(Part 3) Top products from r/AskSocialScience

Describing the best form of taxation involves a combination of economics and values. The economics asks "how does the policy change the way people behave?" which is the positive side of the question. The value side of things asks "is that consequence something we want?" which is the normative side of the question.

The economic, or positive side of things is completely game for social science, and is the subject of a great deal of research for different tax systems. The normative stuff we talk about sometimes, but we try to be very cautious about separating values from predictions and only say a policy is definitely a bad idea when we're pretty sure society views the consequences of the policy as unacceptable.

From a positive side, I don't think the arguments that are made to support the Flat Tax hold too much water. I don't know of any strong evidence that it would induce a great deal of growth. But I also don't know of strong proof that it doesn't. So positive economics maybe doesn't have too much to say here. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong, and point me towards a paper or two (I'm talking about research on the Flat Tax specifically, not just the ETI literature)).

From a normative angle, it comes down to the following question: your policy will probably make the rich better off (they'll have lower tax liabilities) and the poor worse off (they'll have higher tax liabilities). The rich might be more productive and this could mean more income for everyone. Is it worth it to you? Given that the research on the responses of the rich finds that they've been pretty small in the past, I think the flat tax is a bad idea. But there's some values there that have nothing to do with social science.

On the other hand, simplification of the tax code in a way that approximately maintains the progressivity of the system would be a welcome change. Taxes are way too complicated, and a large literature on salience suggests that you could make people better off by making their choices easier to understand. (Incidentally, salience is right in the middle of my research.) Some of the arguments around the flat tax take this route, and this is something I agree with. Even though I don't think the flat tax specifically is a good idea at all.

A further complication is that sometimes when people say the flat tax they mean/don't mean a Negative Income Tax. I think that an NIT is not entirely a bad idea if you're going to do a flat tax, because it would allow you to make sure the system is still progressive. What I've written above mostly applies to the flat tax without a NIT built in.

If you're interested in hearing the full debate, instead of what your professor (who, by the way, isn't representatives of economists who study tax) thinks, I would recommend this book.

Edited for citations and typos. There's probably still some typos. Oh well.

“How much power does the media have?” Sounds like a question of measurement, but that’s an oversimplification. This is a question that’s been asked by many social scientists for literally decades, and the research into newer forms of media is ongoing. It’s far too vast a literature to describe in a Reddit comment. I am literally getting a PhD in this and I will never be able to read it all.

But, in short, the media does have an effect of some size on almost everyone because almost everyone consumes media. Most do so for both entertainment and information, and that then influences our attitudes and beliefs, the way we think about social reality (what the society we are in is like even though we will never meet even 1% of the people in it, what our position is in that society and how it relates to other people or groups), which in turn influences our judgements/decisions and behavior choices. There are effects for both entertainment and informational media. It may be different effects for different people or groups, depending on your personality and social identity (or rather, identities). It may be different sizes of effects depending on your personal style of information processing and volume of information, personal or information consumption circumstances, and other forms of information you consume and have access to and use, like interpersonal conversations or direct experience. But effects exist in some size for most people a significant amount of the time.

Media is just a systematic way of distributing or consuming information and stories, usually such that it doesn’t require an in-person transfer anymore. Much of the power of media derives from the power of information and the power of stories. Information and stories existed before media in general and mass media in particular. If you think you are influenced by and use information, then you can be influenced by media.

One common trope used by such researchers is that media do not successfully tell you what to think, but DOES succeed in telling you what to think ABOUT. (This isn’t quite true...sometimes the media can successfully tell you what to think, but it’s much more difficult because people aren’t passive consumers, any more than they are of religion or things told to them by their parents or friends.) Know that trope how “Don’t think of an elephant” doesn’t work because you have to think of the concept of an elephant in the process of consuming the words? And now you are thinking about elephants, positively or hatefully or with boredom but you are still thinking about them. Media effects and media power is more like that.

That said, media effects do not exist in a vacuum and you don’t consume media in a vacuum. They are enhanced or contradicted by your family, your friends and peers, your coworkers and industry, and other elements of your social world in a cycle. Would you say your parents had no effect on the way you think about things and the decisions you make and the way you behave? No. Would you say they have an absolute effect such that you are exactly what they made you and what they intended? Also no. Even if you went against the grain, what they did influenced you specifically enough to reject it. Parenting is powerful, but it’s not determinate. Same for media.

