Stripping a phemenon of its social context, normalizing a base rate to 50%, and seeking an on-off decision: all of these can give the feel of scientific objectivity—but the very steps taken to ensure objectivity can remove social context and relevance.Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
This list of legitimate objects of empirical study in the social world, resulting in legitimate and evidence-based knowledge and explanation, can certainly be extended. And if being scientific means no more than conducting analysis of empirical phenomena based on observation, evidence, and causal inquiry, then we can reasonably say that it is possible to take a scientific attitude towards empirical problems like these.
But the hard question is whether there is more to social science than a fairly miscellaneous set of results that have emerged through study of questions like these. In particular, the natural sciences have aspired to formulating fundamental general theories that serve to systematize wide ranges of natural phenomena -- the theory of universal gravitation or the theory of evolution through natural selection, for example. The goal is to reduce the heterogeneity and diversity of natural phenomena to a few general theoretical hypotheses about the underlying reality of the natural world.
Are general theories like these possible in the social realm?….
Here is one possible answer to the question posed above, consistent with the points made here. Yes, social science is possible. But what social science consists in is an irreducible and pluralistic family of research methods, observations, explanatory hypotheses, and mid-level theories that permit only limited prediction and that cannot in principle serve to unify the social realm under a single set of theoretical hypotheses. There are no grand unifying theories in the social realm, only an open-ended set of theories of the middle range that can be used to probe and explain the social facts we can uncover through social and historical research.
In fact, to the extent that the ideas of contingency, heterogeneity, plasticity, and conjuncturality play the important role in the social world that I believe they do, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that there are very narrow limits to the degree to which we can aspire to systematic or theoretical explanation in the social realm. And this in turn suggests that we might better describe social inquiry as a set of discrete and diverse social studies rather than unified "social science". We might think of the domain of social knowledge better in analogy to the contents of a large and diverse tool box than in analogy to an orrery that predicts the "motions" of social structures over time.Understanding Society
In 2010 I made the prediction that the United States will experience a period of heightened social and political instability during the 2020s. Recently, several people challenged me to make this prediction more quantitative. There are all kinds of caveats, and I will get to them eventually.
But first, the TL;DR version.
Structural-demographic theory (SDT) suggests that the violence spike of the 2020s will be worse than the one around 1970, and perhaps as bad as the last big spike during the 1920s. Thus, the expectation is that there will be more than 100 events per 5 years (see the upper panel in the figure). In terms of the second metric (the lower panel) we should expect more than 5 fatalities per 1 million of population per 5 years, if the theory is correct.
And there you have it. If violence doesn’t exceed these thresholds by 2025, then SDT is wrong.Cliodynamica — A Blog about the Evolution of Civilizations
I See Satan Fall Like Lightning may not have been the best place to start for a Girard newbie, but it does contain some of the most concise, most powerful and beautifully written statements of the key insight of social science: that human beings are not autonomous monads but fundamentally social beings, whose thoughts and actions are shaped by the people around them. (Peter Thiel, who has been vocalabout Girard’s greatness, seems to have put these insights to more practical use than me or most of my classmates in anthropology did.)
Girard takes an unusual route to get to this insight, using scraps from the Bible and the Greek myths more in the manner of a literary critic, but he expresses it as well or better as any of the greats of twentieth-century social science.…
How does a field of phenomena come into focus as a subject of scientific study? When we want to know about weather, we can identify a relatively small number of variables that represent the whole of the topic -- temperature, air pressure, wind velocity, rainfall. And we can pick out the aspects of physics that seem to be causally relevant to the atmospheric dynamics that give rise to variations in these variables. Weather is a closed system, if a complex one.
Deciding what factors are important and amenable to scientific study in the social world is not so easy. Population size or density? Economic product? Inter-group conflict? Public opinion and values? Political systems? Racial and ethnic identities? All of these factors are of interest to the social sciences, to be sure. But none of this looks like anything like a definition of the whole of the social realm. Rather, there are indefinitely many other research questions that can be posed about the social world -- style and fashion, trends of social media, forms of etiquette, sources of power, and on and on.
For that matter, these don't look much like a macro-set of factors that are generated in some straightforward way by the simple actions of individual persons. These social factors aren't really analogous to macro-level weather factors, emerging from the local cells of temperature-pressure-humidity-direction. Rather, these social concepts or constructs are theorized and developed in a complicated back-and-forth by sociologists or political scientists seeking to identify social-level constructs that seem to give some insight into the ordinary and systematic experiences we have of the social world.
