Sociologist Philip N. Cohen, Part Three

Part One Part Two

‘Introduction to Social Problems’ (Aug. 29, 2020)

0:00 Lays out the lecture: what sociology and social problems are, the main theoretical perspectives, and the research methods.

0:24 Sociology as the science of society, the study of individuals, groups, and the social structures that emerge from their interaction, with attention to the role of those structures in creating problems and solutions.

1:00 A social problem defined as a condition or pattern of behavior with negative consequences for individuals, for the social world of families, education, and the economy, or for the physical world of housing and environment.

1:27 Gallup’s most-important-problem question in August 2020, where coronavirus dominates, followed by government and the economy, with everything that would normally rank high pushed down.

2:14 The objective and subjective duality.

“Objectively, does the particular condition exist? Do we have a pandemic? Yes, we have a pandemic, we have a virus which is spreading, which has killed a lot of people around the world. So that’s objective reality. But do we think it’s a problem, and how do we shape or define that problem in our collective minds? Do we think the problem is the pandemic? Do we think the problem is the way the government is dealing with it? Do we think the problem is the government telling us what to do? What is the problem?”

3:10 Social constructionism, with the illustration he uses to mark its limit.

“Social constructionism is the view that social problems only become problems when they’re perceived to be problems. If a meteor hit us and we were all obliterated, that wouldn’t really be a social problem. That would be the end of all problems. It’s called constructionism because it’s acknowledging that social reality is the meaning we attach to it. There is a reality out there beyond our consciousness, but in terms of society, what matters is how we construct it.”

4:06 The back and forth is iterative. Some problems emerge fast, like a pandemic, and some persist a long time, like racial inequality, and the defining, blaming, and fighting over solutions goes on continuously.

4:45 Stages of the process, with the caveat that they are categories for thinking, and that some problems do not move through them in order.

5:09 Stage one, claims making. Somebody has to come forward and say this is a problem. With a pandemic there may be no single actor, but the disparities and consequences require someone to stand up.

5:53 Stage two, getting weight behind the claim, especially from government agencies willing to accept the definition and take on the role.

6:23 Stage three, negotiation and power struggle over whether the response is adequate, effective, and moving in the right direction.

7:01 Stage four, when invested groups conclude the established system will not produce the results they want and have to work outside it or change it radically. He notes that not every social problem reaches this.

7:43 Why courses on social problems focus on protest: it is the most explicit version of the process, where people gather and literally state what they think the problem is.

8:03 A photograph he took at the Women’s March the day after the 2017 inauguration, and the observation that people bring signs, friends, and relatives.

9:04 What protest does beyond making claims.

“In this process of making claims and having protests, people are also building identities around their definition of problems, and who else thinks it’s a problem, and who defines it the same way we do. The formation of a social group comes out of that process of making the demand that something be considered a problem.”

9:23 A photograph he took at the March for Life, where teenagers from religious schools came from around the country, and the same analysis applied.

“It’s not just people saying, hey, we think you should stop women from having abortions. It’s this process of we are all in this together, we all believe this, we reinforce it. I’m looking at my friend, my friend is really into it, I’m really into it, we’re really into it together. And it’s building solidarity and identity.”

10:12 C. Wright Mills and The Sociological Imagination, and the link between personal experience and the social world, described as the intersection of biography and history.

11:00 Personal troubles against public issues.

“If I’m hungry right now, that’s a personal trouble. I’m hungry, maybe I just need to go in the other room and have some food, or maybe I don’t have enough food. But it’s still one person who doesn’t have enough food. The point at which it becomes a public issue is when it affects a lot of people and we start to acknowledge that.”

11:29 The illustrations: cars lined up for free food in San Antonio, and bags of food at a drive in Des Moines.

12:07 Theory defined as a set of assumptions or propositions used to explain, predict, or understand, stated explicitly and systematically.

13:37 Why the theories were already in place.

“We may even be able to make predictions. We’ve seen pandemics before, we understand that they’re likely to take a certain course. If we could already in January, February say some intelligent things about what was likely to happen, it’s because we had experience and we already had theories about how pandemics work.”

14:04 Macro and micro as a continuum. Macro asks why this happens in one society. Micro asks why an individual gets in line at a food drive.

15:05 Functionalism, traced to Durkheim, and the body metaphor: organs with distinct functions maintaining a balance, and institutions like family, politics, and religion working in some harmony to meet social needs.

16:18 Change as the problem, from that perspective, producing anomie.

“When society changes rapidly, when the social order changes rapidly, it disrupts that balance, and we end up not knowing what the rules are, what the norms are, how we should behave, how our institutions should work together, where individuals fit into the changing social order. This produces a state that Durkheim described as anomie, or normlessness.”

18:04 The functionalist question: where did the problem come from, and is it serving some function, the way a fever serves the body against an infection.

18:41 Merton, and the argument that crime may help mark the boundary between good and bad behavior, and poverty may motivate people to avoid destitution. He calls the poverty version cold-hearted and grants there is a logic to it.

19:29 “There’s a potentially faulty logic to this, which is that if you see something happen in society you assume there must be a good reason for it. Every society seems to have poverty and inequality, so it must be good, right? Like human beings have lungs, everybody’s got lungs, let’s see why we have lungs. You can see the potential logical problem in this metaphor is you tend to define things as good and then try to rationalize them after the fact, working from the assumption that they are good. So this tends to be politically a conservative theory, because it tends to be describing the status quo as somehow good, and it’s suspicious of rapid change.”

20:12 Conflict theory as the opposite, with a teaching disclosure: when we teach sociology we build up this opposition because it is easier to learn that way.

20:31 Society defined by conflict, held together through power and coercion, with social problems emerging from conflict between groups.

21:53 The attitude toward change reverses. Conflict theories are positive about social change, especially where the tension can be harnessed, and especially if the less powerful side wins.

22:33 Marx introduced with a qualification.

“Karl Marx was not an academic sociologist. He was a writer and philosopher, and really a political activist in the nineteenth century. He wanted to change society in what he saw as a progressive direction. But his framing, and the way he identified how society works, is really the basis for what we’re now simplifying into conflict theory.”

23:01 Workers who own nothing but their labor and owners who own capital, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, brought together non-consensually and unequally.

23:56 Alienation, set beside anomie as a parallel condition arriving by a different route: workers do not control the process because the owner makes the rules, and do not own the product.

24:46 The contemporary illustration: iPhone factory workers in China who cannot afford iPhones, do not set how the factory runs, and produce for people in other societies.

25:24 Where the two theories part on the same fact.

“When the subordinate group, the weaker group, gets an awareness of their position, that is when they are ready to make change. This is what concerns or frightens functionalists, and what excites Marx and the conflict theorists.”

26:10 Feminist perspectives, introduced with a caveat that they are not all conflict theories, though they lean that way because of the focus on inequality between the genders.

27:14 Patriarchy defined as a male-dominated society or subsystem, family, workplace, or school, with the term originating in the family and extended outward.

27:55 Intersectional feminism, its origin in the position of Black women, and its extension to class and sexuality. Patricia Hill Collins, who he notes retired from his own department, on Black feminist thought. Angela Davis, from activism into academia. Audre Lorde, writer, activist, and poet.

30:00 An aside on the migration of the term.

“One of the interesting things about this is that for something that kind of came from academia, intersectional feminism has really emerged into politics in the last few years in a really interesting way, where you see people actually holding up signs at rallies that say intersectional feminism. Which if you’re old like me strikes you as a big change in the world.”

30:33 Interactionism as the third of the big three, a micro-level theory about how people create and maintain social reality through language, words, and symbols.

31:34 George Herbert Mead, and society as organized and patterned interaction among individuals, so that society is real at the macro level and built from interaction at the micro level.

32:12 The self as both mental and social.

“You can’t have a self if you never interact with anybody else. Our ability to see others in relation to ourselves is reflective. Once we have social interactions and they shape our identity and our personality, we know that when we act a certain way, when we say or do something, we can use our imaginations to predict how people will react, or to understand how they react when we’re seeing their reaction. So this reflective ability is what really creates the self.”

34:07 The summary table in speech: functionalists on order held together by institutions, conflict and feminist theories on tension and coercion and the engines of change, interactionists on definition, anticipation, and labeling.

35:20 The line that governs the whole lecture.

“The key thing is that most people are not one or another of these theories. We use different kinds of ways of thinking to ask different kinds of questions.”

36:33 Research methods. Survey research first, as probably the most common, with the tradeoff stated in one breath: you can ask many people efficiently and get answers to questions like whether older people support Trump more than younger people, and it is not a rich question and will not tell you about their hopes and dreams.

37:23 Secondary data analysis, and his own practice.