Don’t think of media as brainwashing or copy/paste editing. Thing of it more like the flow of a river you are swimming in. It pulls and pushes you in a particular direction and influences where you end up, but it’s not the only element of the equation in the journey nor the destination. You aren’t totally powerless in the river but you also aren’t in total control, and how much you can influence where you end up compared to an Olympic swimmer compared to a young child or some other person varies.

If you want to know what kinds of effects exist and have been demonstrated, the search term you are looking for is “media effects” or “media impact” and you can look in media psychology, communication, political communication, political science, social psychology and sociology academic disciplines for books and studies.

If you want a place to start, my favorite overview book is “Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research” by Bryant and Oliver. The 3rd edition is here: https://www.amazon.com/Media-Effects-Advances-Theory-Research/dp/0805864504
but you can get a free sample intro on the Kindle version to get an overview of the state of the research at the beginning, and either rent it or search for individual chapters online based on your interest, some of which have been posted for free fair use purposes by their authors. I like agenda setting, priming, framing, and cultivation theory, but there are many more.

Hope that helps.

Any good labor economics textbook will cover this is some detail. For example Borjas:

>It has long been recognized that unions can arise and prosper only under certain conditions. Because the free entry and exit of firms into the marketplace reduce profits to a normal return on investment (that is, zero excess profits), unions can flourish only when firms earn above-normal profits, or what economists call "rents." In effect,
unions provide an institutional mechanism through which employers share the rents with workers.

. . . . .

>In general, workers are more likely to support unionization when the union organizer can promise a high wage and a small employment loss. Moreover, because there are additional costs to joining a union (such as union dues), the worker will be more likely to support unions when these costs are small. These factors generate the "demand" for union jobs.

>The demand for union jobs is not the sole determinant of the extent of unionization in the labor market. The ability of union organizers to deliver union jobs depends on the costs of organizing the workforce, on the legal environment that permits certain types of union activities and prohibits others, on the resistance of management to the introduction of collective bargaining, and on whether the firm is making excess rents that can be captured by the union membership. These forces, in effect, determine the "supply" of union jobs.


>The extent of unionization observed in the labor market is determined by the interaction of these two forces. As a result, the unionization rate will be higher the more workers have to gain by becoming unionized and will be lower the harder it is to convert jobs from nonunion to union status. This "cost-benefit" approach helps us understand differences in unionization rates across demographic groups, across industries, and over time.

. . . . .

>There are also sizable differences in unionization rates across private sector industries, with workers in construction, manufacturing and transportation being the most likely to be unionized, and workers in agriculture and finance being the least likely. The available evidence,in fact, suggests that workers employed in concentrated industries, where most of the output is produced by a few firms, are more likely to be unionized. This result is consistent with our cost-benefit approach to understanding differences in unionization tares. Ater all, firms in concentrated industries earn excess profits due to monopoly power, so unions have a good chance of extracting some of the rents for the workers. Moreover, the goods produced by highly concentrated industries tend to have few substitutes, implying that the elasticity of demand for the output is small. As we saw in Chapter 4, low elasticities of output demand imply relatively inelastic labor demand curves. THese two forces suggest that unions can offer workers in these industries large wage gains without a corresponding loss in employment.

>Unionization rates are also much higher among blue-collar workers (such as production workers and laborers) than among white-collar workers (such as managers, professionals, and persons in sales jobs). Blue-collar workers are likely to be a more homogeneous group and hence are probably easier to organize. In addition blue-collar workers tend to have less amenable working conditions
and would react more favorably to the union's promised employment contract.

In political science most of the literature on vote choice, at least in contexts with stable party systems, builds out of the loyalties people have to political parties. Partisanship creates what the authors of the seminal work The American Voter call a "perceptual screen" which filters information in ways that reinforce these ties. In other words, people first identify with a political party, then interpret the world in ways that support these views (think confirmation bias and motivated reasoning). This identification, moreover, typically [comes from parents](http://press.princeton.edu/titles/654.html] or other early social experiences.

Vote choice and candidate preference then follows from these loyalties. Loyalties to a political party is symbolically and psychologically meaningfully, much like supporting a sports team or adhering to given religious tenets. That's why you'll see people sticking by candidates regardless of information, among many other political phenomena.

See this in the NYTimes for a quick overview.

Which are the last two? Assuming capitalist development and codes...

