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According to Martin Booth in his book Cannabis, a History, "self-described" hippies accounted for only 0.2% of the population.

According to Lewis Yablonski in his book The Hippie Trip, he claims only 200,000 "full time" hippies, with another 200,000 "part-time" hippies (meaning dayjob, but in the culture). This combined number puts the hippie percentage lower than 1.5% based on then-populations.

Simply put, pop culture seems to have latched on to the idea of counterculture (and thus drug positivity) way way more than actual people of the time did.

In short yes there is evidence of this. It is a long held observation that those whose parents divorced were more likely to get divorced themselves (source). However there is an ongoing debate about the extent to which this trend is weakening (source). The basic idea is that the nature of divorce is changing within society and therefore the way it is 'transmitted' between generations is becoming softened.

There is a lot of research on the intergenerational effects of divorce. The effects of children later in life are quite complex and changing as the nature of divorce itself changes.

This Quora question is quite exhaustive:

> Short answer: of course! > > More sophisticated answer: it is unclear to what extent observed differences are due to biological vs. societal/experiential factors.

Also see this old thread.

According to this study, Sex differences in effective fronto-limbic connectivity during negative emotion processing, women are supposedly more sensitive to negative emotions. Full paper is on researchgate.net.

There is no broad reaching scientific study or meta-analysis that confirms this idea, at least from a cursory search. It's a patchwork of research. It is a widely held notion in society that women are more sensitive and emotional, and such studies are potentially subject to research bias, in which the researcher may engage in confirmation bias in selecting their results. In addition, it is a plausible, although debatable, theory that women are just conditioned to be more sensitive through the far-reaching effects of societal norms.

sucker (n.) "young mammal before it is weaned," late 14c., agent noun from suck. Slang meaning "person who is easily deceived" is first attested 1836, American English, on notion of naivete; the verb in this sense is from 1939. But another theory traces the slang meaning to the fish called a sucker (1753), on the notion of being easy to catch in their annual migrations. Meaning "lollipop" is from 1823.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=sucker

Recent Anthropology grad here. To my understanding, it's mostly followed by Franz Boas' establishment of his brand of 4-pronged American Anthropology. Mostly the use of;

1)Archeology to show all cultures have had their own historical development

2)Linguistics to assert all languages have their own rules and complexity

3)Cultural and Biological Anthropology to assert that all cultures are complex and have had independently developed according to their own circumstances. Biological Anthro was done more so to disprove the scientific racists of yore that minority groups we're considered lesser or even a lesser species

I'm a bit rusty, but the anecdote that stuck to me the most about Boas' early work was his study on immigrant children in New York. Dominant consensus was that immigrant groups were inherently inferior due to their destitute social conditions which were "validated" by measurements of their physical features. At the time, measurements of skull sizes were THE way to determine a racial group's superiority over another. Boas' assertion that it was a prejudiced, negligible factor induced by malnutrition and social neglect was radical at the time and changed the way to how we see race

I believe his paper was "“Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants” (1912)". This write up on Encyclopedia.com has more sources you can peruse http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Franz_Boas.aspx

Edit: non-immigrant to immigrant. Derp

(mods, please remove if my source is bad)

I like the book The Righteous Mind and its discussion of morality. One of the points it makes is that being loyal to one's tribe and obeying authority are deeply moral matters for some people - and that those are more important then being nice, or being fair. The President is the head of a group they identify with and thus they are loyal.

Short answer is mostly yes.

An experimental study recruited participants to complete a survey and offered them an opportunity to cheat for more money. The authors found that cheating was more common among people with a stronger "self-present orientation" and when detection was more certain but not when the penalty was more severe.

These results align with earlier work from Gottfredson and Hirshi, specifically on self control and its relationship to crime. In a 2001 article, they say:

>"People who rob and steal are more likely than people who do not rob and steal to smoke and drink, use illegal drugs, break into houses, and CHEAT ON TESTS."

One criticism of this view is the role of trajectories of offending and the desistance of this behavior over time. Is the relationship between cheating and stealing an adolescent-limited behavior, or does it continue throughout the life-course? Lots of heterogeneity in this context, which suggests that there might be other causal mechanisms at play.

You're making some assumptions that aren't warranted. I'm going to assume you are discussing training like that in the US. There is no training to neglect their humanity. The training does two primary things in regards to mental frameworks. It instills discipline to follow orders, and begins to develop reaction patterns so soldiers can react instinctively rather than stopping to think about what to do (the time delay can easily mean the difference between life and death). It is their humanity generally that cause them to fight. There can be many influences, but often the most influential is fighting to protect the other members of their unit to whom they've bonded.

Many soldiers experience a psychological cost from combat. One of the most influential works on the subject that may answer some of your questions is "On Killing: The Pyschological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society" by Dave Grossman.

Try one of Bobbio's books, Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction. I think his definition is pretty universal in nature, since it doesn't focus on the specific political positions themselves, but how those positions are shaped by what you think society should be or strive for (such as "being in favor of hierarchization").

This book does a great job explaining the hegemonic influence of US drug policy and how the US developed international consensus.

State capacity is not the same thing as the size of the state or the extent of its intervention into the market.

People who ascribe to laissez-faire or the free market are not anarchists. To have a market and civil society, you must have enforcement of contracts and freedom from force and fraud. This requires an effective government, i.e. a government with capacity. This includes a police force that can control the territory, enforce the law, apprehend criminals, and investigate fraud.

Provision of public goods can be left up to markets when a country is sufficiently advanced, has a socio-economic culture that can support it, and has a government with effective capacity to monitor markets providing public goods. Again, laissez-faire is not anarchism. There are certain things that markets are not great at providing (or would underprovide), like national defense, education, or certain public infrastructure. Usually these are areas that either involve organized violence (e.g. national defense, policing) or insoluble collective action problems (e.g. public infrastructure, education, disaster recovery). There is ongoing debate about the extent to which certain sectors are truly insoluble collective action problems or natural monopolies, justifying government intervention or nationalization.

In general, failed states are also characterized by a low level of development, a low level of social division of labor, and a socio-economic culture that does not yet support the privatization of the provision of public goods. Without a state that can enforce the rule of law, it is difficult to develop economically and generate the socio-economic culture that enables a laissez-faire state.

This probably isn't good for getting at racism specifically, but in the book The Foundations of Ethnic Politics: Separatism of States and Nations in Eurasia and the World, Henry Hale draws from evolutionary psychology to argue that when humanity was first starting to form political units, we were not terribly well equipped to deal with the complexities of the social world. As such, humans formed information shortcuts, like othering, to associate themselves with their allies and against those that are unknown or known enemies. As such, tribal mentality would take hold and form the basis for ethnic relations between peoples as those small political units grew increasingly complicated over time and the reach of those political units expanded to a global scale.

So again, this isn't racism specifically, but it does make the argument that people naturally form barriers against those they do not know to preserve themselves against that other. Racism may be one of the constructs people built to encourage this othering to preserve their group against others.

