Slate summarizes today a fascinating study on the effect that racially-readable names have on social and economic life chances. The authors remind us once again that correlation does not equal causation and have the California data to prove it. It’s a useful companion to the study of black names in resume success, though in debunking that study, the authors do not really discount name-discrimination, merely show that any name discrimination that may exist barely registers next to the aggregate of other bases of racial and class discrimination.
What fascinated me equally about this study though is that it’s another illustration of an idea that’s been floating around in my head for a while: economics now serves as the ur-discipline for the educated classes, whereas sociology has been marginalized. Levitt and Fryer’s study of racially-marked names, in fact, is the sort of Durkheimian project a sociologist should be doing and popularizing. Perhaps they are; if so, would their research rise to broader view? There’s no Economic Scene or Dismal Science column for the sociologist, no Economist or Reason applying sociological insights into current events analysis, no sociologist counterpart to the commentary of Paul Krugman, Tyler Cowen or Brad DeLong. (Crooked Timber’s Keiran Healy is the most prominent sociological blogger I can think of). I don’t mean to discount a discipline that for all I know is doing cutting edge work nor sociologists out there blogging or even writing for a popular audience. It’s just that it’s undeniable that since the age of David Reismann, C. Wright Mills, and Michael Harrington, sociology has lost its role as a generating set of ideas for policy and public discussion. I’ll revisit this as I have a chance to collect my thoughts.
No comments have been added to this post yet.