"We'll Just Have to Drop the Sociology Department"

So goes the punchline of an old Doonesbury cartoon, after the deans are talking about their financial woes in the first few panels. But how about dropping the sociology department for other reasons?

I can think of three reasons to drop a sociology department. The first is if it is a low-quality department, made up of third-rate faculty who write rubbish articles and books and who are not especially good teachers. The second is if it is a disfunctional department, made up of faculty who fight with each other constantly and have no public-spiritedness towards the department. The third is if sociology itself is a rubbish field, so even the bst sociology departments write rubbish articles and books, despite their faculty being trained in the best sociology graduate schools in the world.

I’ll say a word about each of these reasons. But first I will say something that applies to all of them: to be a good university you don’t need to have a sociology department. This is not a slight to sociology.¹ A good university does not need engineering, or a med school, or a law school, either. Princeton has none of those. Not every university has to have every subject organized as a department. There are a few subjects that are necessary, perhaps. It is hard to imagine a university without a math department, for example. (I was going to say it is hard to imagine a university without an English department, but then I realized that the English department is optional for a French or Russian university, and that maybe MIT doesn’t have an English department.) Thus, if there is a problem with your sociology department, you don’t ruin your university by eliminating it.

The first reason to drop sociology would be if it has low-quality faculty. By this, of course, I don’t mean low absolute quality, but low quality relative to the rest of the university. Harvard might have a very good sociology department, but still much worse than its economics and government departments. Indiana State might have a very bad sociology department, but still much better than its economics and government departments. But a university should build on its strengths, and be ruthless with its weaknesses. This is just like with corporations. If one division of a business is unprofitable, a corporation should sell it off and double up on its profitable divisions. Do what you do best.

One reason to do what you do best is that it’s cheaper too. The ideal for a university (or a corporate lab, or a think tank) is to assemble a group of scholars who value working with good colleagues over earning more money. Thus, if MyState U has a good economics department, Professor Doe might be willing to work there for $150,000 and turn out down outside offers for $200,000, because he wants to be near Professor Roe. Professor Roe works there for cheap too, because he wants to be near Professor Doe. The university pockets the difference, and everybody is happy.

On the other hand, coming to our second reason, if Professor Doe has dysfunctional colleagues he will demand higher pay— say, $250,000— to work at Mystate U. Thus, a department full of people who hate each other not only loses the benefits of cooperation, it costs the university more too.

It is the third reason which is the touchiest: an entire field being rubbish.

Is sociology rubbish?

Probably, given the way the field operates. I myself have a fair claim to being a sociologist. I’ve published article on sociological topics, though not in sociology journals. My latest paper, with J. Mark Ramseyer of Harvard Law School, is “Ostracism in Japan”. Here is the abstract:

J. Mark Ramseyer & Eric Rasmusen, "Ostracism in Japan," Asian Journal of Comparative Law, 19(2): 326-347 (August 2024) https://doi.org/10.1017/asjcl.2024.13. Groups ostracize members. Sometimes they do so to enforce welfare-maximizing norms, but other times ostracism reduces welfare. Japanese villages have long used ostracism as a tool for conformity, and the targets have sometimes sued in response. The cases that have reached the courts disproportionately involve welfare-reducing behavior by the community; for example, ostracism against targets who report corruption. The targets usually win the civil cases against ostracizers and prosecutors usually win the criminal cases. Yet the targets seem not to have sued for financial or injunctive relief, and the prosecutors seem not to have pushed for prison terms. Instead, they have used the courts for an informational end: to certify and publicize innocence. This end is of minor importance in normal litigation, but crucial for ostracism, as we explain using a formal model. We use case examples and the model to explore the factors that cause disputes to lead to ostracism and ostracisms to lead to litigation.

I’ve also written “Identity Politics and Organized Crime in Japan: The Impact of Targeted Subsidies on Burakumin Communities” (with J. Mark Ramseyer);² “Norms and the Law” (with Richard McAdams);³ “Review of Mario Ferrero: The Political Economy of Indo-European Polytheism: How to Deal with Too Many Gods”;⁴ “Creating and Enforcing Norms, with Special Reference to Sanctions” (with Richard Posner);⁵ "The Economics of Desecration: Flag Burning and Related Activities”;⁶ “Review of Timur Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification”;⁷ “Of Sex and Drugs and Rock'n Roll: Law and Economics and Social Regulation”;⁸ “Stigma and Self-Fulfilling Expectations of Criminality”;⁹ and “Cooperation in a Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma with Ostracism” (with David Hirshleifer).¹⁰ That’s a lot of sociological papers. The field has very good questions to try to answer.