While this may be a "natural" outcome, it is important to understand that this outcome is still one founded upon ignorance, specifically ignorance of the complexities of the social world that give rise to brief information shortcuts that form the foundation of othering those who are not like the given organism doing the judgment.

I'm not quite sure I have the answer for you, but Evil Men by James Dawes goes into this quite a bit.

Ultimately there are many reasons: stress coping mechanisms, hysterical groupthink, corruptive power.

I think that you are suffering from hindsight bias. It is very difficult to know what sorts of things will be successful. This idea was given a book length treatment by the sociologist Duncan Watts in Everything is Obvious (once you know the answer). He argues that there is lots of chance and randomness in the world and when we look back on the past we can come up with a story for why things turned out the way that they did, but these are just stories.

Lots of things that worked seemed like bad ideas (Wikipedia is my favorite example). People's behavior is often surprising and a wise investor will not be too confident that their own expectations about the future will be correct. In a world where outcomes are uncertain and based on luck it makes sense to spread your bets widely.

I think this is the biggest explanation for the behavior you're describing although some of the other explanations (social ties, needing to invest large amounts of money, etc.) are all partial explanations.

I don't have a definitive answer to your question, but you might get some ideas from Colin Turnbull's ethnography of the Ik called The Mountain People

> Turnbull became very involved with the Ik people, and openly writes about his horror at many of the events he witnessed, most notably total disregard for familial bonds leading to the death of children and the elderly by starvation. He does speak warmly about certain Ik, and describes his "misguided" efforts to give food and water to those too weak to provide for themselves, standing guard over them to prevent others from stealing the food. Turnbull shares these experiences to raise questions concerning basic human nature, and makes constant reference to "goodness" and "virtue" being cast aside when there is nothing left but a need to survive (even going so far as to draw parallels to the individualism of 'civilized' society). Overall, living with the Ik seems to have afflicted Turnbull more with melancholy and depression than anger, and he dedicated his work "to the Ik, whom I learned not to hate".

John Money was a piss poor scientist, he swept his findings so far under the rug that he literally ignored the fact that the application of his theories literally caused suicides (such as the one detailed in the non-fiction novel "As Nature Made Him" so we don't generally take him seriously anymore...

There's an entire discipline in social science (communication) devoted to answering questions like this, and you're kind of asking to have summarized most of the findings of that discipline, which is a tall order.

I'll start by pointing you to two good overviews of the subfield of media effects, which seems to be what you're getting at.

Jennings & Oliver's Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research, Third Edition

https://www.amazon.com/Media-Effects-Advances-Theory-Research/dp/0805864504/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1527168732&sr=8-1&keywords=media+effects

Nabi & Oliver's The SAGE Handbook of Media Processes and Effects

https://www.amazon.com/SAGE-Handbook-Media-Processes-Effects/dp/1412959969/ref=sr_1_38?ie=UTF8&qid=1527168732&sr=8-38&keywords=media+effects

Yes! There is an entire body of research exploring the way language and culture shape how we think about sexuality and sexual orientation. It is not so much limited to "linguistics" but more about what we call "discourse." Discourse is a more general term describing how we use language to produce the meaning of things in our lives. It argues that language is not just a set of symbols, but that it is a set of symbols that create relationships of power by defining what is true and false, real and imaginary, moral and immoral. This approach originates in the work of Michel Foucault, especially in his books The History of Sexuality (I think there are 4 volumes but most people just read the first).

I don't have sources for work on other cultures, but there must be some out there. Here is an interesting article on the history of anthropological work on sexuality using Foucault. It also gives a nice summary/overview of his work.

Mostly, they rely on the candidates positions on 'easy issues' (easy to have an opinion on ; gay marriage, marijuana, guns, etc...) to act as cues to signal whether they are likely to support the candidates other positions or not. Other people rely on external cues in the form of endorsements from unions, interest groups, or other politicians (source: Lau and Redlawsk).

That said, there is substantial research (including my own) which finds that when voters truly have no preference they'll simply skip that item on the ballot. What's more interesting is that who skips some items on the ballot isn't random; that minorities are more likely than white-men to roll-off the ballot in non-partisan elections. Evidence that women and minorities are disporportionatly disenfranchised by non-partisan elections.

Building onto this wonderful comment, another great resource is this book written by Ethan Nadelmann from Drug Policy Alliance and Peter Andreas who is a professor of political science at Brown. This book challenges the idea that crime/drug control is too often described as simply a natural and predictable response to the growth of transnational crime in an age of globalization. Instead, the authors argue that international drug laws primarily reflects ambitious efforts by generations of western powers to export their own definitions of "crime," not just for political and economic gain but also in an attempt to promote their own morals (drug use is bad) to other parts of the world.

You can go to the comments and see what people who contributed are saying: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/324283889/potato-salad/comments

A significant % of people are saying they're backing it for irony or because they think it's funny. For example:

> Donating the extra money to charity would be nice but that's not why I backed this project. I'm backing because I thought it was a hilarious joke and I wanted to be in on it. I don't care if he gives the excess to charity, sends himself to school or throws a massive party. I'm happy as long as he pulls the joke off in style

>Mathematically, I can do ANOVAs but have had virtually no opportunity to practice them and have not done linear regressions.

Economics and sociology use a decent amount of statistics in their research. You may or may not need to know how to conduct statistical tests, depending on how the level of sophistication you wish to achieve. Instead of textbooks, here are two links to descriptive and inferential statistics. These courses are free, and will allow you to practice stats through an online platform.

I don't know about empathy but there have been a few studies on the issue of corruption. Can't look up the reference due vacation but there have been experiments on how in one case economist students were more likely to conduct corrupt behaviour than other type of students.

Interestingly the effect didn't increase with how long people studied meaning it was more about what kind of people attended the specific studies. I would theorise something similar could be at play here

Edit: found a source https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bjoern_Frank/publication/222541916_Does_Economics_Make_Citizens_Corrupt/links/00b7d518a643ed4000000000.pdf

You're opening a whole can of worms about how much political affiliation is related to IQ, and how much IQ is related to knowledge/education. IQ is supposed to measure the capacity that someone has to learn and figure things out, but it's not really all that good at it.

So the old standby pop-psych formulation of the issue is that Democrats have higher IQ than Republicans. That link goes to Snopes for a reason - the case is almost always vastly overstated.

Edit: Alright, I'll take this as a thought experiment, which is what it's intended as. First we'd have to look at what IQ is correlated with. The best correlation that I know of is education: every four extra years of schooling adds another 5-10 points to mean IQ (depending on who you ask). So limiting IQ would effectively take voting rights away from the uneducated.

Let's imagine that we have a voting population that consists solely of people who have graduated college. The ideologies you would expect to see are Liberalism and Libertarianism - conservatism on either side seems to drop away with college education, and secularism seems to rise on both sides. So from this, I would expect a fairly even split between the parties, but a different focus to their policies. I'd expect the laws which currently prop up social conservatism to melt away, because Liberals and Libertarians can both come to an agreement about that (in general).

