Good evening.
I'm Steve Cohen, a professor
at Columbia School of
International Public Affairs
and Vice Dean of Columbia
School of Professional Studies.
Welcome to the first event
in our Ideas Exchange series this summer.
The ideas exchange is a unique program
we've created that grew
out of our recognition
that so much of what makes
Columbia University special
is being part of the community
and joining the lively
conversations that take
place between our faculty,
our students, alumni and friends.
The pandemic has meant we're
required to be off campus.
However, our work continues,
and so does the need
for our community to convene, connect
and converse around the important issues
that are affecting us here today.
As much as we love our campus,
and is important as places,
people are more important.
In the final analysis, Columbia,
and all schools or communities,
teachers and students.
Buildings and facilities are
important, but who we are,
is more important than where we are.
That's why this summer a number
of our top faculty are both teaching
and participating in these
special conversations
about their work, its impact
and how the pandemic is affecting
and influencing all of us.
Through this series we will explore
how a variety of fundamental structures,
intellectual origins
and cultural roots shaped
value system, social practices,
institutions and meaning in
our lives and society today.
For more information on
all the exciting events
and courses at Columbia, over the summer,
please visit summer.sps.columbia.edu.
That's the shameless
pitch, let me continue.
To initiate our series.
This evening, I'm pleased to introduce two
of our most accomplished faculty members,
Shamus Khan and Nicholas Lemann.
Professor Khan is chair of
the sociology department.
But together with his
co-author Jennifer Hirsch
wrote the landmark book, Sexual Citizens,
which was published earlier this year.
Since then,
he's been working on the
Sexual Health Initiative,
which seeks to understand sexual health
and sexual violence on
college campuses and beyond.
He's gonna be interviewed
tonight by Nicholas Lemann,
Dean emeritus of the journalism school
and director of both
Columbia World Projects
and Columbia Global Reports.
Nicholas is a frequent contributor
to the New Yorker magazine
and the New York Times,
among other publications.
And tonight's conversation,
Professor Khan will share a little bit
about his own intellectual journey.
And together with Professor Lemann
will draw upon contemporary examples,
such as our collective
response to COVID-19.
To convey what he finds is vital
and inspiring about using a
sociological lens to examine
and understand our world.
So let me turn this over to Dean Lemann.
And let's begin.
- Thanks, Steve.
And welcome, Shamus,
and welcome to all of
you who might cannot see.
I wanna start, let's
start at the beginning.
So when Shamus, I should say that Shamus
and I have met before this evening,
which I'll make some references
to throughout this session.
So when you were a little boy,
your parents said to
you please make us proud
and become a sociologist right?
- No, not at all.
It's funny when I was a little boy.
And my parents asked
me what I wanted to do.
I told them I wanted to
be a tollbooth collector,
because I thought you sat there all day
and people just handed you money.
And I wondered, like, "Why
are all these schmucks working
"for a living?
"I could just set up a toll booth."
But no, my parents are both immigrants.
So my mother's from Ireland,
she moved here,
just after she finished college,
she was the first in her
family to go to college.
My father was the same
and moved here from Pakistan.
And, my dad really
didn't wanna be a doctor.
Or he did kind of wanna be a doctor.
But he really wanted to be a mathematician
and a physicist.
And it's interesting
because a lot of people
who have parents from the subcontinent
sort of have a lot of
pressure to be physicians
or engineers or something like that.
And I think my dad was just really proud
that he had come to the United States
and his kids could do
whatever they wanted.
They didn't have to make
the sets of decisions
that he made to try and
get out of Pakistan.
And so, my brother is
a political scientists
he runs the kind of largest race equality
think tank in the UK.
And I became a sociologist.
- Yeah, I should say I
have a lot of students
from this subcontinent.
And they'll often say things like,
you haven't really suffered
until you've been a 30
year old single woman
from the subcontinent who
wants to go into journalism.
And you have to face your parents.
But I'm glad your parents
who are more tolerant than the parents
of a lot of my students.
So out of all the things to do
in the world, why sociology?
- So, I think what most drew me
to Sociology was its messiness.
Economics has a kind of clarity to it,
which I really admire.
But it's a heuristic.
It's a way of looking at
the world and you use that
to try and understand everything
from that perspective.
So you can understand, not
just markets but families
and the ways in which
nations interact, et cetera.
But it's a really useful framework
that everybody consistently applies.
Sociology is sort of a mess.
It draws upon a wide range of disciplines,
it thinks up in terms
of political phenomenon,
cultural phenomenon,
demographic phenomenon,
economic phenomenon.
And I kinda liked that about it,
it feels like a hodgepodge
of different areas.
Another way of thinking about this
is I felt like I could
do whatever I wanted
and call it sociology.
And that really appealed to me,
because even in my career,
you still see this I sort of move
between topics all the time
relative to what's interesting to me.
- Let me first sort of
going a little side road
and then come back to the main road
based on what you said about economists,
to me as a non sociologist,
there's a big divide within sociology
between the quantitative
and qualitative people,
you being in the latter category.
