-: Hello and welcome to this lecture
on social science paradigms.
So we're gonna learn about some different ways
of seeing the world.
Some gonna just go over a few of them
and why they matter,
why we as social science researchers should understand them.
Why knowing where somebody stands and the lenses they use
and the way that they understand the world
can give us a more nuanced understanding
of their experience of the world
and their experience of various social phenomena,
which is what we social scientists do.
So, I like this comic.
It just shows that so much of what we know
and so many of the ways that we think
of ourselves is in relationship
to other individuals to our society,
that it's really very hard for us
to describe ourselves
outside of any sort of social structure.
And that knowing sort of where we stand
and maybe where how we see the world
and why we see the world
and why our research subjects see the world the way they do,
and have the understanding and count as true
and count as knowledge the way that they do
will help us be better social science researchers.
So we're gonna first talk about what is a paradigm
and some common social and economic ones.
So a paradigm is a fundamental frame or model
or a lens by which we organize our world,
what we know, what we think,
what we observe, how we understand it.
In many cases,
for ourselves, they can be so obvious
that we don't see them, that at the founding
of the United States, this first bullet here
of freedom, 'cause the ability of white male
landowners.
That was a pretty new thing then.
Now I think the ability
to elect our own leaders
is not a very radical notion.
There was a time when women should have the same rights
as men, again, was a very radical notion.
And now I think at least in general,
most people would broadly agree with that.
Although how it plays out
and how those rights are defined
and what those rights are, again,
are very much a subject of current social dispute.
But we'll leave that discussion
for another day.
And we, as social scientists,
it's important that we see them and recognize them.
Because first, it can help us understand
What others do, how they believe,
how they behave, what they're aware of,
what they perceive, can help us to see new things.
And by understanding our own paradigms,
we can understand our own biases.
And we talked at length about confirmation bias.
And so by understanding them, it helps us
to be more reflexive, which is one of the key ways
to combat confirmation bias.
So again, for ourselves by understanding where we stand,
it helps us to avoid our own confirmation bias.
Not just see what we intend to see or wanna see,
but see other people points of view.
And for our research subject, it's key for two reasons.
First, social desirability bias.
That there's a well-known bias of human subjects,
of social science research subjects.
That what we want is for them
to tell us the truth about what they know
and understand and do.
But in many cases, they will either
say what they think makes them look good,
makes them a good person, would they donate
to some charity or take a noble action?
They might say they would,
but they may not actually do it.
As well as strategic responses
where people will sort of give an answer
that would contribute
to their sort of political agenda.
For example,
somebody might ask about a person in Burlington
about their encounters with unhoused folks.
And if I just, for example,
want the city to do more and spend more money
or to take like greater action, I might exaggerate
and say, oh, things are bad.
You know, it's a problem for me,
even if it hasn't been a problem for me.
And there's a lot of other examples in that way
where our subjects will say sort of something
that contributes to a political agenda
rather than what is actually true for them.
And again, what we want is for them
to actually say what's true for them.
So here are a few that we're gonna go through
and we're gonna highlight on these three
positivism, constructivism
and lumping together a few things
like feminist and critical race
and just critical studies in general.
So let's start with positivism.
And that assumes
that there is a single knowable objective reality.
That reality is one single way
and it's based on scientific
observation and reason.
And we get our data through
and empirical observation
through measurement.
This tends to work well for sort of biophysical sciences
and such, but not so well
for humans that wait,
like to think about the last slide,
I doubt if the planet Mars
would change its orbit
because we are observing it,
because we think it would think that it would look better
or it'll sort of misrepresent
what it does or has an agenda,
these sort of tools are better
for these sort of biophysical sciences
and maybe not as good for social sciences.
Constructivism says
there may be a single external reality.
And while I think a key assumption
of positivism is if we all had the same tools
and looked at things at the same way,
we would come up with the same conclusion.
Whereas constructivism says, well, that may be,
but that there may be this sort of single external,
but all that we know every bit of every word, every idea,
everything that we know, our concept, our language,
what we know is true are all human social constructs.
And it tends to be much more pragmatic,
it's what works, it's sort of true in this situation
rather than always true in all ways.
But then again, this sort of table here to the left
has more information on this.
So this is an example of social constructivism.
Each of these individuals is sure that what they're saying
and what they're seeing is right,
which leads us to the sort of alternative paradigms.
And there's a whole sort of social
and psychological and other sorts of research
and thinking under the feminist view,
which basically says that so much of what we know,
the construct of our society
and all of our institutions
and what counts as true, have really been developed
by a very male centric society.
And looking at how the perspectives
of women, the issue of gender,
the concern of inequality
and how the sort of power
and privilege in our society
has shaped what our society looks like.
What we think is true, what are the institutions,
what are the norms?
What are the behaviors that we have as a result of this?
And what have been the effects of this
on women and how does it vary by gender
and such matters like that.
In the same way it could be said
that those same sort of institutions and knowledge
and all that we know
and the way we structured society
also has a very white-centric view.
And just in general,
the word critical in this context
means sort of non-traditional, at odds
with the mainstream paradigms.
But sort of how does someone
who is of a different gender or a different race
or a different ethnicity,
how do they see the world differently than you?
How does their lens change?
I think that we could talk about many, many examples
where that is true.
So here are just a few examples of ways
in which sort of critical theories bring things to light
with some sort of new and not so new events here.
So think about, and we will discuss in class.
So I am a white male,
heterosexual and cisgender.
How would my perception of the world change
if I were none of those things?
Or if I were not all of those.
