You read the title right. This Tuesday the world ends. So say about two thirds of my Facebook friends. One third of my friends believe that the world will end if President Obama is re-elected. They think that we are on our way to socialism. The government will tax all rich people into poverty. The government will send agents into our churches to take away our religious freedom. The borders of our country will swing wide open and immigration will... Read more
Since I teach an undergraduate course on racial, gender and class inequality I am always on the lookout for new examples that are pertinent to students’ experiences. The biggest story in terms of race in higher education is the possible shift in affirmative action during college admissions based on a case by a white female student who did not gain entrance at the University of Texas at Austin. I’m still awaiting more news on how this will end so I... Read more
Last week, Margarita has a very interesting post about positive psychology and it’s implications for sociology. For some time now, I’ve been wondering about what it would look like to focus on the positive in social life and how to attain it. In other words, is there a sociological corollary to positive psychology? Let’s start with something simple, what would such a study be called? It might be awkward to call it positive sociology because that’s awfully close to positivism. Furthermore,... Read more
What ideas or images come to your mind when you hear the word modesty? Until fairly recently, if I was designing an SAT question, I would probably have put modesty as a word similar to boring, ugly, or weak. Now I’ve learned to see modesty as daring, strong and attractive. In a recent email exchange with a colleague who is a Muslim theologian, Mohsen Kadivar of Duke University, he asked me to find out for him what the Catholic Church... Read more
While the third and final presidential debate focused on foreign policy, it was notable that even there—if my memory serves me—the answers offered regularly managed to find their way back to domestic economic policies. Unemployment and job creation have played a central role in this campaign. But is it just me, or does anyone else wonder whether the information-based economy that is ours today simply cannot sustain the sort of job-creation demands we are placing upon it? Talk of creating... Read more
A month ago, the economist Richard Easterlin published an op-ed in the New York Times where he drew upon his work analyzing surveys to argue that increasing economic growth does not boost reported happiness. China is one of his best examples. I admire Easterlin’s long-standing work and I like his argument. The idea that money doesn’t always bring good things is old and validated. Jesus did say that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of... Read more
Recently, while reading Andrew Sayer’s book “Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values and Ethical Life,” I was captivated by the question of which of these two sentences sounds like a more accurate description of reality: 1) Thousands of people died in the Nazi concentration camps. 2) Thousands of people were systematically exterminated in Nazi concentration camps. Most people probably pick #2. Just saying people died in Nazi concentration camps could imply they died a natural death, but saying... Read more
A friend passed along this article from the Wall Street Journal, about the shrinking gap between men and women in terms of who reports marital infidelity. It relies on the good old General Social Survey, whose numbers can be compared from year to year for the purpose of assessing trends in Americans’ social behavior. It states: Among the most reliable studies on this issue is the General Social Survey, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, which has been asking Americans the... Read more
Perhaps it’s my imagination, but “fact checking” this election season seems to have reached a fever pitch. This despite the historically weak tie between facts and politics in general, it would seem. Perhaps I’m overly sensitive to it, given the word-by-word scrutiny to which my own work and media interviews have been subject recently. (Not that the media would ever misquote someone…) But after “lecturing” to a class of 12-year-olds yesterday on some themes in the book of Exodus, I... Read more
This is the last entry of my series based on my latest book entitled What Motivates Cultural Progressives. My basic argument is that cultural progressive activists shaped a social movement that meets the needs of the people in that movement, who tend to be white, male, wealthy and highly educated. Over the past three entries I identified church/state separation,, rationality and progressive politics as the basic values within this movement. Those values are not exclusive to each other and... Read more
Black, White and Gray
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