Social Sciences

[Patrick Murtha]

This is a big bucket. These fields runs the gamut from the intellectually stimulating to sheer garbage. As a former high school teacher of the social sciences, though, I always encouraged my university-bound students to take Intro to Psychology and Intro to Macro- and Micro-economics as soon as they arrived there, because an understanding of the basic concepts of those subjects is mandatory for functioning in the modern world.

When I was at Tec Prepa in Culiacán, I would read any volume in English in the library (which served both the high school and university populations) Some of the following titles stem from that time, books I might not have taken up otherwise, but that in most cases I really benefited from.

Charles Bowden, Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (see post below)

Samuel Cameron, The Economics of Sin (a supremely entertaining academic book!)

Edward Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation (I recommend to all)

Andreas Fahrmeir, Citizenship: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Concept (so dry that it was not like reading someone’s PhD thesis, but the NOTECARDS for that thesis)

Andrea Finkelstein, Harmony and the Balance: An Intellectual History of Seventeenth-Century English Economic Thought (not light reading, but stimulating)

John Gibler, To Die in Mexico (better than the Bowden book above)

David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital (invaluable guide)

Robert L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers (nicely readable survey of economic thought)

Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One (yes, I did it, read every word! Now for Volumes Two and Threej

Karl Marx, Results of the Immediate Process of Production (an appendix to the Penguin edition of Capital, Volume One)

Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings (one of the best books on Mexico)

Samuel Ramos, Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico (a key source for Paz)

Saskia Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization

Albion W. Small, The Cameralists: The Pioneers of German Social Polity (from 1910, one of my favorite books on this list, providing a magisterial survey of a neglected - to say the least - school of thought)

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (essential, in the unabridged text. Still one of the great books on the US)

Edward B Tylor, Primitive Culture (huge pioneering work of anthropology from 1871)

Thomas M. Wilson/Hastings Donnan, Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers (got some good ideas out of this essay collection)

Brian Winston, Media Technology and Society (thought-provoking)

Diana Wood, Medieval Economic Thought (similar to Finkelstein above)

 

[Patrick Murtha]

There is interesting and valuable material here, so I give the book a qualified recommendation, but in truth it is something of a botched job. Charles Bowden's courage and dogged pursuit of the facts are not in question, but are undermined by his writerly ambitions to be a new Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson, a star of "creative non-fiction."

Murder City is at its worst when you catch Bowden "writing," and unfortunately, it happens a lot. He gets very repetitive and starts to write in circles, making points he made 50 pages back. He rejects sociology in favor of absurdity - the deaths in Juarez can't be explained, he explains, except as expressions of a crazy new global reality - but, if that is all he really wants to say, he scarcely needed so many pages to do so. He uses devices, like the repeated references to the travails of "Miss Sinaloa," that simply do not work and should have been dealt with mercilessly by his editor.

Somewhere inside Murder City, there is a good book trying to emerge, but this is a pretty clear example of an author getting in his own way, perhaps because his self-estimation is too high - Bowden constantly rams home the idea that he "gets it" but no one else does, and inadvertently becomes an unattractive character in his own narrative. You don't feel his painful grappling with painful truths - if you did, the book's faults wouldn't matter much - you feel his sense of superiority.

 

[Ben Jackson]

Social Sciences can be considered part of philosophy as well (under the branch of State and Government), so here are some authors in the field of Economics I would love to read in future, possibly in my 30s:

Marx
J M Keynes
Adam Smith
Alexis Tocqueville
Amartya Sen
Ayn Rand
Frederich Hayek

And most Nobel Laureates from the fields of Economics.

 

[Patrick Murtha]

^ Yes, many key social scientists such as Marx can be considered philosophers as well; that line is porous. As a matter of fact, I taught Marx in my History of Philosophy, Introduction to Social Sciences, World History, AND Modernism classes; I had Marx coming out of my ears. ?