By far the most famous geographer studying global capitalism is David Harvey. He recently wrote The Enigma of Capital which is a pretty easy introduction to his work. I think his Spaces of Global Capitalism is a more useful summation. He's very famous for a few other books, but I think the most important work he's done is in The Limits to Capital. The last one is a tough, meticulous book. Also worth checking out is his protege Neil Smith, either his Uneven Development or for a focus on cities The New Urban Frontier.

There really are not many books that take up housing and building code specifically, though Ben-Joseph's The City of Code is a useful introduction. If you're looking for a good rant (and a reliable one) on how we got to the less-than-stellar spatial arrangements of American cities, James Howard Kunstler's Geography of Nowhere will get your blood pumping. If you're more interested in the cultural politics of place, one of my all time favorites is Landscapes of Privilege by the Duncan's.

I started reading Kill all normies last night and it's probably the best thing I've read so far. The author, Angela Nagel is an Irish Anthropologist who wrote her ph.d on online anti-feminist movements. Here is another more introductary article by her. She's also a great podcast guest so check those out.

If you want to read alt-right authors themselves, Paul Gottri is a must read as many his writings lay the theoretical foundations of the alt-right. Richard Spencer is worth reading for his influence, despite is abhorrent views, he is an intelligent guy. VDare, which I'll let you google yourself, is the more high-brow intellectual magazine of the alt-right and has tons of material.

Dear llordlloyd,

I am not an expert in taxation, but there is theory of optimal taxation called Ramsay taxation that to minimize tax distortion and inefficiencies, the tax rate has to be *inversely proportional" with its elasticity. The idea here is that higher tax rate lowers incentive to work. But if a person's effort on a particular occupation is inelastic, a high tax rate is efficient because it only reduces work effort by a small amount, while an occupation in which its work effort is sensitive to a higher tax rate, then a smaller tax rate should be implemented because you don't want to drastically reduce the amount of work effort.

I wish I could tell you more about taxation but Joel Slemrod's Taxing Ourselves is a good layman's book on the subject of taxation.

This is a very contested area of economics. I liked this book, though:
http://www.amazon.com/How-Rich-Countries-Poor-Stay/dp/1586486683

It sort of states that the rich countries are ones that set up protectionist policies to support infant industry and subsidized them heavily. Policies that promote free trade for developing countries may end up harming them. Hence, they should follow the development models of the West in using government support to create industry then later open up to free trade.

Legislatures polarize. People do not.


And yes, legislatures (and the congress) have polarized substantially. DW-NOMINATE data on legislative voting behavior demonstrates a recent trend towards a highly polarized congress. Not all state legislatures are as polarized (see Shor-McCarty) but nationally this is certainly the case. DW-NOMINATE has put out this great video (you can see it on youtube here) that demonstrates the ideological movement of legislators in congress over time (from the 1st to the 111th legislature).

What we see amongst the voter however is maybe more of a faux-dealignment. Which is to say that people claim to identify less with either political party thusly, reporting themselves as being "independent". We can see this trend clearly in the surveys (see 2015 Gallup Poll).

However the prevailing models of electoral behavior cast a great deal of doubt on this being anything more than the electorate signally displeasure (perhaps over legislative polarization) while otherwise doing what they've always done. Campbell et al.'s The American Voter (which is the seminal electoral behavior work in contemporary american political science) argues that partisan identification is so stable that it is essentially inherited via a process of socialization and from one's own parents. They then go on to point out that all political preferences and decisions are then viewed through that inherited partisan lens. So while we see people self-reporting less affiliation with either party than we did before we don't see people behaving any differently. In fact, when we consider partisan leanings amongst independents (meaning: whether independents "lean democrat" or "lean republican") we don't see any added likelihood of the voters "switching" parties. In fact, we see most independents consistently vote for one party or the other based on their leanings in precisely the way Campbell's model suggested they would.


Sources:

DW-NOMINATE - national polarization data

Shor-McCarty - state polarization data

Campbell et al. 1960. The American Voter

Additional reading:

V.O. Key. 1966. Responsible Electorate

First off, Okun's law is partly observational (though it can be derived through IS-LM), and because of that it is really only tested for "normal" situations, and there are no completely fixed economies in the real world, even Japan has a certain level of churn even when the aggregates hover around zero. Like most economic theories, the predictions are strongest at the margin.

To address the main question, to a certain extent the answer is implied in the question. When dealing with mathematical (textbook) macro, we simply assume that GDP is equivalent to welfare, because on a micro level it is impossible to aggregate utility. From a theoretical standpoint, assuming GDP growth equal to zero is equivalent to assuming welfare change equal to zero.