The qualitative people are
more like us journalists
they go out and look at
things and talk to people.
Is that a wrong perception on my part?
Or is that in fact a meaningful
division within the field?
- I think for some,
it's a very meaningful
division within the field.
My qualitative work
is really inspired by the
quantitative work of other people.
And so, the very first book
I ever wrote was inspired
by an economics paper.
And it was inspired by a
paper by Thomas Piketty
and Emmanuel Seaz.
It's really classic econ paper,
that basically it uses
American tax return data
to show what inequalities
looked like since 1918.
In the US, and what that paper shows is
that inequality is primarily
driven by wealthy people.
And for me, that was just
such a profound insight.
And it may not seem like that
profound of an insight today.
But I remember when I
first read that paper,
I was in graduate school,
this was, came out in 2003,
I think.
I kind of went around and I said,
"Look, all of inequality is being driven
"by the position of rich people.
"We spend all our time
studying poor people,
"but they're not where the action is,
"shouldn't we be studying
the rich people?"
And I got a lot of pushback for it,
actually, when I first started doing it.
But I think for me,
as a sort of problem driven sociologist.
I'm deeply interested in
combining quantitative
and qualitative work.
And even in the introductory
remarks that Steve noted,
the Sexual Health Initiative
to foster transformation project
was a combination of quantitative
and qualitative work, which I do both.
- (coughs) Excuse me,
I should say as a side (clears throat)...
I intermittently teach a course
in the journalism school on interviewing.
And in the course, I bring
in actors to play parts.
And then the students
have to interview them.
And Shamus has in the
past helped me with this.
And I remember you
playing a wealthy person,
for the students
and you did a very good
job of it, I have to say,
so I don't know if you were
acting or whether that's real,
- It's my tribe.
The early work I did as
a qualitative sociologist
was sort of like an anthropologist
going into elite spaces.
And I actually have spent a
lot of time in those spaces,
not just in coming from Columbia,
I went to an elite boarding school.
And even though my family
was sort of not kind of
long term money family
that would be found in that institution,
among many of the students,
you get to know them pretty well.
And so I would be disappointed Nick,
if I couldn't have performed
the role very well.
Given that, anthropologists
may have their tribes
if they study the Yoruba
or something like that,
and my tribe just happens to
live on the Upper East Side.
- What's the difference
between the sociologists
and anthropologists
since they both are
studying human societies?
Where are those two different disciplines?
- Sure.
For a long time, they worked
as different disciplines
And even in some universities today
in some smaller liberal
arts colleges, for example,
the departments are combined,
you have departments of
sociology, and anthropology,
in particular, in the French tradition.
So in the tradition of Emile Durkheim,
the distinction between the
two hasn't been that strong
for very long.
I think the defining
feature has become method,
where anthropologists
primarily use a method
of field research.
Which is a kind of ethnographic method
where they go and they're
deeply immersed in a place
for a long period of time.
And sociologists, some
of us use that method,
but we use lots of other methods.
So we also interview people,
which tends not to be a strong
approach for anthropologists.
We do shorter term studies.
So we're anthropologists
sort of often spend years
in their sites, we may do it
for six months or something.
And then we also do other
kinds of quantitative work
and sort of a huge wide range of work
that has nothing to do with
spending time with people.
Textual analysis.
So say,
using computers to sort of
scrape huge amounts of text
and then say,
how do we see what the
patterns are within this text?
And so I think the difference
is that we do a little bit
of what anthropology does,
then we have all these other
things we also tend to do.
The second big division,
I think, is not methodological,
but anthropologists tend to
be much more theoretical.
And by that I think
that they put a huge emphasis
on the conceptual apparatus
of what it is they're doing.
And in my own work,
theoretical development
is kind of important,
but really,
like rich description of just
what's happening out there,
and why that matters is super
important to somebody like me.
- Let me go back
and then go back forward
into into sociology
and just go back to why did you decide
to become a sociologist?
I know that at one point you
were very serious pianist,
for example.
- Violinist
- Violinist
and did you think about
completely other careers
did you think about other
academic disciplines?
Was there a moment?
- Yeah, when I started college,
I never thought I'd be a
sociologist and in fact,
the first course I took in
college was a sociology course.
And I absolutely hated it.
I thought it was the worst
course I'd ever taken.
And I found it totally unpleasant.
And I was really interested
in math and classics.
But the teacher who also
happened to be my advisor said,
"Why don't you go take a
course with my colleague,
"who's very different than I am?
"And I think
"you'll really like that
class and he was right."
And I think,
what it was was sociology provided me
with a capacity to sort
of understand things
that I have seen before
but hadn't been able to make
sense of and famous Columbia
sociologists C. Wright Mills wrote a book
called The Sociological Imagination.
It's kind of a classic in sociology.
And, he argues that sociology
is the combination of personal stories
and social structure,
or it's a combination of
biography and history,
it's two ways of saying
some of the same things.
And, elements of biography
that were really difficult
for me to make sense of was why it was
that when I went away to
this elite boarding school,
I didn't always feel at home,
even though I was a
very successful student.