Most particularly, there isn't a natural way of mapping these social concepts into an integrated and comprehensive mental model of the whole of the social world. Instead, these high-level social concepts are partial and perspectival. And this is different from the situation of weather or climate. In the latter domains there are finitely many higher level concepts that serve to characterize the whole of the domain of global climate phenomena. Call this "high-level conceptual closure." There are no questions about climate that cannot be phrased in terms of these concepts. But the social world is not amenable to this kind of closure. We lack high-level conceptual closure for the social world.…Conventional economics assumes closure because its models are closed. Then the question becomes to what extent are they representational of the world. As one would expect they model the factors that figure in their assumptions with varying degrees of success, and they fail to represent what falls outside of their restrictive assumptions.
The eighteenth century term “moral science” (or “moral philosophy”—‘philosophy’ and ‘science’ are often treated as synonyms at the time) does not quite mean what we might think it means. And so when people urge on us to remember that economics was once a moral science and should be reformed back into some such science, they often reveal their ignorance about the past of economics (recall).
In writing about science morale, Condorcet, for example, understood "by this term all those sciences that have as their object either the human mind itself, or the relations of men to another.”[1] Moral sciences were opposed to physical sciences, and distinguished by the kinds of causes to be discussed. Moral sciences dealt with moral causes; and ‘moral’ meant something like ‘social.’ For example, institutions, norms, education, language, emotions, and property-relations (etc.) were all often thought of as moralcauses. (By contrast, geography, climate, mechanics, and matter-theory (etc.) were all physical causes)....Another point of interest:
Now, Adam Smith has a traditional and demanding understanding of virtue. His most explicit definition is as follows: “virtue is excellence, something uncommonly great and beautiful, which rises far above what is vulgar and ordinary” (The Theory of Moral Sentiments 1.1.5.6,).This is The Greek conception of virtue.
Arete (Greek: ἀρετή), in its basic sense, means "excellence of any kind".[1] The term may also mean "moral virtue".[1] In its earliest appearance in Greek, this notion of excellence was ultimately bound up with the notion of the fulfillment of purpose or function: the act of living up to one's full potential.It is particularly Platonic.
Like other ancient philosophers, Plato maintains a virtue-based eudaemonistic conception of ethics. That is to say, human well-being (eudaimonia) is the highest aim of moral thought and conduct, and the virtues (aretê: ‘excellence’) are the requisite skills and dispositions needed to attain it.It is also Aristotelian.
Aristotle emphasized the importance of developing excellence (virtue) of character (Greek ethikē aretē), as the way to achieve what is finally more important, excellent activity (Greek energeia). As Aristotle argues in Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics, the man who possesses character excellence does the right thing, at the right time, and in the right way.
Aristotle's ethics, or study of character, is built around the premise that people should achieve an excellent character (a virtuous character, "ethikē aretē" in Greek) as a pre-condition for attaining happiness or well-being (eudaimonia). It is sometimes referred to in comparison to later ethical theories as a "character based ethics". Like Plato and Socrates he emphasized the importance of reason for human happiness, and that there were logical and natural reasons for humans to behave virtuously, and try to become virtuous.Plato and Aristotle connected moral virtue with the good and beautiful. That is to say, the criterion of "right" is both ethical and aesthetic. Smith would call this the "moral sentiment."
Aristotle emphasizes throughout all his analyses of virtues that they aim at what is beautiful (kalos), effectively equating the good, at least for humans, with the beautiful (to kalon).[9]Plato and Aristotle held that happiness (Greek: eudaimonia) is the result or by-product of a virtuous life, that is, a life dedicated to excellence understood as unfolding one's full potential as a human being as well as a particle individual. This pursuit is the meaning of philosophy not as a study but as a way of life. In this sense, it has the a similar meaning to the ancient Indian concepts of dharma and yoga.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments begins with the following assertion:"How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrows of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous or the humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it."
Smith departed from the "moral sense" tradition of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume, as the principle of sympathy takes the place of that organ. "Sympathy" was the term Smith used for the feeling of these moral sentiments. It was the feeling with the passions of others. It operated through a logic of mirroring, in which a spectator imaginatively reconstructed the experience of the person he watches:This was extremely prescient in that it anticipates contemporary discoveries of cognitive science regarding the operation of mirror neurons."As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is on the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. By the imagination, we place ourselves in his situation."
