petersoc

O tempora o mores

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A neat digest from xkcd of worries about the pace of modern life here, including the following from 1907:

Our modern family gathering, silent around the fire, each individual with his head buried in his favourite magazine, is the somewhat natural outcome of the banishment of colloquy from the school.

Meanwhile, one hundred and four years later,

…when parents do view programmes with their children, only 15% use them to start a conversation. A fifth say they sit in silence with their children.

(Data from the ‘Hello Campaign’ reported here.)

‘The Cartography of Bullshit’

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At ‘Africa Is A Country’, Siddhartha Mitter discusses Max Fisher‘s article ‘A fascinating map of the world’s most and least racially tolerant countries’, derived from World Values Survey data:

We are left with a shiny color-coded “fascinating map” on the Washington Post site that sends a strong message of Western, Anglo-Saxon moral superiority, assorted with a mystifying portrayal of the rest of the world, and accompanied by near-gibberish interpretations – all based on a methodological process that fails pretty much every standard of social-science design and data hygiene. In other words, pseudo-analysis that ends up, whether by design or by accident, playing into an ideological agenda.

More here.

Joseph Schumpeter and will.i.am

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In his ‘Theory of Economic Development’ (1911), Joseph Schumpeter notes the importance of innovation and the role of the entrepreneur in economic growth. Specifically, the importance of carrying out ‘new combinations’ is emphasised, yet whilst the innovative entrepreneur has a creative role here, Schumpeter notes in later work that,

I have always emphasized that the entrepreneur is the man who gets new things done and not necessarily the man who invents.

~

Earlier this month, musician Arty noted on twitter that despite the use of significant elements from Arty & Mat Zo’s ‘Rebound’ in will.i.am‘s ‘Let’s Go’, that no clearance rights to use the song had been sought or issued, adding later,

I was never contacted or consulted by Interscope Records, and never signed any license agreements

In addition to ‘Let’s Go’, on ‘#willpower’ it is noted that ‘Bang Bang’ contains elements of Sandro Silva & Quintino’s ‘Epic’, ‘#thatPOWER’ contains elements of Arty’s ‘Kate’, ‘Great Times Are Coming’ contains elements of Denis Koyu’s ‘Tung’, and so on. The Will.I.Steal facebook page looks into this further.

But is this theft? Or is will.i.am acting as the Schumpeterian entrepreneurial source of economic growth, enacting new combinations and realising innovation? His account of the Arty & Mat Zo incident implies that the problem lies in the fact that the law can simply not move at the pace of creativity, and his admiration of innovation is in no doubt:

Who would you invite to your dream dinner party?
I would invite the best Japanese chef ever. Then I’d invite today’s best scientists and innovators like Dean Kamen, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Marc Benioff, and the world’s most influential venture capitalists, and the dinner would be about investing in new innovation led by youth in inner cities.

More here.

will.i.am, #willpower, the #willpower logo and variations thereof are trademarks of William Adams and/or i.am.symbolic, llc.

‘Relax…it’s Courtney Love!’

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As the riff from ‘Celebrity Skin’ starts up after Courtney Love shocks the establishment prudes in her recent e-cigarette commercial, thoughts naturally turn to some other work from the late 1990s – Thomas Frank’s ‘Commodify Your Dissent’:

Corporate America is not an oppressor but a sponsor of fun, provider of lifestyle accoutrements, facilitator of carnival, our slang-speaking partner in the quest for that ever-more apocalyptic orgasm. The countercultural idea has become capitalist orthodoxy, its hunger for transgression upon transgression now perfectly suited to an economic-cultural regime that runs on ever-faster cyclings of the new; its taste for self-fulfillment and its intolerance for the confines of tradition now permitting vast latitude in consuming practices and lifestyle experimentation. Consumerism is no longer about “conformity” but about “difference.” Advertising teaches us not in the ways of puritanical self-denial (a bizarre notion on the face of it), but in orgiastic, never-ending self-fulfillment. It counsels not rigid adherence to the tastes of the herd but vigilant and constantly updated individualism. We consume not to fit in, but to prove, on the surface at least, that we are rock `n’ roll rebels, each one of us as rule-breaking and hierarchy-defying as our heroes of the 60s, who now pitch cars, shoes, and beer. This imperative of endless difference is today the genius at the heart of American capitalism, an eternal fleeing from “sameness” that satiates our thirst for the New with such achievements of civilization as the infinite brands of identical cola, the myriad colors and irrepressible variety of the cigarette rack at 7-Eleven.

More here.

(Bonus material: Earlier this month, Courtney also appeared in advertisments for Yves Saint Laurent. Relatedly, the Guardian notes the continuing influence of punk on fashion, in advance of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s punk exhibition ‘Chaos to Couture’.)

Not enough sociology?

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At thetangential.com, Jay Gabler responds to the recent n+1 editorial ‘Too Much Sociology’:

…sociology has provided many explanations for the rise of sociology, among them Émile Durkheim’s theory of functional differentiation and Max Weber’s theory of rationalization. Durkheim and Weber both predicted that as a society, we would increasingly come to see ourselves in rational—that is, scientific—terms. In other words, we would increasingly come to understand our society in sociological terms. Unlike Marx’s predictions, that one has come true.

More here.

How important are Reinhart and Rogoff’s errors?

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In spite of much ado about inaccurate calculations in Reinhart and Rogoff’s influential ‘Growth in a Time of Debt’ (e.g. ‘European austerity programmes based on an excel error?’), Matthew Klein at Bloomberg argues that…

When it comes to policymaking, this news changes very little: the Reinhart-Rogoff paper was always a flimsy justification for fiscal austerity.

More here.

‘The Great British Class Fiasco’

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At Oxford Sociology, Colin Mills discusses ‘The Great British Class Survey’, and its implications for sociology:

I don’t find A New Model of Social Class: Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey Experiment a very impressive piece of work. Its high profile in the media is, I think, not a positive thing for British sociology. In some domains people believe that any publicity is good publicity. In science, some sorts of publicity only serve to make the subject as well as its practitioners look ridiculous.

More here.

‘Marx’s Economy and Beyond’

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Over at normblog, Norman Geras and Mark Harvey question Marx’s theories regarding where value arises within capitalist systems:

Labour-power, cornerstone of his theory of value and exploitation, is not amenable to being described or theorized by reference to some standard, universalizable labouring-situation, which might then be captured in a mathematically expressible schema. For there is no transcendent situation of the labourer in capitalist economies, and one of the reasons there is not is that the circumstances of those who work and the pressure upon them to exchange their labour-power are never purely economic facts, as they might be within a closed economic system. The worker’s position within capitalist formations is subject to moral, legal and cultural constraints, which themselves contribute to defining the price for which the commodity labour-power is sold and the conditions under which and manner in which it may be used by its purchasers. Moreover, the production of labour-power cannot be treated as comparable to the production of other commodities.

Full text here.

Richard Florida: ‘Bollocks’

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Richard Florida strongly reasserts commitment to his ideas about a ‘creative class’ after Joel Kotkin’s assessment that “the experiment appears to have failed” :

As in all economic transformations, the invisible hand of the market can only take us so far. The rest is up to us. This is not a time to complain about or belittle this shift, or, as with Kotkin, to pretend that it is not even taking place. We need to build the new institutions and the new social compact that can harness its power and extend its benefits to everyone