And part of the struggle for me there,
part of the struggle at that
institution was the ways
in which my family didn't really,
culturally match with the
expectations of the institution.
I was a pretty big
nerd, a pretty big geek.
And that wasn't really
what the institution
as much as it claimed to be a
place of academic excellence
wasn't really what a place like
that sought to produce among young people.
And so,
I guess what sociology
made me capable of doing
was aligning a series of
misalignments in my life
where I had a bunch of experiences
that I wasn't sure how to make sense of.
And it helped me do that.
And it helped me do that,
in large part by making
me realize the deep impact
of what we as sociologists
call social organizations
and social structures.
- Yeah, so I just wanna pick up on that
and go a little more into
how sociologists think,
do it in the manner of, anybody seen
I don't know if you have
the movie Wayne's World.
And remember when they meet
Alice Cooper and bow down
and say. "Not, worthy, not worthy."
That that's a little
bit like my experience
as a journalist with sociologists
because, journalists,
like many human beings think naturally
and what I would call narrative logic.
The world is moved by individuals,
individuals can be divided into good guys
and bad guys.
And life is a sort of struggle
between good and evil.
So when I first started,
I remember the moment I
was working on a book,
and I ran across an essay called
social structure and enemy,
which you know very well
written by Robert Kay Martin,
and I thought,
this is really interesting.
I've never thought about
the world this way.
He says in the essay, basically,
that when people share the same goals,
but they don't have the
means to reach the goal,
some of them don't,
engage in what other people
regard as aberrant behavior,
but they sort of want the same thing.
So I called him up and went to see him.
He lived at 450, Riverside Drive,
he was a Columbia professor.
I was not then.
And he said,
"Kid there's this thing
called social structure
"that have to learn about."
And that was the beginning of my education
that the world wasn't properly seen
as a fight between good guys and bad guys,
or what we like to say in
journalism, corrupt officials
and whistleblowers, that kind of thing.
So what is social structure?
And how are we to understand why
people do the things they do?
- Yeah,
it's a cliche to think
about this debate in sociology
between structure and agency.
And the debate is,
are people engines of their own lives?
Or are their lives determined
by the conditions under which they live?
And I say it's a cliche because it...
The way that we sociologists
think about this is how our own actions
produce the structures
and our structures
reproduce our own actions.
And so let me give an example
of this because I think,
these words like structure and agency,
they're not always that useful,
they give the the appearance
of analytic precision,
when actually they
obscure a lot of things.
And this isn't just a
sociological insight,
but it's certainly an insight
that sort of aligned with
lots of sociological insights.
So,
one way to think about gender
is the gender is something
that you are, people have a gender.
Another is to think about
it as something that we do.
And in so far as we do
it, we reproduce it,
and we reproduce it in particular ways.
And if you think about gender
as something that you do,
We can walk through lots of examples
of the ways in which we all do gender.
So, for example, when
people have children,
the ways in which people
buy gifts for those kids,
the toys that they get for
them, those are actions
that help reproduce an
understanding of gender,
sort of these sets of
actions that help make
and remake a gender all the time.
In this sense,
their agency really matters.
Like they actually do this by say,
buying boys trucks and buying girls dolls,
and I'm thinking in
terms of boys and girls,
and those actions are
deeply, deeply meaningful.
But another way
that gender is done is
through an organization of,
say, our schooling or the
organization of day-to-day life
that helps reproduce those actions
and make them more legible
or more sensible in all kinds
of sort of profound ways.
And so to think about
gender as a structure,
so to think about it, not
just as something that we do,
but a set of institutions, that make
that doing legible,
requires a little bit of
a different perspective.
It requires us to think,
Okay,
what are the sets of things in a society
that help reproduce gender
in the way that it gets done?
And, one of them, of
course, would be households
and the ways in which we tend
to structure our households
and who does different
kinds of work within it.
You may not think about sort of schooling
as a gendered phenomenon,
but there are deep pressures
within systems of schooling
that help reproduce gender orientations.
So the ways in which we describe
different kinds of careers
and the skills that
have to be good at them.
And, if we look, for example, at surgeons,
overall surgeons are
disproportionately male.
And we can generate a really
gendered explanation of that.
We can be like,
"Wow, surgery requires cutting things."
And that's gross.
And, boys are more likely to like that.
And it also requires being assertive
and making really quick decisions.
But like we could generate
a totally different account of surgery,
like surgery is effectively sewing,
It requires really fine
motor skills in the hands
and little kinds of sewing
of different objects in ways
that saves lives, and it
requires deep compassion.
And so there's a sort
of just so story there
in the ways in which we deploy gender.
We might then think about
what are the sets of things
that help produce gendered patterns
that aren't just individual choice?
That aren't just Nick,
as you sort of said,
the cruel CEO who happens to
discriminate against women,
that person exists.
But there are lots of other
reasons that make it difficult
for us to have equality among
surgeons relative to gender,
that are about how we've decided
to organize how surgery happens,
how we've decided to organize workplaces.