I would recommend Moira Weigel's Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating. It looks at the historical roots of contemporary American dating and how it's tied to our work culture. It's not an unbiased account, but it's well worth reading.

1. Landsburg, "The Armchair Economist." A very good treatment of first-year microeconomic principles. Heavy focus on what we call "applied price theory," incentives, and individual rationality.

2. Schelling, "Micromotives and Macrobehavior." The aggregate implications of heterogeneity. Very well written.

3. Collier, "The Bottom Billion." A very good introduction to economic development.

4. Clark, "A Farewell to Alms." Read the first chapter in great detail, then skip or skim the rest.

5. Read Dixit's "Thinking Strategically." It'll teach you game theory without any math and change your life.

6. Friedman, "Free to Choose" or Friedman, "Capitalism and Freedom." They're classics.

7. Pick up a behavioral book for perspective. Ariely's "Predictably Irrational" or Thaler's "Nudge."

8. Pick up one book to put economics in social perspective. I really liked Florida's "The Rise of the Creative Class."

They all offer unique insight into how human beings interrelate. Many people flippantly think that since the cold war communist experiment was a resounding failure, that somehow Marx was proven 'wrong'. This could not be further from the truth. In fact, current class struggles in the United States, coupled with the unprecedented success of social democracies such as Norway, Sweden, and Denmark seem to vindicate his theories.

Smith also has some unfortunate baggage to overcome. When most people think Smith, they picture a God like founder of capitalism, waving an American flag. His book, The Wealth of Nations, is frequently cited as proof of his devotion to economics and capitalism. His less known opus, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, is perhaps the more insightful of his works. Smith would (ironically) be appalled at the concept of a 'free market' being the great decision maker in society. He existed in a time when economics was divided into social philosophy and political economy, and would likewise be appalled that these fields have merged into simply 'economics', and have left behind their basis in morality and ethics.

Keynes has basically dominated the theory and practice of macroeconomics since FDRs New Deal; his contribution is probably the most relevant in a modern context. As his influence began to wane with Milton Friedman and Reaganomics, the Anglo-American model finds itself in the bubble-burst paradigm which causes regular and avoidable recessions.

All 3 are necessary to understanding modern economics. My personal opinion on the subject is that Adam Smith is the most useful of all 3; he created the most out of nothing, and is fundamental to any understanding of economics. He, to me, is like the Isaac Newton of social sciences - he figured it all out, it just needed to be tweaked. Marx and Keynes are probably tied. Both left their mark, and both are continually referenced when making policy decisions. Too close to call.

From the earliest usage, 1786, it was "the term that carries with it all the obloquy and contempt and rejection which whites have inflicted on blacks"

I don't think there's a name for what you describe, but motivated reasoning is a similar concept - about how people will seek out and preferentially take in information that confirms their preconceived beliefs, while rejecting information that doesn't. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-case-for-motivated-reasoning.-Kunda/329a0178e56350cf27b41e4cde9c8e278854ec32

The section in your main link (Sharkey et al.) on individual poverty covers most of the primary ideas behind general crime motivations / lack of inhibition. It does not cover violence specifically as much. To supplement that, I would recommend Elijah Anderson's <em>The Code of the Street</em> as an entry point to the extensive literature on the role of violence and the threat of violence in communities of concentrated disadvantage (i.e. "the ghetto"). To that, add the deep literature on aversion to contacting the police in poor communities of color---and the resulting reliance on violence and other informal methods for solving disputes---and you have a pretty clear recipe for high violence.

Some variant of this question is pretty common (this is the best relevant thread IMO). If you want an overview of modern economic thinking, personally, I think you'd be better off reading textbooks than original sources. I know that's not a satisfying answer for educated people - everyone likes to be able to say they've read X.

But so much of the original manifesto type books have been revised so much, and so much of economic thinking is done in journals rather than books, that I really think textbooks are the way to go. If you can find a used international version, Mankiw has mean micro & macro books. Krugman & Bernanke also have solid macro books.

If I had to pick a few from the last 50 years, Capitalism & Freedom (Free to Choose is better, but even less original thought than C&F - more of a restatement) & Road to Serfdom (mostly politics, but good economic insights too). Both are pretty right-ish, but I'm afraid I haven't found a single book that personifies the left-ish Stiglitz type perspective. They won't give you a modern look, but I really think textbooks are where its at for broad modern understanding.

If you want readable books, rather than classics of a sort, I'd suggest Choice and Consequence, The Economics of Life, Armchair Economist, Predictably Irrational, Zombie Economics.

> How could this problem have been avoided?

There is an excellent book on various historical solutions to these problems.

>>Pick up a free copy of Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson from Mises.org.

Please don't do this as Austrian economics is not actually taught in undergrad today and is a pretty fringe ideology, if your goal is to do well in your class this is one of the last things you want to do because chances are it has nothing to do with your course material.

I kind of hate how Freakonomics (and Superfreakonomics) get disgustingly sloppy with their statistical analysis and conflation of correlation and causation, but I think it (they) provides some good insight into the way economists think while still being readable. Nudge is also quite good in a similar way, and I hear good things about Predictably Irrational.

I really don't recommend most macro books for laymen because my experience is that most of what you'll find is heavily politicized and you might not necessarily recognize the names to know their previous bias.

Also, Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers and The Making of Economic Society are very readable books that will give you a fairly good, albeit incomplete, understanding of the histories of economic thought and economic systems, respectively. I might warn you that his opinions are decidedly leftist (his exclusion of Friedman and inclusion of the utopian socialists in Worldly Philosophers still confuses me), but I don't think it's a big deal.

For behavioral stuff, Ariely's "Predictably Irrational" and Thaler and Sunstein's "Nudge" are classics.

And don't sleep on Freakonomics. Its not a perfect book, but I think if you poll most current econ grad students (and junior APs for that matter) a not insubstantial number are studying econ at least in part because they thought Freakonomics was pretty cool.

Also, I know this isn't what you asked for, but Mankiw's Principles book is a best seller for a reason. If you're serious about learning economics, just pick up an older edition on Amazon.

Do not waste time on Wealth of Nations. It's beautiful for history of thought, but you can get the relevant info without wading through a thousand pages of 1776 English. I say this having a great fondness for the book, and a lovely unabridged, annotated edition on my bookshelf. Same goes for Marx: don't read him, read secondary literature on him.

To start with read Landsburg's The Armchair Economist. This is required reading, no excuses. Then read Friedman's Free to Choose and pair it with Galbraith's The Affluent Society.

Then read something about finance...Reinhart & Rogoff is maybe a bit too advanced, but at least read the first chapter.

Also: blogs blogs blogs. Read Scott Sumner. Read Paul Krugman. Read, yes, Steve Keen. Decide for yourself who's right, then read Nick Rowe because he's always right (but writes at a level aimed at graduate students).