Now, from a societal standpoint this becomes more complicated. As mentioned, even when the macroeconomic aggregates are relatively steady the underlying real economy can experience tremendous fluctuations. For example, US inflation over the last few years has been overall rather moderate, even though food prices have risen and technology costs have fallen. Similarly, if Consumption falls by a trillion dollars and Gov't Spending rises by a trillion dollars, it is possible (though not necessary) that this could represent a fairly large decrease in consumer welfare even though the aggregate figure is static.

Further, there are socio-economic reasons to assume that stagnant GDP would hurt welfare. Tyler Cowen theorizes that US economic growth is due for a drastic slowdown in the near to mid term, and that because so many contracts and expectations are based on the idea of continuous economic growth this will cause a great deal of disruption. If we wish away these fairly high transition costs, a society that was organized and expecting zero growth would be so very different from what economic science typically studies that it is hard to say what would happen, though leaning heavily on IS-LM equations seems like a reasonable first estimation of what would occur.

You may find Acemoglu and Robinson's Why Nations Fail interesting reading. They are growth economists from MIT. Their main thesis is that states that are controlled by a small elite will tend to oppress the population and set up extractive economic institutions. These states will tend to stagnate, and because of political in-fighting, will eventually fail. Sustained economic development occurs when a state has pluralistic political institutions (which hold the exploitative tendencies of the elite in check), this in turn leads to inclusive economic institutions that allow the greater part of society the freedom to pursue and profit from economic success.

On the other end of the spectrum from what /u/srilankan_in_london recommended (and I also recommend Freakonomics), a less versatile but more specific book that gives an interesting look at the history of financial economics is Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money. It won't go deep into economic theory like some of the other recommended reads here will, but it is an interesting overview and history of financial markets and monetary economics.

How an Economy Grows and Why it Crashes is a really good primer for macroeconomics and will set you on the right path.

Economics in One Lesson is a great book that will give you a solid theoretical foundation and perspective.

I also recommend anything by Thomas Sowell, such as Basic Economics or Applied Economics.

Fair enough, but I believe the third paragraph is the most easily supported. Just off the top of my head I think OP is citing Neil Smith and his theories on capitalism, urban development etc .http://www.amazon.com/Uneven-Development-Nature-Capital-Production/dp/082033099X

erik s. reinert examined medieval Venice and Renaissance-age Holland in his book "How Rich Countries Got Rich . . . and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor"

According to him, it historically had to do with the synergetic effects spawned by a huge diversity of trades and businesses trying to share the same dense business space. The policy focus was on fostering the business diversity

There's an entire discipline in social science (communication) devoted to answering questions like this, and you're kind of asking to have summarized most of the findings of that discipline, which is a tall order.

I'll start by pointing you to two good overviews of the subfield of media effects, which seems to be what you're getting at.

Jennings & Oliver's Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research, Third Edition

https://www.amazon.com/Media-Effects-Advances-Theory-Research/dp/0805864504/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1527168732&sr=8-1&keywords=media+effects

Nabi & Oliver's The SAGE Handbook of Media Processes and Effects

https://www.amazon.com/SAGE-Handbook-Media-Processes-Effects/dp/1412959969/ref=sr_1_38?ie=UTF8&qid=1527168732&sr=8-38&keywords=media+effects

This one looks at the many (and often hidden) political advantages enjoyed by the wealthy class: The Unheavenly Chorus.

If you're interested in reading about how party systems work in principle and practice, I would recommend the book Patterns of Democracy by Arend Lijphart. You can get it for only eight bucks on Amazon.

You might be interested in read The great Stagnation.

Pikkety is articulate and speaks in a way that a novice can understand and I do think you should read what he has to say. That said, his works also fit a very common narrative that is frequently reinforced here on reddit. Therefore, for an alternate perspective, I would also like to recommend Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell. He is also very adept at breaking down complex topics in a way that can be understood.

Integrald's list is awesome. I would also add-

Governing the Market by Robert Wade

And, as someone in the legal field myself, I also must throw in a plug for The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander - I think understanding the criminal justice system can do a lot to help illuminate some of the dynamics of U.S. inner city poverty. Also, the Wire.

Arend Lijphart is probably the biggest name in political science when it comes to constitutional design. He outlines two dimensions which democracies can be centralized or decentralized. Check out his seminal book Patterns of Democracy.

As for your second question, I would look into political histories that cover the progressive period in American history. This is where you start to get reforms like the primary, initiatives, referenda, recall, and the like.

