Yet at the same time, it is strong ties that have the kinds of grand effects on personality and ideology that McPherson et al mention in the first article. Acquaintances or contacts will not shape our view on how “people like us” behave or mold our deepest convictions about political or social issues. It’s the people that we interact with, indeed those we have chosen, that influence what kinds of people we will meet and interact with in the future.

I felt as though the passage, “In the parties and sects into which we are divided, we sometimes learn to love our brother at the expense of him whom we do not in so many respects regard as a brother” is one of the most profound in the reading. It alludes to the power of positive feedback in homophily. Like the prison debate where we tend to assume that punishment is a zero sum game, perhaps we can take a similar attitude towards homophily. It is a dangerous idea that we only love those who are similar to us as much as we are averse to those who are different. In my opinion, this is a somewhat prevalent idea in society – the fact that if you hold respect for many kinds of people, you haven’t really defined the notion of respect or admiration.

Later in the article, the author mentions that there are different kinds of social capital – both the kind that allows for cooperation and mutual benefits as well as the kind that allows gangs to function well and Timothy McVey to blow up buildings. Increasing the first while suppressing the second kind seems to be a big goal of the authors in the second article. I believe that suppressing idea of a dichotomous society is integral in achieving these ends. The positive benefits of social interaction still hold true even if the idea of “feeling connected” to people is more diffuse. The more we can promote universal connection in addition to the individual, the more we can curb positive feedback and use it to socially desirous ends.

While I do not contest that clusters of like people form in social networks far beyond the rate that would statistically be predicted as chance, I found myself continually questioning the assumptions made in the review article. Of course, given that we are reading an interpretation of studies done by others, I suppose I could be more charitable to the initial articles in my reading of the review, but it was nevertheless frustrating. For example, in the section on the progressions of methodology, there was relatively little historical context mentioned to shed light on the changing traditions in this line of research. As far as the section on race, I feel that reporting on studies nearly 20 years old without mention of how factors today may have caused (or not caused) the results of such findings to change a bit problematic. Have affirmative action policies affected homophilic processes? How does homophily explain the rise in mixed-race marriages that exist today? Robert Zajonc (at Stanford) did an classic study which showed that mere exposure to outgroup members has the tendency to increase liking–how would such a theory play in? I would like to comment on a recent article from the reading on race and exposure, but there simply wasn’t one in the section. Also, I’d like to suggest that in the Shrum et al study (1988) that homophily along racial lines among school children, especially during this period, may be due to the general racial homogeniety at most schools; at diverse schools, media representations of typical school relationships also socialized students to remain within racial lines. Only recently have interracial relationships been portrayed in the media.

I suppose I could go on to question a lot of the article, but will leave that for class. I think more important would an a discussion of what underlying psychological processes cause homophilous relationships to occur. I see the overlying positive feedback loop contributing to homophily, but wonder if the underlying processes act in this way as well.

Connections made over the internet are likely to be homophilous when it comes to education, but as the internet continues to grow stronger in our culture that is likely to decrease. It decreases the effect geography has on homophily, which could mean weakening racial and religious homophily, but I think that it probably strengthen homophily when it comes to beliefs/values…liberals would frequent liberal message boards, atheists would be more likely to frequent websites aimed at atheists, and so forth. However, since the most enduring relationships are face-to-face relationships, it’s hard to say how much an effect this will ultimately have.

As for social capital, it seems that the internet, like TV would lead to a decrease in social capital, since people will be sitting at their computers more. However websites such as Meetup.com also suggest that the internet can be a positive force for organizing. Personally, I hope that as people engage in discussions over the internet rather than having messages delivered to them over TV, and as people meet others with similar interests over the internet, websites will come to make up for some of the loss in social capital that has occured over the last few generations.

What is interesting about this two edged sword is how hard the effects (good or bad) are to predict or index in any sort of generalization. People can “flock together” according to an infinity of different possible traits, from race to age to interest, and grouping along each of these axes seems to come with a unique set of positive and negative consequences. The final chapter we gave from Bowling Alone I think eloquently introduces this idea. For every social problem, there are different types of homophily that are good and bad for it.

