Monthly Archives: May 2011

The Sociology of Funeral Service

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Through the short history of this blog, I have highlighted a number of sociology courses that tackle interesting topics:

1. The course Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame is taught at the University of South Carolina and drew a lot of media attention.

2. Taught by a sociologist, the course Baseball in American Society is offered at Florida Southern College.

3. Recently, I highlighted a sociologist who teaches the Sociology of Self-Improvement.

4. I offer an addition to this list from Malcolm X College in Chicago: The Sociology of Funeral Service. Here are some insights about this industry:

Women have entered many educational and professional fields in recent decades. But the nurturing-woman stereotype seems to explain why more and more female students have decided to study funeral service. They have grown from a small minority to a small majority at the country’s 56 mortuary science programs.

In 2010, 56.8 percent of new enrollees were women, virtually unchanged from 56.9 percent in 2006, according to the American Board of Funeral Service Education.

The article goes on to talk about women still encounter some issues even as more women enroll in this field. On the whole, I would think that there is a lot of sociology that could apply to this field, particularly cultural ideas about death, emotions, aging and the lifecourse, gender, family, and race.

A few additional questions come to my mind:

1. While the article seems to suggest that women would be particularly well-suited for this field because of the “nurturing-woman stereotype,” it is also interesting to note that it has historically been a male field. Why was this the case and how exactly is this changing in the field?

2. It is interesting that this is now an academic field of study known as “mortuary science.” How has this field become professionalized over time? And has this shift toward a science helped lead to the increase of female students since women are now getting more degrees?

A call to collect better data in order to predict economic crises

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Economist Robert Shiller says that we would be better able to predict economic crises if we only had better data:

Eventually, these advances led to quantitative macroeconomic models with substantial predictive power — and to a better understanding of the economy’s instabilities. It is likely that the “great moderation,” the relative stability of the economy in the years before the recent crisis, owes something to better public policy informed by that data.

Since then, however, there hasn’t been a major revolution in data collection. Notably, the Flow of Funds Accounts have become less valuable. Over the last few decades, financial institutions have taken on systemic risks, using leverage and derivative instruments that don’t show up in these reports.

Some financial economists have begun to suggest the kinds of measurements of leverage and liquidity that should be collected. We need another measurement revolution like that of G.D.P. or flow-of-funds accounting. For example, Markus Brunnermeier of Princeton, Gary Gorton of Yale and Arvind Krishnamurthy of Northwestern are developing what they call “risk topography.” They explain how modern financial theory can guide the collection of new data to provide revealing views of potentially big economic problems.

Even if more data was collected, it would still require interpretation. If we had the right data before the ongoing current economic crisis, I wonder how confident Shiller would be that we would have made the right predictions (50%? 70% 95%?). From the public narrative that has developed, it looks like there was enough evidence that the mortgage industry was doing some interesting things but few people were looking at the data or putting the story together.

And for the future, do we even know what data we might need to be looking at in order to figure out what might go wrong next?