US Income Inequality: Real, Perceived, Desired

Michael Norton and Dan Ariely, by producing the graph below, have provided an interesting addition to the growing discussion of income inequality in the US.

The two columns on the left come from representative national samples of the American public.

The one on the far left shows the wealth distribution their respondents said would be ideal. In other words, in an idealized version of America, the public thought that the wealthiest 20% of the population (the purple bar) should control about 32% of the total wealth, the second and third quintiles (the blue and green bars) should control slightly more than than their proportionate 'share' (about 22% for each), while the poorest 40% of the population (the yellow and red bars) should control substantially less of the total wealth. In short, the American public embraces the concept of inequality of wealth, but not extreme wealth inequality.

The middle column captures American perceptions of how wealth is currently distributed. Clearly, Americans perceive the country as being more unequal than their 'ideal' distribution. They perceive the wealthiest 20% as having substantially more than ideal, the second 20% as having close to their ideal share and the bottom 60% having substantially less than ideal.

The column on the right shows the actual distribution of wealth in the United States, which is substantially more unequal than the perception. In sum, "respondents to his surveys universally think that wealth is more evenly distributed in the United States than it actually is—and what’s more, respondents say they would prefer for the wealth to be still more evenly spread around."

For more:  What We Know About Wealth

Barbara Ehrenreich: Smile or Die

Continuing with the apocalypse versus optimism theme, here are two versions of Barbara Ehrenreich's summary of her latest book, Smile or Die. The RSA Animation version and the longer lecture that it was taken from.

Bill Freudenburg Tribute Sites

Some of you are, no doubt, aware that noted environmental sociologist William Freudenburg died of cancer last December at the age of 59.

A video tribute site, with lots of interesting material related to Bill's work, is now available.

Specifically, there are the following items:
1) Bill in His Own Words (interview of Bill done in November 2010)
2) The Legacy of Bill (tributes from colleagues who attended Freudenfest)
3) Bill's Blowout in the Gulf Lecture (lecture on his latest book, November 2010)
4) 12 class lectures by Bill, part of his "ENVS 1 Intro to Environmental Studies" course

While the class lectures are nominally 'introductory' material they are informed by Bill's own research and full of unique and unusual insights. Some of his last work placed a special emphasis on “disproportionality,” or the tendency for a major fraction of all environmental impacts to be associated with a surprisingly small fraction of the overall economy as covered in Structural Factors and the Double Diversion: I=PAT and beyond embedded below. (Note: the recording quality on some of the class lectures isn't great and you have to turn the volume all the way up.)

ENVS 1: Structural Factors and the Double Diversion: I=PAT and beyond (Freudenburg 9-30-10) from Environmental Studies UCSB on Vimeo.

Finally, photos of and memories about Bill, testimonials to the personal impact Bill had on their lives and other such things are here.

WalMart, the Supreme Court and Marxism without Revolution

In Marxism without Revolution John Quiggan provides an interesting analysis of the current socio-economic situation: There isn't a proletariat calling for revolution in the Western world. But there clearly is a ruling class, a top 1%, which controls wealth and power. Based on the insights from several books, most notably Jerry Cohen’s if You’re an Egalitarian How Come you’re so Rich, Quittan poses the following question: How can we more effectively oppose the rule of this 1%? (Note: for a wonderful, interactive graph displaying the changing proportion of US income allocated to different groups through time, click here.)

As Cohen puts it, the revolutionary working class postulated by Marx had to satisfy four conditions:
1) They constitute the majority of society;
2) they produce the wealth of society;
3) they are the exploited people in society;
4) they are the needy people in society.
. . . . 1. and 2. give the proletariat the capacity to revolutionise society, and 3. and 4. give them the reason to do so.

It seems clear, as Cohen says, that no sensible definition of the working class is going to satisfy all four conditions.