EDIT:Oh, and duh: pick up a first-year textbook. Cowen, Mankiw, whatever. Their whole point is to teach you economics. Please pick up a first-year textbook.

Needle exchange programs have a wealth of academic backing as regards their efficacy in reducing HIV (and other blood-borne pathogen) transmission.

>Obviously correlation is not causation.

That is literally the only thing you should say about this graph.

If you're trying to get into research, let me advise you that the better things to do than run pointless regressions are 1) read what experts have written about this and 2) think about why inequality might affect growth, and try to test that. I don't follow this side of the macro literature, but a Google Scholar search will give you more than you could possibly want to read on the subject. My bet is that there's no consensus whatsoever, because that's how the growth literature works.

It's only somewhat related, but there is evidence that contact with the police can reduce civic participation--not just felony convictions, although those have the biggest impact, but things like getting stopped and frisked or pulled over. Amy Lerman and Vesla Weaver wrote their book &quot;Arresting Citizenship&quot; about this, and it might be a good place to start; here's a writeup of the work in Vox

I'm very confused about precisely what you're asking about--concepts like charity are brought up in the Old Testament and Buddhist scripture. Romans had a developed system of providing for the urban poor even before the Republic turned into the Empire. This snippet from an encyclopedia gives several other ancient examples. Did you have a specific kind of charity in mind, as in, are you specifically asking about the historical concept of "the white man's burden"?

>Lastly, what you say about "artsy-fartsy" things is spot on. I would bet that etsy has a much larger female user base for the same reason.

Being Devil's Advocate again... Females are cited as "under-represented" according to these statistics on deviantART (arguably one of the largest social art sites out there today), yet Etsy is majority female, as you state. Interesting that one art site is predominantly male, while the other is predominantly female, yet both can be argued as being "artsy-fartsy." Perhaps creativity has nothing to do with it?

You might want to read ordinary men. It goes into a lot of detail on the explanations that soldiers came up with to justify their actions to themselves. One big theme was duty, basically "If I don't do this gruesome thing, the next guy in my unit will have to do it and that's not ok". Probably the one anecdote that stuck out to me the most was a soldier who would only kill children because he felt like he was freeing them from living lives as orphans since everyone else was killing their parents.

edit: This book focuses on a the history of a specific battalion working the final solution on the Eastern Front. If I recall correctly the men were reservists from an area of Germany that wasn't particularly pro-Nazi and were very "ordinary".

Freakonomics and The Armchair Economist are very easy and entertaining books that will introduce you to many economic concepts in a very gentle way. I'm on an economics course at a top uni and they're on our reading list.

I haven't read that particular book, but Thomas Friedman is one of the most ridiculous faux intellectuals in the world. Everything I've ever read by him is pseudo-profundity of the highest degree and makes no sense at all, both in substance and in prose. From what I've read about it, this particular book of his is no different. That, in addition to the fact he's ousted himself as an astonishing racist and megalomaniac in the Israeli press, is reason enough for me to not want to pick up anymore books of his. He's just not a serious thinker. He's basically the worst kind of celebrity polemic, and as soon as he passes away and becomes unable to use his access to the media to promote himself, his works will fade into intellectual obscurity in roughly half a Planck time.

As for alternatives, it really depends on what kind of works you're looking for. "The Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith is a good classic, and while it's not exactly the cutting edge of theory, it's an interesting read none the less (it's somewhat disturbing how many people refer to this book without, apparently, actually having read or understood it). Patricia Werhane wrote a great examination of the book called "Adam Smith and his Legacy for Modern Capitalism". A good general book is "Understanding Capitalism: Critical Analysis from Karl Marx to Amartya Sen" by Douglas Dowd.

You should read The Armchair Economist. It has a great discussion of what the economy actually is in the first few chapters. The economy governs the allocation of resources. In a world where resources are limited and wants are not, how the economy works becomes central to individuals' well-being.

The above suggestions are good (I especially second Naked Economics, as it's what got me interested in the subject), but if you really want to learn, read Economics in One Lesson or Naked Economics, but skip most of the rest (apart from Wikipedia summaries) and instead buy some college textbooks on economics. Mankiw's Principles of Economics is a good intro text, and after you read that, you'll be able to think about what direction you want to continue in from there.

> Keyensian economics as its practiced today is vastly different than what John Maynard Keynes had in mind in the early to mid 1900s.

Further complicating matters is John Maynard Keynes's opaque writing style - it's hard to tell exactly what he had in mind. An additional complication is that Keynesian economics as practiced today by governments (inasmuch as they can be said to be practicing any school of economics) is not the same as modern academic New Keynesianism.

I think this could tie in with the idea of hegemonic whiteness. I read a chapter from this book for a course on race and organizations that touched on this. Hughey does ethnographic/interview work with two white groups - one is a group of white supremacists, the other is a group that's whites for racial justice.

The chapter is a very interesting analysis of how whiteness is constructed and made to be privileged/empowered. Part of maintaining this power is finding a way to delegitimate certain groups. So, for rural white people (many of whom are underprivileged on the axis of class, in Appalachia and elsewhere) are subordinated. So, they're still white, but they fail to fit into the image of hegemonic whiteness.

I think asking if they're still white in a CRT lens is a curious question, but I'd still say they are. I would really approach this question through an intersectional lens that asks how not just race, but class and place shape the lives of rural folks. When I think about CRT, I mostly think about how racism is embedded in our social and legal systems. I often look at the law, separating the de jure and de facto implications, and seeing how laws are written/practiced to conceal racism while enabling it through the law enforcement arm of the state.

I'd recommend Desmond and Emirbayer's paper "What is Racial Domination?" (here's a link to the paper) and read the fallacies they present. I think rural white people do not experience racial domination the way people of other racial categories do, though they are often left out of the implicit whiteness of organizations.

In speaking about neoliberalism, David Harvey argues that neoconservatives needed to build their platform and did this in part by appealing to evangelical Christians. I notice that other people have asked you to consider what you mean by religious people, but I'm guessing you're speaking specifically (or at least toward) evangelical Christianity. It's complicated, but as someone who studies neoliberalism I love Harvey's marxist interpretation of the phenomena.

GGS is a horribly incomplete introduction to economic development.

Growth theory has seen an outpouring of "popular" books that can be grasped by non-specialists. A few are:

1. Easterly, "The Elusive Quest for Growth."
2. Easterly, "The White Man's Burden."
3. Sachs, "The End of Poverty."
4. Collier, "The Bottom Billion."
5. Collier, "Wars, Guns and Votes."
6. Sen, "Development as Freedom."

That's a half-dozen books that can get you started on the modern economic debate about growth, development, poverty and aid.

Here are a few direct counterparts to GGS. They are all "big history."

1. De Soto, "The Mystery of Capital." (Growth comes from economic institutions.)
2. Clark, "A Farewell to Alms." (somewhat more technical. Heavy focus on the Industrial Revolution and its underlying catalysts.)
3. Landes, "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations." (Sprawling. Growth comes from culture.)
4. Acemoglu and Robinson, "Why Nations Fail." (Growth comes from good political institutions.)

