Thank you once again for your kind input to my blog.

I read details about the Woods’ pre-nup tonight (apparently about two weeks later than the rest of people interested in the story – I’m embarrassed to say) and

1) I’m astonished at the monetary figures
and
2) I have absolutely no understanding of two people making such agreements (as you so poignantly said in your own blog.)

I grew up in a culture where we didn’t talk about money. We had *very little* of it, but my grandparents and parents were very proud in the sense since we had little – we didn’t talk about finances. I remember going to Cornell summer college and hearing my roommates talk about how much their fathers earned – and I didn’t know if it was a lot or a little because I had no concept of what a good annual salary was. I did not even know the annual income of my family. As I continued on to college at Harvard – I found myself at a loss knowing little “social rules” of those that went to Private schools all their lives.

All that to say – I would have never dreamed of bringing up finances while dating someone nor would they have entered my equation of marriage.

Now I hope that my daughter will have a better balance in her mind set in that

1) she wouldn’t rule out or rule in a mate solely based on monetary economics
2) she would feel comfortable discussing personal views of finances seriously with a potential mate
3) she would never feel that she had to stay in an unhappy marriage because of monetary economics.

Thanks again for posting this article. It has been very thought provoking.

thank you for writing this blog piece. It is one of the most thoughtful pieces I have seen written about Tiger Woods’ infidelity. I am posting a piece on my blog in response to this, and would greatly appreciate your comments. Here is most of my response – and would greatly appreciate if you could post any comments on my own blog. http://fightingzombies.com/2009/12/15/response-to-money-for-monogomy-infidelity-and-wealth-the-cases-of-woods-and-gordon/

Thanks.
Stacy

thanks for your anwser!

Kind Regards,

Daniel

What does it say about two people who are sharing their lives together if they can’t even share their finances? Is there not a fundamental mistrust in that which undermines the whole relationship?

Whether it’s compensation for her or a fine levied on him, it was unlikely to change the behavior. And maybe that’s true of bad-boy clauses in general, not just for the ridiculously rich. It reminds me of the Israeli day care center story reported in Freakonomics. To reduce parental lateness in picking up kids, the day care center instituted a system of fines. But lateness didn’t decrease; it increased. Apparently, when the obligation was financial and no longer moral, parents gladly paid the fine and felt absolved of their sins. A monetary fine changes the bad behavior from a categorical no-no to something that can be done for a negotiated price.

Where else does this kind of selling of indulgences happen? I should think that in the typical scenario of money for bad behavior, it’s after the fact; it’s more like a gift, and it upholds the norm. “I know I behaved badly, and I’m really sorry, and to prove it, here’s this gift.” But if the parties negotiate a price on it beforehand, both are agreeing on the norm-violation. “How much would I have to pay you to accept that I’m going to have sex with someone else?” Or not go to your mother’s house for Thanksgiving? Or whatever. Sounds like a Larry David script.

I’ve been trying for the past few days to find for you the legendary George Homans’ “translation” of The Social System: Homans reduces entire pages of the book to a paragraph, and a paragraph of Parsons’ prose to a single sentence. It’s genius. One of my fellow students brought it to that class where we were being forced to read the Parsons book, just to lighten our collectively abysmal mood. It worked!

Sadly, I couldn’t find the Homans translation/parody online, but I can recommend that you check out his famous ASA Presidential address, reprinted in the 1964 volume of ASR, titled “Bringing Men Back In.” It’s a righteous smackdown of all the haute conceptual nonsense that Parsons stood for, and a rousing return to the grand old American intellectual tradition of pragmatism. Also, I found this bio of Homans really interesting: http://www.soc.iastate.edu/sapp/Homans.ppt I’d been a fan of Homans since those days in 1993, but hadn’t realized that he’d been both an English major in college and a journalist subsequently. That suddenly made clear to me why Homans had such a gift for clear, simple and concise use of English, and why Parsons’ writing would drive him up a tree; also, I happened to have taken the same route into sociology, so it was comforting to know that someone I held in such high regard had walked the same indirect path.

All this is a very long way of saying that I find Parsons intensely frustrating as a thinker and a writer. One of the things that makes him frustrating is that he cannot be entirely dismissed: hidden amidst the piles of unreadable text he produced are some genuinely useful ideas. And that’s why some of them, like AGIL, remain current a good 50 years after he first wrote about them. So all of us in the field have to have at least a passing acquaintance with his concepts, just because they’re used as a kind of theoretical shorthand. I come back again and again to the ascriptive/achieved dichotomy, and it seems like a pillar of theory, not just for economic sociologists but for all kinds of social scientists.

As for economic sociology, Parsons did the field a real disservice by overconstraining it vis-a-vis economics (which is tied into my answer to the second part of your question). For a fantastic review of this history, I recommend David Stark’s paper “For A Sociology of Worth,” particularly the first section, entitled Parsons’ Pact: http://www.coi.columbia.edu/pdf/stark_fsw2.pdf

Regarding Institutional Economics, new and old, I see the field as basically Economic Sociology executed by people working on a higher pay scale! Seriously: as far as I can tell, institutional economists use most of the same ideas as economic sociologists, and try to solve very similar kinds of problems, but get paid a lot more for their trouble, because they enjoy a much higher professional status. Economics, as you may know, was for centuries considered a branch of moral philosophy, and didn’t really get started as a discipline unto itself until the late 19th century, when it began modeling itself after the “real” sciences, like physics. That’s a big reason the field is so dominated by quantitative work, and by purely theoretical work, with no interest in applications to the empirical world.

Example: I just attended a lecture by a economist who illustrated his complex proof that it was “optimal” to include bonuses in executive employment contracts, but could not answer any questions about how his findings applied to the raging debate currently taking place about bonuses for financial execs at firms that took federal bailout money last year; he said he simply hadn’t thought about the empirical implications of his work! And his paper was forthcoming in the premier scholarly journal in economics. *headdesk*

Institutional economists are obviously far closer to the empirical world, but still, they maintain a hard, bright line between what they do and what sociologists do. Check out the references section of most works of institutional economics, and you won’t find many references to anyone who might be considered a sociologist (except perhaps Max Weber, who is an intellectual icon for many related social scientific disciplines). I find this frustrating not because it affects my own life or work, but because it seems unfair to the many great sociological thinkers whose ideas go uncredited within institutional economics. By the way, you will see many sociologists citing institutional economists–it just doesn’t happen much the other way around.

So to answer your question, I find many things within Institutional Economics fascinating, but I’m disappointed that there isn’t more acknowledgment of the discipline’s intellectual debt to sociology, and that so much effort gets put into redrawing the boundary that defines institutional economists as “not sociologists.” The whole turf-war aspect of social science can get really tedious and discouraging. We all lose because of it, because those disciplinary fences mean there’s no room for really broad-based work of the kind that Weber or Marx did: those guys probably couldn’t get a job these days, because they don’t fit neatly within anyone’s boundaries. Which is what made them great.

So…as you can tell, your questions provoked a lot of thought on my part. Thanks very much for your note.

Best,
Brooke