Peter Levin’s Rethinking Markets

May 7, 2008

Dits and Dashes

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 7:31 am

Reading Maureen Dowd’s column today, which I do sometimes but not terribly frequently nowadays (NYT opinion page = yawn), I don’t even get it. There are so many mixed metaphors - Blanche DuBois, Tara, hippies, matter/anti-matter, butterflies, scorpions, prom queen. It’s like she’s somehow channeling the aliens from Mars Attacks!: ack! ack ack! ack! Nonsensical rambling, I would be embarrassed if I wrote that way - leaving aside the point of the column even.

Wow.

April 22, 2008

New template

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 8:03 pm

there’s going to be some ugliness as I work out the kinks in this new template of mine, but it’s pretty much designed as a combination of existing pastiche and original sentiment, so be nice.

Priorities

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 8:15 am

April 16, 2008

Feeling mediocre

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 11:24 am

Workin on some sociological goodness and a site redesign. In the meantime, I give you the always wonderful xkcd:

April 2, 2008

Failure of Journalism

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 11:37 am

Lisa DePaulo, writing in the GQ blog (ht political wire) demonstrates how to do bad work. I realize this is not the NYT, but I don’t care. You interview politicians, you are doing politics. From an interview with Karl Rove:

I get the sense you respect Hillary more than you respect Obama.
Off the record?

Please don’t go off the record.
Off the record… [Yeah, it's good. Sorry.]

Damn! Now say that on the record.
No. Nope. Nope. Nope.

Let’s try again, then: on the record. I get the sense you respect her more than him.
Uh, I know her better than I know him. And I just, uh—she has been around public life a lot longer and has demonstrated, you know, more involvement than he has.

This is different from confidentiality in social sciences, which affords us no protections under the law and is not, you know, an important institution of a free society. What a good, non-hack journalist would say is, if you can’t tell me on the record, don’t tell me. Otherwise, stick it back in your pocket. Again, I don’t care if it’s a style magazine, in some ways it is even worse since it has the style of journalism without any of the standards.

More generally, and this is not limited to DePaula, is the insider nature of the press compared with the outsiders they consider their readers - i.e., us. What makes these kinds of things so galling is that people in the press either fail to see how they are being used (which makes them idiots), or else know they are being used and use that to advance their careers without actually doing their jobs (which makes them craven - lacking even the rudiments of courage).

April 1, 2008

Don’t know what to make of it, so not makin’ anything

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 5:26 pm

I’ve kind of been in a funk about posting, though the shennanegins of investment banks are interesting. But the massive multi-billion dollar write-downs is depressing me, and I just don’t know what to say about them. Plus, I’ve been and will be out of town for weddings and other family stuff. Will return with verve soon.

March 18, 2008

Not about markets - photos!

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 4:19 pm

In Central Park, not far from where I live, I shot this photo - if it looks familiar, it’s because it’s been shot about a gazillion times by people looking over the West Side from the West 70s:

I ran across a lovely tutorial, which allowed me to transform that photo into this:

I’m proud of it, it’s possibly the coolest photo I’ve taken myself. That’s right - sociological, socially awkward, and on the rarest of occasions, artistic (but no whimpster, thank you very much).

Photo credits? Me. Me. Me.

March 11, 2008

It doesn’t have to be a motto

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 7:53 am

From Making Light:

Act now! Act without thinking! WORK LIKE YOU WERE LIVING IN THE EARLY DAYS OF A BETTER NATION.

This is good advice.

March 7, 2008

Moderation

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 6:40 pm

For me, moderating this blog is not a problem. There’s something like a dozen people who have commented, most of whom I knew or know, not a really wide readership, certainly not a wide commentariat. But at BoingBoing, one of the larger readerships on the net (at least blog-wise), the hijacking of comments by morons, wackos, and trolls eventually resulted in their disappearance.

Enter Teresa Nielsen Hayden, an editor at Tor and co-curator of the magnificent Making Light. She took on the job of community moderator for boingboing some months ago.

As a result, you get aggressive disemvowelling (pllng th vwls frm nnyng cmmntrs) and, every once in a while, a gorgeous anti- or at least skeptico-authoritarian smackdown. It’s long, about the TSA, and worth seeing how it’s done.

March 6, 2008

Shirttails flapping in the breeze behind them, like unambitious dragons

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 12:52 pm

Now that’s pizza.

February 25, 2008

not market related, but…

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 1:14 pm

Once was my favorite movie of 2007 (perhaps not the best, but my favorite), and if you can’t be happy for Hansard and Irglova for winning best song, I don’t even want to know you.

