Peter Levin’s Rethinking Markets

July 30, 2008

Unmarked bills

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 10:14 am

This article notes that a number of Republican senators (Gordon Smith, Elizabeth Dole, John Sununu - wait a second, these are all senators running for…re-election!) are ‘giving up’ money donated to their campaigns by now-indicted Senator Ted Stevens. I love the phrasing, that they will donate to charity the $10,000 Stevens contributed to their respective campaigns.

It’s not that they will donate $10,000 to charity, in repentance to or contrition for taking money from a felon - Smith “will donate to charity the $10,000 that he received from Stevens.” This is a shout-out for the Zelizer worldview, then - that money can go from being fungible-and-anonymous to incommensurate-and-marked depending on the context. I hope they marked the serial numbers on the Stevens money, or maybe it was, you know, in his freezer.

July 24, 2008

PAL Happiness Index

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 1:20 pm

What would go into the Peter Happiness Index (PHI)?

weather (temp+humidity+rain+sunshine quotient)
day of the week (Monday= -1; Tues-Thurs= 0; Fri-Sat= +1; Sun= 0)
amount of work accomplished (three-day moving average of some kind of productivity index)
relationship status (arguments, romance, etc. as dummies, or perhaps a 7-point scale)
work to-do list
home to-do list
recent wider-world communications (recently caught up with friends, family)
days since last vacation/days to next vacation
personal finances (stock market + real estate market proxy)
health (days since last workout, sickness level, current weight, 4-week weight changes)
hobby activities (days engaged in/since last)
cultural consumption (good songs heard / movies seen / TV watched / clubs gone to / high culture)

What am I missing? I’m going to try to put this index together and see if it has face validity…

Anonymity, thing of the past?

Filed under: Art, Culture — Peter @ 11:07 am

Jenn notes with sadness the unmasking of Banksky, and how she is both saddened and mildly implicated in the process. Authority and identity are largely left understated in someone like Max Weber’s societal theories on the trajectory towards rationalization, and picked up instead in Foucault’s notions of governmentality.

I wonder what it means for us to no longer (if we ever?) find anonymity satisfactory. Right now, at least, we live in a society where celebrity and markets and a creeping surveillance state have crowded out something like anonymity/symbolic identity? Banksky, Digby, Fake Steve Jobs, US torture and blanket domestic spying; the impulse to find out who just swamps the impulse towards being left alone.

Maybe these are concurrent trends, the surveillance and the paparazzi, and they are just coincidentally conjoined in the current era of constant post-9/11 fearmongering and post-Michael Jackson celebrity gawking. Foucault would say no, that man is a confessing animal, and we demand confession more and more - there is an excellent scene in the sparse-but-powerful book Disgrace, where an accused professor accepts blame but does so while refusing to explain or ‘confess’ appropriately, and is ripped for it. That’s sometimes how I feel nowadays about a variety of issues. Explain yourself, show yourself, unmask yourself.

There is a long history of muckraking for these purposes, journalism to expose the underbelly of corruption in government and in business - Frank Norris’ The Pit, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives. But they don’t seem to compare to the contemporary infrastructure designed to find out more, to learn the intimate details, to expose.

I recall the early days of MUDDs, where pseudonymity was an adequate substitute for identity; no one ever really asked you who you ‘really’ were, since who you presented yourself to be was, with repeated interactions, enough to establish a reputation and identity. Then ip tracking, web analytics, and more importantly the cultural reassertion of the internet-as-fancy-telephone. After this, you could and did link users to their geographic location, their social class status (via data imputed from zip code, for example), and from there their consumer and political preferences.

I don’t know, maybe it’s just a bit of a depressed reaction from the Banksky news, and the feeling I get that I personally don’t want to know more paired with a sense of inevitability that the anonymous one would inevitably be found out.

