to learn from psychology where lifelong motivations come from. Academic psychology isn’t ready to recognize social time either biographically for individuals or historically as societies change.

In clinical psychology, doctors and therapists have to categorize people’s problems under the current version of the DSM. This handbook’s distinctions don’t inspire confidence when former mental disorders vanish from newer editions of the DSM. Were older diagnoses wrong, or did society change and turn formerly abnormal mindsets into useful features of society? Over the decades we have lost the neurasthenic, the neurotic and the narcissistic. Psychology cannot tell us why its own concepts later become obsolete. Here is an academic study that fails when it faces the problem of time. Professional clinicians have to change historically and healthy human beings continue to grow over their lifetimes. Clearly psychology is unable to explain aspects of its own subject. For social scientists it’s no surprise that human beings cannot be understood simply by natural science; they are actually and irretrievably part of society!

Envy of this discipline is unlikely for anyone who wants to explain our collective social life.

Overall, my review of three disciplines shows none of them to be better than sociology. Political science, economics and psychology are all baffled by some aspect of their own subject. Practitioners in their fields work with concepts that are unknown to their academic counterparts.

So overall nothing in these social sciences looks impressively good. There are no grounds for complacency here. I want a sociology that is able to define ‘society’ and no doubt the other social sciences should improve theirs. The work will be hard but isn’t isn’t trying to really understand the world the most important thing we can do?

How good are the social science disciplines – 2 economics

My second social science is economics. Sociology is not alone in having deficiencies. Economics is another discipline which cannot explain its own subject matter and leaves non-academic researchers to use the most effective methods. The deeper question I am addressing in these comparisons is why the social sciences today haven’t got their act together.

Economists do correlations. They are good at crunching data. They have now taken away what sociologists used to do in stratification. Economists like Raj Chetty publish on upward mobility in America today. But this is done utterly without theory; it is no help to people who need conceptual explanations. Correlations at the individual unit size cannot explain the big changes in society.

The big picture economists’ have is of macro economics. They discuss central bank and government policies and look for measures of how the economy is doing. This is lively and interesting stuff. (See Krugman’s recent https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/20/opinion/monopsony-rigidity-and-the-wage-puzzle-wonkish.html ). But this whole area exists without such theory as micro economics provides and is conducted without any pretense to explain big questions of social change. This is not a new deficiency; economists have never been able to explain how economic growth happens. How the first Industrial Revolution happened remains a mystery despite the efforts of economic historians (See McCloskey). Today’s courses in micro and macro economics won’t tell you how the economies of today grow or fail to do so. One thing economists don’t seem able to do is explain their own subject.

In the meantime, people whose job requires them to study the economy look at ‘industries.’ Researchers in finance and business divide the economy into different sectors, knowing that industries operate under different conditions. Academic economics won’t let economists do this;  theoretically, its all one market and one economy. No theory exists of what an industry is or why industries should exist at all. To my mind, industries are probably created by sociological and demographic factors … and disciplines don’t like explanations from outside their own field!

So it turns out that sociologists don’t have to be envious of economists; they can’t answer the important questions in their field either.

How good are the social science disciplines?

This is the first of three posts I’m going to present comparing sociology with its rival social sciences. I’m arguing that, just because sociologists can’t define society and don’t believe that generations are real, they shouldn’t feel inferior to other social sciences. It turns out that those fields are silent about key features of their own subjects. And they remain silent when related fields use obviously important ideas that should be in their expertise.

The issue here is why social sciences today are all so deeply flawed.

Let’s start with politics.

At this moment of writing the buzz of political reporting can be summarized as “all things Trump.” This was not so previously and it will not be so again pretty soon. Will we be any wiser when things calm down? Does academic political science posses any theory that explains why political fervor pops up and disappears? Seen over the decades, politics never could. And as time passes it appears to have less and less to tell us. Studies of class, race and religious voting which were popular fifty years ago, and studied by sociologists, have largely disappeared – all without political science explaining why or knowing how they occurred in the first place. Society appears to have moved on. But are we any wiser about where voting behavior or activism comes from? Pollers take surveys and report public opinion but it’s bereft of all theory. Political science doesn’t claim to understand anything from one election cycle to the next.

Other social sciences, and the public generally, believe that it is political parties that rally people and the efforts of one party or another wins or loses elections. But political science has never liked party campaigning or the idea of party itself. Political parties are not part of any founding constitution and they are barely touched by political law. What would it take for political science to have an actual theory of how people vote? Do political parties lead or follow public opinion? And, in the end, how much does politics really matter in modern society? Do we even know? Academic political science clearly doesn’t! So sociologists have no reason to feel inferior to this field.