And importantly, sociology
helps us sort of reveal that.
It helps us see like,
not that women are making rational choices
not to enter surgery,
but instead that they're are aspects
or ways in which we've organized
the performance of surgery
that dry women out and
that pull in men in.
- So let me use that as a segue
into your work on sexual assault
with Jennifer Hirsch, so, to me,
this is sort of the perfect example
of the difference between
how journalists think
and how sociologists thing
because as you have noticed,
and when we want to, we
journalists want to tackle
that issue, we look for a
really, really bad person
and expose that person's mistakes.
And, one can say, that's the Lord's work
that does good things.
And to some extent, it brings
to light as a minor theme,
the underlying structures.
But, your work as I read it,
it starts with a whole
different set of questions,
then, let's find the bad guys
and call them to account.
- Oh, absolutely.
and it's not that we don't
think people act badly.
But there are a whole
bunch of other things
that we think about
when we're trying to
explain sexual assault.
And so,
so much of the attention to sexual assault
is on questions of adjudication like,
who was right?
Who was wrong?
What are the he said, she said moments?
And how do we figure out
who's the protagonist and
antagonist within this.
And even within journalistic stories,
that setup leads you into
all kinds of places where,
if you think about the Duke story
from Rolling Stone where you end up
in places where things
can flip really quickly,
I think we're seeing also,
the ways in which the narrative arc
of the Biden story is happening
right now as part of this.
So, Tara Reid is moved from
being protect protagonists,
to maybe the antagonist, someone who was,
an under sung hero to now
maybe somebody who's the exact opposite,
but for us, this is like,
not a very helpful way
to think about things.
And so I'll give you an example of like,
what someone like me
would think about when they
think about sexual assault.
Furniture, and like, it seems
totally absurd at first,
what does furniture have
to do with sexual assault?
If you think about two young
people hanging out together,
they're at an event party
or something like that.
And they end up saying,
let's get out of here,
and they go back to one of their rooms.
In that room, in a college environment,
there are typically four
pieces of furniture, the desk,
the chair, a bureau and a bed.
And if the two of them
are going to sit together,
they're going to sit on a bed.
It's awkward not to do that.
And beds have social meaning.
And so someone like me
looks at this and thinks,
wow,
look at the deep ways in
which the built environment
has facilitated certain
kinds of behaviors.
So let's not just think
about like, what it is
that these people are as human beings
in terms of their clear moral character,
but let's instead think about
aspects of the situation
or the context that makes the actions
that they're undertaking a
little bit more understandable,
Nick, we can also take the interaction
that's happening right now.
if we were at dinner,
this would be really
intolerable as an interaction,
because there's not a
lot of give and take,
and you have very generously
asked me a lot of questions.
And I've never reciprocated.
I haven't turned it around and said,
What about you, Nick,
what about your work?
And, one way to read that
is that I am a megalomaniac
and you are a very polite human being.
And we are in this situation
because of my megalomania
and your, politeness to
the point of passivity.
Another way of reading it is,
we're both playing the role
that we're supposed to play.
We're doing the thing that
we've been asked to do,
which is that this is an interview
and I'm the person being interviewed.
Sorry, go ahead.
- When I'd say similar
things to my students.
When I teach this interview in class,
I'll start off and I'll say,
so you go to the doctor,
and the doctor is wearing a white coat,
And the doctor says,
"I've never laid eyes on you before.
"But I want you to take
all your clothes off now."
Until you say,
Why do you do that?
Because it's a signifier that
he's not who he really is.
He's playing a role.
And you know he's in
role and you're in role.
So then if you're a journalist,
think about what would our
uniform be if we wore uniform?
And what are all this things,
the promises embedded in the uniform,
like what you just said,
I'm gonna be able to ask
you personal questions
that I might not ask if we were
(conversation drowned out by interference)
expect you to say,
doing
By this list it's useful
to think about people playing these roles.
I wanna pivot to a couple
go to first thing
that I struggle with
in my sociological study of sociologists.
On the one hand per our
previous discussion,
one of my sociologist friend
saying you as a journalist,
stop putting everything
into this frame of good guys
and bad guys,
and try to understand people,
the way like in a certain way
a botanist would understand plants.
The plant grows in this direction,
not cause it's a good
plant or a bad plant,
but because the environment
encourages it in some way
and you've got to find out
what the encouragement is.
So you're supposed to take
your body out of yourself
in a way a more to pay
yet many sociologists
I know including
passionately wanna change,
the world and make it a better place.
So how do you square this
kind of anti moralizing
form of research with
a desire to make change
if you have a desire to make change?
- Yeah, I do have a desire to make change.
And I think, part of the
answer is that I think
that change comes through understanding,
not through judgment.
And that empathetic understanding
that trying to have a deep understanding
of why people are doing
what they're doing,
helps you transform that behavior in a way
that standing in judgment doesn't.
And,
I think we can return to the
sexual assault case here.
It's not that I don't think
that there are sociopaths out there
and that they require addressing,
I certainly actually think
that that's the case.