I mean, there is someone still looking for D.B. Cooper. I hope they never find him - but they probably will…

July 22, 2008

Yet another redesign

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 2:23 pm

I’m sure everything will stop working, of course…

July 21, 2008

Unhelpful institutional theory, real world

Filed under: Institutional — Peter @ 10:41 am

Let’s say that the CEO of an organization publicly announces during a board meeting that if the org misses its (ambitious) numbers over the coming year, she will eliminate X employees. We know that often, public announcements of impossible goals get met not by actually meeting those goals, but by shifting the goalposts down the line - (i.e., that the $10 million gap somehow gets filled at the last moment, or that fuzzy ‘productivity’ numbers come into line somehow). But just as often, those publicly-stated goalposts force company’s do make real changes, despite their often-symbolic nature (i.e., that Exxon commits itself publicly but symbolically to ‘green technologies,’ which then gives employee activists ammunition to start up a costly recycling program which otherwise the company would reject).

But when are ambitious, symbolic statements going to be decoupled from on-the-ground changes, and when are ambitious, symbolic statements going to be the impetus for on-the-ground changes? Absent a wave to ‘well-situated activists’ or somesuch, do we really have an answer here?

July 17, 2008

Politics + XKCD

Filed under: Culture — Peter @ 8:44 pm

This is clever.

Why are comments on Crooked Timber so bad?

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 7:07 pm

I read Kieran’s post, essentially a pointer to Bruce Western’s work on the social effects of mass imprisonment, and I’m struck by how much the comments at Crooked Timber just make me sad. It is a virtual showcase of spirit-crushing commentary. We have:

the reflex appeal to Levitt: “You cannot carry out a cost/benefit analysis of maintaining a high prison population unless you seriously consider the benefits.”

the political-swipe-dressed-as-social-science concern trolling: “The author criticises “folk theory of immutable criminality” but we are only ever offered (by leftwing criminologists) correlations between criminality and poverty. I say that this failure to prove causation makes the poverty-causes-crime argument just as much a folk theory.”

the Kurtz-like “Exterminate all the Brutes!” response: “Things will have to get far worse before they can get better. The system will have to collapse before it can be replaced with something more equitable. The Crime of Punishment by Karl Menninger today reads like a alien history from a distant and forgotten past. Which I suppose it is. There is also a good deal of torture going on in those private prison. You’ll never hear about it in the press.”

the stupid-response-followed-by-borderline-ad-hominem attack: “[stupid response].” “If you read the article linked, which deals in part with the effects of the US’s huge prison population on those imprisoned, on those close to them and on society at large, you might appreciate why a response like this is so stupid.”

the imponderable: “Basically, you rent the underclass. You employ all your citizens and pay them decent wages and you invite starving people from abroad to do all the menial work for next to nothing. As soon as a ‘guest worker’ raises his head and gives you a look – you kick him out of the country, no prisons necessary.”

the possibly-though-not-definite bad-faith remark followed by a total slap-down: “[possible bad-faith remark].” “wow virgil, you witnessed it first hand on the nightly news!!? You are a brave soul, venturing so far from your couch to gain real intelligence on the problems facing other peoples’ posses “in the hood”. word!”

This is just a sampling in the 3 hours since the post was published - and this is actually not bad compared to some other threads. The frustrating part is that CT provides such good contributors, and it seems to consist of a large audience of diverse and smart people; it is a deservedly built-up social platform. But I’ve just never seen a comment thread there that carries through with something approaching dignity. I had all prepared this explanation, but I don’t think that covers it. What is going on over thar?

Rethinking markets - market metaphors

Filed under: Art, Markets, Pollution, Ramble — Peter @ 2:43 pm

I think it’s time to regroup, and actually do some of the ‘re’ thinking of markets I’m always planning to get around to. I want to do so in the context of three recent observations:

The Examples

The first observation comes from Fabio Rojas, over at the orgtheory blog - though it is slowly becoming the orgborg (almost 20 current or past posters!). In talking about the possibility (likelihood, I’d say) of a downturn in the contemporary art market, and sifting through the comments of restive art producers, Rojas is puzzled by four things:

Interestingly, for me at least, the comment thread turned into a discussion about how the readers (mostly practicing artists) felt about Chelsea (the fancy pants NY art district). A few things came up in this thread, which are obvious to anyone hanging around artists:

* Some folks seem to have bitter feelings towards the booming art market. Winkleman himself seemed perplexed that some readers should wish for the disappearance of the galleries which are responsible for selling the art. It’s like car engineers hating local dealerships.
* Some folks resent the fact that there are types of art which are popular in hip art districts like Chelsea.
* There is often a severe mistrust of dealers, not just specific dealers.
* People believe that markets are irresistable forces that undermine art.

