Lecture Videos

Lecture Videos

Filiz Garip: “Networks, Diffusion and Inequality”

Symposium on the Future of the Social Sciences IV
Oct 26, 2018

DiMaggio and Garip (2011) define network externalities (where the value of a practice is a function of network alters that have already adopted the practice) as a mechanism exacerbating social inequality under the condition of homophily (where advantaged individuals poised to be primary adopters are socially connected to other advantaged individuals). The authors use an agent-based model of diffusion on a real-life population for empirical illustration, and thus, do not consider consolidation (correlation between traits), a population parameter that shapes network structure and diffusion (Blau and Schwartz 1984, Centola 2015). Using an agent-based model, this paper shows that prior findings linking homophily to segregated social ties and to differential diffusion outcomes are contingent on high levels of consolidation. Homophily, under low consolidation, is not sufficient to exacerbate existing differences in adoption probabilities across groups, and can even end up alleviating inter-group inequality by facilitating diffusion.

Lecture Videos

Sandra Gonzalez‐Bailon: “Digital News and the Consumption of Information Online”

Symposium on the Future of the Social Sciences IV
Oct 26, 2018

Measures of audience overlap between news sources give us information on the diversity of people’s media diets and the similarity of news outlets in terms of the audiences they share. This provides a way of addressing key questions like whether audiences are increasingly fragmented. In this paper, we use audience overlap estimates to build networks that we then analyze to extract the backbone – that is, the overlapping ties that are statistically significant. We argue that the analysis of this backbone structure offers metrics that can be used to compare news consumption patterns across countries, between groups, and over time. Our analytical approach offers a new way of understanding audience structures that can enable more comparative research and, thus, more empirically grounded theoretical understandings of audience behavior in an increasingly digital media environment.

Lecture Videos

Duncan Watts: “Prediction and Explanation in Social Science”

Symposium on the Future of the Social Sciences IV
Oct 26, 2018

Historically, social scientists have sought out explanations of human and social phenomena that provide interpretable causal mechanisms, while often ignoring their predictive accuracy. We argue that the increasingly computational nature of social science is beginning to reverse this traditional bias against prediction; however, it has also highlighted three important issues that require resolution. First, current practices for evaluating predictions must be better standardized. Second, theoretical limits to predictive accuracy in complex social systems must be better characterized, thereby setting expectations for what can be predicted or explained. Third, predictive accuracy and interpretability must be recognized as complements, not substitutes, when evaluating explanations. Resolving these three issues will lead to better, more replicable, and more useful social science.

Lecture Videos

Michael Macy: “Social Wormholes and Parallel Worlds”

Symposium on the Future of the Social Sciences IV
Oct 26, 2018

Using global network data, we discovered the existence of social “wormholes” – high bandwidth social ties that bridge vast network distances, enabling rapid diffusion of costly, novel, or controversial innovations whose transmission depends on strong social relationships.

Lecture Videos

Yu Xie, Princeton University

“Long-Term Trends in Intergenerational and Multigenerational Occupational Mobility in the United States 1850-2013”, by Yu Xie, Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor of Sociology and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, Princeton University, presented at the Center for the Study of Economy and Society, Cornell University, on November 30th, 2017.

Abstract

We examine long-term trends in social mobility in the U.S. from 1850 to the present, a period spanning two eras of exceptionally high economic inequality, the 1870s to 1900 and the 1970s to the present. We will utilize newly available data that include several million linked household and population records from 1850-2013 to better understand changes in mobility and its relation to social inequality. Findings from this study provide the first depiction of long-term continuity and change in the rates and patterns of occupational mobility in the face of dramatic historical changes spanning more than 150 years.

Based on ongoing collaboration with Xi Song at the University of Chicago, Karen A. Rolf at University of Nebraska at Omaha, Joseph P. Ferrie at the Northwestern University, and Catherine G. Massey at the University of Michigan.

Lecture Videos

Is Neoliberalism Over? by Monica Prasad

We are pleased to present our CSES Lecture Series on April 17th, 2014 at Cornell University from 4:30 to 6PM in the A.D. White House, Guerlac Room. Monica Prasad presented her research “Is Neoliberalism Over?”

Abstract

By neoliberalism I mean a set of policies built around a faith in the free market, and a strong distrust of state intervention. In the United States, we have witnessed a rise in policies of this sort in the last three decades, starting with the presidency of Ronald Reagan. In his first inaugural address Reagan said quote “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”; in his lighter moments, Reagan’s joke was “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Reagan’s anti-government approach to government has been a stable presence in American politics ever since. We saw it catch fire again under the presidency of George W. Bush, and we have seen it flare up most recently in the rise of the Tea Party. But there are reasons to wonder whether this era of American neoliberalism might be drawing to a close. For example, nearly half of the American public now holds a negative image of the Tea Party and its extreme anti-government stance, compared with only a third who view it favorably. And Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, and they hold one house of Congress today partly thanks to gerrymandering. So, has this era of American history come to a close? Is neoliberalism over?

About the Speaker

Monica Prasad’s areas of interest are economic sociology, comparative historical sociology, and political sociology. Her book The Politics of Free Markets (University of Chicago Press, 2006) won the 2007 Barrington Moore Award from the American Sociological Assocation’s (ASA) section on comparative and historical sociology. Prasad has also published an edited volume on the sociology of taxation, co-edited with Isaac Martin and Ajay Mehrotra, called The New Fiscal Sociology: Taxation in Comparative and Historical Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Her most recent book is The Land of Too Much: American Abundance and the Paradox of Poverty (Harvard University Press, 2012), which has received three awards, including the 2013 Barrington Moore Award and the Viviana Zelizer Award from the ASA section on economic sociology. Prasad is the recipient of several awards including a Fulbright to the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris in 2011 and a Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies also in 2011. She received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award in 2009. With this funding, she and project manager Elisabeth Anderson are conducting a cross-national and longitudinal study of the relationship between income tax progressivity and welfare state spending. Prasad’s most recent book The Land of Too Much develops a demand-side theory of comparative political economy to explain the surprisingly large role of the state in the United States, its origins in the 19th-century revolution in agricultural productivity, and its consequences for undermining a European-style welfare state and leaving U.S. economic growth dependent on “mortgage Keynesianism.” She is currently researching a book manuscript on the Reagan-era tax cut of 1981 and conducting investigations into several aspects of taxation and development with graduate students.

Older Entries →← Newer Entries
citation engraving
“Economic action is ‘social’ insofar as its subjective meaning takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course.”— Max Weber