The Protestant Ethic in 2009

It's more than 100 years since Max Weber wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. I'm told that it is a long time since economic historians took the essays seriously, but that hasn't prevented the text being a mainstay of sociological theory reading lists. The main reason for this, I suspect, is probably the wilful obscurity of the text itself. Not being entirely clear about what exactly it is that you are claiming is great for the secondary and tertiary level exegetical works that flourish on the corpse of a masterwork. Usually I'm bored by this kind of thing but I was recently intrigued to see an article in a German newspaper reporting work done by a pair of economists examining the relationship between religious confession and economic success in late 19th Century Prussia. Sascha O. Becker and Ludger Woessmann use county (Kreise) level data from the 1871 Prussian Census together with a couple of similar sources to investigate whether level of economic development in Weber's time was related to the proportion of Protestants residing in a county. The answer is yes, but the relationship is spurious and disappears once level of literacy is controlled. They make the argument that whatever Luther and Lutherism may have done to theological and ultimately popular notions about 'the Calling' and the ethics of economic behaviour, a more fundamental consequence of the reformation was Luther's stress on literacy. Luther argued that Germany's Protestant princes should encourage the schooling of their subjects so that they could read the word of God. Protestant's built more school's than Catholics and Protestant's were more motivated than Catholics to become literate because salvation came not through the intercession of a priest but through understanding God's written word in His book. Literacy was, of course, also pretty useful in economic life and gave Protestants the edge over Catholics. All in all Becker and Woessmann tell a pretty convincing story, but I'm left with an uneasy feeling. After a century of worrying over Weber's text sociologists have remarkably little of real value to show for it. Two economists come along, do some spade work, unearth some relevant data, extract a remarkable amount of information from it, and without much fuss produce an answer to a very basic question. How come sociologists aren't capable of doing this?

Becker and Woessman's article will appear in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. A working paper can be found at: http://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/1366/1/weberLMU.pdf

Editorial Independence

This morning my PA inadvertently opened a letter that had been delivered by mistake. It appears to be be intended for the letters page of Private Eye.

Sir

I feel I must write to protest. Last night, just as Mrs Buffton-Tuffton and I were settling down to our usual Sunday supper of boiled beef and carrots we were affronted whilst listening to Radio 4's Poetry Please by lines from the so called poet Rab C. Nesbitt (surely Rabbie Burns? - ed) which must call into question the BBC's long cherished editorial independence. I quote:

Then let us pray that come it may,

(As come it will for a' that,)

That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth,

Shall bear the gree, an' a' that.

For a' that, an' a' that,

It's coming yet for a' that,

That Man to Man, the world o'er,

Shall brothers be for a' that.

I fear that the broadcasting of such dangerous 'humanitarian' nonsense can only raise doubts in the minds of our friends both within and outside the country about Britain's long standing commitment to keeping people in their place, unless, of course, that place is somewhere that we don't want them to be. It was all I could do to restrain Mrs B-T from shredding the wireless licence (shurely shome mistake? - ed.) with the minature assegai presented to me by my house boy on my retirement as District Commisioner of (name deleted - ed.) in 1963. To restore the balance can't we have something from that chappie who liked Mussolini - Cantos is what I think it is called?

I remain Sir your most obedient servant,

Col. R. H. Buffton-Tuffton (retd.)

The Old Glebe House

Lesser Cockswell

Oxon.

See Jim Malcolm perform Burn's song at

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=bd68sw71UDI

Disaster Emergency Committee Gaza Appeal

http://www.dec.org.uk/

Blowing your own trumpet

There was a time when I often got asked to referee Research Council grant applications. Then for a few years I didn't get asked at all. I assumed that too much of the time I had made the "wrong" recommendation. Recently I was asked again and things have changed. Firstly one now does these things on line which is no big deal, but more surprisingly, at least to me, is that referees are required not only to evaluate the research proposal, but also evaluate themselves as evaluators! First you must rate yourself on several pro-forma criteria and then give a longer justification for your own self-rating. My immediate reaction to this invitation to waste even more of my time was: why would you ask me to evaluate a research proposal if you were unsure as to whether I would be any good at evaluating it? Moreover, why would I choose to evaluate it unless I had some relevant expertise? Referees give their time free and gratis, why would you make their job more onerous by requiring them to particpate in what amounts to a demeaning exercise in self-aggrandisement? Those with skill in blowing their own trumpets (and believe me there are many of these) will no doubt love it, but do we really want science to be controlled by people like that? This is what happens when academics are too pusillanimous or venal to resist the managerial takeover of British higher education.