Fabio wants to inject “a little bit of Cowenism,” which as I understand it means economics+incentives+assumption of efficiency-via-markets. Or something. Somebody has to pay for art. So rather than whine about dealers getting their share of the financial compensation for art, or the power of galleries/dealers in setting aesthetic and market standards for the art world, artists ought to be more appreciative of the expansion of the art world via art markets. And we ought to simply recognize art as another market, organized in similar fashion (if a little quirky), and play by those rules. Or, you can get a real job.

The second example comes from the EPA’s recent decision to lower the value of human life. Or rather, to lower the determination of the value of a statistical human life, the hypothetical monetary value of the loss of human life. As a result, decisions are being altered for how the EPA would regulate the environment. The EPA, since the 1970s, has used cost-benefit analysis in its decisions to regulate or not (read Wendy Espeland’s Struggle for Water, and Ted Porter’s Trust in Numbers!). Thus, reducing the value of human life has the practical effect of making regulation less likely - the ‘costs’ of regulation have to be lower than the ‘benefits’ of saving X number of human lives. The more the costs and the lower the benefits, the less likely environmental regulation would be.

Analysis of the costs of human life vary, but the main way to measure it is via the economic principle of ‘revealed preference.’ That is, people make decisions everyday that put them at risk of death, and by measuring these decisions, we could assumedly make inferences about peoples’ own value on life. The probability of a firefighter dying in a fire over the course of their career, combined with the salaries of firefighters in the labor market, yields a kind of indirect decision that ‘reveals’ one’s own value on human life. You may not be willing to be paid $3 million to die, but you might be willing to be paid $65,000 to take a job with a possibility that you could die during the course of your duties.

In practice, the EPA has dropped the value of human life from $7.8 million in 2003 to $6.9 million in 2008. Interestingly, a number of different federal agencies apparently have different valuations of human life, despite attempts to come to a single price. The EPA, in its Solomonic wisdom, decided to split the difference between a couple different studies giving a high and low estimate for the value of human life.

The final example comes from the ongoing housing meltdown, this time the Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae edition ¹. These two agencies are quasi-governmental, meaning that they have had a governmental imprimatur to buy and package mortgages, not backed by the federal government per se, but really backed by the federal government. In the coming bailout that you, me, and your grandchildren will be paying for, a number of folks in the business press are suggesting that we’re treating these agencies, and bad homeowners, to a version of ‘capitalism lite’:

Why should responsible homeowners have to foot the bill for the irresponsible behavior of others in a capitalist system? (No, the folks buying homes they couldn’t afford weren’t all hoodwinked by mortgage lenders.)

The answer: A higher power has decided that the anticipated future cost — the risky behavior it encourages tomorrow by rewarding it today — is less than the more easily measured current cost.

The housing market is a mess. Sales and prices are still falling, competition from distressed sales (of foreclosed properties or short sales by the bank) is mounting, lenders are tightening credit standards and employment is falling. Policy makers have decided that short-term pain is intolerable, especially in an election year, with constituents badgering their representatives to “do something” about high gas prices and a lousy economy.

Assumedly, this means that we should be treating them as just capitalism (or ‘capitalism classic,’ maybe). That is, let the banks fail, let markets separate the wheat from the chaff, let the capitalist system to its work. This is the financial crisis writ small, I think. The argument goes something like, let Bear Stearns fail, banks should close, people making stupid decisions should be punished. Capitalist markets are about market signals, punish with poverty, reward with prosperity. Let the government get out of the way of these signals.

