When economics meets sociology

There was a great post on The Economist awhile ago about an economics teacher that spent some time helping homeless single mothers improve their financial knowledge. It was a fabulous step out of normal social boundaries, the kind that is entirely too rare. Have a care to read the original.

"If there was one thing I learned from my experience, it was what a bad job the financial system does by people with low incomes."

Given the economic status implicit in pursuing an advanced degree, it is not surprising that virtually no economists have personal experience with living in the underclass. It is surprising though that more do not study this significant portion of the population.

A profession that seeks to benefit all portions of society should strive to understand all portions as well. No doubt many economists do not fully see the bubble of privilege they reside in. This lack of perspective damages the credibility of the profession and begs for unintended consequences in policy recommendations.

Perhaps it is too much for academic economists to step off campus, but they might at least get in touch with the Sociologists and Community Studies professors across the hall. This diary is a laudable example of the learning that can occur when we step into the shoes of the working poor.

Names are just words, words, words

It's not an assumption I've really examined before, but why do we have names?

Names are just a string of characters that may or may not have a literal meaning in some language. Sure, names used to convey information such as personality attributes or occupation, but that time is long past. The only thing names seem to convey these days is a general indication of your ethnic heritage. Even their primary purpose as a unique identifier of a person is slowly losing effectiveness; I know of another person with my exact first and last name that lives within 100 miles of me, and both my names are uncommon to rare.

My primary conclusion is that we have names precisely because we cannot vocalize mental images of faces. However, computer networks are making it extraordinarily easy to broadcast images these days, and even live videos. Will this make our textual names less important?My guess is no. Rather, as the world reaches into 10s of billions of people, every opportunity to distinguish ourselves from eachother will be needed.

It seems certain that our individual identities, whether in a face or a name, will continue to shrink in importance next to abstract concepts and large organizations. Yet, it is through our relationships with other individuals that we build our identities and derive meaning.