“Most sociologists are not actually doing those surveys. We’re using the surveys that other people have done. This is what we call existing data analysis or secondary data analysis. Someone has done a survey, or we’ll pool all of our resources, through the government, and say let’s do a big survey, and then we’ll all analyze it. I do a lot of research using surveys. I don’t conduct a lot of surveys. I conduct a few, but mostly I’m getting the data that someone else has collected and analyzing it.”

38:02 Experiments, less common in sociology because of ethics and construction difficulty, and not necessarily reflective of the world, and useful for specific questions about response and learning under different conditions.

38:55 Qualitative research: in-depth interviews, observation, participation. And its cost.

“Qualitative research is much more time intensive, in the sense that you’re spending a lot of time studying a relatively small number of people, and there’s a lot of interpretation that has to go into making these results meaningful.”

39:47 Historical and comparative methods, comparing countries or one country across time, on questions like why some societies became rich, what causes civil wars, and what happens when democracy breaks down.

Twenty-four thousand views, twenty-five times the audience of anything else in this file, and it is the recording with the least of him in it. Somebody’s syllabus is assigning it. The largest audience Cohen has ever reached with a lecture that I have seen so far came from doing the ordinary work of his job well, and it dwarfs the reach of the fights.

The lecture is also the answer to a question the rest of the file raises. Two days earlier he opened Social Problems with presidential clips and a rally chanting a slur. This is the next lecture in the same course, and there is no politics in it at all. When he teaches conservative theory he teaches it, and when he criticizes it he criticizes the logic.

That passage at 19:29 is the best thing in the lecture. He gives functionalism its strongest form, the fever fighting the infection, then Merton on crime, then poverty, which he calls cold-hearted while granting the logic. Then he takes it apart on the ground it stands on: the body metaphor licenses you to assume that whatever exists has a purpose, and then you reason backwards to the purpose from the assumption. Everybody has lungs, let us find out why we have lungs, therefore every society has poverty, let us find out why poverty is good. He identifies the conservatism of the theory as a consequence of the metaphor.

And then he does something that his blog almost never does. He gives conflict theory the identical treatment structurally, notes at 20:22 that the opposition between the two is a teaching device, and closes at 35:20 by telling students that nobody holds one of these positions and that they are question-generating instruments. A man who is often accused of prosecuting from a fixed position spends forty minutes teaching that theoretical positions are tools you pick up and put down.

Three things carry beyond the classroom.

The construction passage at 2:14 is the most useful thing in the lecture for a general reader. The pandemic exists. What the problem is remains open: the virus, the government’s handling, or the government telling people what to do. Anyone who lived through 2020 watched that fight and mostly did not have the vocabulary for it, and he hands it over in ninety seconds without indicating which answer he prefers. Set that beside the previous lecture, where he had made his own answer unmistakable, and you have the two halves of the citizen scholar problem in a single week of one course.

The March for Life passage at 9:23 is the one that would surprise readers who know him only as a combatant. He photographed the march, and he analyzes the teenagers from religious schools with the identical apparatus he applies to the Women’s March, and the analysis is respectful. The solidarity is real, the identity work is real, and the mechanism is the same on both sides.

And at 37:23 he tells his students something about himself that the rest of the record only implies. He does not collect data. He analyzes what other people collected. That sentence explains an enormous amount: why measurement is his obsession, why he audits instruments rather than gathering fresh evidence, why his reflex when a number moves is to ask whether the survey changed, and why his disputes with ethnographers run the way they do. A researcher who lives entirely inside other people’s instruments will be exquisitely sensitive to what those instruments do and unmoved by the claim that presence in the field is its own warrant. His method and his quarrels have the same source, and he states it in one aside while explaining research designs to freshmen.

Two weaknesses, both small.

The qualitative passage at 38:55 is thin next to the survey passage. Interviews, observation, participation, time intensive, lots of interpretation required. It is accurate and it does not convey why anyone would do it or what it can reach that a survey cannot. The survey section gets its tradeoff stated with real specificity. The qualitative section gets a cost with no corresponding account of the benefit, and a student would come away unsure why that method exists.

And intersectionality gets nine minutes of names and a promise to return, which is fine for an intro lecture, and it is the one section where he tells students to go look people up. He names Collins, Davis, and Lorde and never states what the concept claims, beyond that different inequalities interact. Given how contested the term is in public argument, a definition would have served students better than a reading list.

Transcript flags. At 15:24 “email durkheim” is Émile Durkheim (1858–1917). At 17:14 and 25:14 “enemy” is anomie. At 18:46 Robert Merton (1910–2003) is credited with “dysfunctionalism,” and the term he actually coined is dysfunction, alongside manifest and latent functions; check the slide, since the concept of latent function is what the crime and poverty examples illustrate, and the poverty argument is usually credited to Herbert Gans (1927–2023) in his 1971 essay on the uses of poverty. At 19:50 “let’s see why we have loves” is lungs. At 22:37 Karl Marx (1818–1883) is dated correctly in the chapter title. At 23:03 “the economic director of capitalism” is probably the economic structure. At 31:35 George Herbert Mead (1863–1931). C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) at 10:19, The Sociological Imagination published 1959. Patricia Hill Collins (b. 1948), Angela Davis (b. 1944), Audre Lorde (1934–1992). At 5:12 “emergency claims making” is emergence and claims making, two stages run together.

‘Measuring Inequality with the Gini Index’ (Sep. 3, 2020)

0:00 States the question: is there a way to put a number on how much inequality there is, so it can be studied.

0:17 Why a summary number is needed before the normative question can be asked.

“We know there are poor people, rich people, and people in between. But can we say anything more? To answer how much is too much, we need to be able to answer how much is there.”

0:46 The zero-inequality case. Four people, Betty, Jack, Jane, and Bob, one stack of cash each.

1:09 Building the grid. Each person is 25 percent of the people with 25 percent of the money, so the cumulative shares track one to one and produce a diagonal, which he labels equality.

2:14 A more realistic case. Betty now has five stacks and the others still have one. The first three columns no longer reach 75 percent of the money, so the curve sags below the diagonal and then shoots up at the end.

3:06 The Lorenz curve, named for an economist he places in the early twentieth century, with the rule that the further the curve sits from the diagonal, the more inequality there is.

3:29 The Gini index derived by counting squares, which is the pedagogical move that carries the lecture.

“There’s sixteen squares overall in our grid, eight squares in that lower right triangle. That curved line takes about three of those eight squares. I drew it by hand, but it’s about three. We’re going to call that area Gini. That number is the percentage of that lower right triangle that is above the Lorenz curve. In this case it’s about three of the eight squares, or about 37.5 percent, so 0.375 is our Gini index.”

4:16 The two endpoints. If the curve matches the diagonal it is zero. If one person has everything and everyone before her has nothing, the whole triangle sits above the curve and it is one. So the index runs from zero to one, or zero to a hundred depending on the scale.

4:49 The United States. Census asks a large random sample what their family earns, and the answers get lined up from poorest to richest to see how far the curve bends.

5:13 Points on the American curve. The bottom 25 percent of families hold about 6 percent of income, below $42,500. The bottom 49 percent, below $77,500, hold 19 percent of income together. At the other end, 93 percent of families are under $250,000, so 7 percent are above it, and they hold 25 percent of all income.

6:03 The American family Gini at 0.45.

6:13 What having the number lets you do, which is the point of the lecture.

“Now that we have put a number on it, we can ask questions like: is it going up or down, is it more or less than France, what makes it go up or down, is it higher in New York than in California. Being able to take all the different numbers, everybody’s income is a different number, and describe that whole distribution with one number that quantifies the amount of inequality, turns out to be super useful for analyzing society.”

6:42 The American series from 1947. Falling until about the end of the 1960s, rising since, from about 35 to about 45 between the early 1970s and 2018.

7:16 Causes, offered as a few main reasons rather than a lecture. The rise of the super rich, visible in famous names and also in ordinary top executives, bankers, and lawyers.

7:39 The decline of manufacturing and unions, which had supplied middle-income jobs without much schooling.

7:58 The service economy, which he describes as bifurcated: airplane pilots and cashiers, doctors and janitors, with fewer of the middle-income jobs that had been holding inequality down.

8:16 The minimum wage falling in real terms because increases have not kept up with inflation.

8:23 Family structure, since this is family income. More dual-earner families at the top as women’s employment rose, and more low-income single-earner families at the bottom.

8:47 The Economist chart comparing Gini before and after taxes and transfers.

9:09 What the earlier numbers left out.

“The numbers I was showing you before were just total income, how much income did you have this year. It didn’t take into account how much you ended up having to pay in taxes, and what else the government did for you. Did it give you food stamps, rent subsidies, education subsidies, free health care. Once you take all that into account, you can see how much the amount of inequality you start with in income is changed by the government moving money around.”

