At least for a non-insider, sociology is not a very useful science, if it can be called a science or even a discipline at all. With its checkered history, it looks more like an “undiscipline.” Although there are some brilliant exceptions, the common denominator of most sociologists seems to be the belief that individuals, or at least non-sociologists, are a product of society and that socialism is the solution to all problems. Current exceptions revolve around the rational-choice school of sociology, inspired by economists who applied their methodology to “social” issues such as discrimination, marriage, social capital, etc. At the first rank of these economists figures Gary Becker, laureate of the 1992 Nobel prize in economics.
In his Nobel lecture, “The Economic Way of Looking at Life,” Becker noted:
Specialists from fields that do consider social questions are often attracted to the economic way of modelling behavior because of the analytical power provided by the assumption of individual rationality. Thriving schools of rational choice theorists and empirical researchers are active in sociology, law, political science, history, anthropology, and psychology. The rational choice model provides the most promising basis presently available for a unified approach to the analysis of the social world by scholars from the social sciences
In one of his most important works, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, published in three volumes from 1973 to 1978 (University of Chicago Press, 2022, for the consolidated edition by Jeremy Shearmur), Friedrich Hayek, also a Nobel economist, suggests that a distinct science of society (“sociology”) does not make more sense than would a distinct science of the natural world (call it “naturology”):
I must confess here that, however grateful we all must be for some of the descriptive work of the sociologists, for which, however, perhaps anthropologists and historians would have been equally qualified, there seems to me still to exist no more justification for a theoretical discipline of sociology than there would be for a theoretical discipline of naturology apart from the theoretical disciplines dealing with particular classes of natural or social phenomena. (p. 534)
READER COMMENTS
Dylan
Sep 10 2022 at 12:35pm
I majored in Economics and Sociology, partially because of seeing how I was studying the same thinkers in both disciplines, but that both seemed to have a misguided view of the other. For what it is worth, I found the Sociology I studied to be more methodologically rigorous than most of my Economics work, and the professors to have a far better grasp of statistics than those in the economics department. I’m sure this had a lot to do with me studying the “harder” side of Sociology, demographics and migration. There really was a lot of overlap though, I remember when the Freakonomics book came out and got a lot of press, thinking that his approach was far closer to the Sociology I was studying than to how most of Econ was taught.
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 10 2022 at 12:52pm
Dylan: What about Becker? How did he compare with the sociologists you studied? (Granted that demography is a bit of a special field, consistent with what Hayek wrote.)
Dylan
Sep 10 2022 at 4:03pm
I don’t believe I came across Becker in any of my sociology classes and it was only briefly in econ. My undergrad is decades ago though and my memory is not sharp. I mostly recall studying people like Bentham, J.S. Mill, Comte, Weber, and Spencer. When I came across Becker’s discrimination model some years later, I remember thinking that it ignored any potential for systematic discrimination to lead to actual productivity differences on average between the majority group and the group being discriminated against that would make it rational for even a non-biased employer to be discriminatory in hiring. If I’m an employer and I can use an easily visible characteristic to pare down my applicant pool to a more qualified average, I’m likely to do that even if it means potentially prematurely rejecting a few applicants that are more qualified. Years after that, I came across Arrow’s statistical discrimination critique of Becker that I think was making a similar argument?
Scott Sumner
Sep 10 2022 at 12:42pm
Someone once said that economics is about how people make choices, whereas sociology is about how people have no choice.
They study the same thing (society) with a different set of assumptions.
Dylan
Sep 10 2022 at 4:18pm
I think that’s far too simplistic, maybe some fields within Soc are like that, but certainly not all. I mean, economics is really just one branch of sociology after all.
Justin Fox wrote a nice piece on sociology a few years back, focused on an academic conference, but had some nice general observations on the field in comparison to economics too.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-08-20/economics-needs-help-from-sociology
David
Sep 10 2022 at 4:08pm
Pierre,
I know you and like you. So, I know that you are too smart for a post like this. There is a vast amount of important and insightful sociological concepts, theories, and empirical approaches. I would suggest that you focus on the *best* of a discipline and learn as much as you can from it, rather than this handwaving dismissal.
