Kristina Butaeva

Geoff Wodtke has written a response to the Report on Sociology, authored by Ashley Rubin and issued by the Vanderbilt-Washington St. Louis Commission on the State of Scholarship authored by Ashley Rubin @ashleytrubin. I urge that it be read by anyone interested in the debate on the state of sociology. Geoff is one of the world’s leading sociologists. His research is as rigorous as anything in economics. This critique of the Sociology report from the Vanderbilt-Washington St. Louis State of Scholarship Commission is powerful and fair minded. We will see if the self-appointed crusaders against sociology who have used the initial report as ammunition treat this careful rebuttal with equal seriousness. For sake of transparency, he and I discussed the response that has been posted while he was writing it; he is also a coauthor and friend. How do I update my positive assessment of the Rubin Report based on Geoff’s arguments? I see one major problem with the report which I failed to correctly process: specific discussions of inequality. He is right that the culture of poverty discussion in the report misses the work of many scholars who have moved beyond the earlier shallow formulations of culture of poverty to a richer conceptualization of culture and poverty. Geoff’s modesty meant he did not mention his own groundbreaking work on neighborhood and school effects. I would add Kathryn Edin to the list of culture and poverty scholars he listed, given how much her work influenced me. Further, Geoff is correct that the report’s arguments about sociology “monocropping inequality studies” is overstated and under argued. One reason is that the increase in inequality studies *in economics* should give pause to interpreting the increase in sociology as due to politics. (I simply missed problems with the discussion of structural functionalism. This reflects both lack of sensitivity to its role in sociology and the fact that it is so foreign to how economists in general and I in particular think about social systems.) This does not mean I no longer think the Rubin report has value. First, and I apparently am in the minority, I did not read the report as particularly damning. Related to this, I think Rubin did a fairer job with her various caveats than he does. Second, I take a much more negative view of the political orientation of the ASA than he does. This is partially because of my (I think is somewhat different from Geoff’s) view on the appropriate strictness of institutional neutrality and professional societies. But it is also partially due to my prior information set. Specific examples. 1. While I think the Coleman example in the Rubin report is unhelpful (if for no other reason that the distance from the episode), I well remember the unmentioned controversy over the Franklin Wilson/Charles Camic editorship of the American Sociological Review, having been informed of much of the ugliness by my sociology colleagues at UW-Madison. (Internet seems scrubbed of what I remember reading at the time.) 2. I am troubled by the fact that world class sociologists have left the ASA because of various political stances. Third, my assessment had already internalized a limitation of the report, which represents agreement with Geoff’s arguments that the report gave inadequate attention to the full spectrum of sociological research. This is reflected in my comments at the time and what I have written subsequently about the massive upper tail in sociology. Bottom line: I stand by my overall positive assessment of the Rubin, even after updating based on Geoff’s essay. It is a good faith effort by the author to assess the discipline, not as an impartial observer, but as a participant in a debate and contributes to an important conversation. Let me end by observing that Geoff was able to produce a strong-minded set of criticisms which avoided ad hominem attacks on the report’s author, which has been a common response to the report, and to my eyes self-discrediting. osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/zf…

Kristina Butaeva @Butaeva_K and Lucienne Disch @luciennedisch are fabulous scholars-we are so fortunate to have as part of the @UCStoneCenter community. Kristina is on the job market this year. Here is her website. kobutaeva.github.io/ Kristina is absolutely first rate. Here papers on inequality and mobility that range from the United States to Russia to China. She is a great coauthor and colleague. Her presence will make *any* social science department or research center deeper, more interesting, and a stronger community.

I am delighted that a video of the conference Who Gets Ahead and Why: Inequality, Meritocracy, and Social Mobility in the Americas jointly organized by Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility @UCStoneCenter, Universidad Icesi @icesi and the Georgetown Americas Institute @GUAmericas has posted. The conference was a great opportunity to generate interactions between scholars from across the world. For the Stone Center, it was an exceptional opportunity to interact with great Latin American economists and integrate Latin American inequality into the activities of the center. Icesi was a wonderful host and Cali a great city to have the opportunity to visit. Here is the set of presentations Alexander Monge-Naranjo — A Quantitative Model for the Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in Developing Countries Francis Vella — Marital Sorting, Household Inequality and Selection Maurizio Bussolo — From Patriarchy to Policy: Norms, Votes, and Gender Equal Laws Steven Durlauf — Class Mobility in the Era of Rising Inequality (coauthors with @Butaeva_K, Weiqi Wang, and Geoffrey Wodtke) Yoosoon Chang and Bo Hu — Does the United States Contain Poverty Traps? Juliana Jaramillo — The Long-Run Persistence of Family Ties in Latin America Andrés Álvarez — Gender and Distributive Fiscal Policies in a High Informality Context: Colombia Orazio Attanasio — Inequality in Early Childhood Development in LAC Panel "How to Foster Social Mobility in Unequal Societies?"-Maurizio Bussolo · Juan Esteban Carranza · Orazio Attanasio · Lucio Esposito · Blanca Zuluaga youtube.com/live/ye8PTKByDUw