9:44 The American position: a red dot out past 45 before taxes and transfers, higher than the other countries shown.

10:04 Ireland, which starts with more inequality and knocks about twenty points off its Gini through taxes and transfers, in cash and also in education, health care, and housing. France, Canada, and Sweden also doing more than the United States.

10:38 The conclusion of that section: the United States has a lot of income inequality and does less about it than a lot of other rich countries.

10:48 Global inequality, and a first pass at it.

10:58 The between-country method: treat every person in a country as though they had that country’s average income. India near the bottom with about 20 percent of world population and 6 percent of income. China near the world average, about 22 percent of population and 21 percent of income. The United States at the top with fewer people and a large share of income.

12:04 The result: treating each country like a family gives a world Gini of 0.46, close to the American family figure.

12:21 The refinement. Instead of 116 countries, each country is split into seven slices, bottom 10 percent, 10 to 20, 20 to 40, 40 to 60, 60 to 80, 80 to 90, top 10, with everyone inside a slice assumed to have the same income.

13:00 The single most striking fact in the lecture.

“Down at the red circle at the bottom there is the bottom 10 percent of the US. The bottom 10 percent of the US is above half the world’s population in terms of income.”

13:27 The result of the refinement, and what it implies.

“This gets us to a Gini of 0.58. You can see more inequality, but much bigger is simply the inequality between countries in the first place. So that’s one lesson you can take from that. There’s a lot of inequality between countries, rich countries and poor countries.”

13:45 The summary. Many numbers turned into one number, which then permits comparison across time and place, with a note that the Gini is only one of several ways to describe a distribution and is chosen here for its intuitive reading.

This is the best-constructed thing of his in the file so far, and it is fourteen minutes on a topic that any textbook covers in two paragraphs.

He builds the grid from four named people, moves one person’s money, watches the line bend, and only then counts squares. By the time the word Gini arrives at 3:50 the student has already seen the quantity it measures. And the counting is done by eye, by hand, on sixteen squares, so a student who cannot integrate can still see that three of eight is 0.375. He never writes an integral.

Two things in the lecture matter beyond the pedagogy.

The pre-tax and post-tax comparison at 8:47 is the whole American inequality argument in one chart, and he lets the chart make it. The United States starts with high market inequality and then does less redistribution than its peers, so the gap at the end is wider than the gap at the beginning. Ireland is the example that does the work, since it begins worse and finishes considerably better. That is an argument for a policy position, and he presents it as a comparison rather than a conclusion, which is the register he uses when he is teaching rather than prosecuting.

The global section is the more interesting half and it contains the sentence that would unsettle his own students most. The bottom tenth of Americans sits above half the world’s population in income. He states it flatly, does not soften it, does not moralize it, and moves on. A course that has spent the semester on American inequality now has a fact in it that reframes the whole subject, and it comes from applying the same tool at a different scale. That is what a summary statistic is for.

And the finding at 13:27 is the substantive payoff. Splitting every country into seven slices raises the world Gini from 0.46 to 0.58, which means within-country inequality adds something and between-country inequality dominates. Where a person is born explains more of world income inequality than where they land inside their own country. This is Branko Milanović’s territory and Cohen does not cite him.

Now the weaknesses, and this lecture has one that would draw his own fire.

He teaches the Gini as though it were transparent. Two distributions with different shapes can produce the same index. The measure is most sensitive to changes around the middle of the distribution and least sensitive at the tails, which is a strange property for a country whose inequality story is overwhelmingly a story about the top one percent and the top tenth of one percent. He lists the rise of the super rich as cause number one at 7:23, using a statistic that is close to indifferent to what the super rich do. Top-share measures, the 90-50 and 50-10 ratios, and the Theil index all exist because the Gini hides things. He gestures at this at 14:04, saying the Gini is one kind of number and we could get into other math, and then stops. A man who built a career on the argument that the instrument shapes the finding taught a fourteen-minute lecture on an instrument and gave its limitations eight seconds.

The family-income Gini he shows and the tax-and-transfer chart from the Economist are not the same measure on the same units, so the 0.45 and the red dot are not strictly comparable, and a student would reasonably think they were. And the causes list at 7:16 mixes settled findings, like the decline of manufacturing employment, with contested ones, like the family-structure contribution, without marking the difference.

This is the recording that shows what he is when nobody is watching him fight. The Ithaca news desk is in it: fixed length, deadline discipline, an explanation that has to land in one pass with no chance to take a question. So is the Census Bureau apprenticeship, in the reflex of asking what the number was built from before asking what it means. And so is the thing he told Pepin about not collecting his own data, because this is a lecture about how to read somebody else’s.

Transcript flags. Every instance of genie is Gini, after Corrado Gini (1884–1965), the Italian statistician who introduced it in 1912. The Lorenz curve is after Max O. Lorenz (1876–1959), who published it in 1905, so his early twentieth century is right by a whisker. At 12:37 “812 quantiles” is garbled and should be 812 country-quantiles, which is 116 countries times seven slices; the arithmetic works, so the figure is recoverable. At 1:38 “20 00 five seven five hundred percent” is 25, 50, 75, 100 percent. At 8:34 “low single learner” is single-earner. At 13:19 “the averaging” is the average income. At 5:29 the $42,500 and $77,500 thresholds and the 6 and 19 percent shares should be checked against the slide before you print them, since the audio gives no year for the underlying Census file.

‘COVID-19 Economic Crisis’ (Sep. 20, 2020)

0:00 Sets the plan: what led to the crisis, its contours and extent, and some proposed solutions.

0:15 The pandemic curve from March to late September, with the April spike in deaths, the summer rise in cases, and a smaller rise in deaths.

0:37 He rewinds to March 15, when the epidemic looked small and the economic response was already enormous.

0:45 The New York Times front page of March 16: soaring toll, economy shutting down, business grinding to a halt, schools and bars and restaurants closing.

0:58 The distinction that opens the analysis.

“It wasn’t all because of the policy of locking things down. It was also that people stopped traveling, people became afraid, people stayed home. So you had a big contraction in the economy of all the things that involve people going places and doing things with other people.”

1:22 A teaching note: every slide carries the take-home message written in red, and students taking notes should look there first.

1:36 Google mobility data across all fifty states, showing movement falling by close to 40 percent in New York by April, with varying declines elsewhere, then partial rebounds. He points out the Sturgis motorcycle rally visible in the South Dakota line in August.

2:33 Global perspective. The ten largest economies from 2009, with the 2008 crisis producing a decline he calls what used to be considered very big, then a decade of growth, then the first two quarters of 2020, with the United States approaching a 10 percent drop in the second quarter and not the worst performer.

3:39 American employment from 2000. The 2007 to 2009 decline to about 129 million, the long rise through the Obama and Trump years past 150 million, then 22 million jobs lost in March and April.

4:32 Employment rates for prime-age workers, 25 to 54, down 11 percent from February to April, proportionally more for women, and below where it stood during the 2008 crisis.

5:03 The shape question, which is the most useful forecast in the lecture.

“That purple line is the 2020 recession. The drop is unprecedented, but the other thing to see is that the shape of what’s happening now may be different. We had a very rapid rebound in the first three months after April. We’re still down eight percent in employment, and you can see the contrast with previous recessions, which happened slower and then took longer to recover. We don’t know if we’re going to be rocketing back up or if we’re going to be spending years and years coming back to where we were.”

5:48 Business closures tracked through Yelp listings, approaching 100,000, with the temporary category increasingly converting to permanent.

6:24 The uneven distribution across sectors. Restaurants and retail hardest hit, breakfast and brunch places, burger and sandwich shops, gift shops, clothing stores. Least affected: lawyers, architects, accountants, and outdoor trades like tree work and roofing.

7:07 Occupations with the largest employment losses: waiters, cooks, cashiers, retail sales, maids and housekeepers, and some construction and laborer work.

7:36 Census data on households losing employment income, which he reads as a catalog of American inequality.

“This basically is a catalog of US inequality. Hispanic and Black workers are the most likely to have lost employment income, over fifty percent of them. It’s also single people, divorced and separated people. Then look at the income gradient: the people with the lowest incomes are by far the most likely to have seen a loss of income during this period.”

8:17 Health status in the same chart, with the interpretation.

“People who already had more health problems are more likely to be suffering. That’s because of where they were socially located in the first place. The people with these service jobs, and other jobs that were hard hit in places that were hard hit, were people who were likely to already have health problems.”

9:08 A composition argument, worked out aloud, for why the gender difference looks small. Most households contain a man and a woman experiencing the same shock, more single parents losing jobs are women, and more retired people on fixed incomes are women, so the two run against each other.