And on an unrelated shmoopy note, my darlin’ re-arrived from HI yesterday, and for a small window of time I’ll share an appropriately sweet non-Once, hard-to-track-down, India.Arie song (warning, it’s an mp3).

February 15, 2008

I’m torn between…

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 4:17 pm

this: “[Michelle Obama] talks on the campaign trail about high school advisers who tried to dissuade her from applying to Princeton because they thought her scores were not good enough. (She graduated with honors in sociology in 1985.)”

and this: “The man who opened fire on students in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University was described by police on Friday as a 27-year-old former sociology student there who had been highly regarded, but who had begun to act erratic after he stopped taking medication….When Mr. Kazmierczak was a graduate student in sociology at the university, he appeared to be a model student, earning a Dean’s award in 2006.”

The repetition of high school and college shootings over a number of years has failed to make them any less gut-wrenching for me.

February 4, 2008

I have seen the future…

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 7:18 pm

…and it is the blissful taste of the Cara Cara Navel Orange. Also, there is a blog by Steven Jenkins, Fairway’s buyer. For all my complaining, there is quite a bit to say for living in Manhattan.

January 31, 2008

Two dumb articles…

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 2:41 pm

I’m trying to decide which one is dumber, this article by Anne Applebaum on why there are only beautiful women in Russia post-Soviet Union, or this rock-stupid article in the NYT Times about how economists understand repugnance. While we can attribute the dumb in the former to a single person, the valuelessness in the latter comes in multiples - so it may be the author’s synthesis and story line more than those discussed therein.

January 7, 2008

Falsefiability

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 3:50 pm

This is a bit far afield of my own expertise, but I’m curious: if I predict that an event in the future is a causal outcome, but it was an event that has already occurred that was causal, how can I be proven correct or wrong? I’m thinking about Obama and the Democratic primary, Iowa/NH, and the Feb. 5 2008 primary. Fabio has made the case that Super Tuesday is the crux of the primary, though he’s certainly not alone. And the specific question is more interesting as a broader question of history, evidence, and causation.

Now, if someone else (Clinton or Edwards) wins on Feb. 5 and goes on to win the primary, it seems pretty clear that Feb. 5 would be at least more decisive than Iowa/NH if not completely decisive. But if Obama wins on Feb. 5 and goes on to win the nomination, does that mean that he won because of Feb. 5? Or because of his wins in Iowa/NH?

In other words, if I bet that Obama wins not because of Feb 5. but because of Iowa, and Bowers/Rojas bet that Obama wins because of Feb. 5, what would it take to win or lose my money? Obviously Iowa affects Feb. 5, so they are conjunctive determinants, but is there an actual methodological answer to this question? How do we know decisive, causal, historical events?

January 5, 2008

Could everyone stop using Google Analytics, please!

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 3:36 pm

I’ve noticed that whenever a site fails to load, it’s almost invariably because it’s hung trying to connect to Google analytics. I know there’s blog visitor-porn, but it is seriously obnoxious. Does it really matter how many people are visiting your site? Really? Really really?

December 31, 2007

Resolved

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 2:23 pm

For what it’s worth, one of my resolutions for 2008 is to be a nicer person. To those who I was a total jerk to over this past year, I guess I still own that. But I’m going to try to be more gracious in the coming year.

December 28, 2007

Inter-disciplinary vs. Multi-disciplinary

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 9:04 am

This post riffs on a long-time discussion in my field of sociology, namely, How much should our disciplinary roots matter? It came up most recently as a side-light to a completely thoughtful, really interesting discussion of comments and research notes in journals. The issue of inter-disciplinarity is not new, or news, but I’d like to make my case for sociological chauvinism more explicitly. If crusade is about “the wild lack of critical thinking that many sociologists evince toward work that claims to show the triumph of some sociology-affirming narrative against some outsider (esp. ‘biological’, but also psychology or economic) alternative”, my crusade is about the deep self-doubt, bordering on self-disrepect, that sociologists seem to shoulder more than any other social science. I mean, at least psychology has enough self-centeredness to advocate for their own Presidential Council of Advisors. Sociology? Not so much.

There are two issues here, I think. The first is, do you know enough about the intersections of your discipline with others (and about the world) to make arguments about it? That is, I completely agree that there is a straw person’s argument that is easier to ‘take down’ than a real, nuanced one. But let me stick to sociology/economics, since it’s more my own expertise. In a recent interview with Eugene Fama, the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank noted:

More recently, and often in collaboration with Donald MacKenzie, Fama reexamined the capital asset pricing model, a classic model for determining fair cost for equity capital, and declared it an empirical failure unless two other factors, the performativity of markets and the underlying theoretical mechanisms of finance, are also included. This work, too, has transformed Wall Street.