The thing is, homophily happens whether we like it or not; and certain /types/ of homophily tend to happen more naturally than others. So, the question is, are these types of homophily good or bad overall, and if they are bad, can we change them?

The feedback loop(s) that fuel homophily are in large part detached from their effect. That is, people often flock even when it is bad for them or society in a broader way. Interestingly the same sociological influences that make homophily such a hard phenomenon to curb, also give some hope that we /can/ change homophily. That is, if we can start groups, joined on the right axes, in small places, with small groups, then the same feedbacks can help these types of similarities take hold in a larger social context. Today we can look at the current trends in socialization, and discuss whether our current formulas for group identity might lead to positive affects, or if we should seek change.

Now, more seriously, I like the observation that Putnam made about the correlation between wealth inequality and a reduction of social capital, particularly the growth of the one in the face of a reduction of the other. He also points out that there is less segregation on almost all other fronts, but insists that has very little to do with the collapse of social capital.

I would tend to agree with him, but I think that he downplays the importance of growth of social equality. First, he mentions Scandinavia as nations with high social capital, but they are also rather xenophobic, so there’s some nice evidence that shows some relation between social inequality and social capital.

Trying to relate this to the other reading: if homophily is still important, but most demographic homophily is becoming less important–except for wealth–and it takes money to have social capital, especially as more and more people fall below the middle class line. Thus, we could see income class as becoming the primary means of “homo”ness in status homophily, which would lead the people with the means to support social capital (the rich) to value their relationships with the “others” much less. And since there are fewer people in the middle who can support even modest civil society, we can see the decline.

Of course, Putnam sort of mentions this as a possibility, but he says we don’t have enough evidence for this kind of hypothesis, and we don’t, but we do however have enough evidence from homophily in general to see that you will not bother spending time with people who aren’t similar to.

See, for example:
news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/uk/06/prisons/html/nn2page1.stm

I also found the discusion of the “zero sum fallacy” to be very insightful. In previous research I’ve done on the death penalty, I came across many cases where a guilty verdict had been issued and sentencing came down to life imprisonment or the death penalty. I found it very suprising that in many cases, the victim or the victim’s relatives had a deep emotional involvement in the outcome of the sentence. You would think that, either way (life imprisonment or death sentence), justice has been served and the criminal will be prevented from ever comitting a crime again. And yet, many victims and their relatives felt relief when a death setence was handed out, or anger when the punishment was “merely” life imprisonment. Under this “zero sum” logic, anything that hurts the criminal will help the victim, and yet in actual consequences for the victim, the two possible outcomes are indistinguishable.

While this is merely anecdotal, I haven’t encountered such extreme and wide-spread examples of the “zero sum fallacy” in other countries. Combined with the statistics on world prison populations, I wonder whether there is something in particular about American attitudes towards crime and punishment that has led to such racial unequal and high prison populations.

On a related note, the sheer volume of people who are committed to prison is astounding to me. The idea that prison could be an accepted life stage for approximately 9% of the male population means, in essence, that prison has lost its rhetorical evocative power. Ironically, this merely lowers the inhibition to commit crimes and thus increases the need for jail sentence – one of the many feedback loops inherent in the imprisonment system.

In terms of pure numbers, this website: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/prisons.htm has the statistics for all imprisonments in the past 25 or so years, and it’s incredible to me to watch the numbers rise. Interestingly, I also noted that all the articles we read cited male imprisonment rates; apparently females are incarcerated at less than 1/5 the rate of males. However, that gap is narrowing in a similar kind of feedback process, supporting the idea that our society is becoming more stringent in its sentencing in general. However, viewed through the lens of the first article, this is a more than unsettling trend. As both articles indicate, prison is increasingly viewed as recompense to the victims – the idea being that human welfare can be viewed as a zero-sum game. However, as focus is driven away from rehabilitation, there comes a time when we must ask ourselves where this need for vindictiveness comes from. Indeed, punishing offenders does not help victims of crime unless we subscribe to the compelling rhetoric that the first article alludes to.