9:43 Unequal receipt of unemployment benefits.

“It’s a common myth that everybody who’s unemployed gets the benefits. In fact it requires paperwork, it requires somebody to approve the paperwork, it requires the time and energy and know-how of how to get it, and you have to be in a place where the bureaucracy is supportive of that. For all of these reasons, whites are much more likely than blacks who are unemployed to be getting unemployment benefits.”

10:36 Food insecurity. Twenty-two million American adults in households that sometimes or often did not have enough to eat in the previous seven days, as of the end of August. Higher among households that lost a job, among Black and Hispanic respondents, among those under $25,000 where more than a quarter reported it, among the less educated, and among families with children.

11:28 Housing background. Rent burdens already high and rising through the previous decade for households under $75,000, with most of those under $15,000 paying between 30 and 50 percent of income on rent.

12:15 Matthew Desmond’s formulation, that the rent eats first.

12:24 Census figures on households not caught up on rent, at 15 percent, highest among Black households, with the same education and income gradients.

12:55 A moment of stated ignorance worth marking.

“I don’t know what’s going on with the people over two hundred thousand dollars, why twelve percent of them are having a hard time paying their rent right now. That’s something to look into.”

13:02 Eviction, and its place in American poverty.

13:20 A news segment from Harris County, Texas, running about three and a half minutes. A constable’s deputy executing eviction orders, a father who lost his job and fell thousands behind, a family whose possessions fit in a stroller, the deputy noting he has six children of his own, 200 eviction orders through the county courts in one week against a normal month’s hundred, and an elderly tenant given a one-day reprieve because it is too hot to put her out.

16:57 The CDC eviction moratorium explained. A health-based order rather than a housing one, with five conditions: seeking government assistance, income under $100,000 or $200,000 for a couple, an affirmed substantial loss of income or extraordinary medical expense, partial payments where possible, and a showing that eviction would produce homelessness or crowded doubling up.

17:52 Why it may not work, which is the sharpest policy analysis in the lecture.

“It’s unclear, because the guidelines are vague and subjective, who’s going to actually be protected under this moratorium. It turns out it really depends what state you live in, even what county, even what judge you get when your eviction case comes to court. People still may have to go to court to fight these evictions. The other problem is it’s not paying rent for people, it’s just saying you can’t evict them right now. So there’s no relief for landlords, and a lot of landlords can’t make their payments while they have tenants who are not able to make their rent payments. And the rent is accruing. When the moratorium is up, the rent you owed will now be a debt. So we’ll have to resolve that later, or else we’re going to evict millions and millions of people when the moratorium ends.”

18:43 He introduces a set of proposals from an economist and former labor secretary, and plays the video.

19:04 The embedded argument, in five parts: contain the virus first because there is no recovery until it is contained, citing Germany, South Korea, and Italy on testing, tracing, and isolation; extend the supplemental unemployment benefits due to expire for roughly 25 million people; prevent a wave of evictions and foreclosures, citing 32 percent of households missing a July rent or mortgage payment; shore up state and local budgets against cuts to schools, child care, nutrition, mental health, housing, and health care; and stop letting national debt concerns limit the bill, since the relevant figure is the ratio of debt to the size of the economy.

20:26 Inside that video, the contested claim.

“Now some say the extra unemployment benefits have discouraged recipients from seeking jobs. That’s rubbish. Given the size of the economic collapse, few jobs are available anyway, and normal unemployment benefits typically pay a small fraction of the wages of jobs that were lost.”

23:16 His own summary in his own voice. Not everyone agrees, and there are common elements across the debate.

“One key point that economists tell us is that it’s good, it’s necessary, and it’s fine for the government to be borrowing money, a lot of money right now, to help mitigate this economic crisis. Interest rates are very low. Getting the economy going is better for the national debt in the long run anyway. So spending money is good. The question is how to spend the money.”

23:50 His list: cash stimulus, continued emergency unemployment insurance, rental assistance rather than only a moratorium so that renters and landlords both survive, expanded food support including meals for children whose schools are closed, and aid to state and local governments facing layoffs of firefighters, medical workers, and municipal staff.

Seven recordings now, and a pattern has closed that none of them shows alone.

Where Cohen teaches his own research field, family demography, he does not editorialize. The family violence lecture has no politics in it. The Gini lecture has none. The introduction to social problems teaches functionalism fairly and takes it apart on logic rather than on politics.

Where he teaches an adjacent field, he imports an advocate and hands over the microphone. In April it was three minutes from the Economic Policy Institute on paid sick leave. Here it is four minutes from Robert Reich (b. 1946), who served in a Democratic cabinet, on what should be in the stimulus bill. Both times the numbers in the clip are accurate. Both times the framing and the policy conclusion arrive in somebody else’s voice, and both times the students are not told what the organization is or where it sits.

He is careful in the domain where he could be caught. Outside it, he outsources.

Look at what the outsourcing carries here. At 20:26 the video dismisses as rubbish the claim that supplemental unemployment benefits reduced job search. That question was live and had real evidence on both sides. The $600 weekly supplement produced replacement rates above 100 percent of prior earnings for roughly two-thirds of eligible workers, which is arithmetic rather than ideology. What the research mostly found, then and since, is that the disincentive effect on employment was small despite those replacement rates, which is a striking result worth teaching. So Reich landed close to the right answer and called the question rubbish, and a class watching that clip learned the conclusion without learning that anyone had checked. Cohen, who spends his Decembers counting whether other people’s claims can be inspected, played it without comment.

The strongest analysis in the lecture is his own and it is at 17:52. The eviction moratorium came from the CDC on public health authority, its criteria were vague enough that protection depended on the state, the county, and the judge, it left landlords with no revenue, and it converted unpaid rent into accumulating debt that would come due all at once. Every one of those turned out right. The moratorium’s legal foundation collapsed at the Supreme Court in August 2021, enforcement did vary enormously by jurisdiction, and rental debt was the central problem the emergency rental assistance program was built to address. He worked that out in three minutes from the text of the order.

The employment-shape question at 5:03 is the other thing he got right by refusing to answer it. He put up the comparison, noted the rebound was unlike anything in the prior recessions, and said we do not know whether this rockets back or takes years. It rocketed back. A more confident lecturer would have picked one.

Two problems with the instruments, and they run in his blind spot.

Google mobility, Yelp closures, and the Census Household Pulse Survey are the backbone of this lecture, and he treats all three as though they were the American Community Survey. The Pulse was explicitly experimental, fielded weekly online with a response rate around ten percent, and Census attached warnings to it that he does not relay. The twenty-two million food insecure adults and the fifteen percent behind on rent both come from it. Yelp’s closure counts describe businesses that maintain Yelp listings. Google’s mobility index describes people carrying phones with location history enabled. Each is a reasonable emergency instrument and none of them is a probability sample of the country, and the man who built a career on asking what an instrument was made of skipped the question three times in one lecture.

The other is inside the news segment. At 13:47 the reporter says forty million Americans face eviction. That figure came from an Aspen Institute projection and was an upper bound built on the number of renters in households experiencing income loss. Actual eviction filings in 2020 ran well below normal levels, partly because of the moratoria and partly because of the rental assistance. He plays it without correction. That is the kind of number he would take apart in a Wilcox post inside a paragraph.

The moment I would keep for a profile is at 12:55. He puts up a chart, notices that twelve percent of households above two hundred thousand dollars report trouble making rent, says he does not know why, and says it is something to look into. No hypothesis offered, no gesture at one, no embarrassment. That is a small thing and it is the honest professional reflex the rest of the file keeps circling: the number does not fit, say so, move on, come back to it.

Transcript flags. At 19:01 “robert wright” is Robert Reich. Kobit and covent and copenhagen are COVID. At 1:01 “the potamic” is the pandemic. At 12:22 “the rent deeds first” is the rent eats first, from Matthew Desmond’s Evicted (2016). At 6:30 “all ass all sectors” is all sectors. At 8:18 “fair health poor health good health” is a chart category list. At 9:23 “old women” is older women. At 14:07 “idiom russia’s but doing that get everything we need” is unrecoverable. At 15:25 “before copenhagen” is before COVID.

‘Covid-19 and health disparities’ (Oct. 5, 2020)

0:14 He opens with the CDC definition. Health disparities are the preventable differences in the burden of disease, injury, violence, or opportunity to achieve good health, borne by socially disadvantaged populations. He stresses the word preventable. Something in the social system and the health system produces the gap.