This reminds me of my recent trip to Canada (rocks and trees and water!), where our tour guide kept saying that since the government no longer lets the forests catch fire, they overgrow, get diseased, and now no wildlife really live in them. Fire is natural. Analogously, downturns in capitalist economies are natural. Get in the way of them (with government!), and we get disease, rot, and no more wildlife. Er, innovation.

The problem

Here is the problem. In each of these cases, MARKETS ARE A METAPHOR. In the real world, markets are a metaphor. Say it with me, now. Markets are a metaphor. We’ve arrived at a socio-cultural place where so many people believe that markets are things found in nature that it’s just out of control. Even in the best of cases, say, a core financial capital trading environment, it is a metaphor.

Of course, that it is a metaphor does not make it inconsequential. On the contrary, what this insight should tell you is that if someone tries to convince you with an authoritative, ‘well, you know, markets!’, you should call BS. The extraction and distribution of resources is a political question², subject to formal and informal rules of authority, cultural, and social practices.

There are resources, yes. Raw materials, found in nature, as well as in human ingenuity. Lots of coordination among lots of people is necessary to get at some of these resources, to be sure. And these resources do have to be distributed, with enough subjectively-understood fairness that people continue to want to participate. These things are all true. But there is a big big difference between saying markets=what economics tells us markets are, and markets=how these resources are extracted from the social and natural environment in the world-that-is. I’m not just saying that markets are different where the rubber hits the road, compared to the textbooks of neo-classical economics. I am saying that economic markets do not describe some found reality. They describe an existing set of institutional arrangements. People who believe markets are natural are like people who believe that mathematics taps the mind of God because a nautilus’ shell grows like the Golden Spiral. It has the benefit of being completely arrogant. And the added benefit of being not, you know, true.

Markets are one means of creating incentives for extracting resources and distributing their rewards. Doing so in other ways may require such a shift in what we are currently about that it seems crazy. This is a fancy way of saying that markets are hegemonic; they have achieved ‘theoretical closure’; they have an aura of ‘naturalness’; they are taken-for granted. In Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, he comes across a pastoral, slow-food organic farmer whom he asked about how a place like New York City would fit into his vision of local food economies: “…he startled me with his answer: ‘Why do we have to have a New York City? What good is it?’” (245). Unthinkable! Our society would change a lot, lot lot, if we were to really consider extracting, using, and distributing resources in more radically new and different ways. (Another aside, don’t you just want to kick the asses of those who get the vapors over manufacturing that isn’t carbon-neutral, but don’t give a shit about manufacturing, or farming, or service work for that matter, that doesn’t pay a living wage?)

What has happened here? My own guess is a relative collapse of imagination, combined with a hearty stake in the existing state of things, particularly for the first world (and those aspiring to get there). And that the only alternative to markets is state-determined extraction and distribution of resources (ie communism/socialism) is a testament to the enduring power of Marx to inspire along with a long-term successful stoking of anti-communism as a political maneuver. Are there really no other ways to coordinate and extract resources, and then to distribute those resources, than markets or via the state?

In the meantime, why shouldn’t artists be ticked off at dealers who make money from their labors? To me, a little bit of Cowenism is kind of a version of hectoring laid-off factory workers about the aggregate benefits of comparative advantage, or being ticked at college students who don’t love globalization.

And the EPA doesn’t place a monetary value on life, don’t be moronic (or rather, try to pay the EPA to snuff out a colleague and see what happens). It makes decisions about how and how much to regulate polluters. Cost-benefit analysis is kabuki theater to give well-meaning, and sometimes not so well-meaning, to a decidedly political process of balancing the interests of industrial polluters and the rest of us. ‘Valuation of a statistical life’ is a metaphor, being used to allow polluters to continue to pollute irrespective of the rest of us. Is this that difficult to understand? And Wall Street has never had the interests of the rest of us at heart. Never in its two hundred year history. That it has made some rich, spread some wealth, allocated financial capital to where and when it was needed, provided a powerful ‘information mechanism’ is all true. But we should start comparing these things to the degradations Wall Street has also fostered. Every time someone hides behind ‘markets,’ I feel like getting all Dolores Umbridge ³ on ‘em. So enough BS with assuming markets real things discovered in nature and not social practices bolstered by rules, culture, and practices, already; let’s start working on other ways to tackle the problem.