However, Smith rejected the idea that Man was capable of forming moral judgements beyond a limited sphere of activity, again centered around his own self-interest:But here Smith goes off the mark, arguably in his own day in Britain, and especially with respect to the British colonies. Smith was at heart an apologist for the rising bourgeoisie."The administration of the great system of the universe ... the care of the universal happiness of all rational and sensible beings, is the business of God and not of man. To man is allotted a much humbler department, but one much more suitable to the weakness of his powers, and to the narrowness of his comprehension: the care of his own happiness, of that of his family, his friends, his country.... But though we are ... endowed with a very strong desire of those ends, it has been entrusted to the slow and uncertain determinations of our reason to find out the proper means of bringing them about. Nature has directed us to the greater part of these by original and immediate instincts. Hunger, thirst, the passion which unites the two sexes, and the dread of pain, prompt us to apply those means for their own sakes, and without any consideration of their tendency to those beneficent ends which the great Director of nature intended to produce by them."
"The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species."This is not too different from the ideas of the ancient Greeks however. Slavery constitutes the principal form of capital, and Aristotle argued that slavery was natural since some were better than other.
Introduction: For many decades, mainstream social scientists, mostly conservative, have argued that political commitments and scientific research are incompatible. Against this current of opinion, others, mostly politically engaged social scientists, have argued that scientific research and political commitment are not contradictory.
In this essay I will argue in favor of the latter position by demonstrating that scientific work is embedded in a socio-political universe, which its practioners can deny but cannot avoid. I will further suggest that the social scientist who is not aware of the social determinants of their work, are likely to fall prey to the least rigorous procedures in their work – the unquestioning of their assumptions, which direct the objectives and consequences of their research.
We will proceed by addressing the relationship between social scientific work and political commitment and examining the political-institutional universe in which social scientific research occurs. We will recall the historical experience of social science research centers and, in particular, the relationship between social science and its financial sponsors as well as the beneficiaries of its work.
We will further pursue the positive advantages, which political commitments provide, especially in questioning previously ignored subject matter and established assumptions.A major purpose of scientific method is reduction of subjectivity in the interest of greater objectivity. However, since meaning is context-dependent, it is not possible logically to achieve complete objectivity by isolating the positive from the normative. It is also empirically suspect in that cognitive science has shown that the rational and non-rational are deeply entangled in brain functioning. Since it is not possible to stand outside of point of view, it is also impossible to be sure that one has identified all hidden assumptions. The proper course of rational enquiry is to identify and acknowledge the most significant assumptions that are involved in a model, whether it be conceptual or mathematical.
We will start by raising several basic questions about scientific work in a class society: in particular, how the rules of logical analysis and historical and empirical method are applied to the research objectives established by the ruling elites.….
After World War II, wealthy business elites and capitalist governments in the United States and Western Europe established and funded numerous research foundations carefully selecting the functionaries to lead them. They chose intellectuals who shared their perspectives and could be counted on to promote studies and academics compatible with their imperial and class interests. As a result of the interlocking of business and state interests, these foundations and academic research centers published books , articles and journals and held conferences and seminars, which justified US overseas military and economic expansion while ignoring the destructive consequences of these policies on targeted countries and people. Thousands of publications, funded by millions of dollars in research grants, argued that ‘the West was a bastion of pluralistic democracy’, while failing to acknowledge, let alone document, the growth of a world-wide hierarchical imperialist order.
An army of scholars and researchers invented euphemistic language to disguise imperialism. For example, leading social scientists spoke and wrote of ‘world leadership’, a concept implying consensual acceptance based on persuasion, instead of describing the reality of ‘imperial dominance’, which more accurately defines the universal use of force, violence and exploitation of national wealth. The term, ‘free markets’, served to mask the historical tendency toward the concentration and monopolization of financial power. The ‘free world” obfuscated the aggressive and oppressive authoritarian regimes allied with Euro-US powers. Numerous other euphemistic concepts, designed to justify imperial expansion, were elevated to scientific status and considered ‘value free’.….The result was "weaponization" of knowledge.