I just think that they're
probably a small portion
of the people who are
committing assaults overall.
And I think that the fantasy
that we're gonna punish
our way out of a problem,
or that we can just
yell at people be like,
"Just act better."
And that they're going to act better,
is really naive.
Like, you know, we know that
this didn't work with obesity.
It's like still not working.
It never worked with smoking,
it's not working with drinking,
what's required is actually
a multi sectoral approach.
Now what I mean by a multi
sectoral approach is like,
think about driving.
How is it that young people learn
to safely move two ton vehicles
through the world without
killing other people?
We don't do what we do
for sex ed, which is to say,
all you gotta know is
to stop at a stop sign,
just learn how to stop at a stop sign.
And we're good to go.
And make sure you look out for stop signs.
It's like not at all what we do,
we do lots of things
we sort of think about,
okay, how's the car designed?
And how safe is the car?
Are there seat belts?
and we're going to require
people to wear them.
Yes, we are, create some moral pressure.
And then maybe we should have heard cuts
to protect pedestrians.
And if there are trees that
are in the way of vision,
maybe we should cut those down.
And maybe we should have
entire training programs
for people before they
can ever get into a car.
The idea is you don't teach
someone to drive by saying like,
"Don't hit anybody with your car."
That is not actually an
effective way of doing it.
But for so many of our
other social problems,
we have this like kind of
uni dimensional understanding
that like if we just berated
people enough to act better,
they'd actually act better.
And so from my perspective,
like understanding
and in particular,
empathetic understanding,
it is super important.
So if we take the COVID example.
There's this huge amount
of what I would sort of
describe as like outrage,
pornography of people in
large groups right now
in the United States.
And you know, the approach is like,
we need to berate those
people into acting better,
and we need to stand in judgment of them.
And my perspective as a
sociologist is totally different.
It's like, am I pissed
off that that's happening?
Yes, I am.
But do I think
that screaming at young
people, "Act better."
is gonna actually get them
to do anything differently?
No, what I think is
that I need an empathetic understanding.
I need to, in some ways,
come to an understanding of
why they're acting the way
that they're acting, which is partially
it's not a personality trait.
It's like, what is the context they're in?
What are the networks?
What are their ties to other people
that are driving them to
act in particular ways?
Why does this make sense to them?
Why do they think this way
and if I can get at that,
I can get a lot closer
to a social intervention
that may actually be successful
in transforming behavior.
Let me just stay with the
Coronavirus crisis for a minute
and go back to something
was much earlier in the conversation,
which is inequality.
It's been going up pretty
relentlessly for about 40 years.
It looks to me like this
crisis is gonna make it worse.
Not better.
Am I being too alarmist?
No, I don't think you
are being too alarmist.
No, I think, I'll pause just and say,
social scientists have a
pretty bad track record
of prediction.
So even if we're pretty good at analysis.
Our track record of
prediction is not great.
And I try not to do too much prediction,
but I still give in to
the impulse all the time.
So, I think that there are profound things
that are happening right
now relative to COVID
that are tied to a range
of political decisions
that we're making,
but also tied to,
the experiences of marginal communities.
And so, the way in which
I think about COVID is not
that it's, the great equalizer.
It's actually the great amplifier.
So,
it's not actually, we're
not all in this together.
I, live in Harlem, not far
from Columbia University,
in a lovely apartment
that where I can order
food to be delivered to me,
And meanwhile,
somebody has to deliver that food.
I'm putting them at risk
in part by keeping
myself in safe conditions
and there are ways
that this happens on a tremendous scale.
Because would that person
even be able to do that task,
they may have to get on the
subway, et cetera, et cetera.
And so, one of the things
that we're seeing is the degree
to which COVID is both reflecting
and amplifying existing
patterns of inequality.
The absurd relationship right
now between the stock market
and the employment rate, is something
that's fairly astonishing.
And even if we look at this
is getting into the weeds
and maybe stepping into the econ
around a little bit too much,
but, the range of social policies
that sought to not keep people in jobs,
but to pay them outside of employment,
social policies right now,
like from the Federal Reserve
that's trying to drive people
into the stock market versus into bonds,
which is making people like
Jeff Bezos way wealthier,
way wealthier because of
the rather absurd condition
where 40 million Americans
by tomorrow will have lost their jobs.
And over a year, the long year,
stock markets probably lost around 6%
of its value more since January.
But this is something
that is just a tremendous amplification
of existing patterns of inequality.
- Yeah, I'm just very aware
that at least speaking
for you and me,
not necessarily all the
people watching this,
we have salary jobs.
We have TIAA CREF accounts
that have been performing,
as you just said,
and we have totally transportable work
that can pretty much be done on zoom.
And,
our biggest problem
is feeling a little cut off
from the world and frustrated.
(scoffs) that's not the real world.
- No, and I think,
if one of the things
that we should think about
when looking at inequality is how,
in looking at those
patterns of inequality,
it's not that productivity
hasn't been increasing productivity
has actually been going
up in non-trivial ways
across the United States,
it's that the rewards to
productivity are pretty much gone.
