Often when we study social problems, there is an almost irresistible temptation to study what we would like the cause of those problems to be (for whatever reason), to the neglect of the actual causes. When this goes uncorrected, you can get the phenomenon of “politically correct” explanations for various social problems – where there’s no hard evidence that A actually causes B, but where people, for one reason or another, think that A ought to be the explanation for B. This can lead to a situation in which denying that A is the cause of B becomes morally stigmatized, and so people affirm the connection primarily because they feel obliged to, not because they’ve been persuaded by any evidence.
Pointer from Alex Tabarrok. Heath, borrowing an off-hand joke from Robert Nozick, calls this “normative sociology.” But it is by no means limited to sociology. Think of people blaming snowstorms on global warming. Or blaming the financial crisis on “an atmosphere of deregulation.” Or blaming inequality on the decline in labor unions.
We can also find this normative analysis among libertarians. Blaming terrorism on blowback for foreign intervention.
Or we can find it among conservatives. Blaming the financial crisis on loose monetary policy.
Or blaming the Patriarchy for literally everything.
The funniest might be, “Sex differences somehow more pronounced in egalitarian cultures? Still the Patriarchy’s fault… somehow!”
In your libertarian and conservative examples those people are correct.
I realize you are equal timing, but it is,illustrative that yoi are going to have to try a lot harder.
Blaming snow on global warming is silly. Not because it can’t be true, but because one can’t possibly be as cocksure about it as they are.
Compare that to the argument about libertatians on or terrorism. It goes something like: don’t believe what Osama,actually said, blame it on some academic theory that (wiki) “Bergen argued that the attacks were part of a plan to cause the United States to increase its military and cultural presence in the Middle East, thereby forcing Muslims to confront the idea of a non-Muslim government and establish conservative Islamic governments in the region”
The problem is, libertarians said that too.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/nov/24/theobserver
Obviosly, you have never looked into what Osama Bin Laden’s reasons were. Some of it is strictly based on Islam, but a lot also has to do with American foreign policy.
…is what I just said, of course.
I think, to be fair to AK, some of the less sophisticated libertarians do say what is up there.
The above looked to me like the everyman versions of all of those arguments, not just the libertarian ones. (I won’t disagree with you that even some of the more sophisticated versions of those are still absurd though).
What is it people think “unsophisticated libertarians” say that is wrong/wishful thinking?
Compare to “because they hate us for our freedoms” and “because they are underprivileged.”
This post seems to suggest that sociology could be undertaken without norms. But it seems to me that we humans cannot free ourselves of norms. Someone who claims to be middle-of-the-road has chosen his boundaries, his right and left margins, using norms.
Our best hope may be acknowledge our own biases, and to proceed with our biases listed among our axioms.
We find it so many places because it’s part of how our brains work. Much as democracy is not a machine for identifying the optimal policies to achieve shared social ends (though we wish that it were), our brain is not a machine for accurately analyzing the world’s cause/effect network (though we wish that it were). It is, sadly, much more of a narrator / advocate – creating stories to explain what it observes, and attempting to craft those stories and influence shared narratives to its own advantage.
So while it may be useful for those trying to increase the epistemological water-line within a given ideology to identify the particular instances of this in their field, it is so common that I think a general survey is not very useful.
While I liked the analysis in general, this was pretty naive:
“I actually think this sort of confusion between the moral and the causal order happens a lot. Furthermore, despite having a lot of sympathy for “qualitative” social science, I think the problem is much worse in these areas. Indeed, one of the major advantages of quantitative approaches to social science is that it makes it pretty much impossible to get away with doing normative sociology.”
Has he ever heard of macroeconomics? Or p-hacking? Quantitive approaches certainly bring things from story-world into actual-cause-and-effect-finding world, but “pretty much impossible” is going way, way too far.
good point