 

[umbrarchist]

I shall attempt to maintain my reputation for radical thinking by kicking the bucket.

Wait, that sounds too fatalistic. I'll reduce that too pessimistic.

The Screwing of the Average Man (1974) by David Hapgood

I read that in 1976. It rather shocked me but motivated me to pull out my Samuelson's Economics from college intending to figure out what was wrong. So I would come home from work after sweating over a hot soldering iron and read 15 or 20 pages each evening. I recall reading the NNP equation:

NNP = GNP - Depreciation

That was simple so I kept on reading. I was about 5 pages beyond that when the depreciation hit me. I repaired stereo equipment all day. Mostly stuff that I would not spend 2 minutes thinking about buying. It was all Consumer Goods. The Depreciation in Samuelson's was Capital Goods only. It was actually hours before I thought, "Who cares about stereos? What about all of the cars?" I was kind of mentally numb on the subject because the Great Economics Profession could not possibly make a mistake this dumb for decades.

The following year, 1977, a television series about economics aired, Age of Uncertainty by John Kenneth Galbraith.

https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2UuZUPZA4vjnPDGBe6HMHzep0aeUbRbH

I thought it gave a pretty good historical perspective of economic thought. Of course when Milton Friedman heard about Galbraith's project, while it was still in production I presume, he had to jump in with both feet. Of course at the time I didn't really know anything about either of them. So Friedman produced the Free to Choose series.

https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt27lKoC5LS4wbD28Jkv95UUm9H7wbVO4

All the while this peculiar algebra problem is in my head while I switch to computers and get hired by IBM. And read various stuff including Thomas Sowell. But so much of it is just slight variations on the same thing said different ways.

But I am a techno-geek who has read a lot of science fiction not a social scientist or critic.

This is a recent discovery:

A HISTORY OF COMMERCE, (1925)
by CLIVE DAY, Ph.D.
PROFESSOR OF POLI-ECON AT YALE

https://gutenberg.org/files/70410/70410-h/70410-h.htm

I have never seen a book that mixes technological and economic history like this. Economists seem to have this nearly oblivious attitude about technology like money is more important than land which is more important than labor which is more important than technology. Who cares how it works that is the job of a higher level of labor.

But if you search Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations which is in Project Gutenberg you will find, "read, write and account", not arithmetic. There were fewer than 2,000 steam engines in England when Smith died in 1790. Smith called them "fire engines". They were all stationary, not locomotives to pull cars on tracks. Marx would ride on those .

Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Free kindle book and epub digitized and proofread by volunteers.

gutenberg.org

Accounting Theory and Practice, (1922) Vol 1&2, by Roy B. Kester

Accounting theory and practice, Volume 1 (of 3) : a textbook for colleges and…

Free kindle book and epub digitized and proofread by volunteers.

gutenberg.org

Accounting theory and practice, Volume 2 (of 3) : a textbook for colleges and…

Free kindle book and epub digitized and proofread by volunteers.

gutenberg.org

Smith never used the word depreciation in WoN. He said money could depreciate one time. Marx talked about Depreciation in Das Kapital a number of times, of both money and machinery, but he lived in a world where machinery was much more in everyone's face than Smith.

Das Kapital by Marx, Karl

Das Kapital : Marx, Karl : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Book Source: Digital Library of India Item 2015.124455dc.contributor.author: Marx, Karldc.date.accessioned: 2015-07-03T12:51:47Zdc.date.available:...

archive.org

I have never read Wealth of Nations or Das Kapital in their entireties, just searched them for words based on my skewed perspective on economics.

What did Karl Marx say about vanadium steel?

 

[MichaelHW]

The first modern social scientist was probably the medieval islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406). He is often ignored because he is not part of the western tradition after Durkheim etc. While Herodutus (484-430 or 420 BC) may have founded a historical tradition in the west, it was Sima Qian (145 – c. 86 BC), the grand historian, who founded the Chinese tradition of historical biography.