Saturday, March 10, 2012

Some weekend reading — Daniel Little on social causation


On Thursday, March 8, 2012, I posted Daniel Little — Coleman on the elementary actor. Here is some follow-up on the methodological debate among sociologists, in particular between methodological individualists and institutionalists.

In Causal Pathways through Colman's Boat, Daniel Little examines the relationship of macro explanations and microfoundations.

In Microfoundations and Meso Causation, Daniel Little examines how macro explanations are not incompatible with microfoundations even when not traced out specifically in detail as narrow conceptions of methodological individualism require.

See also Daniel Little, New ideas about structure and agency for more on the debate between methodological individualism and institutionalism.

Finally, here Daniel Little's Current issues in causation research report on Causality and Explanation in the Sciences (2011), which summarizes the major current positions regarding causal explanation in the sciences.

From this, it should be pretty clear that most of the causal "intuitions" one sees on blogs by the non-rigorous are, well, not rigorous.

Peter Cooper shows how this methodological analysis applies to macroeconomics from an MMT viewpoint in Thinking in a Macro Way.

These few short posts cover a lot of territory if you have a chance to get to them.


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