There's a small group of
us in the United States,
who are seizing huge
portions of the rewards.
This is thought of like as
winner take all markets.
And we see this sort of across the board.
We see this even in our
own fields of academia.
The difference in the
wages of somebody like me,
who is a full professor,
tenured Ivy League professor,
and an adjunct faculty member is massive.
Just absolutely massive.
And we have the same exact qualifications.
And so,
I think that the question will be
what are the sets of things
that those at the most
advantaged positions
are either willing to
or forced to give up in order
to weather a kind of new world
on the other end of this,
and if there's an
unwillingness to do that,
I'm actually, concerned
that the consequence of
this is really gonna be,
a huge amplification of inequality
on the level of something
that's almost unimaginable.
The death toll of COVID
is not just the number of people
who are gonna die of COVID,
it's gonna be all the people
who are put under huge amounts
of stress with loss of work,
loss of health care, et cetera.
That will likely resolve
in early mortality
for millions of people.
And so the ways in
which we respond to this
and have been in some ways
willing to let 10s of millions
of people sort of languish
is gonna have massive long
term impacts on death rates
on early mortality
on even on people who are
being born in this moment,
there are fetal conditions
under which their rate
growing up as fetuses,
is putting them at risk
for all kinds of negative health impacts.
And that is like,
disproportionately happening
among the most marginal members
of our society.
- I wanted to go to audience questions.
And here's the first one
which is related to what
we're talking about.
This is about what we hear is
a surge in domestic violence
that's been taking place
while everybody's in lockdown.
How should we understand that
and what could be done about it?
That is an incredible question.
It's a really good one.
I've just started a conversation
with a literature professor
at another university who's
looking at this in Brazil
and trying to think about,
is there some of the estimates are that
there's been sort of a 50%
rise in domestic violence.
And so the question becomes,
why is that happening?
And what can be done about it?
And,
I'm not a scholar of violence.
And so I do work on sexual assault,
it's a very particular kind of it.
I don't actually do work
primarily on domestic violence.
And so I'll just as a caveat
to the person who's asked this question,
give them a sense that,
maybe my answer is not as expert
as other people's answers might be.
But I think that there's
a range of explanations
for why this could be happening.
The first is stress.
And the degree to which economic
and also social stressors
can in particular lead
to rises in violence.
The relationship there is not
as strong as some of us think.
But it's still there,
to a non-trivial degree
and the second thing
is to think about actually to
use our old analogy of space
and who has control over domestic spaces
and the ways in which
that gets worked out.
And then the third is to just think like,
"What is happening here?"
Domestic violence is in
some ways, a neuter term
for what is vastly
disproportionate male violence.
So domestic violence
is not actually just violence in the home.
It's violence that men
are committing in the home
and that sort of the
degendering of that term
requires some degree of challenging.
There's a set of interesting findings
about the ways in which experiences
of emasculation can lead men
to support all kinds of things,
and to engage in actions
that can be particularly harmful.
And so one of the questions
is what can we do relative
to moderating a series
of experiences of
emasculation within the home,
and that can either be
because man in the home
don't actually have a lot
of power in their own homes,
which is maybe counterintuitive,
but somewhat likely to men outside
of the home have lost a
huge amount of the support
that they previously had.
And the first thing I would think of
is like pointing to the Deep Impact
of potentially pure effects on people.
And so here, one insight of sociology is
that we might be able to think about
the ways in which
behaviors are contagious.
And what that means is
that we don't just have
epidemics of biological phenomenon.
We have epidemics of
behavioral phenomenon,
and that those epidemics
of behavioral phenomenon
are transferred through networks,
they actually get transferred from person
to person to person.
Now, you may wonder, how is it possible
that there could be a transferal
of behavior from one person to another,
in a case where people
are socially isolated,
but just think of where we are right now,
like we are interacting.
We're not virtually interacting,
we're actually interacting,
you are seeing me
and so, I think one of the ways
to think about this is like,
what are the positive sets of behaviors
that we could imagine mobilizing,
that might help spread through networks
of male-to-male peers.
And this means a bunch of things.
But I think the evaluation
that I would say,
and I'm sorry, I'm giving
such a long answer to this,
but there are three ways
to think about like
addressing bad behavior,
speed, certainty and severity.
Severity tends to be our go to,
which is like if something bad happens,
we act really severely to it.
But it happens to be also one
of the least effective ways
of addressing behavior.
Speed and certainty are
actually much more effective.
And so for me,
the question would be one of the ways
in which we can institute quick
and fairly regular
responses to poor behavior
that may lead people
to act in better ways.
And I think leveraging pure
influence through networks
is one of the ways in which
we could creatively imagine
that happen.
- I'm gonna move to the next
question from the audience
and that is, we've had
a, not just in the US,
but globally a surge in
sort of right wing populism.
Authoritarianism.
A kind of weird association
between elements to the economic elite
and religious fundamentalism.
This is happening in country after country
not excluding our own.
Why is this happening?
What's driving it?
- Yeah, it's a super fascinating question.
