A Conversation with Malcom Gladwell

Peter Capelli recently interviewed Malcolm Gladwell for Knowledge@Wharton. Gladwell talks about the relationship of what he does to academic research and makes this interesting observation.

The sad fact about being a writer is that in a good year, you have five good ideas. It is not like it is every day; it is more like every two months. But you do become alert to that theme. When you are writing a book, you are assembling little bits of evidence and then figuring out which ones are relevant and which ones are secondary.

Read full conversation here.

For every Social Scientists: Mattias K. Polborn translates an Ancient Letter from the Editor

Mattias K. Polborn writes: Preface
I have recently found an ancient scroll, written in Reformed Egyptian, in my crawl space. It turned out to be a rejection letter from the editor of an ancient scientific journal, Geometrica, addressed to Ptolemaeus of Alexandria, the famous geographer. It is a remarkable document that shows how little scientific publishing has changed since ancient times.
Before proceeding to the full translation provided below, the critical reader may wish to ask how this document came into my basement. While details remain clouded in mystery, there are some strong indications that the document is genuine. Specifically,
• it was found in mid-America, the prime location where Reformed Egyptian docu- ments are found;
• after I completed the translation, the original document mysteriously vanished without a trace;
• the document contains sentences that are almost verbatim the same as written much later by different people who definitely had no knowledge of the text in my basement.

Read full letter here.

Review of DuPont’s Dyes Business: Three Decades of Innovation, 1950-1980

Joseph Innarone and John Tackray are two former members of the DuPont dye business that experienced its golden age after World War II and was sold off in 1979, marking the visible onset of the decline of the U.S. synthetic dye industry. The authors are not research chemists. For the entire period covered by the book, they both held different jobs in the dye business, spanning technical service, sales, and business management. In course of their various assignments that started for both of them as trainees in the Technical Laboratory, the authors acquired substantial knowledge of dye innovations and the business of selling dyes. Rather than attempting a scholarly history (only five sources are cited), the authors offer their own personal history of Du Pont’s dye business. Their story is valuable for anyone who wants to gain a deeper understanding how DuPont became an innovator in the synthetic dye industry yet in the 1970s could no longer compete successfully with foreign rivals. Du Pont exited the industry in 1979 as later did all other U.S. headquartered firms.  Download full Review in AMBIX, Vol. 57 No. 3, November, 2010.

DuPont’s Dyes Business: Three Decades of Innovation, 1950-1980, By Joseph J. Iannarone, Jr., and John S. Thackray, pp: xi + 261, illus. J & J Publishing, Lancaster, PA
2008, $29.00, ISBN: 978-0-615-24927-8, Order Information.

Constructing Relational Databases to Study Life Histories on Your PC or Mac

In this article, I present a strategy for designing relational databases with the program FileMaker Pro (FileMaker) to study the histories of individuals and organizations. The approach facilitates efficiency in inputting data and flexibility for constructing statistical analyses from the rawdata. The key feature of the strategy is to define the basic unit of observation in the database in terms of an agent, an event, and a date. Given that programs such as FileMaker can easily sort data by agent and date, once one structures the data correctly, he or she can construct well-ordered event histories for agents, even if the researcher enters the data in an unordered fashion. By using events that happened to an agent at a particular time as the basic unit of observation, one maintains maximum flexibility to do statistical analysis that aggregates basic data in different ways. This article illustrates the power of the approach by outlining ways to analyze changes in geographic distances between two events marking the life histories of chemists. Download Article.

Evolutionary Economics Meets Business History at Trinity College in Dublin

I participated in a workshop bringing together Business Historians and Evolutionary Economists at Trinity College in Dublin.  Overview information on the workshop and the presentation slides have been posted in the Economic-Evolution.net discussion forum. 

Problems with the Peer Review System in Science

Frank Furedi has written a very thoughtful essay on the problems with current peer review system in science. In my view, the issues are a lot more serious in the social sciences where is much harder to formulate non-trivial general laws and make precise predictions that can be proven or disproven. The natural sciences require replication before something is accepted. There is very little exact replication in management research for example. Theories are accepted on very tenous grounds and when you write a paper that contradicts existing paradigms your data is not going to persuade your peers who have a vested interested in the status quo.  Read Furedi’s Essay.

Update 28. June 2010:Interesting Problem Case in Economics:  Copy URL into your browser: http://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/nachrichten/no-comment-please;1446947

Jeffrey Meyers on Writing Habits

CM: Having written 43 books, including more than 20 biographies, you’re nothing if not prolific. What’s your work routine?

JM: I work every day— it’s important to keep up momentum—from 9:30 to 1 in the morning and from 7:30 to 11 in the evening. In the afternoons I recharge by playing tennis (inexpensive psychotherapy), taking long walks, frequenting bookstores, going to the Cal library, and wandering around San Francisco. I do research and interviews with family and friends for six months. I then write by hand on yellow pads, type three pages a day and 100 pages a month on the computer, and finish a 400-page book in four months. Finally, I spend two more months revising.

