For better or for worse, social science research is now governed by an institutional review board system that seems to have the problems and promises of medical research, and not social science, as its priority. Zachary Schrag has an excellent article on the history of social sciences and the IRB, “How Talking Became Human Subjects Research.” Schrag summarizes the argument quite vividly:

“This article draws on previously untapped manuscript materials in the National Archives that show that regulators did indeed think about the social sciences, just not very hard. … Compared to medical experimentation, the social sciences were the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of human subjects regulation. Peripheral to the main action, they stumbled onstage and off, neglected or despised by the main characters, and arrived at a bad end.”

Recommended.

If you have any interest in the future of higher ed and you haven’t read Jonathan Rees’ reflections on participating in a prominent MOOC (massive, open, online course), you definitely should.

One of this recent posts takes on the issue of the cost of education in reference to MOOCs, and specifically the perception that guild-like professors are trying to maintain their cushy lifestyles at the expense of needy students who can’t afford expensive tuition. This argument has more than one flaw, as Rees notes, especially the idea that most university faculty make a lot of money (in fact, by volume of teaching, I believe most are now adjuncts working a low piece-rate). Rees goes on to quote an article from The American Interest on lavish expenditures by top universities:

Last year Yale finalized plans to build new residential dormitories at a combined cost of $600 million. The expansion will increase the size of Yale’s undergraduate population by about 1,000. The project is so expensive that Yale could actually buy a three-bedroom home in New Haven for every new student it is bringing in and still save $100 million.

The rest of the debate about MOOCs is more important, but I just wanted to pause and reflect on that quote for a minute.

Whatever is happening to higher-ed more broadly, something very different is going on at Yale, Columbia, Harvard and a handful of others. These universities may be generating the content for MOOCs, but they aren’t worried about their traditional model disappearing anytime soon. And gee whiz do they have a lot of money! As Rees elsewhere notes, the Coursera model seems to be premised on the idea that “super professors” will generate free content that will be offered in place of existing courses at less prestigious universities – basically, the most prominent and well-paid faculty doing free labor to (poorly) replace the labor of the adjuncts and TT faculty at lower-tiered schools. The poorly part is important – for some courses, maybe the MOOC is as good an offering as a big traditional lecture taught by a regular professor, especially if the lecture lacks any interaction whatsoever. But, as Rees repeatedly argues:

Maybe you can teach the world a lot of facts by showing them videos of the best professors of the world, but if you can’t teach them how to “do” history, then MOOCs will never be able to replace the in-class experience unless the powers that be no longer care whether students get access to that experience or not.

At Yale, clearly the powers that be care a lot about that experience. But Yale can afford to care, and to generate the tools that help undo that experience elsewhere. Reading along with Rees, and trying out Coursera a bit for myself, I am not very optimistic for the future of humanities and social science education.

Zeynep Tufekci is a sociologist who studies the internet, among other things. This week, she published a fantastic blog post about the interactions of free speech, power, and new media. The post focuses on two very divergent examples: the Reddit/Gawker controversy over the release of the identity of a Reddit editor who pioneered threads dedicated to non-consensual “soft porn” photos of underaged girls, and the controversy over the anti-Muslim Youtube video linked to widespread protests. In it, Tufekci ties together arguments about the internet’s capacity for norm-shifting, the importance of recognizing conflicts between rights rather than asserting one right as absolute, the way that assertions of absolute rights often reinforce disparities of power, and the way that assertions of the so-called “digital divide” similarly work to deflect criticisms of the exercise of power. I won’t summarize the post too much, because it’s brilliant and you all should read it. Instead, I’m just going to excerpt a few choice quotes:

Rather, let’s look at this as a good example for why “free speech” as an absolute value for any community that is not balanced by any other concern is at best an abdication of responsibility, and at worst an attempt to exercise power over vulnerable populations.
…
Because the way power enters into this debate isn’t whether or not there will be creeps who wade through Flickr to find photos of children on the beach –surely there will be with or without Reddit. Indeed, a common answer to issues like this is “well, creeps we shall always have amongst us.” Indeed, that is true. However, the existence of child predators with or without Reddit is in fact a strong argument for shunning them from major sites, including Reddit. Allowing them to be part of the community is not an assertion of free speech, rather it is assertion by Reddit and Condé Nast of the right of adult men to sexualize children & violate women’s privacy through non-consensual exposure. It’s simple as that.
…
This stance of “it’s just the Internet” is basically relegating the children preyed upon into the “virtual” realm. They just aren’t real enough to count while Reddit moderators are so hyperreal that exposing their mere name is a grave violation. In fact, digital dualism often surfaces as this kind of “power assertions” when gatekeepers and already-powerful who have access to broad publics trivialize self-expression on the Internet (“it’s just cat videos”), never miss a chance to put down Twitter (“it’s about what you had for lunch”), or consider social interaction on Facebook to be unreal compared to “real life” interaction.
…
Again, I’m not talking about banning everything offensive. Not at all. I’m calling on major sites on the Internet to assert that in this community, we affirm the right of people to exist in an environment that is not hostile to vulnerable populations over the right of people who claim that their right to prey upon children trumps all other rights.