1:07 The theoretical spine is the theory of fundamental causes, which comes from Bruce Link and Jo Phelan. It exists to explain a paradox. Health improved enormously over the last century and a half through water, sewers, nutrition, medicine, education, and changes in behavior. Life expectancy rose for everyone. Yet socioeconomic status still predicts health as strongly as ever. The answer is that income and education deliver money, knowledge, prestige, power, and social connections, and those resources protect against whatever the current threat happens to be. The threat changes. The resources keep working.

3:00 Life expectancy and income. For the 1960 birth cohort, among men in the poorest fifth, roughly 30 percent survived from age 50 to 85. In the richest fifth the figure runs about two thirds to three quarters higher, and higher for women than men.

3:51 Smoking and education. Among people with graduate degrees, 3.7 percent smoke. Among high school graduates the figure approaches 20 percent. Among people whose credential is a GED, more than a third.

4:48 Infant mortality and race, back to 1850. Infant mortality has fallen enormously. The Black and White gap persists and now exceeds two to one, a wider ratio than in 1850.

6:14 The education gradient in infant mortality holds inside every racial group, and race persists inside every education level. Black women with college degrees have higher infant mortality than White women who finished only high school.

7:39 The opioid epidemic as a second illustration. Overdose death rates cluster in Appalachia, parts of the Northeast, poor counties in the West, and reservation areas. These are places hit by deindustrialization and by shrinking state revenue for schools and health care. Geography of socioeconomic status producing health disparities.

8:50 Why the pandemic is severe. A novel coronavirus, so no prior immunity. High contagiousness. Asymptomatic transmission, which defeats isolation. And the disease is bad, worse than seasonal flu. As of the recording, of roughly one million deaths worldwide, more than 200,000 were in the United States, far above the American share of world population.

10:01 Transmission. Droplets from coughing, sneezing, loud speech, yelling, singing, plus aerosols that linger. Risk rises with proximity, duration, and poor ventilation. People who can separate themselves from others get sick less.

11:07 Institutional outbreaks. Nursing homes account for something like 40 percent of all deaths, with more than 77,000 residents and staff dead. In many rural counties the nursing home was the local epicenter. Prisons show more than 200,000 infections and 1,265 deaths by a New York Times count, with 3,000 positives at Avenal State Prison and 2,500 at San Quentin. Prisons churn, so the virus travels in and out with prisoners and staff. Factories follow the same pattern, with more than a thousand cases each at the Smithfield plant in South Dakota and the Tyson plant in Iowa.

13:59 The telework gradient. Bureau of Labor Statistics data on who reports working from home because of the pandemic. In computer and math occupations, over 60 percent. Lawyers, architects, engineers, managers, and scientists cluster high, all above $1,500 a week. Food service, health care support, personal care, and building and grounds workers sit near $500 to $600 a week, and under 10 percent of them work from home. Truck drivers, bus drivers, sales and office support keep going out.

15:38 The same gradient by schooling. Half of workers with advanced degrees, and Cohen adds “such as me,” work at home at least part of the time. Among workers without a high school diploma, four percent. He draws the analogy directly to smoking: a behavior that raises health risk, concentrated among the less educated, and in this case nobody chose it.

16:37 Paid sick leave. He runs a produced video segment. The CDC says stay home when sick. Twenty-seven percent of private sector workers get no paid sick leave, over 30 million people. The United States is one of two OECD countries without a federal mandate. Those workers concentrate in restaurants, hotels, transportation, travel, and tourism, exactly the contact-heavy jobs. Fewer than half of leisure and hospitality workers have paid sick leave. Among the bottom tenth of wage earners, 30 percent do.

18:27 Disparate impact. COVID-19 death rates per 100,000 by age and race. Deaths rise with age in every group. The Black and Hispanic gap against White rates is largest among working-age adults, 18 to 65, where Black and Hispanic death rates run five to eight times higher. For Black Americans over 85 the rate reaches 1,600 per 100,000, meaning 1.6 percent of that entire population died.

20:16 The wrap. Resources shape living conditions. Education and discrimination shape which jobs people hold. Workplace policy shapes exposure. Health care shapes outcomes after infection. He points at the president and his circle as the illustration: reckless behavior, infection, and then medical care that no ordinary patient could obtain.

Cohen teaches one theory and then climbs a ladder of cases toward the pandemic, so that by the time COVID arrives the students already know what they are supposed to see. Smoking, then opioids, then telework. Each rung is a health-relevant behavior that tracks education. The third rung is the strongest thing in the twenty-two minutes, because a warehouse worker cannot choose to telecommute, and once you accept that, the choice language around smoking starts to look shakier too. He touches this and moves on. He should have stopped and hammered it. It is the argument the whole ladder was built to deliver.

The single most portable fact he gives is the crossing pattern in infant mortality: Black college graduates faring worse than White high school graduates. He delivers it in one sentence. That finding is the strongest available evidence that socioeconomic status does not absorb race, and it is also the finding most contested on interpretation, since SES measured by credential is a poor proxy for wealth, and maternal age structure and immigrant selection among Black mothers both complicate the comparison. A stronger lecture names the objections and answers them. This one states the number and keeps walking.

The weak point is mediation. He shows a five to eightfold race gap among working-age adults and then says he thinks we can trace it back to preexisting conditions and to the inability to work at home. That is the theory predicting the answer rather than the data producing it. Household size, multigenerational living, transit dependence, and the accident that the virus seeded first in New York City were all carrying weight in the fall of 2020. None appear. The lecture never names a rival explanation, which means students learn a framework and simultaneously learn that nothing else was ever on the table.

The nursing home number sits unreconciled with the occupational story. If 40 percent of deaths occurred in and around long-term care, the causal chain cannot run mainly through who commutes to work, because residents do not commute. It has to run through who ends up in which facility, how those facilities are staffed and reimbursed, and how thin the wage floor is for the aides who move between them. Fundamental cause theory handles this well. Cohen has the pieces on the same slide and leaves them apart.

If resources protect against whatever threat is current, then the affluent should capture tests, then treatments, then vaccines, in that order and ahead of everyone else. In October 2020 that prediction was two months from its natural experiment. He gets close with the president’s care and treats it as an anecdote about recklessness instead of the test case.

Two cautions. At the oldest ages, differential survival to 85 complicates any simple race comparison, since the Black population reaching 85 has already passed through heavier attrition. And the rate he reads as 1.6 percent of all Black Americans over 85 is a cumulative figure over about seven months, which students will hear as an annual risk unless told.

The sick leave segment changes genre. Music comes up, a produced advocacy video plays, and a named policy is called essential. Whatever one thinks of the policy, and the public health case for it is strong, the students watching are graded by the man who queued the clip. Same with the closing turn on the president, delivered a month before a presidential election. This is the pattern from his corpus generally. The arithmetic travels anywhere. The verdicts travel only among people who already share them, and they give anyone looking for a reason to discard the arithmetic a free one.

When he reaches the education gradient in telework, he says half of workers with advanced degrees, “such as me,” are working from home. He puts himself inside the distribution he is describing, on the protected side, while explaining why the protection exists.

‘The Pandemic and the Family’ (Oct. 27, 2020)

0:07 Introduces the talk as the family demography edition, added because the number of family topics touched by the pandemic is effectively infinite.

0:23 Sets aside the direct effects, sickness and death inside families, because the mortality and infection data cannot yet be located inside households.

0:57 The frame he offers instead: social metabolism, his term for the general slowdown, which he says is inaccurately called a lockdown.

1:11 Then unemployment and economic insecurity, which he describes with a rare personal hedge.

“What has really turned into a seismic inequality event. I don’t want to say we’ve never seen anything like this, but I’ve never seen anything like this that I can think of, that has been not only this big but this unequally experienced.”

1:43 The demographic agenda: births, then marriage, then divorce, with the acknowledgment that in October the births could not yet show pandemic effects.

2:23 The thesis, stated as an empirical observation rather than a theory.

“The hypothesis is basically there’s less of everything demographic happening. And so what does that mean for families and the future of families and life experience? I wish I had more wisdom on that, but that’s my empirical observation.”

2:46 The sources, with the caveat attached before the evidence: vital statistics from various states, some miscellaneous items, and a lot of Google search data, which he corrects himself on mid-sentence. “It’s at best speculative. Or I should say suggestive.”

3:09 Google mobility data, aggregated from pings at groceries and pharmacies, transit stations, retail and recreation, residential, and workplaces. He notes he averaged counties up to states without weighting: “Don’t hold me to this methodology exactly.”

3:56 Mobility crashing 15 to 40 percent across states by late March, the reopening rebound, and renewed declines.

4:21 Face-validity checks he points to himself: Hawaii not recovering because of tourism, and the Sturgis motorcycle rally visible as a bump in the South Dakota line.

5:01 Google search terms as a proxy for social life, prefaced by the disclosure that matters most in the talk.

