Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity

Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist

This 1966 paperback edition of a publication which first appeared in 1963 has by now been widely reviewed as a worthy contribution to the sociological study of deviant behavior. Its current appearance as a paperback is a testimonial both to the quality of the work and to the prominence of deviant behavior in this generation. In general the author places deviance in perspective, identifies types of deviant behavior, considers the role of rule makers and enforcers, and some of the problems in studying deviance. In addition, he develops a sequential model of deviance relying on the concept of career, a concept originally developed in studies of occupations. In his study of a particular kind of deviance, the use of marihuana, the author posits and tests systematically an hypothesis about the genesis of marihuana use for pleasure. The hypothesis traces the sequence of changes in individual attitude

Outsiders Studies in the Sociology of Deviance.

It comes as something ofa surprise to reflect that the New York Review ofBooks is now over twenty years old. Even people of my generation (that is, old enough to remember the revolutionary 196os but not young enough to have taken a very exciting part in them) think of the paper as eternally youthful. In fact, it has gone through years of relatively quiet life, yet, as always in a competitive journalistic market, it is the controversies that attract the interest of the reader and to which the history (especially an admittedly impressionistic survey that tries to include something of the intellectual context in which a journal has operated) must give some attention. Not all the attacks which the New York Review has attracted, both early in its career and more recently, are worth more than a brief summary. What do we now make, for example, of Richard Kostelanetz's forthright accusation that 'The New York Review was from its origins destined to publicize Random House's (and especially [Jason] Epstein's) books and writers'?1 Well, simply that, even if the statistics bear out the charge (and Kostelanetz provides some suggestive evidence to support it, at least with respect to some early issues), there is nothing surprising in a market economy about a publisher trying to push his books through the pages of a journal edited by his friends. True, the New York Review has not had room to review more than around fifteen books in each issue and there could be a bias in the selection of

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3507774.pdf

The New York Review of Books

Ecological Engineering: Journal of Ecotechnology. Editor-in-chief William J. Mitsch. Elsevier. 4/yr. DFL 361, $195.

Science in action

The Federal Reserve (the Fed) is responsible for monitoring, analyzing and ultimately stabilizing US financial markets. It also has unrivalled access to economic data, high-level connections to financial institutions, and a large staff of professionally trained economists. Why then was it apparently unconcerned by the financial developments that are now widely recognized to have caused the 2008 financial crisis? Using a wide range of Fed documents from the pre-crisis period, particularly the transcripts of meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), this paper shows that Fed policymakers and staff were aware of relevant developments in financial markets, but paid infrequent attention to them and disregarded significant systemic threats. Drawing on literatures in economics, political science and sociology, the paper then demonstrates that the Fed's intellectual paradigm in the years before the crisis focused on ‘post hoc interventionism’ – the institution's ability to limit the fallout sh...

/pdf/what-were-they-thinking-the-federal-reserve-in-the-run-up-to-47xe1x1kro.pdf

What were they thinking? The Federal Reserve in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis

While the Washington Consensus is one of the most (in)famous economic policy paradigms of recent times, the literature on it still lacks a detailed, diachronic analysis of how it evolved within one...

How did the Washington consensus move within the IMF? Fragmented change from the 1980s to the aftermath of the 2008 crisis

Connection to academic knowledge is a defining feature of modern expertise, and it is often treated as the key to maintaining professional authority. It is unclear, however, just where and when it has to be made and how it might fail. Interviews with economists working in a variety of different settings in the United States suggest that most of their academic knowledge is too abstract to be of much substantive use, and their academic standards of scientific rigor may play only a minor role in legitimizing their day-to-day authority. This does not threaten their status, however, because economists have become entrenched in a variety of organizational settings as possessors of a craft-like “core” of valuable skills. The momentum of this basic institutionalization suggests that although connection to elite academic knowledge is a defining characteristic of modern expertise, it may not always be central to explaining ongoing expert authority.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/sop.2007.50.1.101

Academic Knowledge and Expert Authority in American Economics

The Reluctant Economist: Perspectives on Economics, Economic History, and Demography:

This article looks at how parts of a social stock of knowledge can become insulated from each other via their uneven distribution both "horizontally" across time and space, and "vertically" with respect to degrees of embodiment in unconscious habits and routines. It uses ideas from Alfred Schutz, Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann, Michael Polanyi, and others to argue that this insulation can produce a highly dynamic structuring of knowledge, awareness of which has the potential to help explain the existence of ignorance, misperception, and multiple interpretations in different social settings. This potential is illustrated with examples taken from a study of American economists, showing how an approach considering insulation can improve understanding of at least one currently influential branch of knowledge. The article also suggests briefly how such an approach might augment recent theories of habitual action by accounting for both stability and change, and even help with some longstanding epistemological problems in social theory.

Mike Reay

Papers

What were they thinking? The Federal Reserve in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis

How did the Washington consensus move within the IMF? Fragmented change from the 1980s to the aftermath of the 2008 crisis

Academic Knowledge and Expert Authority in American Economics

The Reluctant Economist: Perspectives on Economics, Economic History, and Demography:

Knowledge Distribution, Embodiment, and Insulation*