To conclude my comment, the more I write, the more I realize how complex the issue is. It seems difficult to synthesize the various factors at play into a single coherent explanation for rising imprisonment rates (despite reasonably stable crime rates). However, from these articles, it is clear that they are somehow coalescing to produce a result that is spiraling out of control. I think this week’s readings show, once again, how dangerous feedback loops can be when they become dissociated from their original causes and take on sustentative powers of their own.

What I find interesting about all these various observations is that all these factors might be related or unrelated in complex ways. This is why, I think, I was unsatisfied that the articles did not talk more about the real consequences of the trends in incarceration practices, and specifically their effects on crime and public perception. It seems like there may be more direct feedbacks in play into the trends being analyzed. For example, the decrease in crime rates is probably due, in part, to the stunning increase in prisoners taken. The public perception of crime may be influenced by the media (as when it generates an inflated fear of crimes occuring), but there may be other factors, like those which determine the public’s perception of the prison system itself, and it’s efficacy. One article mentioned in passing the shift in general mentality from the instantiation of a “reformative” justice system versus a “punitive” justice system. In fact, this general mentality tends to oscillate over, as society wavers between the opinion that people are ultimately a product of either their environment, or their nature. Underlying opinions such as these may have a very strong effect on all of the symptoms being discussed in these articles.

I look forward to talking about this in class because it is such a mindbogglingly complex and nuanced issue. Hopefully Jack will have more to say about specific feedbacks and phenomenons that occur, and how the influences of all these different factors come into play.

In fact, I’m not sure how much I buy the desensitization towards the act of crime itself. While images of violence may bother us a lot less than they used to, it seems that our reaction to the act of crime is just as angry as it once was, if not more so. This is why we have the 3 strikes rule and all that fun stuff. We’re not saying, “Oh I just saw Arnold kill 3 people in cold blood in the movies, i guess that when Joe Murderer does it, it’s not so bad either and he can just get community service.” Violent movies almost always result in justice being done to the bad guys. That’s why we see them, so we can feel better about ourselves and reinforce our faith in the system. And that bad guys pay, and they pay hard. So in our society, the bad guys should pay as well.

I managed to read a lot of Jorge’s article, and I’m sure I have a lot to say on the issue, mostly because i don’t know econ. The author discusses the concept of a self-fulfilling crisis, in which people’s own actions trigger the crisis, and not something wrong in the economy of the “attacked” nation. (What a strange term, by the way.) He then discusses warnings from the IMF about Thailand before Thailand collapsed. Is it possible that this was the cause of a currency crisis as well, that even economists can be responsible for self-fulfilling crises?

A few I noticed:
*Building prisons on speculation of course encourages an increase in mass incarceration, therefore increasing the profitability of the private prison industry and encouraging the construction of more and more prisons.
*The lack of trust in the prison system appears to cause people to push for stronger laws, which in turn appears to have made our system in actuality less fair, and thus has increased distrust in the system.
*Our war on drugs and crime has caused police to profile areas that already have high arrest rates, leading to continued high arrest rates. This point is particularly important in the reading’s discussion of African American and low-income areas.
*The media’s coverage of crime leads to increased ratings generating even more coverage of crime. Tangentially, the media’s coverage of crime fosters a negative outlook about our treatment of crime in this country, necessitating more stringent laws.
*Because a criminal record erodes one’s future employment opportunities, ex-prisoners are often forced to repeat a vicious cycle of crime and imprisonment.

A few points in the reading that I think need to be made/discussed:
*According to the Zimring reading, only 90% of schools are considered “safe”–how does the media’s coverage of crime impact what is considered safe, and is anything being done to improve the other 10% of schools? Or are these students being fed into the prison system?
*I thought the discussion of the zero-sum mentally was extremely interesting, but a lot of policy analysts (and lawyers) do recognize the fact that prison sentences do create a vicious cycle likely to increase crime. How much is incarcerating mass numbers of people benefitting society? I would argue that mass incarceration is undermining civic engagement and our ability to function as a democratic society.
*I would argue that not only does the sensationalization of crime in the media create a fearful and negative impression of society, but it also desensitizes people to crime. I think, too, that popularizing crime as normative makes people more likely to resort to crime/violence as a potential solution to problems.