The Cranky Graduate Student's Rant-O-Rama

Note to self: the two factors I am most likely to forget when analyzing an issue are as follows:

1. Opportunity cost

2. Statistical sampling bias

Both are obvious when studying topics with which I am familiar. As soon as I leave my research comfort zone (i.e. economics and sociology) however, I am likely to miss these. Nevertheless they are quite present, if not always of central importance.

Otherwise intelligent people (e.g. me) can produce rather poor analysis when discussing topics they have not specifically been trained to approach scientifically. It is not about lack of relevant knowledge (though this can affect the quality of argument as well), it is about mindset.

The "surge's" success has always been based on two changes on the ground. The first has been the placation of the Sunni militias in the north with weapons, money and promises of support. By buying off our enemies and convincing them to battle Al Qaeda instead, we bought further time for political reconciliation. I am not sure that arming militias whose leaders are willing to switch sides for the right price is a wise long-term strategy but it certainly has reduced violence somewhat in the meantime. The second and probably more important change has been the cease fire declared by Al Sadr, the "firebrand" cleric who is behind the most dangerous and violent Shia militia. Again, his willingness to halt his militia's paramilitary operations has led to increased stability and further time to enact desperately needed legislation (which, by the way, has still not occured). In the last few days this cease-fire has essentially shattered as the result of a government led assault on Basra, a stronghold of Sadr's movement. This strike, which apparently was launched without prior American information, was meant to swiftly reclaim the city and solidify the political power of  Prime Minister Maliki. With causalities in the hundreds over the last three or four days and no demonstrable progress in reclaiming territory, has instead returned Iraq, at least temporarily, to its pre-surge state of smoldering chaos. The cease-fire may survive the current battle though this appears less likely as the operation continues; militias have already begun to re-seize Baghdad neighborhoods and set up heavily armed road blocks. Regardless, the whole incident demonstrates just how tenuous the surge-enabled relative peace is/was. Without political progress it is only a matter of time before Iraq returns to the chaos of civil war, before the Sunni militias, newly armed, rethink their truce with American forces, before the Shia militias grow tired of Al Maliki and decide to re-exert control of the streets. Let's hope the government has not already squandered all the breathing room our military could afford them.

Never underestimate the Clinton machine.....she'll play up her ability to win big states and "purple" battleground states and force Obama to join her in the gutter, which will only disillusion his acolytes. She can't possibly win the nomination via regular delegates but as a result of her tenacity Obama can't either. It is going to come down to back room deals with super delegates. I wonder which candidate has the scummy connections and years of corrupt experience necessary to succeed on that battleground.....

We should probably prepare for a possible McCain presidency as a result.

Yes, I take bitter satisfaction in watching naive idealism fail. Movements scare me....fainting/crying supporters and sermons and chanting scare me. Can't trust Obama to "heal the tear in our nation's soul"....nothing is that pure, nothing is that easy. Time for people to wake up to the grim realities around us. One man, even in the unlikely event that he is all his followers claim he is, cannot fix what ails us (though he can apparently easily manipulate people into thinking he can). That's too easy...something much bigger needs to happen. Obama as a candidate is fine...Obama as messiah is not.

Everything I've discovered during the course of my research today has been discouraging. I had forgotten or been unaware of several important factors that complicate the "story" I have been constructing. This is a good reminder that social phenomena are rarely simple; multiple causation abounds. Further it proves once again how difficult and long the road to a dissertation is. I am near the very beginning of the process and will face many more days like this, and far worse. In other words, I'll need to wake up tomorrow reinvigorated and undeterred by this little bump. Easier said than done but imperative if I plan to make it out of here while I still have hair on my head.

Sorry I haven't updated much recently; I've actually been rather busy working a part-time job. The most recent fellowship check for my summer position as a research assistant arrived on August 22nd. The next fellowship check for my fall teaching assistantship won't arrive until October 7th. When I was living on campus this hiatus did not pose much of a problem; Stanford was both the source and destination for most of my pay and the financial services office didn't seem to mind waiting six weeks to move virtual dollars from column to column in its accounting tables.Now that I live off campus however, capital liquidity has taken on new importance. My landlord certainly expects regular payments. I've thus taken a position in the sociology department office doing odd jobs at 15$/hour. The pay is not bad considering the difficulty level of the tasks and I've labored in far worse conditions over the years but still I find the whole experience annoying; it is cutting into my research time.