¹ back
As an aside, I’d like give a shoutout to that subset of jerks who knew you could not afford the homes you bought and bought them anyway, feigning shock over the future costs of those giant fake mortgages. Thanks, guys! Way to give a crap about the rest of us!)

² back
You know, you don’t have-a a patron saint for the United States, but there are some American saints. Just the last couple of years they made-a some. The first was-a about-a two years ago. Her name was-a Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton. Mother Seton-is-a what they call her. And she’s got-a these nuns of her own order who lobby-they’re real heavy-they came to Rome and everything. And it’s amazing, you see. To be made a saint in-a the catholic church, you have to have-a four miracles. That’s-a the rules, you know. It’s-a always been that-a. Four miracles, and-a to prove it. Well, this-a Mother Seton-now they could only prove-a three miracles. But the Pope-he just waved the fourth one. He just waved it! And do you know why? It’s-a because she was American. It’s all-a politics. We got-a some Italian-a people, they got-a forty, fifty, sixty miracles to their name. They can’t-a get in just cause they say there’s already too many Italian saints, and this woman comes along with-a three lousy miracles. I understand that-a two of them was-a card tricks. Next thing you know, they’re gonna be making Kreskin a saint. Saint Kreskin-they’ll probably call him. It’s a good one.

³ back
Dolores Umbridge: [walks in front of Harry with a straight face] Yes?
Harry Potter: [hesitates and looks at his scarred hand] Nothing.
Dolores Umbridge: [bends down] That’s right. Because deep down you know that you deserve to be punished. Don’t you Mr. Potter?

July 9, 2008

Types of variables, drop-down menus

Filed under: Data, Organizations — Peter @ 5:49 pm

Over at 37 Signals, they have a regular series detailing their design decisions. It is an insightful feature and an insightful blog.

Their latest discussion is about how they managed a question on their support forms. I want to drop some research methodology on this problem. While their discussion is about how to design a feedback form, it is also about the kinds of questions you should ask on a survey. And it would benefit from a discussion of categorical/nominal variables, ordinal variables, and interval-level variables. Yep.

So, terms. Categorical variables (also called nominal variables) are those variables with 2 or more ’states’, but without an intrinsic ordering. Male/female is categorical, as is eye or hair color, race, what school you went to. Ordinal variables are those variable with two or more states that have an ordering to them. Low/medium/high are ordinal variables. Less than HS, HS, some college, BA is ordinal. Interval-level variables are ordered, and the distance between categories is evenly spaced. Income, height, and years of education are all interval-level variables.

The difference between categorical/nominal variables and ordinal variables is the hierarchical ordering of the latter. What school you went to is nominal, but tiered ranking of what school you went to is ordinal. Tiered ranking may be ordinal, but amount of school endowment is interval-level. And quantitative variables are a hint that the variable is ordinal or interval, but not decisive (zip codes are nominal, for instance).

So, back to 37 Signals. What they want is some variable that would be easy to understand (from the customer perspective) and helpful to process (from the company perspective). Their first attempt looked something like this:

It takes time to think through what my state of mind is, because the items are almost ordered, but not really. Confused, worried, upset, and panicked are not points on a continuum, they are just different states of being. The question is asked as a categorical variable question. But it is one that they reallywanted to be an ordinal variable question. They tried to solve the problem by formalizing an ordinal variable, and putting a numbered ordering system on it to make it clearly so:

This is easier to deal with as a customer, since you can sort of pick up your relative state of panic. In other words, you pick up that there is a rough ordering very quickly, and the numbers help a lot in this respect. But alas, what’s good for the customer was no good for 37Signals. The reason is that while they began by wanting to know the subjectivity of the customer, what they really really wanted to know was, ‘how important is this problem for our company?’. Reasonable, but different. This is their final solution:

They have a reason for this, and it is a decent one:

Now, if something’s broken, we can spot it and fix it right away. A system failure is much more important to us (and our customers) than a feature request or general feedback. This method lets us prioritize these queries accordingly, instead of treating them like they’re all the same.

