Middletown, USA (1998) | THINK TANK WITH BEN WATTENBERG
Think Tank visits Muncie, Indiana — famously known as Middletown, USA — the site of several sociological surveys on middle class attitudes in America.Host: Ben Wattenberg — senior fellow, American...
View ArticleThe Man Who Knew Russia Too Much
Narod bezmolvstvuet. The people are silent. Throughout Russia’s history, this morbid stillness, immortalized by the last line in Pushkin’s “Boris Godunov,” was complicit in many of its tragedies....
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Why Groups Go to Extremes
How does group behavior drive extremism and challenge democratic values? The answer lies in social dynamics–the ways people influence one another. Conventional wisdom suggests that open discussion...
View ArticleAEI Politics Watch, Session II
In stark contrast to the rest of the world’s advanced nations, the United States is growing at a record rate and, according to census projections, will be home to 400 million Americans by 2050. Noted...
View ArticleAEI Politics Watch, Session II
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View ArticleWill Your Sociology Professors Talk Behind Your Back If You’re Conservative?...
“Will everyone be whispering about you behind your back because you’re a Republican? Yes.” I was sitting across from a senior sociology professor of a respected institution in the Northeast when I...
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Lessons from the Bubble Quiz #1
One of my central propositions in Coming Apart, a book I published in 2012, was that a high-IQ, highly educated new upper class has formed over the last half century. It has a culture of its own that...
View ArticleFor an Economic Humanism Wilhelm Röpke’s “Civitas Humana” and the Social...
Read the PDF Abstract. Civitas Humana is a thoroughly articulated work. In it, Wilhelm Röpke makes interact all the disciplinary spirits that inform the so-called social market economy: economics, both...
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How the Modern World Made Cowards of Us All
Back in the late 1980s, Dana Carvey of “Saturday Night Live” used to do a funny impression of President George H. W. Bush, in which the character would justify his own supposed timidity by muttering...
View ArticleEpisode 277: The Trump Canon
In the Before Times, when we’d all walk around bookstores putting our dangerously diseased digits on various tomes without a care in the world, did you notice a recurring phenomenon? It’s been the...
View ArticleThe Perils of ‘doing Something’
Fifty years ago, Edward C. Banfield published The Unheavenly City: The Nature and Future of Our Urban Crisis at a time much like our own, with poverty, crime, and racial unrest seemingly ascendant. It...
View ArticleThis Must Not Be the Place
In The Injustice of Place, three sociologists—Kathryn Edin, H. Luke Shaefer, and Timothy Nelson—write about the effects of natural disasters on the poorest regions in the country. Policies that seem...
View ArticleTeen Suicide and the Limits of Sociology
“No one, it appears, was free to just parent as they wanted to parent—free of the web of social ties that both gave their lives meaning and set firm constraints around expected behaviors.” This...
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