(Self-awareness disclaimer: I know full well how lucky I am to have this job and to have year round financial stability, guaranteed medical coverage, etc. I don't mean to winge too much. I'm just an academic who is more comfortable earning money teaching and conducting research than throwing out garbage, and filling out electronics disposal spreadsheets. This is why I entered graduate school after all!)

Speaking of research, I've set June 2008 as a target date to defend my dissertation prospectus (proposal for you non-wonks). If I manage this, and that is a big if, it will put me on track to graduate this program in five years or less. For some students in our department, the third year is spent adrift in a sea of possibilities. They don't achieve focus until the midpoint or even end of their 4th year. I think I have a chance to avoid this fate because of my previous time (served) in the economics department; I've had a lot more time to think about issues that interest me. Also, I have finished with my classes already and that frees up valuable hours.

As for the research in question, I already know that I want to focus on phenomena arising in credit markets for the poor (i.e. payday lenders, pawn shops, etc). I am working on tying this to research on the "ethnic economy" and on the "moral economy," both of which I've mentioned and discussed in previous posts. I don't yet have data or a collection of coherent hypotheses but I do have direction and a good idea where I need to search for relevant data. That, obviously, is a start.

As my (currently inchoate) ideas evolve into a full-fledged dissertation project I'll post more on this. I'd also like to return to my previous habit of posting the occasional screed or eschatological warning. For now though, a sojourn in the land of Nod; there is a mountain of menial matters to attend to in the office tomorrow morning. 

Here is some theme music to work by:

04 - Depeche Mode - Work Hard

Depeche Mode

Iraq has entered a downward spiral of chaos and bloodshed; the housing and credit markets are collapsing; oil is near record highs and has investors and analysts predicting 95-100$/barrel prices by the end of the year; the Whitehouse is drunk on power and threatening to turn our country into an outright police state; is anyone else filled with anxiety and dread every time he reads the headlines?  Yeesh.

I'm back in N.J. for a couple of weeks visiting my family and attending the annual conference of the American Sociological Association. It is hot and humid and smelly but it is home. I'll take this opportunity to fill up on real pizza and soak up the sights and sounds of NYC.

Not much else to report. Maybe I'll update again if I attend a particularly interesting lecture or discussion group...

My adviser is going to kill me. If there is such a thing as intellectual ADD then I must have it. The other day in the Stanford University bookstore while killing some time before a doctor's appointment I came across a history of ancient Japan. Since I find Japan both fascinating and near inscrutable (the former probably due to the latter) I couldn't resist picking it up and ceding some of my precious, highly-limited shelving space to this weighty volume.

I suppose there are worse vices than compulsion to learn but I can't help but feel a bit guilty having spent the last few days reading about ancient Japanese bureaucracy and the internecine power struggles between prominent noble families; I should be hunting for data sources related to my project on moral economy. It seems I have developed an "internalized" adviser (How's that for a piece of secondary socialization). :-) Sigh. I think a sociologist can read almost anything and find interesting material on which to ruminate so I will, in the next few lines, attempt to relate this history to the intellectual issues I've been grappling with this summer. Consider it a peace offering to  my adviser who is no doubt reading this entry and shaking his head in mild disapproval.

What can we learn about norms, symbols and multiple networks from the history of the formation of the Japanese state? Let's look at the adoption of Buddhism. Buddhism entered Japan around 550 A.D. and was introduced as a gift from a Korean kingdom that sought Japanese help in a war against a more powerful Korean kingdom to the north. Sacred Buddhist texts and a golden idol came packaged with a letter praising the doctrine as advanced and righteous and truly superior to other religious systems.

The Japanese had no real interest in religious conversion but they did feel a certain insecurity when comparing the state of their union with that of the Chinese empire. The Chinese were Buddhists and powerful, the Japanese kingdom (it was far too small and primitive at the time to be considered an empire) was not. Certain noble families embraced Buddhism and used it to press for reform of the Japanese state, to reshape it according to the Chinese model.

I'm trying to link this process with the hypothetical scenario I described below in which an individual found himself in an alien environment, unable to comprehend the interaction he was witnessing. According to philosophical pragmatism,  human creativity kicks in when we are faced with problems, i.e. situations that call into question our assumptions about the world. In the below example a man is faced with an entirely new type of interaction (a Chinese grocer offering a loan in indirect fashion) and has nothing in his repertoire of "scripts" to allow him to understand much less participate in the interaction. In the case of Japan however there was no new, unintelligible scenario to cause a shake up in world view. Instead the "problem" may have occurred upon comparison between Chinese and Japanese governing results. At the time the Japanese state was extremely fragile, prone to continuous, destabilizing conflict between nobles and unable to perform all but the most basic functions. Observation of other's superior results and associated different methods may elicit an understanding of taken-for-granted normative scripts and their failures.