The transformation of social science into an ideological weapon of the ruling class reflected the institutional basis and political commitments of the researchers. The ‘benign behavior’ of post-World War 2 US empire-building, became the operating assumption guiding scientific research. Moreover, leading academics became gatekeepers and watchdogs enforcing the new political orthodoxy by claiming that critical research, which spoke for non-elite constituencies, was non-scientific, ideological and politicized. However, academics, who consulted with the Pentagon or were involved in revolving-door relationships with multi-national corporations, were exempted from any similar scholarly opprobrium: they were simply viewed as ‘consultants’ whose ‘normal’ extracurricular activities were divorced from their scientific academic work.
In contrast, scholars whose research was directed at documenting the structure of power and to guiding political action by social movements were condemned as ‘biased’, ‘political’ and unsuitable for any academic career.….
In other words, academic authorities replicated the social repression of the ruling class in society, within the walls of academia. Their principle ideological weapon was to counterpose ‘objectivity’ to ‘values’. More specifically, they would argue that ‘true social science’ is ‘value free’ even as their published research was largely directed at furthering the power, profits and privileges of the incumbent power holders.….You can see where this is going. Neoliberalism.
Twenty-five years ago, the concept ‘reform’ referred to progressive changes: less inequality, greater social welfare, increased popular participation and more limitations on capitalist exploitation of labor. Since then, contemporary social scientists (especially economists) use the term, ‘reform’, to describe regressive changes, such as deregulation of capital, especially the privatization of public enterprises, health and educational institutions. In other words, mainstream academics transformed the concept of ‘reform’ into a private profitmaking business. ‘Reform’ has come to mean the reversal of all the working-class advances won over the previous century of popular struggle. ‘Reform’ is promoted by neo-liberal ideologues, preaching the virtues of unregulated capitalism. Their claim that ‘efficiency’ requires lowering ‘costs’, in fact means the elimination of any regulation over consumer quality, work safety and labor rights.
Their notion of ‘efficiency’ fails to recognize that economies, which minimizeworkplace safety, or lower the quality of consumer goods (especially food) and depress wages, are inefficient from the point of view of maximizing the general welfare of the country. ‘Efficiency’ is confined by orthodox economists to the narrow class needs and profit interests of a thin layer of the population. They ignore the historical fact that the original assumption of classical economics was to provide the greatest benefit to the greatest number.…
Once their political commitments define the research ‘problem’ to be studied and establish the conceptual framework, they apply ‘empirical’, historical and mathematical methods to collect and organize the data. They then apply logical procedures to ‘reach their conclusions’. On this flawed basis they present their work as ‘value-free’ social science. The only ‘accepted criticism’ is confined to those who operate within the conceptual parameters and assumptions of the mainstream academics."Efficiency" is the neoliberal weapon of choice, as if efficiency were synonymous with effectiveness. It is not.
“Political economy, or economics, is a study of man’s actions in the ordinary business of life; it inquires how he gets his income and how he uses it. It follows the actions of individuals and of nations as they seek, by separate or collective endeavour, to increase the material means of their well-being and to turn their resources to the best account. Thus it is on the one side a study of wealth, and on the other and more important side, a part of the study of man.” — Alfred Marshall, Economics of IndustryHere is the complete reference: Elements of economics of industry, being the first volume of Elements of economics, p. 1.
Balliol Croft, Cambridge 27. ii. 06 My dear Bowley,
I have not been able to lay my hands on any notes as to Mathematico-economics that would be of any use to you: and I have very indistinct memories of what I used to think on the subject. I never read mathematics now: in fact I have forgotten even how to integrate a good many things.
But I know I had a growing feeling in the later years of my work at the subject that a good mathematical theorem dealing with economic hypotheses was very unlikely to be good economics: and I went more and more on the rules — (1) Use mathematics as a short-hand language, rather than as an engine of inquiry. (2) Keep to them till you have done. (3) Translate into English. (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life. (5) Burn the mathematics. (6) If you can’t succeed in 4, burn 3. This last I did often.
I believe in Newton’s Principia Methods, because they carry so much of the ordinary mind with them. Mathematics used in a Fellowship thesis by a man who is not a mathematician by nature — and I have come across a good deal of that — seems to me an unmixed evil. And I think you should do all you can to prevent people from using Mathematics in cases in which the English language is as short as the Mathematical …
Your emptyhandedly,
Alfred Marshall
When people criticize Piketty for elevating a mere economic identity that shows that the share of capital income in total income is x times y (not important for my argument) to a Fundamental Law of Capitalism they show their inability to go back to economics as a social science, or differently, to transcend neoclassical economics.The aim of neoclassical economics was from the outset the elimination of consideration of economic rents, which had been central to classical economics, coincident with the rising influence of Marx, one hand, and of Henry George on the other.
