I talk about how we create societal narratives in most of my courses. These are stories we tell ourselves as a society about how we think things work. These narratives often have more to do with backing up other beliefs we have than with what is really going on. The problem is that these societal […]
Talk about voter fraud has been swirling around the internet a lot. This is where it is important to go out and look for good data. Is voter fraud a problem? (you know the answer if you read the title above) Should we be worried? Why are people talking about this? It is common in […]
Most students who take an introduction to sociology class don’t take another sociology class. That begs the question – why do we ask students to take this class? The short answer is that it helps people understand the effect of society on the individual. It also helps them see how the system works which, from […]
I just ran across this article that is relevant to how complex and messy our definitions of race are. It gets right to the heart of social construction of race and the dominant group getting to define how others define themselves inside this messy and inconsistent system.
Here is a great article in the Boston Globe about social class differences between summer residents and year round residents in the Berkshires. It talks about how hard many people have to work to bring in enough income with the jobs that are available here. It also includes a couple of BCC students. Basically, it […]
As the primary season gets underway, statistics are flying all over the place. It can be very hard to analyze how value and reliable they are. FiveThirtyEight is a great site that does a meta-analysis of the polling data so you can get a better look at what is really most likely to happen (remember that […]
Recently, a report sparked a media feed (not quite large enough to qualify as a frenzy). We heard that the murder rate in many cities had soared. As is often the case this was a gross misreading of the data. Two of the largest mistakes were ignoring the notion of statistical fluctuations and that the […]
There have been a lot of arguments about government subsidies to individuals (food stamps, TANF, fuel assistance) lately and their impact on behavior. The general assumption is that giving people cash means they won’t work. The reality is much more complicated than this and it turns out that most people do not make significant changes […]
The New York Times has an excellent blog post on how changes in Federal and State funding of college education have increased inequality in our society.
A study was recently released by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez from Harvard and U.C. Berkeley. This has been widely reported in the press as the Harvard Mobility Study. The results are not entirely radical, but they are important. The short story is that mobility (a change in class status from […]