On the other hand, there clearly is a self-conscious and generally dominant class, centered on control of capital, but including plenty of people whose source of power and wealth is derived from their job rather than from capital income. On a narrow definition, it includes the top 1 per cent of US households which now receive 25 per cent of all income and hold around 35 per cent of all wealth. More broadly, the top 20 per cent of the population has, in broad terms, increased or maintained its share of national income as the top 1 per cent have become richer. This broader group controls more than half of all income and wealth.

. . . .

Coming back to Cohen’s conditions, the case to be made against the top 1 per cent is that:

1) They constitute a tiny minority of society
2) they consume far more of the wealth of society than they actually contribute
3) they exploit their control over capital for their own benefit
4) they are the primary obstacle to meeting a wide range of social needs

. . . .

The existence of those structures mean that a relatively simple set of feasible political demands, primarily involving reversal of the losses of the past few decades, could form a basis for political opposition to the rule of the top 1 per cent. The key elements are fairly obvious, and include

• reimposition of control over the financial system
• restoration of a progressive tax structure, combined with a more vigorous assault on international tax evasion/avoidance
• shifting the burden of ‘austerity’ back to those responsible for the crisis, and rejection of cuts to the welfare state
• repeal of anti-union laws and measures to make union organization easier

With those modest goals in mind (particularly the idea of making it easier for workers to organize and pressure for their needs) it is useful to consider the recent WalMart supreme court ruling. The broad evidence clearly shows that women are, on average, paid less, are less likely to be salaried, and hold lower-ranked positions than men. This is true even though there is less turnover among women, meaning that the average female employee has been working at Walmart significantly longer than the average male employee. You can see the data for yourself here.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the plaintiffs' lawyers had improperly sued under a part of the class action rules that was not primarily concerned with monetary claims. But they were divided 5 to 4, along ideological lines, on whether the suit met a requirement of the class action rules that “there are questions of law or fact common to the class.” Stated another way, the conservative majority among the court used the case as an opportunity to up the threshold for class certification. Room for Debate has an interesting mix of informed reactions to the ruling.

In simple terms, the underlying issue involves the 'homogeneity' of the class. Class action lawsuits are typically done on a contingency basis and are expensive. Thus, in situations where the individual claims are likely to be small, lawyers who undertake this work need to come up with a large class in order to justify their upfront expenses in bringing the case. In the WalMart case the average damage was approximately $1100 per year. So the lawyers devised a scheme that would let them claim 1.5 million potential class members in order compensate for the relatively low per-person claim. And, as a result, the individuals in the class were much more diverse in their personal situations than, for example, individuals exposed to asbestos on the job.

So, how does this all relate back to Quiggan's analysis? One of his suggestions was changes in laws to make union organizing easier. Or, to put the point more generally, to make it easier for the less-powerful to advance their position. This is exactly the opposite of what has happened in the Supreme Court ruling. By upping the bar for what counts as a homogeneous class the Court has made it harder for large, relatively heterogeneous classes with small individual claims to organize in order to redress their grievance.

Inequality and Cohesion

There is a long tradition in sociology, going back to Durkheim, that treats social solidarity -- the process of gluing a society together -- as fundamental. One factor in this process that gets a lot of attention is income inequality. Sociologists and economists have developed lots of different measures, the easiest to conceptualize are measures of "income share"; the percentage of national income received by a particular group (e.g., the top 10% of wage earners take home 30% of all the income).

While there is little agreement on precisely what level of difference is most appropriate (or if there is even such a thing as a single best appropriate level), there is broad agreement that tilting to the extreme in either direction can be problematic. Too little income differential and economic productivity suffers as the rewards and motivation for productivity are removed. Too much income differential and social cohesion suffers as feelings of exploitation or hopelessness spread. In an age of cheap and powerful weapons, the results can be tragic and equally disruptive to economic productivity as many countries in Latin America and Africa have discovered.

Slate contributor Timothy Noah has recently completed the fascinating series The Great Divergence, available in its entirety as a pdf file here. While the increase in income disparity within the US has been the topic of discussion for many years, the series is notable both for placing the debate in the context of a longer historical frame and for the the breadth of the research and explanations it examines.