“This is for suggestive purposes. I didn’t keep a record of all the things I tried that didn’t look good. And Google isn’t very transparent with how they release this data.”

5:26 The searches that fell: breathalyzers, party invitations, weekend, and happy hour, which he says was decimated, all dropping sharply after March 9.

6:12 Young adults living at home. Normally about 42 percent of people aged 18 to 29 live with parents, grandparents, or in-laws, and the figure spiked to almost 50 percent in June, roughly three million more.

6:54 The measurement caveat he supplies unprompted.

“We can’t say from this if they were moving back, or this could also have been achieved just by people who normally move out not moving out.”

7:24 Employment change by occupation since January, top nine occupations for each sex.

7:47 The class gradient, delivered with the one joke in the talk.

“Chief executives, that includes small business owners, managers, software developers actually increased. Thank you, Zoom. They were much less impacted than the working-class jobs: janitors, retail sales, construction workers.”

8:22 Retail sales as the rare occupation with enough of both sexes to compare: almost 60 percent of women in retail sales were out of work in April against about 40 percent of men, and by October still 20 percent against about 5 percent.

8:44 The reversal from the previous recession. Women lost more jobs than men, unlike the 2009 downturn.

8:58 The same chart for Black men and women, with larger shocks, and personal care aides where nearly 60 percent of Black women were out of work at the trough.

9:30 Labor force participation for parents with resident children, down about four percent overall, recovering faster for fathers, with the autumn decline steeper for mothers, which he links to school closure without asserting it.

10:32 The Census Household Pulse Survey, which he calls “pretty good quality,” on households losing income.

10:57 The result.

“Overall it’s about 45 percent of people, them or a household member, lost income, which is insane. Whites the least, Hispanics and Blacks the most. Never married or divorced people the most, poor people the most, people in bad health the most, people with less education, people with children, and younger people.”

11:28 Gender as the exception, and his own working explanation for it, offered as unverified.

“Gender is a wash, and I think that’s because you have old women on fixed incomes who haven’t lost income and young women, single mothers, who have lost income, and so it balances. I haven’t looked at the micro data, so I’d have to sort this out.”

11:51 The theory of planned behavior as the framework for family decisions: background factors, demographic characteristics, social context, beliefs about consequences, expected social support, perceived control, intention, birth.

12:56 What the pandemic does to that diagram, walked through item by item: emotions shot, income devastated, social context wiped out, beliefs about consequences unknown, social support out the window, interfering factors everywhere. “A giant red splotch flies onto this graph.”

13:51 An aside noting that the photographs in the slides are his own, taken when he came out of his basement once.

14:07 The pandemic baby boom prediction, dismissed.

“I don’t know if you remember that charming era six months ago when people were saying things like, oh, there’ll be a pandemic baby boom because people are all stuck at home. That was a hypothesis. It was not well grounded, and I don’t think it’s going to bear out.”

14:23 Condom sales as an indirect measure: Durex slumping, double-digit consumption declines at the company that owns Trojan in the second quarter, most brands recovering in July and Trojan not.

15:03 The inference, and the teaching aside inside it.

“This is a great methods assignment. Condoms prevent births. If there are fewer condoms, will there be more births? No. So I think people are not having as much sex. That’s what I’m getting at.”

15:18 The Guttmacher survey fielded in late April and early May: about a third of women aged 18 to 49 said the pandemic had made them want to delay childbearing or have fewer children, with Black, Hispanic, queer, and poor women more likely to say so.

16:24 The comparison to a version of the same question asked in 2008, which shows a larger effect now.

16:46 The care gap alongside it: 39 percent more careful than previously about contraceptive use, 25 percent more worried about affording it, and delayed or cancelled reproductive health care. “This is not a recipe for happy family development.”

17:17 Google Trends methodology, explained in full: each term scored zero to a hundred by week, five-year window, terms chosen for contemporaneous correlation, combined into indices with a reported alpha.

17:50 The contraceptive index, built from birth control, condoms, and depo shot, alpha 0.7.

18:31 The comparison that saves him from a bad inference: three grey lines for 2016 through 2018, 2019 in black, 2020 in red, showing that a decline was already underway in 2019.

“I do that just to show you that we already had a decline in 2019, and this is a theme we have, which is declining fertility in the US. So that’s going to complicate our interpretation of all of these.”

19:27 Sex-related searches as a proxy, and the self-correction two sentences later.

“What would people Google if they were sexually active? Premature ejaculation, pain during sex, pain after sex, orgasm during sex. These all show declines to varying degrees this year compared with last year. Orgasm during sex, I realize later, maybe that’s actually porn searches. I’m not sure.”

20:39 The pregnancy index: am I pregnant, pregnancy test, morning sickness, missed period, alpha 0.74, with a large drop in March and April and no normal spring bounce.

21:44 The alternative reading he supplies against his own conclusion.

“You never know, maybe people are just Googling other things and not bothering to think about whether or not they’re pregnant. But with the sex and the contraception and the condom sales and all this, I think there’s less sex and less pregnancy. That’s where I’m going with that.”

22:17 Births, which he says are too early to read, except for the possibility of miscarriages and abortions, which he flags as outside his expertise and poorly measured, with the stress hypothesis called “purely speculative.”

22:59 Monthly rolling birth data from Florida and California, the only two states he could find publishing it.

23:29 The comparison line on each chart is the average annual decline over the prior three years, about 0.7 percent for Florida and closer to 3 percent for California, so the pandemic drop is measured against an existing trend.

23:53 California’s September figures, posted the previous Sunday, showing a roughly 10 percent drop against September 2019, with four possible explanations offered and none chosen: premature births, miscarriages, immigrants going home, or something else.

24:18 The forecast, and the disposability of his own talk.

“This is going to be updated when we see probably a catastrophically giant crash in births in December and January and February. If that happens, we won’t remember this talk.”

24:44 An apology to the strangers photographed on the National Mall who ended up illustrating his marriage slide.

25:07 The wedding index: wedding invitations, wedding shower, bridal shower, wedding dresses, alpha 0.94, showing a catastrophic crash in 2020.

25:54 The four readings he will not choose between: people sneaking to the courthouse, people completing licenses without acting on them, relationships falling apart, or minds changed about marriage.

26:41 The forgone-versus-delayed distinction, carried over from fertility.

“For every hundred births delayed, some are forgone, some never occur. Relationships break up, people’s bodies get older. The recovery of delayed births is less than a hundred percent. I don’t really have the basis for guessing what the recovery on delayed marriages will be, and that’ll be a super interesting question.”

27:13 Marriage license searches, excluded from the index because they did not correlate, showing a first-quarter drop and substantial recovery.

27:52 The paper with Brandon Wagner and Kate Choi, “Decline in Marriage Associated with the Pandemic,” and the results from three jurisdictions.

28:08 Florida: cumulative recorded marriages down roughly 25 percent, with the monthly shortfall tapering by June and July.

28:41 Hawaii: close to a 50 percent drop, most of it non-residents not coming to marry there.

29:04 Seattle marriage applications: down about 10 percent, and tapering.

29:28 What the gap between the three means.

“Some evidence that the decline in weddings is going to be greater than the decline in marriage. Maybe some people are managing or deciding to execute their marriage without having the wedding they dreamed of. That gives a hint that some of these lost marriages may be recovered, in the sense that a lost wedding may still become a marriage.”

30:08 Divorce, and the news story he takes apart.

“A big news story that broke a while ago: divorces are rocketing up during the pandemic. I don’t believe that. That story was based on a company press release, a company that sells an online divorce kit, and their downloads went up. It seems pretty likely that people who were considering divorce would be shifting from in-person to online divorce processing.”

30:56 Why the timing makes an increase implausible: divorces take processing time and some states impose waiting periods.

31:03 His expectation instead.

“Even if, as we have reason to believe, this pandemic is catastrophic for marriages and families, and more people want to get divorced, I wouldn’t expect to see more divorces yet. It may very well be not unlike the Great Recession: decline in divorces, possibly followed by some rebound as the people who had to put off their divorce because of housing and the expense and the moving and the kids, all the reasons that people who kind of want to get divorced don’t get divorced, that may rebound when the logistics become more practical.”

31:43 The divorce ideation index: divorce lawyer, divorce attorney, get a divorce, how do I get a divorce. A decline followed by a rebound that pushes above earlier years.

32:22 And then the sentence that is the best thing in the talk.

“This is very speculative, but it does fit my presumption, which is probably why I’m showing it to you.”

33:00 Florida divorce records in three-year bins back to 2006, with the pre-existing downward trend visible, and a large 2020 drop. He canvasses whether clerks were closed and reports that his coauthors found most were not.