It's a hard question.
Actually, Nick,
I think you would be good
at answering this as well.
So maybe I'll take a stab
I'd be interested in
hearing what you think.
So some of this actually,
I would relate this back to
experiences also of masculinity.
It may seem surprising to think about that
but it's important to know
that these things aren't
necessarily universal.
It's particular sets of people
who are more likely to embrace this
and that tends to be men.
And when we talk about
increasing levels of inequality,
we talk about that in
a really general term
that masks an important
set of phenomena relative
to that inequality.
Which is that wages overall,
for the average worker has
remained relatively flat
in the United States since the mid 70s.
But that masks an
important gender dynamic,
which is that women's wages
have increased in non-trivial ways
over that period in time,
and men's wages have actually declined.
And there used to be this idea
comes from a sociologist Andrew Cherlin,
who writes about the family wage.
And that men's wages
is for a very long time,
were actually hyper inflated
because men were understood
not just to make money
for themselves, but actually to make money
for an entire family.
And the idea of a family
wage has largely evaporated.
But one of the things I'm pointing to here
is that the experience of men
and in the United States,
white men in particular,
has been one of a non-trivial
loss of political,
social, cultural and economic power.
You guys may think like, no
white men are still dominant,
look at who the
presidential candidates are,
look at who CEOs are,
et cetera, et cetera.
And I will say, you're absolutely right.
But in a broad base, men's relative wages
compared to all other kinds of groups
over the last 40 years,
has declined in non-trivial ways.
Men, their overall control
over the cultural apparatus
has gone from being
like 99.5% to about 75%.
And I think hear of it, like this,
beware the wounded Lion,
beware the way
in which a former really
dominant political actor
has experienced a relative decline
and is able to identify some people
that are responsible for that.
So who are the people who
responsible for the decline?
Black Americans
who used to be in much
worse social conditions,
were hardly in great
social conditions now,
but it's way better than
it was in the 1960s.
Women who, again, are not,
they're not in dominant social positions.
But it sure as heck is
better than it was long ago.
Gays and lesbians used to be
an incredibly marginal group
in the United States.
All of these groups have
seen relative increases
in their status.
And white men have experienced
non-trivial status declines.
And so as societies have opened
up to all kinds of groups
that they've been closed to before,
there has been a palpable decline
in the political power of
the formerly dominant group.
And there is a huge backlash against that.
And we're seeing that
I think it really pronounced
ways in the United States.
I don't know if you'd agree Nick.
- Yeah,
I would just harken back to
something you said earlier,
which is about actually
economists and sociologists,
so the standard, at least
in my adult lifetime,
liberal economists way of
thinking about inequality
in these kinds of problems is,
you solve it on the back
end, you solve it by,
trying to drive down using Keynesian means
drive down the unemployment rate,
have a progressive tax system, et cetera.
It seems to me one of the
great sociological truths
is people experience the
life they live in society.
They don't experience it as
like looking at a balance sheet.
And so, you can say it's
important, just something you said
very briefly to sort of address
people's perceived needs,
at the level at which they perceive them,
which tends to be, for
instance, employment,
unemployment, security of employment.
So in the '80s and '90s,
which you're too young to remember,
but I do.
In elite liberal circles
if you had any suspicion of free trade,
you were regarded as a kind of nut job,
because free trade is good for everybody.
And you'd see this tremendous
amount of resentment
in blue collar communities
against free trade.
And now it's finally become
politically respectable.
But that's an example
that,
it doesn't matter as much
what your aggregate economic condition is
as what the life you live is like,
and if your dignity of work
and your place of work
has been taken away,
it means something.
I wanna switch, we're getting
close to the end here.
There's a couple questions
about social media.
So I'm curious kind of what you
and your fellow sociologists
think about this.
One feature of social media
is it's an open platform.
So you can say things that are
true and you can say things
that are untrue.
You can say things that
are positive and wonderful
and you can say things that are hateful.
Anybody can say anything,
anybody can receive anything.
It may change the way
people orient themselves.
There, what you would
call, a reference group.
I'm just would like to hear you reflect on
is the rise of social media,
a really big change in the
sociology of our society?
- I think so, I think it
has had non-trivial impacts.
And that,
when I say non-trivial impacts,
it may make you think like,
"Well, that's not a very
ringing endorsement of a thing."
But, nothing matters that much
and everything kind of matters.
And that's sort of like the approach
of a sociologist is like,
if you can move something
by, 5%, that's huge.
It's not that likely
that you can sort of move
societies in massive ways.
I think that the,
it's super interesting how
the anxiety of some older people like
you and me, Nick, maybe even
relative to social media,
versus the ways in which
people actually use it.
So I'll give just a quick example
that draws on some of my own work
and, work of other people
about hookup apps or apps
that people use to meet
potential sexual partners.
And there's a non-trivial
amount of anxiety
about those things, about the ways
in which people use those things.
And let me say facts first,
young people are not
having sex at earlier ages
than they did then than
they did 20, 30 years ago.
Second,
young people are actually having less sex
than people did 20 years ago.