More general economics:

1. Friedman, "Capitalism and Freedom" and "Free to Choose."
2. Galbraith, "The Affluent Society."
3. Schumpeter, "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy."

Enjoy!

Actually, there is a whole field about that: behavioral economics. The Wikipedia page for it is here. I'd rather not write about it in detail, as there are other people in this board who are active in that field and could provide better input. However, if you are interested you might enjoy Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational which is non-technical and quite entertaining.

Absolutely not. If all you needed to know to understand economics was a couple formulas, then it wouldn't be such a controversial topic. Most formulas from economics require some level of intuition, which a list isn't going to help you with.

I'm not sure I would say that The Wealth of Nations is necessarily unassumptive, just that it maybe predates the point at which economists were a little more specific with their axioms. That said, it's certainly "from the ground up," given that it was maybe the first economics treatise.

It looks like what you really want to read is something foundational that also includes equations. What you might be interested in then is Cournot's Researches into the Mathematical Principles of the Theory of Wealth. I would warn you that I've read it and it's about as much of a page-turner as any scientific treatise from the 1800s is. It is, however, the first book to have a demand graph drawn. Him, Leon Walras, and Alfred Marshall are generally considered the fathers of mathematical economics. That said, none of this is going to tell you much about modern economics.

If you are looking to understand modern economics, then you're not going to be able to skip reading textbooks. Mankiw's intro text is the classic one.

Oh yes it is totally inaccurate. It's a weird term used in a German anthropology proposal in 1795, it is totally lacking in veracity. But people use it because it isn't "white".

Study cited in the guardian article.

Also, I don't think the study referenced in the CBS article there made a claim that print was better.

> - Students in 10th grade reported an overall positive experience with e-readers as compared with print.

> - Differences in medium preferences varied between subgroups in the sample.

> - More boys than girls were in favor of e-readers.

> - Avid readers tended to prefer print, whereas reluctant readers preferred e-readers.

> - Device features had little impact on self-reported perceptuo-cognitive and phenomenological experiences.

Try chapter six of Sands et al., The Anthropology of Sport and Human Movement: A Biocultural Perspective. Discusses the consensus that running produces pleasurable chemicals & pain reduction; the muscular & skeletal evidence; whether the body is adapted to the protein-and-cholesterol that a hunting diet produces; and the like. The author finds strong evidence that running was likely a major part of early human behavior. But all discussion of how much running (other than "a lot") is drawn by analogy with present-day persistence hunters. So: read up on the Tarahumara, the Nandi, etc.

My authority on this derives solely from playing around with google scholar.

From the Online Etymology Dictionary:

Pizza >1935, from It. pizza, originally "cake, tart, pie," of uncertain origin. Klein suggests a connection with M.Gk. pitta "cake, pie," from Gk. pitta "pitch."

Pita >"thick, flat bread," 1951, from Modern Heb. pita or Modern Gk. petta "bread," perhaps from Gk. peptos "cooked," or somehow connected to pizza (q.v.).

No entry on Pide.

this reads very stuffy but it was one of the first things that turned up...

If you're looking for something about language and cultural power that is readable and classic, I'd recommend Barthes's Mythologies... the field of semiotics is one way into the subject if nobody has a better, more comprehensive resource

Well just taking a look at the World Happiness Report (p30), it's kind of hard to find any good correlation between racial homogeneity and happiness. For example Japan, a homogeneous country, ranks lowly when compared to other developed nations.

> on soviet prison tattoos you will find depictions of marx, engels and lenin

It's interesting that you've mentioned this, as the first thing I thought about after reading the title question were the Russian prison tatoo studies. There are quite a few of them. For instance, the three volumes of the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia. You can find it on amazon. The same author also wrote a book called Drawings from the Gulag.

Also, here's a study from Post-War Greece. JStore has a lot of stuff on that topic, but I didn't see a cross-country one. I guess, one could produce one by combining all these regional studies.

Yes, this phenomenon was one of the main focuses of Dan Ariely's book "Predictably Irrational." Super interesting book that I would recommend to anyone.

It turns out that people are much more willing to cheat to obtain tokens that can be traded for money than they are willing to cheat to obtain money directly.

The study involved a test of really hard questions, and the participants were told they would be paid based on the number of correct answers. The trick is that participants were asked to grade their test themselves, and told that their answers would not otherwise be checked. One group was paid directly with cash, and the other group was paid with tokens that could be exchanged for cash. The group that was paid in tokens cheated something like twice as much on the test when it came time to grade themselves. Not surprising really, but very revealing of human nature.

In exploring the reasons for this phenomenon, he concluded that it is because people hold a sense of fairness around money that they did not hold for the tokens. Obtaining tokens was seen as a kind of game, whereas cheating for money was seen as a kind of sin. The existence of the tokens allowed participants to psychologically distance themselves from the real-world outcomes of their actions.

Interestingly, when the ten commandments were displayed prominently in the classroom, the rate of cheating dropped dramatically as people were primed by this to act virtuously, and the effect was more pronounced on the group that was being paid money rather than tokens.

It is easy to observe this phenomenon in the world of money, but I think it extends far beyond that. People often intentionally remove themselves from situations in the same way that the tokens are designed to do, and just play everything by the numbers when it is easy to do so. Minimaxing a numbers game is far easier than minimaxing the messy world of morality.

16 hours and no citations or experts yet? This is a heavily studied field.

Peopleware and Joel on software are both programming related books that have tone of research and citations.

A strong data point is that productivity drops sharply for programmers (aka knowledge workers) after so many hours per day. To maintain optimum productivity, privacy and silence is needed (contrary to modern pop-business culture big open space office planning) and you cannot estimate that your resources will get more than 5 real hours of work done in a day. Extending the workday would not change this.

I would love to see trials comparing this directly. Hopefully an expert can chime in

I'm not an expert on ancient economic thought, but I just reviewed my notes from an undergrad class I took, so I'll take a stab at it...

Aristotle wrote about just price in his discussion of "reciprocal justice" in Book 5 of Nicomachean Ethics. The rules (again, from my notes) were as follows:

• No force or fraud

• Just price is the harmonic mean of the preferred prices of the buyer and seller

i.e. H= 2xy / (x+y)

Where H is the harmonic mean and x and y are the preferred price of the buyer and seller respectively.

Note that this follows under Aristotle's particular (rather than universal) law.

As far as citations go, consider "Aristotle and Two-Party Exchange" in S. Todd Lowry's The Archaeology of Economic Ideas: The classical Greek tradition (Duke UP, 1987.)

Also check out the first two Powerpoint decks in this Google Search

As for Al Ghalazi and Aquinas, I haven't the slightest idea. I don't think Aquinas ever has a firm definition of just price. Sorry if I'm not much help.

