Similarity breeds connection. This principle—the homophily principle—structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, comembership, and other types of relationship. The result is that people's personal networks are homogeneous with regard to many sociodemographic, behavioral, and intrapersonal characteristics. Homophily limits people's social worlds in a way that has powerful implications for the information they receive, the attitudes they form, and the interactions they experience. Homophily in race and ethnicity creates the strongest divides in our personal environments, with age, religion, education, occupation, and gender following in roughly that order. Geographic propinquity, families, organizations, and isomorphic positions in social systems all create contexts in which homophilous relations form. Ties between nonsimilar individuals also dissolve at a higher rate, which sets the stage for the formation of niches (localize...

/pdf/birds-of-a-feather-homophily-in-social-networks-3kjmeyr23w.pdf

Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks

世界経済・社会統計 = World development indicators

It is argued that P-values and the tests based upon them give unsatisfactory results, especially in large samples. It is shown that, in regression, when there are many candidate independent variables, standard variable selection procedures can give very misleading results. Also, by selecting a single model, they ignore model uncertainty and so underestimate the uncertainty about quantities of interest. The Bayesian approach to hypothesis testing, model selection, and accounting for model uncertainty is presented. Implementing this is straightforward through the use of the simple and accurate BIC approximation, and it can be done using the output from standard software. Specific results are presented for most of the types of model commonly used in sociology. It is shown that this approach overcomes the difficulties with P-values and standard model selection procedures based on them. It also allows easy comparison of nonnested models, and permits the quantification of the evidence for a null hypothesis of interest, such as a convergence theory or a hypothesis about societal norms.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/271063.pdf

Bayesian Model Selection in Social Research

A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

We investigate whether income inequality affects subsequent growth in a cross-country sample for 1965-90, using the models of Barro (1997), Bleaney and Nishiyama (2002) and Sachs and Warner (1997), with negative results. We then investigate the evolution of income inequality over the same period and its correlation with growth. The dominating feature is inequality convergence across countries. This convergence has been significantly faster amongst developed countries. Growth does not appear to influence the evolution of inequality over time. Outline

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/81822/1/02-28.pdf

Economic growth and income inequality

In the late 1970s, shortly after the Cultural Revolution ended, the People's Republic of China reopened its door to the West. Through the open door came tens of thousands of students and scholars. By 1988 more than 60,000 of them had gone aboard, with 93 percent going to the United States.' Between 1978 and 1988, students from the People's Republic of China became one of the largest foreign student groups in the United States, second only to those from Taiwan.2 According to recent estimates, by the beginning of this decade more than 40,000 Chinese students were living in the United States.3 The number may seem small, given China's population of more than a billion. Additionally, the group is by no means a representative sample of ordinary Chinese students and scholars, much less of ordinary Chinese people. Before June 1989, they were referred to as Communist China's "best and brightest," "new elite," "future leaders," or the "successor generation."4 After June 1989, they were more often regarded as "the source of political disturbance," or the only group who openly "vowed to carry on the struggle for freedom and democracy."5 They have, however, attracted much attention from educators, politicians,

/pdf/western-influence-on-people-s-republic-of-china-chinese-49jk3qo4zs.pdf

Western Influence on (People's Republic of China) Chinese Students in the United States

Since property ownership affords the elderly some control over resources and perhaps even support and respect from potential caretakers, examination of the decision to transfer property to children can help us gain insight into the underlying dynamics of intergenerational exchanges between the elderly and their children. In this paper we use data from the 1989 Survey of Health and Living Status of the Elderly in Taiwan to explore the demographic and social characteristics associated with pre-mortem property division. From both bivariate and multivariate analyses, we find that the likelihood of property division is positively related to age, widowhood, natality in Taiwan, rural residence, and the number of living children, and negatively related to education. After controlling for other characteristics, our results show that widows are more than twice as likely as widowers to have divided all their property. These results lend statistical support to findings in the ethnographic literature on the Chinese family.

/pdf/division-of-family-property-in-taiwan-4arm5bajen.pdf

Division of family property in Taiwan.

/pdf/the-tension-between-generality-and-accuracy-1zr96ed77g.pdf

The Tension between Generality and Accuracy

The US public holds more nuanced views about China than are typically captured in public opinion surveys. Empirical investigation of a nationwide online survey of US adults shows that the American public is sharply divided over the US–China trade war, despite reporting high support for international trade with China (76%). Using survey questions on US–China trade and the trade war, a typology was developed that indicates more than 40% of US adults support trade with China but oppose the trade war. A slightly smaller share has a more economically militant view of trade with China, supporting trade and the trade war. Political identity is strongly associated with attitudes toward the trade war, but only weakly associated with attitudes toward trade with China. Perceptions about China and its government, people, and culture are highly correlated with views on trade with China but are unrelated to views on the trade war.

Americans’ Attitudes toward the US–China Trade War

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/29005/0000?sequence=1

Yu Xie

Papers

Western Influence on (People's Republic of China) Chinese Students in the United States

Division of family property in Taiwan.

The Tension between Generality and Accuracy

Americans’ Attitudes toward the US–China Trade War

Model fertility schedules revisited: The log-multiplicative model approach