Go read the whole thing, and follow the blog if you haven’t already!

I actually don’t remember how I came upon World Bank economist Branko Milanovic’s (2010) The Haves and the Have-Nots and decided to buy it, but I’m very glad I did. Despite the cheesy name, Milanovic’s book is a really excellent overview of global inequality with an innovative structure that mirrors the problem at hand. The book contains three essays and 26 vignettes. The essays deal with three aspects of inequality: within-country, between-country, and global (trying to examine the distribution for all individuals in all countries). They are very readable – you could easily assign them to first-year college students – and explain both the history of studies of inequality as well as some of the complexities of measurement and data availability. Each essay is followed by 7-10 vignettes that range from deathly serious to a bit silly, such as the analysis of where Mr. Darcy would have fallen in the income distribution of early 19th century England. Along the way, Milanovic addresses the pressure for migration in the contemporary world, inequality under socialism and capitalism (and how between region inequality was a problem for the USSR, and may yet be a problem for China), and more. The scope is delightfully wide, but Milanovic has pretty historical and sociological sensibilities for an economist which makes the endeavor feel much less imperialistic.

The most interesting and unexpected vignette so far (I’m a bit more than halfway through the book), analyzed within- and between-country inequality in the context of Marx’s writing of Capital and the history of socialist revolution in the early 20th century. Milanovic argues that when Marx was writing, circa 1870, between-country inequality was quite small as compared to within-country inequality. The richest people in the poorest countries were much richer than the poorest people in the richest countries. Workers everywhere (in Europe) had quite comparable incomes. And so it made the claim that the workers of the world all had common interests much easier to make. Much like Malthus, though, Marx had the misfortune of being right about the past and present, but wrong about the near future:

But in an ironic twist of fate, it is precisely around the publication of the first volume of Das Kapital in 1867… that things started to change. A new data series of English real wages produced by Gregory Clark shows that it is around 1867-1870 that real wages began their secular rise that continues (with some small declines from time to time) to this moment. Moreover, it is around the end of the nineteenth and the in the first half of the twentieth centuries that income differences between the rich world of West Europe, North America, and Oceania, and the rest of the world (Africa, Asia, and Latin America) exploded. (110)

By the 1900s, then, it was no longer so true that workers in England and Germany had similar standards of living to workers in Russia, and between-country inequality only got worse over the 20th century. Workers in Germany, in other words, had something to lose other than their chains at the time of the Russian revolution.

Which leads us to the present, and another nice quote from Milanovic. In vignette 2.2, Milanovic shows a graph of income ventiles (groups of 5% of the population) for the USA, Brazil, China, and India (reproduced below).

The graph is a bit awkward to read, but conveys an enormous amount of information, all of which emphasizes the importance of between-country inequality in the present moment. As Milanovic puts it:

In the case of India and the United States, only about 3 percent of the Indian population have incomes higher than the bottom (the very poorest) U.S. percentile. (118)

Interpreting this finding is hard, as it’s based on notoriously fickle purchasing power parity data, and probably masks a lot of non-income forms of inequality, but the story is still striking. All but the tiniest fraction of people in India have less money than all but the absolute poorest Americans. As Milanovic explains in the introduction to the next vignette:

[In] a regression where we have the actual incomes of everybody in the world (of course only in principle, because the data are based on national income surveys)… it turns out that place of birth explains more than 60 percent of the variability in global income. (120)

Social scientists, sociologists included, tend to think about within-country inequality and stratification and focus on big predictors like race, gender, and parent’s socioeconomic status or class. But in a global perspective, nationality dominates all of these variables as a predictor of income. At least, it does in the 21st century. That between-country inequality dominates within-country is not an eternal truth, however, as Milanovic reminds us.

Highly recommended.