The share of capital income in total income is not only a reflection of the fact that people with a factor of production B have so much, and people with the factor of production A have the rest. It gives us a measure of the share of the total pie that owners of capital (who are the principal social group in capitalism) are able to claim for themselves without having to work. This is key. We are basically saying: 20% of people of the richest people claim one-half of national output and they do so without having to work. If it were a question of changing the distribution in favor of factor A (donuts) and against factor B (pecan pies), there would be no reason to be concerned. But here you change the distribution in favor of those who do not need to work, and against those that do. You thereby affect the entire social structure of society. This is where social science comes in, and neoclassical economics goes away....
The entire 100 years of neoclassical economics was, in part, driven by the attempts to make us forget this key distinction: between having or not having to work for a living.See John Maynard Keyes, The General Theory, Book VI, Chapter 24. Concluding Notes on the Social Philosophy towards which the General Theory might Lead.
I see, therefore, the rentier aspect of capitalism as a transitional phase which will disappear when it has done its work. And with the disappearance of its rentier aspect much else in it besides will suffer a sea-change. (II)Seems Maynard had anticipated this.
The principal, and stark, issue then becomes: can a society where most of the rich are non-workers be called a “good society"?I don't see this as the key criterion. The very wealthy are aware that those who do not work are not recognized as part of a meritocracy, which is key to their self-justification. They actually "work" very hard and getting things to go their way. Even at the top, it's not bean bag. Different cohorts of the rich compete for capital share. This is often a fierce battle that transcends nation states. This is now a global issue, and it is becoming increasingly global under neoliberal globalization and a new aristocracy of wealth and power.
The defense of hierarchy is what conservatism is all about, as Corey Robin reminded us all with his recent book, “The Reactionary Mind.”Salon
What’s more, the differences between how liberals and conservatives think are reflected in a range of divergent cognitive processes, as summarized in a 2003 paper by John T. Jost and three co-authors, “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,” a “meta-analysis” that brought together findings drawn from 88 study samples in 12 countries:
“The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality and is motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty and threat,” Jost and his co-authors wrote in the abstract. These are not merely American phenomena, nor is there any reason to think they’re particularly modern.
While Jost’s paper revealed a complicated array of different factors involved, two in particular have been shown to explain the lion’s share of intergroup prejudice: right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO)....
A few weeks ago, I came across a reference to an unpublished conference paper, with the intriguing title, “Does endorsement of hierarchy make you evil? SDO and psychopathy.”
So I contacted the lead author, Marc Wilson, a New Zealand psychologist at Victoria University of Wellington, to ask him about his research....
“When SDO was originally proposed, it was argued that group dominance (as measured by SDO) is not the same thing as individual level dominance, and indeed that’s what the original research appeared to show,” he explained. “More recently there have been a few studies that have suggested SDO and psychopathy are related, and I’ve collected a lot of data now that leads me to believe they’re flip sides of the same coin — interpersonal dominance (psychopathy) on one side and group dominance (SDO) on the other.”...
“Therefore, it makes sense that environments that promote social hierarchies will also be fertile breeding grounds for individual dominance, and vice versa,” he continued.
My conclusion: Economics needs to become a non-equilibrium social science that embraces importance of institutions, culture [rhetoric?], networks, endogenous technology, structure, as well as the individual. It is an information science where the relevance of complexity is central. Time must be acknowledged not masked by fantastic tricks, and where asymmetries of all sorts are the norm not the exception. An economy changes itself as surely as the people within it adapt to their ever changing environment. They shape and are shaped by that environment, so feedback keeps the whole thing moving along. It is a learning device where we both discover and create solutions to everyday problems. It is driven by both competition and cooperation. It sits within, not without, society as a whole. It is melange of energy, resources, and knowledge that we configure and re-configure to satisfy our needs. And it is a process whereby we explore the potential of that melange and translate potential into possible, and then into actual, ways to satisfy those needs, whilst recognizing we are creating needs as we go along. It is thus open ended, procedural, dynamic, and intensely human. In other words it is evolutionary.Real-World Economics Review Blog
My defense of meso-level causation is based on four ideas.