As the above above graph shows, income disparity within the US has been increasing rapidly since the late 1970's. The difference between rich and poor is now as great as it was at the end of the Robber Baron era. More interesting to me, particularly in light of the current debate about taxes in the US, is the data below taken from the work of Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels (author of Unequal Democracy).

The graph compares the rate of income growth for individuals of different income levels during years of Republican and Democratic presidential administrations. Three things are worth noting. First, income growth at all income levels has been higher when Democrats were president (blue lines) than when Republicans were president (red lines). (Technically, the growth rates at the 95th percentile are equal, even though the graph shows higher growth for the Democrats. The difference for the 95th percentile, unlike for the others, is within the margin or error.)

Second, the length of the blue lines are roughly the same. In other words, "equal economic growth for all" seems to be a more accurate characterization of the outcome under Democrats than "economic redistribution favoring the poor." While the top percentile does do a bit worse than the rest under the Democrats, there is little difference in the rate of income growth among the bottom 80% of the population.

Third,not only does everyone do worse, but the disparities in income growth are dramatically larger during Republican administrations. The poor (20th income percentile) average only .4% income growth under Republicans, while the richest (95th percentile) see their income grow at a substantially higher rate of 1.9%.

Significantly for Canadians, this is one area where information about the US has little relevance for Canada. While poverty and inequality certainly remain issues here, the same trend toward massive increases in inequality aren't present.

For more information, see the Resilience Science post Inequality in the USA -- driven by politics? which summarizes and links to several other related works.

The Quadruple Squeeze on Planetary Boundaries vs Homer-Dixon's Tectonic Stresses

Johan Rockström, Executive Director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and lead author of Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity (which was extensively discussed in a special issue of Nature), recently gave a TED talk describing the project and its findings.



The project has two major components. The first looks at changes to the biosphere in an attempt to identify key planetary boundaries, that is "human-determined values (of key ecological variables) set at a “safe” distance from a dangerous level" such that major tipping points will be avoided and the biosphere will continue to function more or less as it currently does.

The image at the left summarizes the findings from this portion of the study: 1) the group identifies 10 key ecological variables (climate change, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss, etc. represented by the slices of the pie), 2) defines a 'safe' level for each variable (represented by the green region) and 3) compares the current measures for each variable (red regions) to the save level. The study concludes that for three variables (climate change, biodiversity loss and nitrogen cycling) we have already crossed the planetary boundary.

Second, Rockstrom argues that humanity is putting the planet into a “quadruple squeeze” through pressures of human growth and inequality, climate change, ecosystem loss, and the problem of surprise – rapid tipping points.

It is interesting to compare this analysis with that provided by Tad Homer-Dixon in The Upside of Down. Homer-Dixon contends that five "tectonic stresses" are accumulating deep underneath the surface of today's global order:

• energy stress, especially from increasing scarcity of conventional oil;
• economic stress from greater global economic instability and widening income gaps between rich and poor;
• demographic stress from differentials in population growth rates between rich and poor societies and from expansion of megacities in poor societies;
• environmental stress from worsening damage to land, water forests, and fisheries; and,
• climate stress from changes in the composition of Earth's atmosphere.

Of the five, energy stress plays a particularly important role, because energy is humankind's master resource. When energy is scarce and costly, everything a society tries to do — including growing its food, obtaining enough fresh water, transmitting and processing information, and defending itself — becomes far harder.

The effect of the five stresses is multiplied by the rising connectivity and speed of our societies and by the escalating power of small groups to destroy things and people, including, potentially, whole cities. Interaction among the tectonic stresses and multipliers, according to Homer-Dixon, increases the possibility of unexpected and potentially catastrophic 'synchronous failure', a concept very similar to Perrow's characterization of a system accident.