Economics in One Lesson isn't a good introduction to economics, you need to know economics rather well to really get a grip on it. Not because it is overly complicated, but because it glosses over so many important assumptions that you'll have a false sense of understanding unless you already know what those assumptions are.

Don't take my word for it, take the word of a Berkeley Economics professor, Brad DeLong: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/04/economics_in_on.html

Naked Economics

The Undercover Economist

Depression Economics

The Accidental Economist

Do not read:

Economics in One Lesson

It's old and outdated. Maybe useful as a complement to other economics reading.

Honestly though, most intro economics textbooks are petty easy to read and the authors can be fun to read. Check out Krugman's textbook or Mankiw's. Krugman is always fun to read.

Smith is actually pretty easy to understand from his work because he writes in clear prose and it all jives with our commonsense understanding of how markets work. I'd go straight to The Wealth of Nations.

Marx is a bit trickier. He writes with the exacting detail of a philosopher and assumes you'll be able to keep up, which most of us can't. You should start with Capital Vol. 1, but since it's pretty hard to actually know what to look for in it, use these lectures by David Harvey as a reading guide.

http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/

e - actually, before delving into Capital, I might suggest giving the videos in the link below a watch. This guy explains some of the concepts in Capital simply and has animations that are amusing and sometimes informative. A good place to get the 'feel' for Marx so you know what to look for when reading Capital. The Econ 101 series explicates a lot of the concepts in Vol. 1, and the Law of Value series really helps you understand the different approach Marx takes to economics compared to Adam Smith. I didn't really 'get' the Law of Value series totally until I'd watched it a million times and spent a long time immersed in marxist theory, but the first time I watched it gave me glimpses into what about his analysis was so different.

http://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/

I believe you are describing two discrete phenomena. Rich people getting their kicks in low status neighborhoods and clubs has historically been called "slumming" and there actually is a fair bit of writing on the subject out there. Here's a decent book about slumming you might find insightful:

https://books.google.com/books?id=Pcs6T-NVz0wC&amp;dq=sociology+of+slumming&amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s

The psychology behind 'poor people ballin' has also been researched, I can't pull up a good resource for you right now, but Ruby Paine's books could possibly be a good start, she has written fairly extensively on the differences between surviving in the different social classes.

Another interesting read is Paul Fussel's book 'Class' (http://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/dp/0671792253). It's dated (first published in the 80's) but it is an interesting read that gives some insight into the mindset, values and preoccupations of the different classes in American society.

Short Short Short answer - Upper Class folks use short term adventures into the lower classes to temporarily alleviate the stresses of high society life (pressures like reputation maintenance), while Lower Class folks want to use short term purchasing power displays to temporarily alleviate the stress of a life of poverty.

Of course the detailed answer is much more complicated than that, but I suspect there are others on this board who could illustrate the nuances better than I could and I hope they chime in to add to or correct anything I've posted.

> A trans women is not masculine and would be the only male excempt from "toxic masculinity"

No, any male who doesn't strongly exhibit the qualities associated with toxic masculinity, such as aggressiveness, violence, unemotionality, etc. would be exempt.

As I said, the word "toxic" is a qualifier - "a word that limits or modifies the meaning of another word". In this case, "toxic" limits the meaning of "masculinity" to those who exhibit a particular set of traits that are deemed toxic.

The whole reason toxic masculinity is raised as an issue is in order to help recognize that other notions of masculinity exist, and have benefits.

This is a interesting question. I believe when other animal populations are confined to a smaller area hostility arises. here would be a good start

This article talks about how soliders may shift morals to maintain a "greater good" of group solidarity: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.846/abstract

Looks like theres some promising results in Scholar. If the PDF isnt available, try your schools database or looking at the author's university website: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&amp;q=peacekeeping+and+stress&amp;btnG=&amp;as_sdt=1%2C5&amp;as_sdtp=

I’m not aware of any specific research on this (or prior) pandemics and religiosity. Drawing from terror management theory, I’d assume there could be truth to this claim though. The premise is that as people are forced to think about their mortality, they are likely to turn to things that alleviate it.

“The most obvious examples of cultural values that assuage death anxiety are those that purport to offer literal immortality (e.g., belief in afterlife, religion).[3]”

Quote from Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory

Source cited is: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Terror-management-and-religion%3A-evidence-that-Jonas-Fischer/5a1d8065d86f2ed702b0d7bef993c23f3e258592

As for how you’d study it, the pew and other organizations track things like religious beliefs over time. There are modeling techniques to attempt to isolate the effects of the pandemic (eg look at whether increases in religiosity were in places more impacted by the pandemic) even if they don’t have fresh data on the person’s own exposure to the pandemic.

Hi, I'm not really all that qualified to answer, but when I was a freshman I wrote a literature on findings review regarding prison conditions' effects on recidivism. I thought it might be of some interest to you.

I wrote a paper on this a few months back, and there wasn't a whole lot of scholarly work around then (actually I don't think I found anything that directly talked about the Alt Right).

It's not a peer reviewed article, but this report on the history and politics of the Alt Right was really useful: http://www.politicalresearch.org/2017/01/20/ctrl-alt-delete-report-on-the-alternative-right/

You can read the paper I wrote on this here (it's not publishable quality at all, but might give rise to some interesting thoughts): https://www.academia.edu/32839460/The_hyperreality_of_the_Alt_Right_how_meme_magic_works_to_create_a_space_for_far_right_politics

I want to emphasize that this comment is meant to outline one real world instance where minimum wage is strongly being taken into consideration regarding opening up a business, thus directly affecting creating a handful of jobs. Also please take this to be an anecdote, not a "This will happen everywhere."

http://www.sanjoseinside.com/news/entries/12_16_13_starbucks_developer_living_wage_policy_city_council/

The facts as I understand them:

California's state minimum wage is higher than the federal mandated minimum wage

San Jose's city minimum wage is higher than the state mandated minimum wage

The convention center's minimum wage is higher than the city mandated minimum wage

As I understand it, San Jose convention center is having difficulty filling some of the empty lots in the city's convention center. Starbucks has said that they would be willing to fill the spot if they could go below the convention center minimum wage. I do not believe that Starbucks intends to go under the city mandated minimum wage, just the convention center's minimum wage.

There are more articles on this specific subject if one uses types the search terms "convention center," "san jose," and/or "minimum wage" into http://news.google.com/

My apologies if I misunderstood any facts. Please correct me if any of my facts are wrong and I will edit my post to reflect them.

How about some classic Ricardo? Classic International Economic theory pretty much covers why NAFTA is a big win for all involved.

Also check this paper out, it is good.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1062940802001183

> I didn't read the Ellis, Widmayer, and Palmer study, it would be worth double-checking the definition they used.

The paper is available here. The authors used the data of a pre-existing survey (Ellis & Cole-Harding, 2001).

The data includes answers from both women and men (7,817 and 3,978, respectively) who reported being sexually assaulted. Ellis, Widmayer, and Palmer note:

> No specific definition of “sexual assault” was provided in the questionnaire. Because assaults obviously come in varying degrees of force and threat, participants are bound to have had differing degrees of “seriousness” in mind when answering (Ellis, 1998b).