It is sociology’s method, or lack of method, that is the problem. Economists starting with Adam Smith have tried to answer sociological questions. Gary Becker, Michael Spence, and probably others I am forgetting have gotten Nobel Prizes in economics for doing sociology.¹¹ The economic method, though, is the same as that of game theory: construct a formal model, usually mathematical, by selecting, players, the actions available to players, the players’ payoff functions, and the information each of them has (PAPI), and then seeing what actions they choose to maximize their payoffs. This is “rational choice” theory. It has entered sociology— the famous sociologist James Coleman of the Coleman Report was an advocate of it (he ran a rational choice workshop with his friend Gary Becker in the 80’s). Doing sociology without a method requires great wisdom. Max Weber (of the Protestand work ethic) had it, and Harvard’s Edward Banfield (of The Unheavenly City), and Baylor’s Rodney Stark (the sociologist of religion) but most scholars don’t. Indeed, a surprising number of sociology professors admit to being marxists. Bryan Caplan tells us of a 2006 survey of professors generally as to whether they considered themselves marxist. Just 3% of professors across all fields declared themselves marxist, though 5% in the humanities. The shocker, though, is that 18% of social scientists self-identified as marxist. And in sociology, 26% of professors declared themselves marxist. This is shockingly high; it is as if a quarter of sociologists were Freudians or phrenologists. As Bryan Caplan puts it,

If 18% of biologists believed in creationism, that would be a big deal. Why? Because creationism is nonsense. Similarly, if 18% of social scientists believe in Marxism, that too is a big deal. Why? Because Marxism is nonsense. Furthermore, if 18% of a discipline fully embrace a body of nonsense, there is also probably a large bloc of nonsense sympathizers – people who won’t swallow the nonsense whole, but nevertheless see great value in it. Suppose, plausibly, that there is one fellow traveler for every true believer. That would bring the share of abject intellectual corruption to fully 35% – and 51% in sociology.

What about my university, Indiana University? Are our sociologists doing good work? I’d have to look the list of faculty and their resumes over carefully before recommendingthe department be eliminated, but my guess is, “Not many”. I wouldn’t say none, because I do recall that they have someone who is an expert on the STATA statistical computer package and has written books about it. But I will not pretend to respect sociology. I will even betray my polite colleagues in the field of economics by telling you that other economists despise sociology too. We are just too nice to say it (except for me). Economists are derisive of a lot of fields in our private conversations. We are just too nice, or too timid, or not civic enough, to talk in public about the deficiencies of the rest of the university.¹²

So let’s look at every sociology department and think about its value. And I am not thinking of sociology alone as a target for closure. Some other departments that come to mind are anthropology, criminal justice, entrepreneurship, physical education (kinesiology), clothing design, education, public relations (for learning how to be a PR flack, not the university’s own PR flacks) and fine arts. But I’ll leave them to a future substack.

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Footnotes

1. Not yet. I’ll slight sociology later, but at the moment I’m speaking generally of departments.

2. In 1969 the Japanese government launched a subsidy program (the SMA) targeted at the traditional outcastes known as the burakumin. The subsidies attracted the organized crime syndicates, who diverted funds for private gain. Newly enriched, they shifted large numbers of young burakumin men away from legal business and intensified the tendency many Japanese already had to equate the burakumin with the mob. Although the resulting community centers and public housing improved burakumin infrastructure, they also lowered the cost to the public of identifying burakumin neighborhoods. We explore the effects of the termination of the program in 2002 by integrating 30 years of modern municipality data with a 1936 census of burakumin. Outmigration from municipalities with more burakumin increased significantly after the end of the program. Apparently, the subsidies restrained burakumin from joining mainstream society. Conversely, once the mob-tied corruption and extortion associated with the subsidies ended, real estate prices in burakumin neighborhoods rose; it seems other Japanese found the burakumin communities more attractive places to live after the subsidies ended. http://rasmusen.org/papers/burakumin-ramseyer-rasmusen.pdf

3. Richard McAdams and I wrote a survey for the 2007 Handbook of Law and Economics, vol. 2, eds. A. Mitchell Polinsky and Steven Shavell, chapter 20, pp. 1573-1618. Amsterdam, Elsevier http://www.rasmusen.org/published/Rasmusen-07-handbook.norms.pdf

4. Journal of Economics(Zeitschrift fur Nationalokonomie), https://www.rasmusen.org/published/Rasmusen-2023-polytheism_Zeitschrift.pdf.