33:48 The rebound in the percentage difference by September, with the arithmetic point that a rebound only recoups the lost divorces if the cumulative gap closes to zero.

34:28 Conclusions, illustrated with a photograph of a basketball court near his house where the hoops were removed and people now play soccer.

34:36 The open question: what recovers, against what gets worse.

“The fact that the economic shock is not as bad now as it was a few months ago doesn’t mean that the shock to the decision-making system of families deciding whether or not to have children is reduced. Maybe they’re catching their breath and thinking it over and thinking, definitely not having children.”

35:23 The forecast he stakes out.

“The big demographic story of 2021 is likely to be the very large decline in births. Everything points that way, and I think that’s going to be quite shocking when we see how big that is.”

35:46 What he is not covering: violence and abuse, “with reason to believe there’s more violence and abuse being detected less”; educational disparities; the gender division of labor, where more men are doing housework and child care while more work has moved into a home that “is generally not the place where you find the most gender equality”; a mental health catastrophe; and the opioid epidemic merging with the rest.

37:00 The close: “It’s a disaster, it’s a catastrophe. If you’re studying anything in this space, you’re going to be studying this for a long time. I expect to be studying this for the rest of my career, however long that is.”

This is the best single document in the file so far for understanding how he works, because it is the only one where he shows the method operating under conditions where the method barely holds.

The subject is a set of demographic events that have not happened yet. He wants to know about births in October 2020, and the first pandemic conceptions could not have been born before December. So he assembles proxies: condom sales from earnings calls, Google search indices for contraception and pregnancy and weddings and divorce lawyers, mobility pings, two states’ rolling vital statistics, and a survey question fielded in April. Every one is weak. He says so about every one, before showing it.

Count the disclaimers. At 2:46 the data is suggestive rather than speculative, corrected in the same breath. At 3:40 don’t hold me to this methodology. At 5:10 he did not keep a record of the searches he tried that did not look good, which is a confession of the file-drawer problem in his own slide deck, volunteered to a room of demographers. At 6:54 the living-at-home spike could be people returning or people never leaving, and the data cannot distinguish them. At 11:35 he has not looked at the micro data behind his own explanation of the gender wash. At 18:31 he puts up three prior years to show that fertility was already falling, which complicates every reading that follows. At 20:07 he wonders aloud whether one of his own search terms is measuring pornography. At 21:44 he supplies the alternative explanation for his pregnancy index. At 22:33 he says nobody measures miscarriages well.

And then at 32:22, the line: this is very speculative, but it does fit my presumption, which is probably why I’m showing it to you.

I have not seen a working scientist say that about his own slide. It is the file-drawer problem, confirmation bias, and motivated selection admitted in one clause, at the moment of committing them, without any apparent discomfort. Anyone writing about his epistemics has to reckon with that sentence, and it complicates the picture the audits give. The man who counts other people’s replication packages is capable of narrating his own bias while it operates.

The forecast record here is his best. He predicted a large decline in 2021 births, and American births fell in 2020 and the first months of 2021 before recovering, with the birth-dearth story dominating demographic coverage that year exactly as he said. He predicted that divorces would fall rather than rise and that the viral story to the contrary rested on a vendor press release, and he was right on both. He predicted that the wedding decline would exceed the marriage decline, and he had the Seattle-versus-Hawaii spread to support it before anyone else was looking. He predicted a partial rather than full recovery of delayed events, which is the standard demographic result and which held.

The September California drop of 10 percent, offered with four candidate explanations, is the sort of single-month figure in a monthly series that usually turns out to be reporting lag, and he lists that possibility only obliquely.

Two things for the biography.

The condom passage at 14:23 is what a demographer does when the data he needs does not exist for eighteen months. He reads earnings calls. He then converts it into a teaching problem, out loud, in the middle of the talk: fewer condoms should mean more births, the sign is wrong, therefore the mediating variable is sex. That is the whole discipline in ninety seconds, and it is funnier and more instructive than anything in the lecture recordings.

And the divorce-kit takedown at 30:08 is the Rosin method applied at conference speed. A number went up, the number came from a company selling the product, the vendor is new, the shift from in-person to online is the obvious confound, and divorces have statutory waiting periods so the timing is impossible. Four objections in forty seconds, none requiring data he did not have. That is what he was doing to Rosin in 2012 and to Goffman in 2015, and here he does it in passing to a press release.

He builds indices from Google Trends, reports Cronbach’s alpha for each, and posts none of the search terms as a file, no code, no downloaded series. The audits he runs every December ask other people to ship exactly that. This talk is a slide deck, and slide decks are not held to the standard, and the asymmetry sits there unremarked.

Transcript flags. At 15:19 “the good mocker institute” is the Guttmacher Institute. At 27:52 “kate troy” and “k troy” are Kate Choi, and the coauthor is Brandon Wagner; the paper is “Decline in Marriage Associated with the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States,” which appeared in Socius in 2021, so link the published version rather than the preprint. At 8:51 “the heek man session” is the he-cession, and the 2009 coinage was mancession. At 15:11 and 24:11 “birds” is births. At 16:40 “the 2008 procession” is the 2008 recession. At 33:17 “rotating clockwise” is his own borrowed phrase, credited to David in the August 2020 lecture. At 36:44 the suicide figure is given as 11 percent of adults and about a quarter of young adults, which is the June 2020 CDC survey and carries the same thirty-day versus twelve-month problem I flagged in the August lecture.

‘Pandemic and after interview’ (Dec. 4, 2020)

0:04 Opens on what will last: online interaction, and specifically the regularly scheduled contact people now keep with distant friends and relatives to compensate for lost travel and local socializing, which he expects them to want to continue.

0:43 The first pass at winners and losers.

“The people who are doing really well in this situation are probably the people who are doing really well already. I don’t think there are a lot of people who are having troubled or difficult or terrible relationships and life at home who are now finding themselves suddenly doing better.”

0:58 A methodological warning inside a claim about survey response.

“If you interview people and ask them, has the pandemic improved your relationships and your family life, the people who say yes are probably already headed in that direction.”

1:10 Things on hold, split into two kinds. Some are mechanically blocked: weddings cancelled, divorces hard to process.

1:33 The other kind, which is his actual subject.

“Other things are not happening because the drivers of family change are just being impaired. People are meeting new people less. Casual interaction is not happening as much. People are putting a stop to plans that they would have had before.”

1:48 The forecast, made in early December 2020.

“I think it’s very likely that we’re going to see a substantial drop in birth rates. People are holding off, at least temporarily, from their decisions to have children.”

2:01 Young adults living with parents in the millions, who are not marrying, probably not meeting people, and not having children, through two routes he keeps separate: opportunities impaired by isolation, and changed decision-making under uncertainty.

2:29 The summary, with the hedge attached.

“It means everything has ground to a halt in family life. It’s a slight exaggeration, but a lot of things have ground to a halt or slowed down substantially.”

2:37 What makes families work, stated as plainly as anywhere in the record.

“Successful families are a lot about security and comfortable interdependence and being able to rely on each other. That’s especially the case for children, but it’s also the case for people in intimate relationships. So the people who were secure, in the emotional as well as material sense, are probably the people who are doing better now.”

3:03 The other side, and the measurement point he had been making since April.

“The downside is, we can’t measure this, but the terrible and abusive situations that are being experienced in many homes and families are going undetected. Both our formal ability to detect and root those out, like school social workers and nurses and hospitals, but also just the informal interactions and connections that people have that are buffers against trouble at home.”

3:48 The gender division of labor, worked through as a genuine two-sided problem rather than a talking point.

“People are spending more time at home, which is a gender-unequal space, and so women are doing more parenting, homeschooling and all that. On the other hand, because men are home more, they’re also doing more. So they’re maybe not doing so much a greater share, but they’re doing a greater quantity of housework and child care and care work generally.”

4:22 Who handles that well, and the condition he attaches.

“The people who already had the relationship infrastructure in place to have those conversations successfully are probably also doing better at handling that flexibility. People who don’t talk about those things, or couldn’t talk about those things, or couldn’t come to agreement because of conflict, I’m not sure how they are able to work out the changes that they have to make now.”

5:01 Low-stakes unplanned interaction, and why its loss is hard to see.

“One thing about low-stakes, informal, unplanned interactions we count on so much is that we don’t realize we counted on them so much, and we often don’t do a lot to make them intentional. And that’s part of the point.”

5:20 The strength of weak ties, explained without naming Granovetter.

“In sociology we’re very aware of what we call the strength of weak ties, the people that you know a little. Those are the people you really need when it’s time to get a job. The people who you know enough to ask for help, but they’re distant enough from you that they know a lot of people that you don’t. Your best friend isn’t the one who’s going to help you get a job, because you know all the same people.”

