Marginal Utility

by Anonymous

I've been tagged! (Remember when the "I love you virus" was going around, and you went to coffee with your friends and they were all complaining about how many times they had been sent the "I love you virus," and you felt bad for their computational health but also a little twinge of jealousy because evidently no one loved you enough to give you a virus, but then when you went back to your office, you checked your e-mail and, lo-and-behold, you found the "I love you virus" waiting for you, and although you were a bit peeved that someone would send you a virus, you were secretly a little bit thrilled that you were on the "I love you" network. Or at least, so I'm told.)

Anywhoo, the tagging task is described here, so I won't repeat it again. Like others, I seem to have run into a bit of a glitch in fulfilling the task. The first book-like item I can reach is the January 2007 issue of American Behavioral Scientist.

First problem: is it a book or not? On one hand, it's bound, with a cover and numbered pages between, and all of the chapters are on the same topic, namely the sociology of income inequality. OTOH, it's just a collection of independently written academic articles.

Second problem: ABS carries over page numbers from the prior issue. The first page in the "book", excluding front matter, is page 579. There isn't a page 123.

If I assume it's close enough to a book, and count 123 pages from page 579, here's the third problem: I land on the first page of my own article.* At the risk of seeming unbelievably conceited for quoting my own work, here's the 6th, 7th, and 8th sentences (counting the abstract, which is the only way I could get to 5 sentences on the 123rd page):

Although an appropriately massive literature on the takeoff [in earnings inequality] has developed among social scientists, this literature is dominated by economists and largely ignored by sociologists. This state of affairs is surprising because sociologists, more so than economists, have represented themselves as uniquely concerned with the unequal distribution of valued goods. Why have sociologists, with several notable exceptions [cite cite cite] studiously ignored what is arguably one of the most consequential developments of our time?

I'll leave it up to the reader to answer Tom's question, "is the sociology professorate reading something more interesting than a SAS User's Guide?"

As for the next victims, I tag Robb and Kyle, two sociologists who I suspect may read this blog from time to time but don't have blogs of their own. Feel free to use the comments section.

*I feel like I should explain why ABS 2007 is sitting on my desk. It's not because I'm so enamored with my own work that I read it for fun. (In fact, I rarely even look at anything I've written once it's in print. Too painful.) SAGE press still sends out complimentary hard copies of the journal to authors, and in this office-that-isn't-really-mine I have no idea where to store lone issues of journals-to-which-I-don't-subscribe, and I can't bring myself to just throw it away.