Best
David
nobody.really
Sep 11 2022 at 2:32am
That’s a common reductionist thought. But why stop there? Theoretical physicists would say that there’s no point in any other sciences: Ultimately everything is a function of physical phenomena. Want to explain why Johnny can’t read? Maybe it’s because of a defect in his brain. Maybe it’s because he was never given the opportunity to learn. Maybe it’s because he lacks motivation. But ultimately each of these hypotheses should be manifest in atoms and molecules and the forces attracting and repelling them. Maybe we haven’t QUITE mastered the techniques for diagnosing Johnny’s circumstances from a scan of his atoms, but no doubt it’s all in the physics somewhere–and therefore we should regard all other disciplines as unworthy of analysis.
It’s a point of view. But until we ACTUALLY master the requisite techniques, I don’t regard this as an especially compelling point of view. Maybe physics has the potential to become the “one ring to rule them all,” but it isn’t yet.
Likewise, it’s all well and good for Hayek to express gratitude for the descriptive work of sociologists, but then dismiss the field of study because (presumably) he thinks that the field of economics has enveloped all the worthwhile information. But has it? And even if other social sciences merely provide “descriptive work” for economists to incorporate into their models, that strikes me as a useful contribution. Honestly, do econ models identify new human behaviors? Or do they merely provide a stylized way to describe behavior previously identified by others?
I like Scott Sumner’s simplified distinction: “[E]conomics is about how people make choices, whereas sociology is about how people have no choice.” This provides a nice contrast with the Becker quote above: “The rational choice model provides the most promising basis presently available for a unified approach to the analysis of the social world by scholars from the social sciences.”
Becker wrote those words in 1992. Does ANYONE embrace those words anymore? Or do we agree with Daniel Kahneman, 2002 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, who argues that the vastly larger share of human cognition occurs below the level of rational cognition? Haven’t we documented long lists of cognitive biases illustrating how systematically IRRATIONAL people’s decisions are? Doesn’t the field of Public Choice pretty thoroughly rebut arguments grounded in human rationality?
Here’s a simple example of the differences between economics and sociology: Look at the photos of all Nobel Laureates in Economics. What percentage of them are wearing western attire in their photos–and why? Did they conduct analyses to identify optimal styles of clothing? Or did they reflexively following the norms of the cultures in which they were raised? A myopic focus on rationality misses the vast majority of human behavior.
CAN we create econ-ish models to explain ever more behavior, such as people’s attire? Sure–and in doing so, we must add ever greater complexity to the models. That is, we must recognize how weak and inadequate were our previous models–and how unjustified were dogmatic assertions based on those simplified models. For example, the Ultimatum Game and democratic elections lead to outcomes that confound predictions based on simplistic concepts of self-interest. Becker argues that we can retain models that say people act according to their self-interest–provided we radically expand our understanding of self-interest.
Eventually we recognize that my utility function includes variables that reflect my understanding of YOUR utility function, and vice versa. And the more we recognize these dynamics, the less adequately the classical “atomized” concept of individuality explains human behavior. We’re forced to acknowledge that humans are SOCIAL animals: We have evolved to care about our neighbor–his welfare, his threats, his status relative to our own. Classical economics disparages envy as an affront to classical beliefs about individualism; other social sciences RECOGNIZE envy as a real human emotion and motivation. Which approach seems more scientific?
All that said, I sense the boundaries between the fields of economics and other social sciences grows thinner by the day–in large part because economics is incorporating ever more of the insights of the other sciences. We might speculate about the day when there will be no more distinction between economics and sociology. And we might speculate about whether Hayek would be able to recognize the field of economics as it will then be practiced.
Dylan
Sep 11 2022 at 11:15am
Nicely said as usual.