However, this final solution kind of sucks, I think. The problem is that it moves priority from the customer to the company, while giving an illusion of giving control to the customer. That is, the variable is categorical/nominal for the customer, but ordinal for the company. In other words, what is important to the company is more important than what is important to this particular customer. This is probably even more true for those customers for whom everything for them is the most important thing in the world. And yet.

I think perhaps a better solution splits the question into two, which provides space for both ‘urgency for the customer’ and ‘urgency for the organization’.

At the risk of adding yet another item to your survey/form, you have solved both problems with some cognitive ease: customers are defaulted to medium (which is easy for people to just ignore/skip over or shift with little cognitive difficulty), which would allow the organization to give its own priority to the categorical variable. If the customer changes the default to ‘not urgent’, this still stands. If the customer makes their own priority ‘urgent’, then the organization has some discretion on whether to treat this as ‘urgent for us’ or not, but at least has a sense of the panic level for the customer.

I’m sure there is an aesthetic here as well, but the general lesson should be two-fold. 1) Consider carefully the meanings behind your survey variables. Categorical variables often require thinking about, particularly as the category options become large. Ordinal and interval variables (which create an ordering) are easy, until they are too refined. Let’s say you are at a hospital, and a doctor asks you ‘how do you feel?’ Sorting through a list of adjectives that describe your feelings sucks. And assessing your level of pain between 1 and 7 is easier than between 1 and 1000.

The thing is, sometimes what is important to you is not what’s important to the doctor. If you feel throbbing, it’s not lethal. If you feel numbness, it is. In this case, the options are categorical to the patient, but ordinal to the doctor.

Which leads to 2) If you want your customers’ opinions, it may behoove you to give them a way to tell these to you. In the medical example, what kind of pain and how much does it hurt are two questions; patients care more about the second, even if doctors care more about the first. So don’t ask what kind of pain without asking how much does it hurt. Even if this saves the patient’s life, they will still be pissed at you for dismissing their subjective reality.

July 8, 2008

Nature!

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 2:01 pm

Canadian Rockies are out of hand. Seriously. I’d post photos of Lake Louise, but it looks like we’re standing in front of a giant postcard.

Think I’m joking? This was our hotel in Banff.

Birthday

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 10:11 am

I’m back from being out of town, and a day past my birthday. In addition to being the same as Satchel Paige and Ringo Starr, it’s also the anniversary of the invention of sliced bread.

I had a birthday party some time back when everyone was required to ‘entertain me’ in some fashion - the results ranged from jokes to dances to stories to the making of an orange peel man. Recent years have been somewhat less prosaic, mostly traveling to and from friends’ weddings.

June 16, 2008

How about this…

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 6:08 pm

The Associated Press, following criticism from bloggers over an AP assertion of copyright, plans to meet this week with a bloggers’ group to help form guidelines under which AP news stories could be quoted online.

Jim Kennedy, the AP’s director of strategic planning, said Monday that he planned to meet Thursday with Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association, as part of an effort to create standards for online use of AP stories by bloggers that would protect AP content without discouraging bloggers from legitimately quoting from it.

The meeting comes after AP sent a legal notice last week to Rogers Cadenhead, the author of a blog called the Drudge Retort, a news community site whose name is a parody of the prominent blog the Drudge Report.

The notice called for the blog to remove several postings that AP believed was an improper use of its stories. Other bloggers subsequently lambasted AP for going after a small blogger whom they thought appeared to be engaging in a legally permissible and widely practiced activity protected under “fair use” provisions of copyright law.

