Social Learning Links, 5/28/2025

Andrey Mir on Academic Media; Rob Henderson on poverty and family structure; Faze on the sense of agency; does studying econ shift students to the right?

Andrey Mir writes,

the unprecedented surge in academic publishing has led to the following outcomes:

• Citation inflation;

• Self-reinforcing interdisciplinarity—in the escalating academic race, researchers often struggle to find real issues, so they try to guess the next big trend and construct new subjects, manufacturing bizarre topics;

• The fusion of publishing and publicity due to the spillover of academic activity onto social media;

• Social contagion as a leading factor in idea dissemination; and, resulting from all of it,

• Academic activism.

This what a system looks like when it has been thoroughly gamed.

Rob Henderson writes,

• In 1960, 95% of U.S. children lived with their married biological parents, regardless of income. Today, this figure remains high at 85% among affluent families (top income quintile) but has dropped to 30% among low-income families (bottom quintile)

• Marriage has a powerful effect on upward mobility, even controlling for education and income

• A child born to a married mother with a high school diploma is 3x more likely to graduate from college than one born to an unmarried mother with the same education

In a comment, Faze writes,

Aaron Renn says being employed by a big company "produces a loss of a sense of agency, as people feel at the mercy of large, impersonal forces and institutions they cannot understand or control." But who is more at the mercy of large impersonal forces than the farmer or small businessman? I'd say that American fled rural life and owning their own businesses in order to escape being at the mercy of forces like the weather, rainfall, or changes in fashion and technology. In a big business you can earn a position that gives you control, in a predictable environment, where you can personally affect the destiny of your product, division, or department. I never felt more agency then when I worked for big companies, where I could use my talents to reach specific goals, help meet business objectives, and be recognized for it.

On a farm or a small business, you are at the mercy of the weather and the market. You have relatively few resources at your disposal. But you can make most of your decisions without asking for permission. You don’t need to get approval for every business purchase or to initiate a project or to make a hire.

I guess one can disagree about which environment gives one greater agency. You might prefer the leverage provided by a big organization. I prefer the decision-making scope of a small one.

Yoan Goldstein and Matan Kolerman write,

This study examines how academic fields shape political attitudes, using data on 310,000 students who entered 477 American colleges between 1990 and 2015. The main analysis employs a conditional-on-observables approach, leveraging unusually rich pre-college controls for political attitudes and major preferences. Results indicate that choosing a business or economics major instead of humanities or social sciences reduces liberal self-placement by 0.22 standard deviations (approximately 10 percentage points).

Pointer from Ed West. Obviously, one should be skeptical about whether this is causation or selection, especially because this about majoring rather than just taking one course. I do think that an economics course, by teaching that market outcomes arise from systemic forces (supply and demand) rather than from businesses being robots (agency without feelings) and individuals being babies (feelings without agency) would make one less anti-capitalist in orientation.

substacks referenced above:

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Coming to America

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What I Told RFK's Team at the Department of Health and Human Services

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Academic Activism as an Effect of Digital Media