Comparison shows a substantial amount of similarity in the two. With the exception of Homer-Dixon's emphasis on energy, they focus on the same factors: demographic, economic, environmental/ecological and climatic stresses and the importance of thresholds and surprise. Each, however, extends the analysis of the other in new and important directions. Thus, the Planetary Boundaries provides details on the entire range of key ecological operations necessary for viable operation of the biosphere; a topic not covered in as much detail by Homer-Dixon. Similarly, Homer-Dixon provides substantial additional insight on trends within human social systems that will affect our ability to implement the changes necessary to live within the planetary boundaries. Specifically, he adds the multipliers of globalized transportation and communication networks and the redistribution of power resulting from the proliferation of cheap weapons to the shared concern for economic inequality.

In short, the two present complementary rather than competing accounts.

New Book: William Catton Returns with "Bottleneck"

George Mobus, Assoc. Prof. of Computing Software Systems at the Univ. of Washington Tacoma does a lengthy review of William R. Catton's Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse. The book is posed as a sequel to Catton's 1983 book, Overshoot, which has become a classic of literature in environmental sociology. The review is posted at The Oil Drum.

Warning: this book does not have a happy ending.

"In the sequel, Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse, Xlibris Corporation, he drops the part about we can evade the worst. The subtitle says it all. Now he concludes that it is already too late to mend our ways and somehow avoid the collapse of civilization. Indeed the main title refers to an impending collapse of the human population. An ecological bottleneck (also called a population bottleneck) is where radical changes in the environment of a species causes a die-off of all but the most hardy of the population; hardy, that is, in terms of the selection pressures arising from the change. Of course there may be no sufficiently hardy individuals left or the ones that manage to survive cannot reproduce sufficiently to produce a new population. In that case the species goes extinct.

Catton's arguments for why this is the most likely outcome for humanity boil down to something I have written about in my blog for several years now. It is the rate of change that matters as much as the degree or magnitude of change when it comes to shocking a population. If we look at the rate of climate change due to anthropogenic forcing, or the rate at which our fossil fuel energy sources are depleting, or the rate of aquifer depletion, or the rate of population increase, or the rate of consumption increase per captia in the developed and developing worlds, or... You get the picture. We are changing the world in ways unfavorable to human survivability more rapidly than we can either adapt or mitigate. And we have already passed the point of no return."

The Great Agricultural Land Grab

What do you do if your country has an increasing population, a lack of agricultural land and lots of cash? The standard answer coming from the CEO's of large corporations in the developed world is "give us money to develop more productive crops. We developed 'miracle rice' back in the 60's and with sufficient development funds we can save you again."

Increasingly, however, it appears that these countries are opting for an alternative solution: shopping for agricultural land in even less developed countries. When I visited my daughter last Christmas, she had this fascinating map up on her wall. Taken from an article in The Guardian, it graphically depicts the location of various land purchases made by several wealthy developing countries: China, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emerits. Convinced they will not be able to provide the food necessary for their future populations, they have started to invest heavily in countries with historically unproductive agricultural lands like Sudan and Ethiopia, with the intent of using the land to support their burgeoning populations. A number of people have questioned the ethics of such actions since these African countries are already unable to feed their populations and, hence, can ill afford to use their land for export crops.

Thanks to the efforts of the folks at Grain and their related website (farmlandgrab.org), these developments are receiving an increasing amount of attention. The recent NYTimes Magazine article 'Is There Such a Thing as Agro-Imperialism' provides a good overview of the issue.

Climate Change and Agriculture in East Africa

In the context of the earlier post discussing expected changes in global agricultural productivity by 2050 (in which the southern hemisphere suffers hugely), it is reassuring to see the recent article "Adapting to climate change: Agricultural system and household impacts in East Africa" in the journal Agricultural Systems.

While East Africa is likely to be one of the least affected regions on the continent, the article notes:

Yields of staples like maize and beans will double in the region's highland areas as a result of rising temperatures, as warmer climates make crops mature faster.

