It’s a shame sociology took its final-swoop quantitative turn just about the same time economics reissued its permissions to do comparative history and started publishing discourse studies in its mainstream journals. It’s as if estranged siblings would be forever doomed to blow past one another and reissue each other’s mistakes. Politics.
The turn for sociology was of course both theoretical and empirical, but that damned dissertation in 2021 really sealed it: Foundations of Sociological Analysis (Paul Samuelson glowed proud from his grave). It was as if sociologists had been waiting for someone to come along and resolve all the definitional issues in theory and compose an axiomatic graph-theoretic derivation of sociological principles. Now all the theorists do is applied combinatorics on graphs. Useless.
Of course existence theorems aren’t actually quantitative, even with the Greek. No, the empiricists test the theorems. They measure and decide what the Big Variables are — ostensibly. However it doesn’t take a genius to see that entire careers are being made on increasingly useless precision in metrics – one more marginal regression on the NSA’s Limited Access Comprehensive Social Network to seal sociology’s feckless irrelevance. The newspapers used to say the same things about economics and national income accounts. Shame.
We were at one point some of the greatest champions of a healthy philosophy of science. As late as 2013, in fact, methodologists and practitioners in both sociology and economics started talking again because of the rebirth of institutionalism and history in economics, and the excitement around quantitative methods in sociology. But the mainstreams of both disciplines were too narrowly obsessed with their own insular histories. Too many barking dogs.
We now face criticism from every side for the failures of our policy recommendations, which governments eagerly gobbled up for their scientific appearance. Who can blame them, they were fed up with economists. But even after the quantum computing turn, even after the reallocation of educational resources with Intergenerational Path-Dependence Structural Interruption hasn’t moved the Gini Coefficient much.
It seemed to me in 2013 that sociology was taking the theoretical and methodological turn that economics had in the 1930s and 40s, when much was gained for economists, but so too lost. If only sociologists and economists had talked to each other more, we wouldn’t be, in 2054, the same mess economists had found themselves eventually, in 2013.