I also had the man run through all his previous models of human interaction to attempt to find something suitable. Eventually he determines that his loan script offers something like the basis for a new script (though it is inadequate for this particular case) and he begins to construct a new script. How is it that he determines this though? There are two possibilities: first through trial and error experimentation (which could be dangerous if he inadvertently insults his alter) and second through observation and emulation. Here again, observation of others' behavior can be important, this time in formulating a new script. When the Japanese government (or certain factions within it) determined that they were failing or at least under-performing they could have turned again to what they already knew to construct something new out of bits and pieces of the familiar. Instead some of them chose to adopt a way of thinking complete with prescriptions for social organization that was(were) largely alien to them.

Japanese Buddhism however, as you may know, ended up quite different from Chinese and Indian varieties. For example, by about 800 A.D. Shingon Buddhism had reconciled the native animism known as Shinto to the teachings of Buddha. Japanese gods were reinterpreted as manifestations of various aspects of an omnipresent Buddha in a pantheistic doctrine similar to that found in Hinduism. These gods included, by the way, the emperor of Japan and members of all the noble families who also claimed descent from divine beings. How did Japan end up with this odd syncretic hybrid that bore little resemblance to the original?

There are several things to keep in mind in answering that question. The first is a bit of Kantian epistemology that was neatly summarized by the post-positivist sociologist Talcott Parsons: "all fact is theory-laden." The Japanese, of course, saw Buddhism through the filter of their own world view. This meant that any ambiguous terminology or statement would be interpreted according to native conceptions and understandings. If the actions and behaviors  of others are made intelligible trough reference to scripts and models then so too are their scripts and their models.

Second (and this is related), it is probably not useful to talk about the adoption of Buddhism as if it were an indivisible whole. Rather we might think of it as a complex of associated symbols, scripts and concepts. Some more than others will stick out as being useful or relevant during adoption by any given group. In this case the Japanese were adopting Buddhism out of what they saw as political necessity, they were repurposing a religious doctrine for political ends.

Third adoption is not simply an event but a process complete with conflicts and emerging secondary and tertiary problems that affect the form of the "finished" (really stabilized since the process never truly finishes) product.In my example below I mentioned conflict but perhaps didn't emphasize enough the importance of group power struggle in shaping institutions. The adoption of Buddhism was fiercely opposed by a noble family that claimed the divine ability to carry out an annual politically important purification ceremony by invoking their ancestral gods. As Buddhist doctrine was revised and reinterpreted to allow compatibility with Shinto gods this opposition melted away thus paving the way for a collection of associated political reforms not related to this doctrinal conflict. Similarly and at about the same time the Japanese government was  struggling to import and effectively apply concepts of Confucianism  in government organization. They faced a snag in the Confucian doctrine that a wicked and corrupt sovereign could not effectively carry out the mandate of heaven and could under certain highly-limited circumstances by deposed on these grounds. The Japanese emperor and nobles believed themselves not to be intermediaries bridging a gap between heaven and earth but rather heavenly gods manifest in earthly form. The Confucian system was thus modified to substitute hereditary for meritocratic legitimacy.

(Giant aside: It is interesting to compare this with what happened in Europe in the middle ages. There the kings had to develop the concept of divine right because of challenges from the clergy to their positions as intermediaries with Christ. In Japan while Buddhist temples became powerful land owners and dangerous political rivals much like the medieval Catholic Church, they never had any ability to claim higher spiritual legitimacy or seize power through anything other than military force. )

Ok that's about it. I don't think I've entirely succeeded in linking this topic to my research but it was a valiant attempt, wasn't it? Hopefully I'll be able to pull a bit more of sociological value from this tome. If I do, I'll be sure to post it; I know how excited you all are to read about this. ;-)

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Saki and I went horseback riding near Half Moon Bay yesterday as part of our 2nd year anniversary celebration. I just thought you'd all enjoy a picture of me looking somewhat ridiculous on  top of my trusty steed. Despite what looks like a grimace, I actually really enjoyed the ride.