International Relations

Sexual harassment of women in academic settings is regrettably common and pervasive, and its consequences are grave. At the same time, it is a remarkably difficult problem to solve. The "me-too" movement has shed welcome light on specific individual offenders and has generated more awareness of some aspects of the problem of sexual harassment and misconduct. But we have not yet come to a public awareness of the changes needed to create a genuinely inclusive and non-harassing environment for women across the spectrum of mistreatment that has been documented. The most common institutional response following an incident is to create a program of training and reporting, with a public commitment to investigating complaints and enforcing university or institutional policies rigorously and transparently. These efforts are often well intentioned, but by themselves they are insufficient. They do not address the underlying institutional and cultural features that make sexual harassment...

Quite a few posts here have focused on the question of emergence in social ontology, the idea that there are causal processes and powers at work at the level of social entities that do not correspond to similar properties at the individual level. Here I want to raise a related question, the notion that an important aspect of the workings of the social world derives from "system effects" of the organizations and institutions through which social life transpires. A system accident or effect is one that derives importantly from the organization and configuration of the system itself, rather than the specific properties of the units. What are some examples of system effects? Consider these phenomena: Flash crashes in stock markets as a result of automated trading Under-reporting of land values in agrarian fiscal regimes  Grade inflation in elite universities  Increase in product defect frequency following a reduction in inspections  Rising frequency of industrial errors at th...

There is a new exciting and valuable contribution from the research group around Raj Chetty, Nathan Hendren, and John Friedman, this time on the topic of neighborhood-level social mobility. (Earlier work highlighted measures of the impact on social mobility contributed by university education across the country. This work is presented on the Opportunity Insights website; link , link . Here is an earlier post on that work; link .) In the recently released work Chetty and his colleagues have used census data to compare incomes of parents and children across the country by neighborhood of birth, with the ability to disaggregate by race and gender, and the results are genuinely staggering. Here is a report on the project on the US Census website; link . The interactive dataset and mapping app are provided here ( link ). The study identifies neighborhoods of origin; characteristics of parents and neighborhoods; and characteristics of children. Here are screenshots of metropolitan Detroit re...

Are emotions real? Are they hardwired to our physiology? Are they pre-cognitive and purely affective? Was Darwin right in speculating that facial expressions are human universals that accurately represent a small repertoire of emotional experiences ( The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals )? Or instead are emotions a part of the cognitive output of the brain, influenced by context, experience, expectation, and mental framework? Lisa Feldman Barrett is an accomplished neuroscientist who addresses all of these questions in her recent book How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain , based on several decades of research on the emotions. The book is highly interesting, and has important implications for the social sciences more broadly. Barrett's core view is that the received theory of the emotions -- that they are hardwired and correspond to specific if unknown neurological groups, connected to specific physiological and motor responses -- is fundamentally wrong. ...