Kieran Healy’s Weblog Sociology and other distractions

Road Movie to Berlin Little Rock

Hello from a motel in Little Rock, Arkansas, which turns out to have free ethernet. (The motel, not the city.) Today’s route ran from near Salem, SC, up I-85 to Spartanburg, SC where I picked up I-26 to Asheville, NC, where you hit I-40. The drive across the Smokies was beautiful, though there were some […]

Markets, Firms and Planning

Some threads of the ongoing discussion about the Efficient Markets Hypothesis have begun to address the contrast between markets and planning, with the state as the prospective planner. As is often the case in such discussions, the implicit contrast is between a Hayekian information-processing ideal and, say, North Korea. To break down this assumption a […]

On the Road Again

After a year of leave in Australia (well, someone has to act as a counterweight to all those Aussie backpackers), I just arrived back in the U.S. Three observations:

It should not surprise you that making a c.1 year-old boy watch the in-flight TV system for six hours of a Sydney-to-Los Angeles flight would lead to […]

For All Your Causal Counterfactual Needs

New from MIT Press comes Causation and Counterfactuals, an anthology edited by John Collins, Ned Hall and L.A. Paul. At the Pacific APA meetings, the latter was recently identified, much to her disgust, as “Kieran Healy from Crooked Timber’s wife.” Causation and Counterfactuals presents the best recent work on the counterfactual analysis […]

Faux Pas

Guest-blogging over at Volokh, Cathy Seipp tells us why we should learn French rather than Spanish:

Last year, when she took French at Pasadena Community College, we got the same reaction: “Why French? Why not Spanish? Isn’t that more useful around here?” Well, no. What’s useful in Los Angeles, just like everywhere else in the country, […]

A New Analysis of Incarceration and Inequality

I’ve written about the intersection of incarceration, race and the labor market several times in the past. In the United States, the remarkable expansion of the prison system over the past thirty years, despite generally falling crime rates, has had far-reaching effects on large segments of the population, but especially amongst unskilled black men. A […]