Aneurin Bevan and Social Theory

My Christmas reading included the first volume of Michael Foot's biography of Aneurin Bevan which covers the period up to his appointment as Minister of Health in July 1945. The book is an unashamed piece of hagiography and is as much a testament to the fight for the soul of the Labour Party in 1962, when it was first published, as to the man that it is nominally about. Bevan was a born contrarian who spent as much time fighting the gutless hypocrisy of the leadership of his own party as he did the gutsier hypocrisy of the Conservatives. He was also an unashamed bon viveur and autodidact of extraordinary intellectual range and penetrating political insight who seems to have inspired unconditional love and hatred in almost equal measure.

I was particularly struck by a passage in which Bevan describes the Parliamentry performance of Stanley Baldwin:

"It is medicine man talk...It lifts the discussion on to so abstract a plane that the minds of the hearers are relieved of the effort of considering the details of the immediate problems. It imposes no intellectual strain because thought drifts into thought, assembling and dissolving like clouds in the upper air, having no connection with earthly obstacles. It flatters, because it appears to offer intimate companionship with a rare and noble spirit. It pleases the unsceptical, because it blurs the outline of unpleasant fact in a maze of meaningless generalities. Over and over again I have been amazed by the ease with which even Labour Members are deceived by this nonense."

Substitute 'empirical sociologists' for 'Labour Members' and you have an almost perfect description of the malign hold of 'social theory' over British sociology. It doesn't take much imagination to guess what Bevan would have made of the Third Way.

Purity, Danger and W. H. Smith

When I was an undergraduate one of my Professors was a great fan of Mary Douglas and was always urging us to read her Purity and Danger. Of course I didn't until much later and I then discovered a moderately interesting book about the social construction of order through the categorisations we use to pigeon-hole the mundane. Dirt, for example, is just matter out of place - which is a striking thought the first time you read it, but afterwards seems rather banal. But maybe that is the point. The categorisations we routinely use are in a sense the most powerful because they are the most banal. They just state what everyone knows and wouldn't think it worthwhile to question.

This stream of consciouness was prompted by something I saw in my local W. H. Smith (for non UK readers W. H. Smith is a large chain selling newspapers, books, stationary etc). Next to the rather full shelves labelled Biography - mainly containing the autobiographies of sportsmen and C list celebrities - were the equally full shelves of a section labelled Tragic Life Stories. Clearly market segmenters have identified a new type - one who gets up in the morning and rushes out to their local bookstore to fill up on the latest installment of human misery. I think there is something vaguely creepy about that.

Posdoc Research Fellowship

We have just advertised a 2 year post-doctoral research fellowship in connection with the new Oxford Network for Social Inequality Research. This is essentially a research centre that will build on the already substantial amount of research on social inequality going on in and around the department. For somewhat inscrutable intra-university political reasons we were not permitted to call it a "centre" - but a centre is what a centre does and the name doesn't matter too much. Its first director is my colleague Dr Tak Wing Chang and the fellowship is a really great opportunity to join us and help shape the future of social inequality research in Oxford. Further details about the post can be found here

http://www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/apply/vacancies.asp.

Statistical Significance

In a world of uncertainty it is nice to have the illusion that something is solid. We spend a lot of time in our introductory quantitative methods courses teaching our students about statistical techniques that were designed essentially for situations where making a decision is the object of the exercise. Reject or fail to reject the null with such and such a probability of making a reject decision when the null is in fact correct. What could be more solid than that? Unfortunately most of the time, at least in the social sciences, decision making is largely irrelevant and a judgment about statistical significance is only one of the things that should go into a proper evaluation of the evidence for or against a particular scientific proposition. Regrettably scientific institutions, like journals, often get into the hands of people who don't appear terribly thoughtful about the publication criteria they establish and enforce. Their psychological need for what they think of as clear rules often gets the better of their scientific judgment - at least that is the charitable interpretation. For why paying too much attention to significance levels isn't a great idea follow this link http://www.demogr.mpg.de/papers/working/wp-2007-037.pdf