I dabbled a lot in my undergrad days, taking classes in just about everything, and something I noticed and was appealing before the charm wore off, is every department seemed to think they had some kind of exclusive on the truth. And everyone relished the stories of when some one else got something spectacularly wrong because of some myopia of their field, while being oblivious to the same faults in their own.
What really struck me though is how close so many of the social sciences were. We were studying the same problems, just through different theoretical frameworks, but even 20 years ago it felt like methodologies were converging.
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 11 2022 at 12:19pm
Nobody: I think you missed the central point in Hayek’s statement:
I also think you will find that many of your objections have been answered if you read Hayek’s The Counter-Revolution of Science as well as Becker in the article linked to in my post.
Brandon Berg
Sep 11 2022 at 10:36am
I think that those would benefit from being a bit less political. Yes, the whole field is biased to the left, but the bigger issue is sociologists’ lack of respect for the difficulty of causal inference and ignorance of or disregard for the findings of behavior genetics research.
The tendency of sociologists to fail to account for heritability of traits that influence socioeconomic outcomes and attribute variance in outcomes purely to social factors is a failure mode so common in the field that it’s known as the sociologist’s fallacy. As I like to put it, the central dogma of sociology is h^2 = 0.
Less bias would be nice, but I don’t want a field full of sloppy left-wing and sloppy right-wrong research. What I really want is enough methodological rigor that bias doesn’t matter.
Brandon Berg
Sep 11 2022 at 10:37am
In the first sentence, replace “those” with “this.”
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 12 2022 at 11:12am
Brandon: I don’t understand your “h^2 = 0”. What is h?
Rui Duarte
Sep 11 2022 at 1:34pm
Oh Gary Becker.. the man who told us that we “should” calculate the utility of children (offspring) or university degrees. 😟
I confess I don’t think much of people who do everything for money. I guess it’s my eathen (catholic, thus different than the “protestant ethics” utilitarian ethics and their cognates stem from) or perhaps the Principles of character taught to me by my family. I don’t think much of people who do everything for money, but I tolerate them: it’s “none of my business”. Gary Becker and his followers, however, seem so surre of their Faith that anyone thinking differently doesn’t practice a proper academic discipline. Pretty radical.
Pierre, not all people do everything for money; 🙄 or Utility. As ethics paradigms go, Utility it by far the weakest. Your guru, Gary Becker, is just an amateur sociologist, as most economists are: after all, human behaviour may have economic consequences, but it’s causes are not the object of “economics” proper. WE, economists, would do the world a favour if we left the study of human behaviour for proper professionals and adapt our “assumptions” to the real humans that really make economic decisions; 🤔 like the marketeers well understood ling ago.
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 12 2022 at 3:10pm
Rui: With due respect, I don’t think that you understand what “utility” is and I would not, at this point, count you among “we, modern economists”! (I understand that one can have other qualities.) “Utility” is just an index of how an individual evaluates different situations. If you are better off having children than not (even if it is because your god loves children and you want to please him, or whatever), children give you more utility, by (the modern) definition of utility. This concept of utility is the Hicks-Allen–Robbins concept, also used by Becker, whom I recommend to your reading. It has something to do with money only in the sense that most individuals (ascetics might be an exception) like money because it allows them to acquire goods and services more easily than barter, and to reach preferred situations (like creating a family, for those who like that).
I would not, at this stage, recommend Friedrich Hayek, who is less mainstream and more difficult to read, but, in The Mirage of Social Justice, he does emphasize the ideas above (my emphasis):
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 12 2022 at 3:24pm
Rui: Allow me one other point, for whatever interest it may have. If I had to choose a guru, I would, at this stage of my thinking, choose James Buchanan, not Gary Becker. See my Econlib review of The Calculus of Consent and my Regulation review of Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative. Of course, Buchanan still takes utility in the Hicks-Allen-Robbins sense; it’s difficult to do otherwise.
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