On the economics/social science of religion Honored to have delivered the SCORE Strand 3 Keynote Lecture. The Social Consequences of Religions (SCORE) 3 Strand: Social Consequences of Religions initiative, directed by the extraordinary Sriya Iyer @SriyaIyer, is a broad integrative project and the occasion of the meeting with the release of Score 3 White Paper econ.cam.ac.uk/publications/… that will launch the next phase of the initiative. My talk "Intergenerational Persistence of Intergenerational Persistence in Religious Status: Some New Measures" had two distinct parts. First, I described work in progress with Kristina Butaeva @Butaeva_K, Renato De Angelis, and Weiqi Wang, which constructs measure of intergenerational persistence in religious status for the bulk of the post World War II period. We document changes in the dynamics of persistence using recently developed Markov Chain measures. These measures illustrate how the comparative persistence of evangelical Protestantism and no affiliation, compared to mainstream Protestantism and Catholicism, map to increasing cross sectional polarization. The methods we employ also allow us to dWe also find interesting gender differences. Second, I turn to the question of modelling the mechanisms underlying these mobility dynamics and make some general observations on the modelling of religious affiliation and religious belief using formal models. I do so from the vantage point of economic theory. I argue that it is essential to model religious affiliation and belief as the product of truth seeking. I contrast this with the focus on the role of identity and community public goods in religious affiliation that has been successfully modelled by economists. This leads me to argue that the modelling of belief has to avoid the fundamental (no pun intended) defect of the Strong Program in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge: the requirement of symmetry, which David Bloor has described as "symmetrical in its style of explanation. The same types of cause would explain say, true and false beliefs." This position is, I claim, wrong to the extent it is nontrivial. My paper with William Brock, A Formal Model of Theory Choice in Science, 1999 is an example of how to integrate truth seeking with other determinants of belief in which asymmetries in explanation emerge as equilibrium properties of the belief distribution across scientists. I further argue that scientific, moral, and metaphysical truths need to be distinguished in the modelling process and further argue that, as a scientific and moral realist, were I to engage in the modelling, the truth or falsity of particular belief systems must be integral to the analysis. The recording of the lecture does not include the Q and A that followed my lecture. Here I raise the issue of viewpoint diversity. As someone who was raised with no religion and has no religion, I argued that my capacity to model religious belief is inevitably handicapped. I do not understand the qualia of religious belief and this matters. youtube.com/watch?v=d89xAyJy…

Delighted that this paper with Kristina Butaeva @Butaeva_K and Alexander Shapoval is now public. Before discussing the paper, it is important to note that Kristina, who is currently a postdoc at @UCStoneCenter, will be on the job market this year. She is an absolutely first-rate scholar whose presence would make any social science community in the world a more vibrant one. Our analysis uses a remarkable data set from the Liaoning province in Northeast China developed by James Lee and Cameron Campbell, which allows us to study the evolution for status mobility for six generations from the late 1700's to the end of Imperial China. These data allow us to estimate a nonhomogeneous Markov transition matrix for mobility and thereby reveal how mobility evolved. We employ some novel intergenerational mobility calculations that derive from alternative mobility concepts—the persistence of class origin across generations and intergenerational class movement. These tools reveal some broad patterns. While each generation possesses a specific mobility structure, we identify two epochs that characterize them. Before 1850, the generation-specific transition matrices appear to exhibit convergence toward a steady state. In contrast, the second epoch, beginning around 1850, exhibits unstable intergenerational class dynamics that persist until the dynasty’s collapse. This epoch reveals a collapse of upward mobility for the late empire. Interestingly, the transition between epochs coincides with the Opium Wars and Taiping Rebellion, demonstrating how the footprints of major crises in the late Qing era appear in the mobility dynamics.

I am delighted to release this paper with coauthors extraordinaire Kristina Butaeva @Butaeva_K, Weiqi Wang, and Geoffrey Wodtke Before discussing the substance of the paper, I want to highlight two of my coauthors. (Geoff Wodtke is a star sociologist and needs no introduction!) Kristina Butaeva is a wonderful postdoc at the UChicago Stone Center, with papers on inequality and mobility that range from the US to Russia to China. She makes any social science department or research center deeper and more interesting. Weiqi Wang is a predoc at the Center, developing great work on college admissions in China. Every Economics PhD program in the world should be competing to attract her when she applies.

Delighted to release with paper with Kristina Butaeva, Lian Chen, and Albert Park. Many of the Markov chain ideas we developed are inspired by mobility ideas that originate in sociology.