Trade as a Science.

Trade Reform Design as A

Trade as a Wage Disciplining Device

This paper considers the wage-setting behaviour of a monopoly union facing foreign competition. Contrary to intuition, trade integration is predicted to make union wages less sensitive to foreign wage changes if union preferences are sufficiently biased towards wages relative to employment. This is confirmed empirically using sector-level time-series on EU member states, using the existence of ...

Sociology as a Population Science.

John Goldthorpe is one of Britain’s most eminent sociologists and a strong advocate of quantitative sociology. In this concise and accessible book, he provides a new rationale for recent developments in sociology which focus on establishing and explaining probabilistic regularities in human populations. Through these developments, Goldthorpe shows how sociology has become more securely placed w...

Science as a human value.

U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s comments on space exploration, told me that the ultimate goal of any medical researcher was “to touch the face of God”.1 When pushed for clarification, he asserted that science – neuroscience in particular – is a utopian pursuit (free from the foibles and fallacies that normally plague people), whose practitioners (i.e. scientists) must altruistically strive to ma...

Sociology as a Strict Science

Sociology and philosophy seem to have this in common: in spite of notable progress in special fields, the discipline as a whole lacks unity and fails to accumulate knowledge. Both disciplines are split into separate schools between which there exist no clearly defined relations and no notable increase of insight. Thus after an auspicious beginning Pitirim Sorokin’s (1927, 1942, 1947) attempt to...