Sociology

I studied History, Urban Sociology and English outside my Chemistry major at Northwestern. While History and English were presented as placid areas of study, my Chicago location guaranteed real fireworks in my Urban Sociology classes. It was the early 70s, post-Moynihan report, but pre-William Julius Wilson. We read Banfield's "The Unheavenly City Revisited", Jencks' "Inequality", as well as early work by criminologist James Q. Wilson (?!); "City Politics" (with Banfield), "Varieties of Police Behavior", and papers that became "Thinking About Crime". Back then, I was a Classical Marxist (Marx-Engels), having rejected my father's Soviet-styled Leninism/Stalinism. I found much of the material humorous and misguided. I imagined bearded professors dressed in ostentatious 19th century millitary parade regalia marching spastically in all directions on a football field before 50,000 screaming Big 10 fans. The professors are carrying enormous Sousaphones, emitting a cacophony of blatts and gurgles akin to a herd of dyspeptic elephants who snorted too much coke. They collide with each other and redouble their efforts.

As a chemist, I discovered that there was no mechanistic relationship between hypothesis and theory in Sociology. (bear with me) In Organic Chemistry, a hypothesis is validated as consistent with bedrock stereoelectronic/structural theory by "watching" the electrons and noting where the atoms end up. There a few simple rules: electrons don't like to bump heads and don't dig crowds; nothing happens if it takes too much energy or effort, and the final products like to be relaxed, mellow, almost soporific. That's called "formulating a plausible reaction mechanism." Sociology is devoid of this.


Today in the Times (‘Culture of Poverty’ Makes a Comeback)

For more than 40 years, social scientists investigating the causes of poverty have tended to treat cultural explanations like Lord Voldemort: That Which Must Not Be Named. Now, after decades of silence, these scholars are speaking openly about you-know-what, conceding that culture and persistent poverty are enmeshed.

As part of a large research project in Chicago, Professor Robert J. Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard, walked through different neighborhoods this summer, dropping stamped, addressed envelopes to see how many people would pick up an apparently lost letter and mail it, a sign that looking out for others is part of the community’s culture [rrrrriiiiinnnnnggggg: THEORY].
In some neighborhoods, like Grand Boulevard, where the notorious Robert Taylor public housing projects once stood, almost no envelopes were mailed; in others, researchers received more than half of the letters back. Income levels did not necessarily explain the difference [buzzzz: HYPOTHESIS] , Professor Sampson said, but rather the community’s cultural norms, the levels of moral cynicism and disorder.

Now if I had a moral cynicismometer with a disorder detector, maybe we could put this puppy to bed and publish in PNAS.....