For a different take on the subject, check out The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison.

The comment I see is invoking the failure of dirigisme in Brazil. There is a point to be made about the shortcomings of dependency theory as formulated by Cardoso & Faletto and Gunder-Frank... to the extent that Import Substitution Industrialization did not (on its own) move Southern-Cone countries up the international value production chain. It should be noted that Wallerstein's formulation of world systems analysis and contributions to development theory and macrosociology go far beyond that of unequal trade. With regard to the question of unequal trade and comparative advantage one ought to go right back to Marx' Capital and Smith's Wealth of Nations: the terms of trade in the market are completely commensurate - there is no such thing as exploitation or unequal exchange at the point of exchange. This is not Wallerstein's argument. Wallerstein performs an analysis of the political economy of production across value chains. His argument is that the lower on the value chain a country is located, the less the labor of its workers is valued, which is born out in the comparison of wages of skilled vs. unskilled labor. This, in turn, determines the relative benefit a country will reap in dealings with others. With regard to the effectiveness of this sort of analysis as applied to economic development, consider the works of Robert Wade and Alice Amsden. They argue that state policies aimed at moving a country's economic base up the international value chain have been crucial in the successes of East Asian Economies. Wade and Amsden are not specifically world systems theorists, but their work helps to reinforce some assumptions in the approach. As for general arguments against World Systems Analysis, you would have to be more specific, as it is a holistic approach to social science.

[Atack and Passell] (http://www.amazon.com/New-Economic-View-American-History/dp/0393963152) have a chapter on it in their book if you can get a copy of it. The chapter isn't the long, but it might help.

Check out America's Bank by Lowenstein, for the American historical context.

It illustrates the kinds of problems people looked to the bank to solve and why the US version looks the way it does. Also, why it was so controversial and took so long to develop.

Almost all activism tends to be dominated by those that are at least relatively well off. This is because participating in political activism is partially a function of being able to have the time and resources to actually do it. Now, this does not mean that poor people or others do not care about these issues, but that they just might not have time to participate in it.

If you want some scholarly literature:

• Process and Protest: Accounting for Individual Protest Participation by Alan Schussman and Sarah A. Soule
  
• The Unheavenly Chorus by Schlozman et al

To maintain a prisoner class of society.

John Money was a piss poor scientist, he swept his findings so far under the rug that he literally ignored the fact that the application of his theories literally caused suicides (such as the one detailed in the non-fiction novel "As Nature Made Him" so we don't generally take him seriously anymore...

What I'm saying is that they're two different things. Financial crises cause recessions. Not all recessions are financial crises. Some are productivity shocks, inflation shocks, currency exchange shocks, etc. What /u/urnbabyurn was saying was that once you account for the different kinds of recessions there's no difference between now and before. I suggest reading this book for a historical perspective on the US economy.

Poor Economics for a great discussion on the many small, incremental steps that add up and could help alleviate poverty.

The Bottom Billion for a nice discussion on the various poverty traps a country can get stuck in. This book focuses more on the bigger macro picture, and less on the incentives and lives of individuals.

Why Nations Fail - I'll admit I haven't read this yet, but a lot of people seem to rate it highly. It looks at the broad picture of what determines the wealth of nations, and especially the nature of extractive vs. inclusive institutions.

I haven't heard of anyone advocating that a central bank play a key role in ending poverty. Central banks are there to help smooth output fluctuations, by keeping unemployment near its "natural" level and inflation low and stable. There's nothing in their tool-set that could bring a country out of poverty. Though they're certainly very important as bad monetary policy can destroy a country.

To describe it another way: poverty alleviation is about creating a long-term upward trend in output per person. But there are unpredictable variations the economy experiences around this long-term trend (recessions). The central bank's job is to prevent or minimize these deviations from trend, by preventing recessions. But it does not determine the long-term trend itself.

Since you seem to be asking about the motives behind Islamic terrorism, in particular, I've just had a long discussion with someone about it. It's mostly sourced with links to Wikipedia and covers background, but it should do for a start.

No expert I know accepts the explanation of the New atheists, and I'm an atheist myself. Sources to check are:

• Talking to the enemy by anthropologist Scott Atran.
  
• Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism by political scientist Robert Pape.
  
• Al-Qaeda: The Myth: The Root Causes of International Terrorism and How to Tackle Them by international relations scholar Rik Coolsaet
  
• Understanding Terror Networks by forensic psychiatrist and former CIA officer Marc Sageman