But the reverse is likely to occur in both drier and more humid areas, with crop harvests decreasing significantly in these places.

In the worst-affected areas, the researchers recommend farmers keep more livestock, switch to more drought-hardy crops such as sorghum, or abandon crop cultivation altogether. New sources of income might include carbon sequestration, they say.

In areas where the effects of climate change are likely to be less severe and crop losses more moderate, the authors call for the adoption of new technologies and agricultural techniques — such as water harvesting — that will enable farmers to continue growing crops.

While it is somewhat comforting to know that mitigation techniques are plausibly successful in such the region, there remains the pressing issue of providing the resources necessary to make such adaptation possible.

The Ebenezer Scrooge Carbon Reduction Plan

The Ebenezer Scrooge Carbon Reduction Plan

1. Am I obliged to give you a day off every 15th of December so you can go to Copenhagen to protest at the climate change conference? I suppose if I didn’t you would think yourself ill used.

2. The Middling Classes should buy as much stuff as possible so the Rich will be rich enough to afford all that expensive technology, like carbon capture and storage. So get back to work, you ungrateful slug.

3. Shut down the coal-fired power plants? Are you mad? Coal-fired power plants spew millions of tons of sulphur dioxide and ash into the air, which everybody knows causes global dimming. We should build as many coal-fired power plants as possible, at least one a week.

4. The poor should stay as poor as possible so the Rich can continue to be industrious. Any increase in consumption by the poor would only turn the rest of us into toasted Welsh Rabbit.

5. Climate change is caused by overpopulation. There are simply too many people on this planet, billions too many. Mass starvation is Mankind’s best Natural defence. If they are going die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.

6. There is nothing more to be done about the mass migrations of Unfortunates driven from their homes by climate change. Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?

7. Binding reductions? Bah, humbug!

Copyleft 2009 Shaun Bartone

Cap and Trade or Carbon Tax?

As we wind our way toward Copenhagen, debate about climate change policy has intensified. Particularly interesting is the US debate, where a seemingly trivial administrative ruling is having tremendous implications. Back in the Bush years, the EPA ruled that CO2 was not a pollutant and, hence, could not be regulated by the EPA. In April, 2009 (following a 2007 Supreme Court ruling) the EPA in the Obama administration ruled CO2 was a pollutant. The implications of this are huge. It means that CO2 emissions are covered under existing legislation and, hence, the EPA can create administrative rules limiting CO2 emissions WITHOUT having to pass legislation through Congress. While there are legal constraints on the types of rules they can come up with under existing law (which mean this probably isn't the best way to go), this gives the Obama administration a really big hammer to use on Congress: do something significant about climage change or the EPA will act unilaterally.

Two EPA lawyers with 20 years of experience dealing with cap and trade legislation, Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, have recently inserted themselves into the debate. As the Obama administration moves toward cap and trade legislation in Congress, they are advancing an alternative -- a carbon tax (or, since tax is a bad word in the US, a carbon fee and rebate system). This is a scheme similar to that proposed by Stephen Dion (though that didn't go over very well, did it?) and, increasingly, by thoughtful economists like Nobel winner Joseph Steiglitz, who served as Chair of the President's Council of Economic Advisers in the Clinton administration. Their recently posted YouTube video is below. For more info, go to their website.



It is tempting to think of this as just a policy debate. But, at its root, it is an argument about creating social rules to facilitate cooperation. Their basic complaint is that cap and trade, as a big accounting scheme, is subject to all sorts of accounting tricks. This means both that it is ineffective and, equally as significant, that it will be seen as inequitable. Since cooperation depends on trust, this means that, over time, an inequitable cap and trade system may self-destruct. Since there really isn't time to limit emissions by trial and error -- that is to try one policy, see if it works and adjust it if it doesn't -- we need to get the policy right the first time. Stated another way, the policy needs to take account of social theory -- our understanding of processes related to social rules and trust -- as well as economic theory. More about rules and cooperation later.

