Where Have All the Sociologists Gone? An Economist’s Perspective

Abstract

The author provides an economist’s perspective on a set of articles examining the role of sociologists in studying recent trends in inequality in the United States. Three themes underlie his comments. First, effective investigations of empirical questions require a combination of statistics and theory. This means the same data can be organized differently according to different theories and doing so leads to greater insight. Second, having more than one discipline work on a problem is helpful not just in providing multiple potential explanations but also in getting researchers to question orthodoxy within their own disciplines; for example, it is important that sociologists not buy into the economics orthodoxy on inequality. Third, many questions related to recent inequality trends are particularly suited to examinations with sociology’s tool kit; evidence from this set of articles is that more sociologists are applying those tools to explaining rising inequality in the United States.