>Sociologist Orlando Patterson sent out a letter telling graduate students
>that the professors would in the future regard graduate students who
>taught sections for non-sociology courses--i.e., history and literature,
>social studies, historical analysis, et cetera--as in some way disloyal to
>their department and their discipline.
>
>This left me thinking that there is a *lot* to be said for market
>incentives when the alternative is social control, and that sociologists
>are--at some fundamental and deep level--enemies of Utopia.
I dunno. Sociologists at least are conscious of the fact that the society
one lives in deeply affects, limits and shapes, one's "preferences" and
"social values" (where the latter is a term that Arrow used but never seems
to have any role in economics). Thus they recognize the mechanisms that
allow a society to produce people who are more likely to prefer that
society. (It's a little like Akerlof & Dickens on cognitive dissonance.)
Economists assume that what we say we want somehow drops from the sky,
unaffected by society and even (it seems) biology. This encourages
illusions of freedom where it doesn't exist. Then of course, economists
develop Utopias (like Debreu's THEORY OF VALUE) that are totally inhuman,
reducing people to mere exchangers. This is the kind of thing that gives
ideological power to folks like Thatcher and Reagan.
In any event, one can't judge an entire profession from one anecdote. After
all, we wouldn't want to pillory the entire economics profession because of
the crimes of the IMF and World Bank, imposing "structural adjustment
programs" which impoverish many people just to keep the creditors (who have
big influence at those institutions) happy. We wouldn't want to pillory the
economics profession simply because Summers wants to dump effluents on Africa.
BTW, there's a whole school of sociology that involves "exchange theory"
and ends up being a lot like economics. I don't know whether it's still
around or not, since I studied them in 1973 or so.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~jdevine