First, the practice of sociologists justifies this claim, since sociologists do in fact make use of meso-meso claims. They often do not attempt to provide vertical explanations from circumstances of the actor to meso- and macro-level outcomes; instead, they often provide horizontal explanations that explain one set of meso and macro outcomes on the basis of the causal powers of another set of meso and macro conditions or structures.
Second, sociology is a “special science” analogous to cognitive science, dependent on a set of causally linked entities at a lower level. Arguments offered for the relative explanatory autonomy of the higher-level theories are applicable to sociology as well. The basis for rejecting reductionism is well established here.
Third, meso entities (organizations, institutions, normative systems) often have stable characteristics with regular behavioral consequences. This is illustrated with the example of organizations.
Fourth, those entities must have microfoundations; we must be confident that there are individual behaviors at lower levels that support these macro characteristics. But it is legitimate to draw out the macro-level effects of the macro-circumstance under investigation, without tracing out the way that effect works in detail on the swarms of actors encompassed by the case. The requirement of microfoundations is not a requirement on explanation; it does not require that our explanations proceed through the microfoundational level. It is an ontological principle but not a methodological principle. Rather, it is a condition that must be satisfied on prima facie grounds, prior to offering the explanation. (I refer to this as the "weak" requirement of microfoundations; link.)Understanding Society
There is a great deal of important international work underway today within the philosophy of social science on the general topic of social ontology. How do social structures relate to the actions of socially situated actors? How does causation work in the social realm? Can we say anything rigorous about the nature of "levels" of the social world -- micro, meso, and macro? And is there such a thing as an "emergent" social property or entity?Understanding Society
Almost everything we do these days leaves some kind of data trace in some computer system somewhere. When such data is aggregated into huge databases it is called “Big Data”. It is claimed social science will be transformed by the application of computer processing and Big Data. The argument is that social science has, historically, been “theory rich” and “data poor” and now we will be able to apply the methods of “real science” to “social science” producing new validated and predictive theories which we can use to improve the world.

What’s wrong with this?...
Looking for “patterns or regularities” presupposes a definition of what a pattern is and that presupposes a hypothesis or model, i.e. a theory. Hence big data does not “get us away from theory” but rather requires theory before any project can commence.
What is the problem here? The problem is that a certain kind of approach is being propagated within the “big data” movement that claims to not be a priori committed to any theory or view of the world. The idea is that data is real and theory is not real. That theory should be induced from the data in a “scientific” way[1].
I think this is wrong and dangerous. Why? Because it is not clear or honest while appearing to be so. Any statistical test or machine learning algorithm expresses a view of what a pattern or regularity is and any data has been collected for a reason based on what is considered appropriate to measure. One algorithm will find one kind of pattern and another will find something else. One data set will evidence some patterns and not others. Selecting an appropriate test depends on what you are looking for. So the question posed by the thought experiment remains “what are you looking for, what is your question, what is your hypothesis?”
It seems to me that one must at least try to answer this question if one is to pursue social science. Not just because it is good science but also because it has ethical and political implications.
The view one takes of social phenomena, either consciously or through algorithms and data, frames what is and is not conceivable for past and future social reality. If you doubt the importance of such ideas one should look that the history of the 20th century. Ideas matter. Theory matters. Big data is not a theory-neutral way of circumventing the hard questions. In fact it brings these questions into sharp focus and it’s time we discuss them openly.Synthesis
Not only is economics as currently taught not a science, it isn’t social either. Margaret Thatcher famously claimed that “there is no such thing as society” and mainstream economics works from exactly the same assumption – for mainstream economists society is simply the aggregation, the adding together, of millions of individual economic actors and actions. All of these actors are assumed to be “rational” – a word which economists also use in a way that reflects their own prejudices – a purely calculating and narrowly self interested mentality focused on short and long run material gratification, whose relationship to other economic actors is intrinsically competitive. Thus ‘rational economic man’ has no emotion, is part of no social psychological processes involving mutual influence, common hopes, beliefs and fears, no mutual support, no group or common class interests. Instead ‘rational economic man’ is a calculating machine, focused on maximising his satisfactions or “utility”.As a model of what human beings are generally like this is crazy – it is more than a simplification, it is a distortion. It is a view that is blind to the different layers of our psyche, to our complexity and to the oft conflicted way in which we behave. Indeed it rules out the very sides of human behaviour that are pro-social and co-operative.