Then I think in many ways
that our sort of positionality in all of this
changes how we see things,
that I might see a statement that is sexist
or racist or homophobic
or antisemitic or anti-Muslim.
I might merely see it as distasteful
and disgusting,
but I wouldn't find it personally threatening
because it doesn't really personally threaten me.
And I think that this is an example
of who we are really influences how we see the world.
And knowing who someone
is helps us to understand
why they see the world like that.
Why their perceptions have been shaped in that way.
And again, as good social scientists doing the best we can
to really understand what do they think and feel
and believe and how do they act and why?
So remember the difference between positive and normative,
and we're gonna use this in our next exercise.
So a positive view is simply how things are,
whereas a normative view is much more
how should things be, that normative has sort of a value
to judgment of how things could be made better.
So we're going to talk about first
the dominant economic paradigm
and the dominant social paradigm
of our time, neoclassical economics
and neoliberalism.
And then we're gonna just dabble a bit
institutional economics and talk
really just name ecological economics.
So our dominant economic theory
is neoclassical economic theory.
And this is based on certain assumptions
that humans have rational preferences
and can assign value to all that we do.
That the rational behavior,
this homo economicus as it's called,
that individuals maximize our utility
and firms maximize profit.
And that is what a rational being does.
And here is where the normative part comes in
that I think too often that this theory says,
this is what we should do, not this is what we do do,
but this is what we should do.
Note that too the assumption
is that all these decisions are made individually
and on the basis of full
and perfect information that we can do this math,
these sort of valuations
in our heads that we have all
the information that we need.
And if we have that, that there's a single right answer,
that this is what we should do, this is what we should buy,
this is how we should spend money,
this is how we should assign our costs
and so forth based on what a rational being does.
So this is a highly normative view,
that it is first that society is best served
by everyone pursuing their self-interest,
that we should all be these rational maximizers
and that we can do this math.
And note that this is a very deductive,
that it's like this is how a rational being should act.
And then in many cases,
a neoclassical economic model
says this is how a rational actor should act.
And then it uses data
to see, do these people act in this way
that we think is right?
Do they act rationally
according to how we define it?
But there are other economic paradigms
that don't use this, that this is actually,
we at UVM and CCDE have a wealth of experience
and expertise in ecological economics.
Dr. Farley, Dr Ament, among others,
and you probably had classes with them,
so I'll leave that go for the sake of time.
But I do wanna talk to you about one
of the economic paradigms that I use most,
which is institutional economics.
So rather than saying
rational actors make mathematical decisions
based on perfect information,
we in institutional economics
see them as being very complex
and an interaction of many actors, of firms,
of individuals, of laws and in social norms.
And it's much more of an inductive approach.
What do we actually do?
Why do humans behave in the way they do
given this set of laws and norms and incentives
and imperfect knowledge?
So it sort of takes how do folks act
and then trying to understand why,
instead of,
this is how the neo classical deductive approach is,
this is what a rational being should do
and being rational is the right thing to do.
And in many cases, sort of scolding them
for not behaving as their model said that they should.
And note that you may guess that I'm somewhat of a critic
of neo classical economics
and if I'm somewhat caricaturing it,
it's to make a point.
I do think that, certainly that approach
and those models does and can have, right?
And it can be be well done,
but I think that it also has some very serious shortcomings.
And if we put too much social emphasis on that,
I think it can lead to many
of the sort of dangerous
social economic outcomes that we see now.
So again, neo classical economics
tends to be very normative and deductive
and institutional economics is more positive and inductive.
And I hope that all those terms
and this phrasing makes sense.
If not, let's discuss it in class.
For the rest of this lecture,
I wanna talk about the dominant social
paradigm of our time, neoliberalism.
This quotation comes from an article
by a man named George,
who I will say is a critic of this view.
And basically it's been the dominant
way in which we have
governed ourselves here in the US
for about the last 40 or so years.
So I'm imagining most if not all of the students
in my classes have never experienced a world
where this was not sort of how things were done.
And so I'll let you read this.
Basically the bottom line is the idea
that markets make better decisions than governments.
That the private sector should allocate resources
and make the decisions,
not the public sector.
So here are some, again, this is a sort of critical
view of it, but it tends to work along these lines.
Low taxes, little regulation,
so things like environmental protection,
food safety, worker safety
tends to be taken care of by the market,
not by government regulation.
Basic human services are privatized
sort of the deep valuation of education
and infrastructure, whereas wealth is a virtue.
And by accumulating wealth,
you are better able,
that shows that you have merit, that you have done well
and that you should able
to have sort of more power in the decision making sphere.
And again, this is a very, I'll say it like this,
that it's not my job to make you think
this is good or bad.
I'm describing it and letting you decide
whether or not you think this is a good way,
that this is how we should be structuring our society
and we'll talk in class about this.
But we've seen a radical change
in so many of our institutions.
Things like education, religion, sports, government,
healthcare being run for profit,
being run as a business
instead of being run sort of to create
public good that they are run,
to maximize shareholder returns, not to sort of do
the most social good that they can.
Just as a disclaimer,
this would be Milton Friedman
who's a Nobel Prize winning economist,
has another view that he is certainly,
I would say in his time, was a supporter of this.
And this were his thoughts.
And again, I leave this all up to you,
whether or not you think,
which of these two views, you know,
is the private sector being the dominant
sort of way that we structure our society
and make decisions.
Is that a good thing, is that a bad thing?
Is there too much of it?
Is there too, love it.
I leave questions like that up for you.
So again, we talked about why it's important to know
and to understand why do people see the world as they do
and that this is a recap.
Thank you.