Eugene Fama has discovered social studies of finance? Oh, wait. Let me try that again:

More recently, and often in collaboration with Dartmouth’s Kenneth French, Fama reexamined the capital asset pricing model, a classic model for determining fair cost for equity capital, and declared it an empirical failure unless two other factors, market capitalization and book value to market value, are also included, are also included. This work, too, has transformed Wall Street by providing academic support for “small-cap” and “value” funds.

I mean, seriously, I agree with Zuckerman that two wrongs don’t make a right, but really, we’re arguing that sociologists need to read and understand the nuanced arguments of finance and all of its heterogeneous variations? When the biggest debates in that field are whether and how to include market capitalization and book value?

The second argument goes something like saying that by incorporating other disciplines into sociology, we make sociology stronger. After all, the world is obviously no more empirically split into sociological, psychological, and biological than a meal is able to be disaggregated into its constituent ingredients (or chemicals, for that matter). The whole is different than the sum of its parts, and we’d be better off as a discipline if we took as our mission understanding the whole.

This is a compelling argument, and I see its merit. But I still disagree. And don’t make it seem like I mean that sociologists shouldn’t learn math, or history, or economics. I’m not a moron, and attributing that sentiment to me is not particularly gracious. That is, I’ll assume you’re not an idiot if you do the same for me. What I mean is that we understand the world better by engaging in multi-disciplinarity more than inter-disciplinarity. At the end of the day, sociologists and economists have different ideas on what is important and on how the world works. Sure we could use integrators. But the disciplines - unnaturally, historically contingent, yes yes - coalesce knowledge and advance understanding. This notion of multi-disciplinary comes from a brief experience at Northwestern with Wendy Griswold’s culture workshop. Her point there, which I would advocate here, was that the workshop works best not as inter-disciplinary, but as disciplinary. Everyone comes with their background not as baggage but as a baseline for multi-disciplinary interaction.

I believe strongly that discussion, scientific advancement, creativity, come in the passionate exercise of disciplinary knowledge. Why give the benefit of the doubt to biological explanations? Force them to be explicit. Why give the baseline assumption that markets express preferences a free pass? For that matter, be prepared to argue why society should be considered sui generis rather than as the sum of its individuals. You can be wrong here, and convinced by others. But why not start with sociology-affirming narratives?

I’m compelled by Zuckerman’s analyses of categories in the making of markets, and Podolny’s status orderings, and Fligstein’s markets as political arenas jockeying for resources. I think we have lots to offer. And I think the sociological case avoids some of the worst of economics’ historical ties to managing the economy, which makes sociology well-positioned to understand markets. We have multiple dependent variables (performance, survival as well as altruism [Healy], and markets themselves [Zelizer, MacKenzie and Millo], to name just a few), which is better than just one (performance). And we have a sweeping range of independent variables. Our mechanisms are clumsy, and our theories are not particularly grand nowadays. But I just don’t get the hand-wringing.

This argument is not unlike though obviously not identical to, arguments about the political center, with sociologists playing the role of self-doubting Democrats. The belief that if we only reached for conciliation and thoughtful understanding of each others’ positions, we’d have consensus and a great society. Partisanship is polarizing and makes those in the political center get the vapors, but it also reflects real debate and real discussion that is a more accurate description of what’s going on. Academically, inter-disciplinarity is a myth, and it marginalizes your discipline. We have genuine disagreements that are not going to be advanced by rushing to the intersection. Because I am highly suspicious that you’ll find any wisp of the sociological in the Theory of Everything.

December 17, 2007

Distemper

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 12:54 pm

I sometimes wonder what the role of blogs in academic life should be, as it seems to work really well for some people and not so much for others. In particular, I think the bleg should have some rules about it. At the obvious risk of picking a fight with a more senior colleague whom I don’t really know, who has tenure in my field, and who has clearly done the work over a much longer period of time than I have, I nevertheless point to this discussion of preferences versus tastes. The point at which the first comment was offered, responded to, and then left with no discussion, leaves me kind of sad. I have no doubt that this isn’t intentional maliciousness or anything close, but still it doesn’t strike me as particularly classy in the grand scheme of things.

Of course, this being Monday, I’m annoyed at myself for not getting enough done last week and now facing a daunting week ahead, so one might simply chalk this up to distemper.