In response, the AP indicated it would seek to create guidelines, though even that idea triggered further protests. Michael Arrington wrote on his TechCrunch blog Monday that AP “doesn’t get to make its own rules about how its content is used, if those rules are stricter than the law allows.”

Fuck you, AP.

June 12, 2008

Movie Night

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 6:47 am

Welp, had a movie night last night, and the highlights, lowlights, and, well, lights, were as follows:
- the dessert was good. Nutella semi-freddo (thanks JL), crepes, strawberries, bananas, sweetened ricotta, cinnamon graham crackers, vanilla marshmallows, dark chocolate. All good.
- the savory crepes were decent. I only had one (carmalized onion, sauteed mushroom, swiss cheese), and it was delicious. Other fillings were ham, asparagus, grilled zucchini and squash, spinach.
- the salad was not good. It should have been good, but it was gritty. Ouch. Top chef wouldn’t have served it. Next time, wash wash wash wash the lettuce.

And the movie, The Player holds up surprisingly well. With apologies to everyone I didn’t get to talk to that much because I was running about, I thought it went pretty ok.

June 10, 2008

All hail our new Culture Section Overlords

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 9:29 pm

Just in from my culture section listserv:

Dear Colleagues,

I’m pleased to announce the official results of our Culture Section elections:

Chair-Elect
Karen Cerulo, Rutgers University

Council Member
David Grazian, University of Pennsylvania
Eiko Ikegami, New School for Social Research

Secretary - Treasurer
Jennifer Lena, Vanderbilt University

Student Representative
Stacie F. Furia, University of California - Santa Barbara

Congratulations to you all, and thanks to everyone who agreed to serve the section by standing for office.

Special thanks, too, to the Nominations Committee– Paul Lopes (chair), John Krinsky, and Omar Lizardo– for your hard and productive work to develop a fine slate of candidates.

Lyn Spillman
Culture Section Chair.

June 9, 2008

On the job market?

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 1:12 pm

First of all, Barnard has a late-junior to early-associate position, in urban sociology. Let me know if you know someone who might be appropriate.

More generally, if you are a graduate student on the job market, here is some advice for you:

- Now, today, as soon as you can, make appointments with faculty in your department to tell them that you are on the job market. This includes faculty you are friendly with but who are not on your committee. Chat with them about what your topic is/was and your findings, etc. You can often pitch this as ‘I was hoping I might get some advice from you. I’m on the market this year, and I’m trying to situate myself professionally. Do you have any guidance you might offer?’ The end point should be to remind them who you are and that you are on the market. You will also get opportunities from this to work on your 2-minute pitch.

- In the next couple/few weeks, or perhaps after you definitely know where jobs will be posted, start to email faculty from schools you think you might be interested in applying to. ‘Hi there, Professor X, we met a couple years ago at the OOW section reception. I’m on the market, and I’m wondering if there might be a time to schedule in a coffee or drink or just a quick chat with you at ASA.’ If they are on the search committee, great. If not, you want to learn about schools as well as to let them know who you are. 3rd party introductions are good here, and essential for some of the fussier schools (see item 1).

- There are lots of places to get advice on things like CVs, cover letters. My suggestion is only that there is an inverse relationship between fancy formatting and substance. Be Thomas Keller here - call your dish PB&J and have it be great, rather than calling your dish tournedos de boeuf and having it be hamburger. A stark CV with little on it may seem kind of crappy, but a fancy CV with little on it is an instant no.

Another suggestion here is to take advantage of the mail merge tools in MS Word or whatever its equivalent is for you. It may or may not be worth your while to create multiple iterations of who you are for different kinds of schools. I am inclined towards the belief that you are who you are, and your life will be easier with a single packet (including writing samples, materials for everyone even if they don’t ask for them), and then spend time finishing your dissertation or what have you. Because a) it already takes a long time, and you want to get it out in one or two waves and let the process do its thing; and b) you will not go far with a presentation of self that really differs from what you are comfortable with in order to persuade schools to hire you. If you do, prepare to wear that presentation of self for the next few years.