World Development Report 2010 focuses on Climate Change

The most recent World Bank Development Report, WDR 2010, focuses on development and climate change. The main ideas of the report aren't particularly surprising: a) both developed and developing countries need to address emissions now and b) developing countries can shift to lower-carbon paths while promoting development and reducing poverty, but this depends on financial and technical assistance from high-income countries.

However, there are a number of interesting specifics. Among them this map showing the predicted global changes in agricultural productivity. Canada, Northern Europe and Russia are the big winners, with the southern hemisphere suffering substantially.


Another graph compares the emissions savings from more fuel efficient cars in the US with the additional emissions needed to provide 1.6 billion people in developing countries with electricity. Quite a thought provoking comparison.

Edward Burtynsky’s Oil

Alberta Oil Sands #6, Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, 2007.

Noted Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has an acute awareness of the scale of our impact on the earth and an uncanny ability to capture it in photos. Click on the image a couple of times to get the full effect. Like seeing his work in person (they are HUGE), the bigger the image is, the more impact it has. Photos from his new work, Oil, can be seen here. His photo of NB's own Saint John refinery is among those decorating the right hand column of the blog.

Burtynsky's TED talk about his work can be seen here.

Social Thermodynamics

The new Encyclopedia of Human Thermodynamics (EoHT), launched in December 2007, is a wiki of 1,150 articles related to the thermodynamics of human systems.

Within EoHT is a subsection on Sociological Thermodynamics. Under this heading I found a section on Niklas Luhmann and a French co-theorist that I hadn't heard of before, Jacque Ellul. The sociology subsection contains a list of social theorists of thermodynamics. Among these is an American anthropologist, Eugene Ruyle, who developed social thermodynamic theory based on Marx's labor theory of value; Edgar Morin, a French philosopher who developed a "complexity theory" of sociology; and Adrian Bejan, a Romanian-born mechanical engineer at MIT, applies thermodynamics in his "constructural theory" of society.

The author of the EoHT believes that the use of thermodynamic theory in sociology is still fairly new. The wiki was started by Sadi Carnot, aka, Libb Thims.

I had been looking for some connection between Luhmann and thermodynamics. I knew that he had a cybernetic theory, but not necessarily a thermodynamic model. I still think that Luhmann's thermodynamics is only partial, mainly concerned with entropy. But that the fact that he conceives society as an autopoietic system is an excellent place to begin to construct a sociology of thermodynamics.

The page lists some excellent sources, including Douglas White's Thermodynamic Principles for Social Sciences.

Visualizing Inequality

The previous post raises interesting questions about the nature of inequality and the impact of urbanization. Do, for example, the middle class of wealthy countries have a lifestyle equivalent to the rich in the developing world? And how might that be changing? Inequality is at the heart of sociology's understanding of the world. And, with the economic growth in China and India, many have argued that global income inequality is declining. Not so argues Branko Milanovic, one of the most knowledgeable people about such issues and author of Worlds Apart: Measuring International and Global Inequality and Global Income Inequality: What it Is and why it Matters? (World Economics, Vol. 7, No. 1, January-March 2006) from which this graph is taken.



The figure compares the income distribution within France, Brazil, Sri Lanka, and Rural Indonesia. The graph shows that the poorest 5% of France (the left hand end of the France line) are richer than the top 5% of rural Indonesians (the right hand end of the Indonesia line). Focusing on the left hand side of the figure, we see the poorest 5% of rural Indonesian are richer than the poorest 5% of Brazil. But, focusing on the right hand side, we see that the richest 5% of Brazil are as rich as the top 5% of France. While people frequently note that income inequality has increased within rich countries over the past 30 years, the same trend has occurred to an even greater extent in the BRIC countries.