When I’m done, I follow the example of my longtime friend, Iris Murdoch, who began her next novel the day after completing the previous one. (More momentum.) While the editor is reading my typescript, I do the research and write a ten-page proposal that secures the contract and advance for my next book.

From California Monthly.

Economics: Is the discipline in crisis?

Drake Bennett of the Boston Globe is reporting on the soul searching that is going on the field of economics and finance after the professions inability to foresee the crisis. 

THE DEEPENING ECONOMIC downturn has been hard on a lot of people, but it has been hard in a particular way for economists. For most of us, pain and apprehension have been mixed with a sense of grim amazement at the complexity of what has unfolded: the dense, invisible lattice connecting house prices to insurance companies to job losses to car sales, the inscrutability of the financial instruments that helped to spread the poison, the sense that the ratings agencies and regulatory bodies were overmatched by events, the wild gyrations of the stock market in the past few months. It’s hard enough to understand what’s happening, and it seems absurd to think we could have seen it coming beforehand. The vast majority of us, after all, are not experts. But academic economists are. And with very few exceptions, they did not predict the crisis, either. Some warned of a housing bubble, but almost none foresaw the resulting cataclysm. An entire field of experts dedicated to studying the behavior of markets failed to anticipate what may prove to be the biggest economic collapse of our lifetime. And, now that we’re in the middle of it, many frankly admit that they’re not sure how to prevent things from getting worse.

Read Full Story “Paradigm lost: Economists missed the brewing crisis. Now many are asking: How can we do better” on Boston.com

Paulson on the diversity of firm in the financial industry

Trying to imitate high-status Newtonian physics, management scholars over the past fifty hear have tried to formulate general laws about the behavior of organizations.  In his statement after the passing of the $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, Paulson in my view correctly emphasized that the salient fact about most industries is the diversity and not the sameness of firms within them. 

Paulson Statement: By acting this week, Congress has proven that our Nation’s leaders are capable of coming together at a time of crisis, even at a critical stage of the political calendar, to do what is necessary to stabilize our financial system and protect the economic security of all Americans.

The American people will appreciate the leadership of their elected representatives and senators who took bold action to help stem a severe credit crunch that threatens to cost many jobs and undermine access to credit for working Americans.

This bill contains a broad set of tools that can be deployed to strengthen financial institutions, large and small, that serve businesses and families.

Our financial institutions are varied – from large banks headquartered in New York, to regional banks that serve multi-state areas, to community banks and credit unions that are vital to the lives of our citizens and their towns and communities. Each institution has its own unique benefits, and their collective strength makes our financial system more resilient, and more innovative. The challenges our institutions face are just as varied – from holding illiquid mortgage backed securities, to illiquid whole loans, to raising needed capital, to simply facing a crisis of confidence. This diversity of institutions and challenges requires that we deploy the tools in this rescue package, in combination with the tools the Fed, the Treasury, the FDIC and other bank regulators already have, in a variety of ways that addresses each of these needs and restores the ability of our financial system to fuel our broader economy.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to alleviating the stress in our financial system. Each situation will be different and we must implement these new programs with a strategy that allows us to adapt to changing circumstances and conditions, and attract private capital. The broad authorities in this legislation, when combined with existing regulatory authorities and resources, gives us the ability to protect and recapitalize our financial system as we work through the stresses in our credit markets.

We will move rapidly to implement the new authorities, but we will also move methodically. In the coming days we will work with the Federal Reserve and the FDIC to develop strategies that deploy these tools in an expedited and methodical way to maximize effectiveness in strengthening the financial system, so it can continue to play its necessary and vital role supporting the U.S. economy and American jobs. Transparency throughout this process will be important, and I look forward to providing regular updates as we move ahead to implement this strategy.

Source

Charles Tilly 1929- 2008

I don’t know anyone who has come in contact with Charles Tilly and who was not inspired by him. For those who have never met him, here are wonderful tributes to this exemplary scholar.
Social Science Research Council Tribute Website
Tributes by Scholars
NY Times Obituary

April 29, 2008

Columbia University: President Bollinger’s Statement on the Passing of Professor Charles Tilly

Columbia lost one of its finest citizens when Professor Charles Tilly passed away April 29. Most recently the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science, serving the departments of Political Science and Sociology, he was a scholar of boundless energy and intellect. Few could, or will ever, match his scholarly output and lasting impact. His 50 years of teaching, writing and intellectual inspiration will be missed here at Columbia and everywhere people seek to understand how history and societies move forward.

The extraordinary half-century career of Charles Tilly continuously demonstrated scholarship that transcended disciplinary boundaries. It seemed that he could write, interpret, and explain virtually anything to curious minds. With more than 600 articles and 51 books and monographs bearing his name, Charles Tilly literally wrote the book on the contentious dynamics and the ethnographic foundations of political history.

Though he received an extraordinary number of special awards, scholarly inductions and honorary degrees during his long and productive career, we will remember that, since 1996, he was a distinguished member of the Columbia community. His students, fellow faculty members and friends will all remember someone not only who reached and remained at the pinnacle of his field but also a warm and valued colleague who never stopped asking profound questions.

Lee C. Bollinger
President

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/08/04/tilly.html