- The job market is a crap shoot, and you will likely face no other (or at best few other) areas where interval-level differences are transformed into categorical differences like the job market. Everything conspires to make you believe it is all about you - a referendum on your work, your life, your personhood. I can not tell you enough times that it is somewhat about you, but only a little. Departments argue, come to consensus, change their minds, interpret their needs and yours, are slow, have key committee members be sick the day you are being considered, and the list goes on. This is the one time in your life to be a good institutionalist and know that agency in the academic job market is overrated. Agency in the academic job market is overrated.

That’s it. I am sure you can find others who have better and more advice, but this is what I can offer without even knowing anything else about your situation. Be lucky you’re not having a child - my best friend told me that not only did they get overwhelmed with advice, but they actually started getting advice about the advice: ‘You see, man, you gotta know how to take the advice…’

June 4, 2008

Masters King, Rojas, Healy, Lizardo, Felin

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 6:08 am

I loves me some Orgtheory. Although my work most prominently overlaps with Brayden’s and Kieran’s (Brayden and I disagree enough on theoretical orientation and substance while agreeing on much else, to make it interesting), the site is a combination of latest-greatest published work, thoughtful social science insights to current events, and how to get through graduate school. You should look at their work often and well. It’s good to great.

Plus, Fabio has the single best post of the political season. All the posts after (and there are many insightful and more accurate ones) make this one even better.

June 3, 2008

Master Uggen

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 12:53 pm

I sure do love me some Chris Uggen. In addition to a rather expansive blogroll to launch from, he gives a mix of personal, popular, scholarly, and inside-baseball-y posts that I can not reproduce. My blog tends to be my early thinking, sometimes applied to contemporary news, with some more rambly stuff in between. His, I think, is better.

Lurk much?

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 12:36 pm

If you do, and you live in NYC, you might be interested in joining me and a couple other sociology blogger types for lunch on Thursday. Email me for the details - plevin {at} barnard {dot} edu. Might be fun.

June 2, 2008

Anchoring, art-style

Filed under: Art — Peter @ 9:34 am

At the Tate Modern, there are a number of paintings by Pablo Picasso. Ten are currently on display (well, as of last week, this obviously changes). Interestingly, however, there is no room where you can see ‘the Picasso paintings’ in one place. Contrast this with the room of Gerhard Richter’s, or the gallery of Rothkos.

Of these ten pieces, they are displayed in the following rooms/exhibit spaces:

Five (well, 6 if ‘Beyond Surrealism’ and ‘Surrealism and Beyond’ are counted differently, as the Tate suggests) different exhibits for the pieces. For instance, the Bust of a Woman hangs next to Albert Gleizes’ Portrait of Jacques Nayral.

Why this? Why no Picasso gallery? Because Picasso is serving a different purpose than Rothko or Richter - rather than showcasing an artist, he is anchoring various categories of modern and contemporary art. Picasso provides the entry point for any number of schools of art, because he was influential in creating them, but also because he is understood as the epitome of a contemporary artist. More versatile than Warhol, more accessible than Cezanne, Picasso currently provides the starting point for understanding surrealism, vorticism, the contemporary ’sublime’ (paired with Bacon).

Categories need centers, and commensuration depends on a ‘third metric’ that can stand outside of other, otherwise qualitatively distinct objects to render them compare-able. Just as cardinals or robins stand in for a central kind of ‘birdness’ against which hummingbirds and penguins can be ‘measured’, in late modern art, Picasso-ness is a measure against which other kinds of art categories can be understood.

Sure she’s good, but is she ‘Picasso-good’?

May 23, 2008

brand timeline

Filed under: Uncategorized — Peter @ 10:34 am

I sometimes imagine doing an exercise where students would write down in a journal all the advertisements they see in a 24hr time-span. Every single one, including logos, brands, commercials, street signs. Anything bigger than an identifying mark for a store or object, anything that aims towards informing you about the company behind the object rather than the object itself. Of course fuzziness would have to be worked out (which itself would be part of the exercise).

In my mind, it is not as cool or clever as this. But more complete.