Turning to urbanization, David Owen's new book Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability argues that Manhattan, Hong Kong and large, old European cities are inherently greener than less densely populated places because a higher percentage of their inhabitants walk, bike and use mass transit than drive; they share infrastructure and civic services more efficiently; they live in smaller spaces and use less energy to heat their homes (because those homes tend to share walls); and they’re less likely to accumulate a lot of large, energy-sucking appliances. People in cities use about half as much electricity as people who don’t, Owen reports, and the average New Yorker generates fewer greenhouse gases annually than “residents of any other American city, and less than 30 percent of the national average.”

A complete review of the book is available here.

Can someone please tell me where to find the system?

[Part 1]

It seems that sociologists don’t study “society” anymore. There’s no such thing. There’s only a “chain of interaction rituals,” or a “network of individuals.” Or to put it another way, the chain of interaction rituals among individuals is the system. So there is basically only one level: the micro-level. If there is a macro-level, it’s just the micro-level writ large. So, micro or macro, there’s really only one level. Ok.

But I still have this nagging feeling that there’s a system. Why? Because we keep talking about it. We still refer to the “economic system” (ooh, that’s a big one), the “educational system”, the “political system,” etc. So the, what do these “systems” consist of? [Silence.] Individuals. In chains of interaction rituals. Aaarrggh! I want to tear my hair out.

This is where I find myself in the discipline of sociology. I have entered a Goffmanian hall of mirrors where the same single object gets repeated over and over into infinity.

The Goffmanian argument goes like this: if all the individual (humans) in the world suddenly vanished, there would be no society. It’s the Social Theory of the Neutron Bomb. Suppose some alien dropped a hundred thousand giant neutron bombs on planet earth and thereby killed all the humans on the planet all at once (and all the plants and animals too, but we won’t get into that). Poof! Society gone. There would be no society.

Pretty convincing and tough to dispute. But, the great thing about the neutron bomb (shiver) is that it leaves all the buildings standing. Just, nobody’s in them. And all the telecommunication systems working, but nobody’s using them. And all the cars running, just nobody’s driving them. (Why can’t they come up with a “car bomb” that only kills cars?) And all the documents stuffed into all the drawers and tacked up to all the walls, mail in the inboxes. The stores would be full of goods, but no one's buying them. And the Internet still humming. All of our Facebook pages would still contain billions of our own words and images, but no one would be looking at them, or adding anything new.

Sociologists almost always ignore the built environment. Except for Foucault—who took into account buildings and spaces like the prison, the asylum, the clinic—and urban sociologists, like myself.

So, arguably, that part of the social system, the built environment, the fabricated environment, the electronic environment, would still be there, all hooked up, ready to go. That conglomeration of objects is at least a significant portion of the social system. But again, without live humans, it’s little more than a smoldering relic.

Out of our decrepit 12 Monkeys landscape, one person crawls out of the wreckage and begins to look around. She had been sheltered in a radiation-protected laboratory deep underground where she had been conducting research with a thousand chimpanzees, who also survived. Once on the surface, she roams the streets, then enters an office building. She wipes the dust and debris off a desktop computer, presses the power switch, and hey, it still works! She sits down and begins to view all the images on the screen, all the stored text , photos, and videos, all the telecommunications sent between hundreds, thousands, millions of people. For her, at least, there is a virtual social system.

She must conduct research. While things are still marginally running, she embarks on a grand scheme of social research to discover one thing: is there anybody out there? In theory, if she can find at least one other human, she has a "social system." But how can she, one human, possibly cover all the territory and search all the places that need to be searched to find other humans?

Ah, thank god, she still has the thousand monkeys! She has trained chimpanzees, and she can send them out to find other humans. It’s the Thousand Monkeys Research. Get one thousand monkeys to randomly do social research for a thousand years, and you might (randomly) come up with something that looks like a social system. So she sends them off—run, fly, go find Society!

This is the state of sociology today, at least as I have found it. Dominated by micro-theories of interaction and Thousand Monkeys research, there is nothing left of what used to be our grand theoretical tradition of social systems. There is no “society.”

I’m discouraged but I haven’t given up. I know there’s a social system out there, somewhere.

[end of Part 1]