5. International Review of Law and Economics, 19(3): 369- 382 (September 1999). Two central puzzles about social norms are how they are enforced and how they are created or modified. The sanctions for violation of a norm can be categorized as automatic, guilt, shame, informational, bilateral- costly, and multilateral-costly. Problems in creating and enforcing norms are related to which sanctions are employed. We use our analysis of enforcement and creation of norms to analyze the scope of feasible government action either to promote desirable norms or to repress undesirable ones. http://rasmusen.org/published/Rasmusen_99.IRLE.norms.pdf

6. Journal of Legal Studies (June 1998) 27(2): 245- 270 (lead article). When a symbol is desecrated, the desecrator obtains benefits while those who venerate the symbol incur costs. The approach to policy used in this paper is to ask whether the benefits are likely to exceed the costs. I conclude that they usually do not. Desecration is often motivated by a desire to reduce the utility of others, which generally is inefficient. Also, if desecration occurs, people have less incentive to create and maintain symbols. Symbols, like other produced goods, need property- rights protection if the outcome is to be efficient. Laws against desecration are a good way to provide this protection, given the likely failure of the Coase Theorem and the possibility of efficient breaking of the laws.(http://rasmusen.org/published/Rasmusen_98JLS.flag.pdf

7. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (1998) 33: 309-311. A review of a book on what happens when people's statement of their information depends on what other people are saying. (http://rasmusen.org/published/Rasmusen_98.JEBO.kuran.pdf

8. Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 21: 71-81 (Fall 1997). Economists tend to be libertarians, because laissez faire is indeed the efficient policy in most monetized interactions, though there are well- known exceptions because of such things as poor information and externalities. Although the economic approach is also perfectly appropriate for non-monetized social interactions such as marriage or politics, the policy presumption does not follow. The reason such markets are non- monetized is that such things as poor information and externalities are the norm, not the exception. This means that laissez faire is not a safe default prescription for social regulation. (http://rasmusen.org/published/Rasmusen_97.HJLPP.Feder.htm

9. Journal of Law and Economics 39: 519-544 (October 1996). In modelling crime, economists have focussed on the expected cost of government sanctions to the criminal, but private sanctions--- notably economic or social stigma--- may be just as important. In the model here, workers decide whether to commit crimes and employers decide how much to pay ex- convicts. In one equilibrium, individuals refrain from crime and economic stigma--- the wage loss from conviction--- is high. In a second, pareto- inferior equilibrium, individuals commit crimes and stigma is low, because employers realize that nonconviction does not imply noncriminality. The model may help to explain large shifts in crime, such as that between 1960 and 1980, in which decreases and increases in government sanctions seem to have asymmetric effects. (http://rasmusen.org/published/Rasmusen_96JLE.stigma.pdf)

10. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (August 1989), 12: 87-106 (with David Hirshleifer). The unique Nash equilibrium of the finitely repeated n-person Prisoners' Dilemma calls for defection in all rounds. One way to enforce cooperation in groups is ostracism: players who defect are expelled. If the group's members prefer not to diminish its size, ostracism hurts the legitimate members of the group as well as the outcast, putting the credibility of the threat in doubt. Nonetheless, we show that ostracism can be effective in promoting cooperation with either finite or infinite rounds of play. The model can be applied to games other than the Prisoners' Dilemma, and ostracism can enforce inefficient as well as efficient outcomes. (http://rasmusen.org/published/Rasmusen_89JEBO.ostracism.pdf

11. Becker wrote on race discrimination; Spence, on people getting schooling so as to make other people think they’re smart (“signalling”).

12. That is not to say that we don’t admire certain fields. We do have physics envy, and we think far too highly of mathematicians— though we snicker about physicists who try predicting stock prices by fitting curves to the path of stock prices.