This is mostly my opinion but you should take everything you learn in economics with a grain of salt. Most of those theories appeared at a time when intellectuals were trying to decide whether or not blacks and women were people and just about all the assumptions of the authors very poor when scrutinized with modern knowledge. Moreover, the work of the authors that came up with those theories have been filtered in order to serve the dominant socio-political paradigm. For example, Adam Smith who described the efficiency of the specialization on the micro scale also advocated for a minimum wage. Ricardo, who recommended specialization on the macro scale believed that the major beneficiaries of capitalism are neither workers nor capitalists but land-owners. You will never hear about these things economics because economics is not a science, it is a justification for a system that benefits those who have the power in our society. Almost everything in economics from rational choice theory, to the historic emergence of markets, to the universality of market systems is basically bullshit. You can read books like Predictably Irrational and Debt:The First 5000 Years to learn more.

In economics, I recommend The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner.

It's a secondary source, not a foundational text, but it's clear (he is often clearer about people's ideas than the people themselves were), thoughtful, and well-researched, and after you read it you'll know where to read further.

I know I bring it up every time we have one of these threads, but The Worldly Philosophers is still the best beginner's book on history of economic thought and maybe the best first book on economic thought you can give to someone.

I'm not a big fan of Predictably Irrational. I think he plays fast and loose with some very important distinctions about what rationality is, what economists do and do not assume, and the difference between normative and positive rationality. And some of his experiments are so ad hoc that I have a hard time seeing them as viable research strategies.

I wish I knew of a better book about behavioral economics though. Nudge is pretty good, but I don't know of anything that really summarizes the stuff being done now all that well.

Honestly, most "econ 101" knowledge is probably intellectually unhelpful, because it's way behind the frontier, and not in a building blocks kind of way that you might see in chemistry or physics. I mentioned a few books over here in a similar thread, but if you're the type who reads a bunch of blogs, I'd more strongly recommend The Worldly Philosophers, of those. A lot of pundits misrepresent classical economists (accidentally or otherwise), and I think it's best to set the record straight on that front before moving on.

>Stock markets reached an oil time low [...] From Bill Gates to common man lost his money in the stock market

Stocks have rebounded just fine, as they do after every crash. People only lost money if they sold off their investments at the bottom of the market (which is always a terrible idea).

>Government had to bail out banks and automotive industry

And they have been repaid:

>Of the $466 billion distributed, about $245.2 billion have gone to banks, both national and local. And, as of Oct. 18, the government had taken back about $266.7 billion, according to the treasury count-- about $21.5 billion more than the initial investment.

Back to your question:

>But where did all that money go?

Where did what money go? The bailouts were repaid. Changes in stock values only represent unrealized gains/losses. I'm not sure I understand your question.

You can check out Craig Calhoun's classical sociological Theory.

Also my favorite sociology professor just launched a MOOC on the topic, you should check it out!

I agree race is not a scientific term but it doesn't matter. Whether it's a social construct or not, the word still exists in the dictionary and the girlfriend used it properly.

You and the OP don't think race is a meaningful division. That's fine. Even the definition I just linked talks about some issues with the term and whether it's social or biological. I'm just pointing out that it's a commonly used word and concept. If the OP is going to talk about white people and black people as groups, then he might as well admit that the word we use for those groups is race.

It’s really not a useful metric. It’s a very elegant statistic for sure. But not overly useful. We covered it a lot in some of my methods classes. (We use it for examples in Inferential Stats classes because of how it is designed)

https://www.webmd.com/brain/news/20121218/iq-test-really-measure-intelligence

Tim is right, while there exists a producer and consumer surplus in cases like this, which come not from the quantity still sold, but from the quantity that would be sold that now goes unsold.

In trade, tariffs produce a deadweight loss in the lost revenue which is not taken by the government.

Its easiest to understand if you draw the graph. You'll then see the area which goes to waste.

Edit: A google presentation I made a while ago on tariffs shows it graphically. https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dg6kqgcx_68fmmmpn6g

Be patient, the transitions in google docs are finicky, and can only do one thing per click.

The three 'recognized' scholarly approaches are rational choice institutionalism (RCI), historical institutionalism (HI) and sociological institutionalism (SI). RCI describes institutions as an equillibria between strategic actors (with changes occurring as a result in changes in the context of strategic calculation), HI emphasizes the importance of pre-existing institutions and the difficulty in totally remaking institutions (making postcommunist Europe an extremely interesting area for these scholars), and SI looks at institutions as normative/cultural things which dictate what actions are considered 'appropriate' in a given setting (again, very important for postcommunism). For more general work on institutional change, I recommend Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance by Douglass North and Kathleen Thelen's How Institutions Evolve. They both sit somewhere between RC and historical approaches. The latter discusses many of the 'methods' or mechanisms by which Institutions are seen to develop as framed in your question.

Numerous very good books have been written on this. Look at Hall's and Taylor's essay for a more fleshed out discussion of the approaches to understanding institutions, as well as tons of relevant citations. https://tinyurl.com/y75jobqf

Young people were the spark. Millennials are leading the charge for downtown housing, but older demographics are now also realizing the benefits to living downtown as a retirement destination. If you have a condo or apartment, you're not responsible for any of the exterior upkeep. And since you live close to everything because you're downtown, you can walk out the front door to restaurants, bars, and whatever other entertainment you desire. Some have begun to realize that it's a great choice for the early part of retirement for people who have the means and the interest... so now they're joining the fun too!

For a lighter read, Jeff Speck's <em>Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time</em> sheds some insight, and there are several studies like this (Williams, Enriquez 2010) that explain in more detail. Just about anything from Ed Glaeser and Richard Florida will also shed some light for you.

No, I'm obviously not asking you if I'm homosexual since the whole purpose of my hypothetical line of questioning was to demonstrate that being gay is not something black and white but you are too willfully ignorant to try to understand that.

To go further down the path you are taking this conversation; Ok. So you are saying that if anyone has EVER had 1 single feeling of sexual attraction to someone of the same sex that makes them gay officially? This is your personal criteria for qualifying someone into this social construct and is by no means absolute

The whole point (that you are obviously not going to try to understand, but I'm hoping this may be helpful for someone else out there confused about their sexuality) is that being gay is absolutely not something that you become when you engage in a specific act and that there is no specific criteria for when someone becomes gay via homoerotic action. It's something that you become (in your mind) when you choose to identify with it, or become in the minds of others when others choose label you with this identity. This is exactly what a social construct is.

Again, I don't expect this to reach you but for my own enjoyment I'm going to delve a little deeper here. I think your big hangup is that you think that someone saying that something is a social construct means it doesn't exist. Being gay exists now that people have created it as a construction but it hasn't always.

Another hypothetical: A huge percentage of giraffe sexual activity is male-male (http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals#/Mammals) - are giraffes gay?