So there's not more sex happening.
And if you think about this entire thing,
that's like massively
facilitating the capacity
to find a willing sexual partner,
it's not leading to
increases in sexual activity.
And so, I think you have to think about
how it is that people
actually use the thing
and experiencing.
And here, I think that
there's an enormous amount
of really interesting work.
scholar at Stanford,
Forrest Stuart is doing stuff
about the sort of
interaction between online
and offline engagement,
and how the ways in which people
are actually using these things
are radically different
than the sort of fantasy.
So, for me, the question would be,
is social media producing the polarization
that we see in the silos?
Or is it reflecting the
polarization and the silos
that already existed
and it's actually making
them much more visible.
And I would kinda be a
little bit in the latter camp
that political polarization
has been going on
for quite some time, quite some time
before the advent of social media.
And that the divides in the country
are becoming increasingly
political polarized places
happened way before Twitter.
That trend started much, much earlier.
And so I think
social media needs to be thought
of not as a virtual place
but a real place.
It needs to be thought
of not as a simulation of interaction,
but an actual interaction.
And we need to think seriously
not in like wring our hands
about how it's doing X or Y
in the way that hook up apps
are supposedly doing that.
But actually take the
sociological approach
of empathetic understanding
in order to try
and make sense of what's
happening in those places.
- I am.
There's this sort of notorious article
by a journalistic colleague of mine,
who's a wonderful person
called Tinder Apocalypse,
in which she said
that the development of Tinder
is the most important
change in human civilization
since the development of agriculture.
(laughs)
So.
But I wanna just call
attention of our audience
for the non sociologists in the room
to what just happened here
in terms of laying out
how sociologists think.
So, almost without noticing it, maybe,
Shamus is trained to say
if everybody thinks X,
then I'm not gonna accept
that as the gospel truth
just 'cause everybody thinks it instead,
I'm gonna treat it as a hypothesis.
I'm gonna try to test it with data.
I'm gonna examine my own assumptions
that I'm bringing to this and
ask myself the tough question,
what are they really?
And maybe they're wrong.
I'm gonna offer an alternative
hypothesis and test that.
It is not how people naturally
think in my experience.
It has to be learned.
But once you learn it,
which you have deeply
and I have shallowly through
knowing people like you,
it just changes it makes the world
look completely different.
Because you're not accepting
what's being handed to you.
- No, I think it's a
very, very simple thing,
which is to how do you think,
with a scientific method
and the scientific method
advances in the following way.
You don't seek to prove yourself right?
You seek to prove yourself wrong.
So I thought to myself,
my hypothesis is that
everybody at Columbia is a man
and Nick and Shamus are both at Columbia.
And so Columbia must be all men.
I have evidence of that,
therefore, it's true.
I would be making a massive,
massive error because as it turns out,
the majority of students in
the broad Columbia system,
Columbia and Barnard of
undergraduates are majority women.
And so instead, what you ask
is, how might I be wrong?
How might I be wrong?
And then you go look for
evidence of where you're wrong.
And you write in ways that do this.
So you basically say,
"Okay, where am I wrong?"
What are the limits to my argument?
And if you can't find
evidence that you're wrong,
you're not right.
You just say to yourself, I
might be right about this,
I might actually have
a leg to stand on here.
And so what you constantly seek
is not affirmation of your idea.
But instead, as we call it negation,
you seek to negate what you
think to negate what you think,
to negate what you think.
And if the idea still holds up.
After you've worked as hard as
you can to try and negate it.
You say to yourself, there
might be something there.
And importantly, when you write,
you then write in in a similar way,
you sort of present the argument,
but then you say,
"Actually, there are limits to this.
"Here's where I'm wrong about this.
"It doesn't extend to all cases."
You often negate what it is
you said in previous instances,
to let people know the
kind of bumper rails
or parameters of your own understanding.
And to me, it's an enormously
frustrating enterprise.
Because as it turns out, you discover
that you're mostly
wrong, most of the time,
but it's also a deeply satisfying one.
Because instead of asking
yourself constantly,
"What's my take on this?"
You ask yourself,
"What's right?
"What's actually most likely to be true?
"And how can I come to that
"and actually have not my understanding,
"but an understanding?"
- To me, that's really inspiring.
And I hope his too, our audience.
It's eight o'clock now,
so we have to wind up.
But thank you very, very
much for doing this.
And as we leave,
I wanna say there's a
similar event tomorrow night,
with another celebrated
Columbia Professor Brian Greene,
a physicist but a very
public facing physicist
who runs the World Science Festival
and writes best selling books and so on.
And he's going to be in conversation
with an author of Faith Salie.
And that's also at seven
o'clock tomorrow night.
So please tune in then.
And thanks for being with us.
And Shamus, thanks to you, especially
for taking time to do this tonight.
It's been fascinating.
- It's been wonderful.
Nick, I always love our conversations
and thanks to everybody at SPS
for the huge back end of
people who pulled this together
and made it possible.
Thanks, everyone.
- Thanks.
(mellow piano music)