A few things to consider:

1. The Canadian dollar is fairly weak right now. So comparisons based on currency conversion may overstate the degree of difference, especially when a large swing has taken place relatively quickly in the past few years.

2. Canada is generally less sprawl centric than the United States, and more of the population is in major urban centers than in the United States. As such, a house in Canada is probably going to be much closer to the urban core than a house in the USA and therefore paying a higher land premium. It's important to keep in mind that to compare house prices from one place to another, someone has to have seen an economic reason to build a house there to begin with.

3. Most of the land you're thinking of is basically useless as far as housing. Canada has truly vast wilderness in a way that exists in few other places in the world.

4. Because Canada is generally quite cold, housing costs which account for heating will generally be higher than in most of the USA, since the temperature varies further away from comfortable for more of the year than most places in the US.

Is there something special about counterfeiting as opposed to other crimes?

You can just google any list of theories of criminal behavior; it's conceivable to make most of them fit.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3403000066.html

It's pretty well established in network theory that a preferential attachment network will tend towards one or two nodes which have a power law more connections than the other nodes in the network. You can actually run a model simulation of this process here.

http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/models/PreferentialAttachment

If we accept that businesses are preferential attachment networks then it follows that this topology would tend to appear as the network scales up. Depending on the institutional norms this could easily result in 'company town' type monopolies where a single institution controls most transactions through the network. Interestingly Barabassi has shown that network centrality doesn't necessarily translate into network influence. Which may speak to the institutional environment being a factor in the formation of monopolies.

Hello, My name is Kelsey Laxton, and I am a graduate student at SHSU. My faculty sponsor, Dr. Adam Schmidt, and I are currently recruiting willing participants who are parents of children between the ages of 6 to 16 to respond to an Internet survey. Participation should take about 15 minutes. For more information and/or to participate in the Web survey, please click the link below. Your time and helpfulness are appreciated! https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/SPSRQCR2014 Sincerely, Kelsey Laxton

Yes, if I remember correctly, this is noticeable in the Pirahã community, which you can read about through Daniel Everett's research. The following book is a good entry point, but you'll have to search around for the bit where he discusses how the community treats children as independent adults, with little to no protective behaviour.

https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0307386120

You seem to be looking at content mostly from the left but if you'd like to see something from the other side defending capitalism, Milton Friedman did a Book/TV Show in the 80s called "Free to Choose", which he made to promote the idea of free markets in a way your average joe could understand. It was apparently a response to John Galbraith's "Age of Uncertainty" which was a similar format. They have debates at the end of each video between rather important people on the ideas presented so you can see the other side's take as well.

Anyways heres the TV part I found on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3N2sNnGwa4&amp;list=PL0364ACCE6C7E9D8E&amp;ab_channel=CommonSenseCapitalism

and heres the book on Amazon if you'd like to buy it: http://www.amazon.com/Free-Choose-Statement-Milton-Friedman/dp/0156334607/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1431390061&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=free+to+choose

<em>The Inequality Reader</em> by David Gruskey &amp; Szonja Szelenyi is a fantastic collection of articles on inequality. I used it to study for my doctoral exam in Social Stratification and I still pick it up to read every once and a while. If you don't feel like buying it, you can check out some of the essays in it by just googling some of the titles in google scholar (click the link and then press the "look inside" button amazon offers to check out the contents). The reader features classics like Marx and Weber but also authors like William Julius Wilson, Massey and Denton, Sharon Hays, Hochschild, Laureau and other pretty notable scholars. It also has the added benefit of giving you a taste of some of the different areas of social strat and a good portion of the essays/articles are excerpts from long books, so if you see something you like there's likely an option to read a lot more.

edit: PS if you have a particular area of interest within I'm happy to recommend some books, but if you're getting your feet wet this reader is really great. Where are you in your academic career?

As a premise, I would strongly encourage to not take any single book or textbook at face value (i.e. caveat lector), but Tim Newburn's <em>Criminology</em> are accessible, well-reputed, introductory textbooks which provide a large coverage of criminological topics and perspectives. The <em>Oxford Handbook of Criminology</em> is also a good book, but in a different way (if you check the contents of these two books it should be clear what I mean).

>economic conservatives would rather address the REASONS why things are so expensive and attempt to lower them rather than just subsidize them so everyone can afford the higher prices on the backs of higher taxes.

How do they purport to do this?

The fiscally conservative answer would not be to address the reasons and intervene in front of that market, but to let it correct itself in the long run (to which Keynes retorts: 'in the long run we are all dead.')

Not only is it not in the interest of business to correct the social issues (the loss of agency for the poor) resulting from this raise in tulip prices. In fact, according to conservative economics (chicago school), it MUST NOT be the role of business to address these reasons lest it interrupt profits:

The Friedman doctrine: "There is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game..."

He says else where in Capitalism and Freedom that corporate social responsibility is completely unfounded wherever it conflicts with profits.

So I ask you: if the market itself is unable to correct for these social issues exemplified in your parable, and business must not correct them as long as they may profit from them, and government may not intervene for fear of encroachment then how is this problem ever resolved?

I think /u/postscarce is right on when he recommends Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. I think Haidt's The Righteous Mind, is another good recommended from /u/balanced_goat. They're both incredibly important psychologists right now at the top of the field.

The sociological recommendations are a bit more mixed. The Sociological Imagination and An Invitation to Sociology are both forty years old. My father is a sociology professor and HE read them in graduate school, and now I'm reading them in graduate school. They're classics, but I'm not sure they're the best (though you could get them cheap used and throw one of them in as a bonus). Similarly, Randall Collins's book on theory is good, but I'm not sure the best place to start as a high schooler exploring.

Instead, I'd have two recommendations for sociology. One is Duncan Watts's Everything is Obvious (once you know the answer), which is probably the best general introduction to sociology written in the past decade or two. Duncan Watts is sadly no longer an academic sociologist (he got tempted away by industry) but he was a tenured professor at Columbia before that. Here's the preface as a free PDF if you're curious.

The other book I'd recommend is not so broad, but one I've found that high school and college students can understand because it's about them: Privilege by Shamus Khan. It's about how elite kids learn to be elite. This isn't some old fashioned introduction but rather modern contemporary research that came out a few years ago--this is what sociologists actually a study today. Here's the introduction as a free PDF if you're curious.

I'd recommend Friedman. "Capitalism and Freedom" and "Free to Choose" are great books, albeit they are biased towards classical liberalism, they still teach a great deal about how markets work etc, and are simplified and not too macro-heavy.

I'm in the 11th grade and read Capital in the 21. Century and didn't have much of an issue, although I've took a few beginners macro courses.

The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein does a pretty good job at this. Particularly, she examines how neoliberalist policy helped perpetuate Pinochet et al through their regimes, the role it played in the fall of the USSR, and the role it played in the Iraq war. (Note: Also worth reading are criticisms of the book; don't isolate yourself to just one view of the events.)