5:54 The design problem that follows, and why he thinks the technological fix is hard.

“The rules of that kind of interaction are not explicit, so remaking it is complicated, and the norms are sort of up for grabs in a space we haven’t developed before. In my case, I have students who might drop into my office to ask me a question, but they might be reluctant to schedule an appointment for an online chat, to get themselves on the calendar.”

6:43 The task he sets for his own discipline: sit down, take apart, and try to rebuild the things about relationships nobody realized were important.

6:56 On the phrase everyone was using that autumn.

“Going back to normal is a myth. For one thing, normal is how we got here. So we don’t really want to go back to normal, being unprepared, and having all the things that have made this worse. The seeds for that were already there.”

7:16 The rebound question, framed as genuinely open, with the historical precedent named.

“Will there be a baby boom of people who are so excited they just start having children again? Will we have a golden age, a roaring twenties, which is what we had after the last great pandemic, of exuberance and outward-looking excitement? That’s possible. It probably depends on whether the victory over the virus in the end is real and sudden and observable, or gradual and a demoralizing war of attrition.”

8:14 The last ten percent, which is his best economic observation in any of these recordings.

“The things that don’t come back could be very big. If we don’t have cruises and movies anymore, well, those are giant industries. What about Broadway, if that doesn’t come back? That last ten percent of getting back to normal makes a very big difference.”

8:36 The divergence thesis, and the part he flags as fear rather than finding.

“I’m afraid it’s the people who are less social or less pro-social that are going to remain turned inward, and keep those barriers up around them and their families and their homes. And I’m afraid that that will have a corrosive impact on society and social life.”

9:13 The generalization: a story of divergence, where those better prepared psychologically, socially, and economically integrate their new selves into the new reality better.

9:31 The link from national narrative to private decision, which is the argument underneath his whole body of work.

“One of the things that is dislocating for people is the overall narrative of history: where is our society going? That has a lot to do with social mobility. Do we think our kids are going to do better than ourselves? If we’re safe with that assumption, then we feel ourselves the masters of our universe, and we’re comfortable making long-term plans.”

9:56 The taxonomy that follows, which is the best single sentence in the interview.

“Making banana bread is a short-term response. Redesigning your home, planning to have more children, making long-term career investments that you don’t expect to have short-term rewards, these are things that people do when they’re confident about the future. For family life, that means the lack of confidence in the future means fewer children, less marriage.”

10:21 His confidence level on that: pretty confident those trends, already underway, continue as the data comes in.

10:30 Masks, and a claim about motivation he offers as observation.

“We were told that we should wear masks to protect others. I don’t think that’s the way most people are built psychologically. If you look at the way people are wearing their masks, I think they’re thinking about protecting themselves.”

10:53 The in-group finding, stated as something he sees rather than something he measured.

“People are much less careful when they’re around people who they see as like them. So around their own neighborhood they’re less likely to wear a mask than if they leave the neighborhood, or interact with people who are more different from themselves.”

11:12 The cost he draws from it.

“I fear that the downside of that is building our walls higher and our distrust of others increasing. So that is the downside of reshaping our home lives in ways that seem positive. We’re going to do great things at home, but it’s partly because we’re afraid of and we distrust the outside world. That’s a real challenge for social cohesion in the future.”

11:36 The close, which is the same close he gave his students in August.

“Who are we going to be after this? That’s an important question to ask ourselves, if we can make that intentional. Who do we want to be after this? Some of that could be altruistic and outward thinking: I can’t wait to get out there again and help people and meet new people and be friendly toward them.”

Twelve minutes, one side of an interview, no slides, no data, no antagonist. It is the only recording in the file where he is asked to think rather than to show, and the result is that the theory underneath thirty years of demographic work comes out uncovered.

Whether a society believes its children will do better determines whether individuals feel like masters of their own lives, which determines whether they make commitments whose payoff is distant, and the commitments whose payoff is most distant are marriage and children. So low fertility and late marriage are, in his account, a readout on collective confidence rather than a change in values. The banana bread line at 9:56 is the clearest thing he has ever said, because it gives the reader a way to sort his own behavior into short-horizon and long-horizon without any technical apparatus.

Set that beside the family-restoration argument and the disagreement gets smaller. Wilcox and the people around him would accept nearly every sentence from 2:37 through 10:21. Security, comfortable interdependence, reliance on each other, and the observation that people without confidence in the future stop making long-term commitments. The dispute is about whether the conditions can be produced by exhortation. Anyone writing about that fight should quote this passage rather than the blog posts, because the blog posts are where the argument gets narrower and louder.

Two passages here are his best work outside his field.

The weak ties explanation at 5:20 is Granovetter delivered without jargon and without the citation, which is the standard way a discipline’s finding enters general speech. And what he does with it at 5:54 is the interesting part. The reason the office drop-in cannot be replaced by a scheduled Zoom is that unplanned interaction has no explicit rules, so it cannot be reconstructed by writing rules for it. The student who would put his head round a door will not put himself on a calendar. That is a design constraint, stated in 2020, and it turned out to be the central problem of hybrid work for the following five years. He was ahead of almost everyone on it.

And the last-ten-percent point at 8:14 is an economic observation a demographer had no obligation to make. Aggregate recovery statistics hide the sectors that do not return, and cruises, cinema, and Broadway are not marginal. Broadway grosses recovered slowly and cinema admissions never returned to 2019 levels. He named the right industries.

The weaknesses are of a kind that recur across the file.

The mask claims at 10:30 and 10:53 are presented as observations and are not observations of anything he measured. He says he thinks people are protecting themselves rather than others, and that people mask less around neighbors who resemble them. The second is plausible, has since been studied, and at the time was his impression from a window. This is the same man who spent 2015 demonstrating that a celebrated ethnographer’s household counts did not match census figures, offering behavioral generalizations about a nation from what he could see near his house. He does not flag it, which he did flag repeatedly in the October talk three weeks earlier.

The divergence thesis at 8:36 has a moral valence buried in a descriptive claim. The people who remain turned inward are described as less social or less pro-social, which makes withdrawal a trait rather than a circumstance. His own account elsewhere says exactly the opposite: withdrawal follows from insecurity, from having no buffer, from an unsafe home. He does say “I’m afraid” twice, which marks it as prediction rather than finding, and the framing still sorts people into better and worse types in a way the rest of his work resists.

And the second sentence of the interview, at 0:43, is a strong empirical claim about who benefited, offered with no data and immediately followed by an explanation of why survey evidence on the question would be unreliable. That is a man who has ruled out his own means of checking and then answered anyway.

For the biography, this is where the December 2020 forecast belongs, and it is the version to quote, because he made it in plain speech before the data existed and it held: births did fall, and the birth-dearth story dominated 2021. It is also the recording that shows the theory rather than the fights, and the only one in the file where the last word is about what people might want to become.

Transcript flags. At 2:29 and 2:34 “grown to a halt” is ground to a halt. At 3:22 “route those out” is root those out. At 3:59 “a gender and equal space” is a gender-unequal space, and getting this wrong reverses the sentence, so check it against the audio before quoting. At 4:14 “a greater shorter share” is a greater share. At 10:58 “in their social people are much less careful” is a stutter and the sentence resumes cleanly. The weak-ties concept is Mark Granovetter’s, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78:6 (1973).

‘OA Week 2021 at Masaryk university – Philip N. Cohen’ (Oct. 30, 2021)

0:00 The host opens the fourth and last event of Masaryk University’s Open Access Week 2021, introducing him as a sociologist at Maryland and founding director of SocArXiv. Twenty-five views.

1:12 He thanks them for inviting him and for “allowing me to speak English.”

4:56 On arXiv: “the original one was in mathematics, also focused on physics, developed at Cornell University and run by the university library.”

16:17 The multilingual policy, which appears nowhere else in the file. SocArXiv accepts papers in any language “that we can translate with Google Translate, or if one of our volunteers can translate or can read it for us. So we have people reading in German and Swedish and Spanish, and then we use translating software to take other papers.”

17:44 Fraser et al. updated: 125,000 articles on COVID-19 topics in the first ten months, about 30,000 of them preprints, with the same finding that many were later published with few substantive changes.

19:19 SSRN identified flatly as “operated by Elsevier.”

21:00 The journalist passage, with a clause he did not include in June 2020.

“If a reporter from a major newspaper, from the BBC or the New York Times, calls me and says there’s a new preprint, I’d like your evaluation of it, I will give them that evaluation right away, because I understand that it’s important, it could have a big impact, and I want my name in the newspaper.”

25:03 Permanence. “Except in exceptional circumstances preprints are not removed. Publishing a preprint is quite a serious decision, because you can’t un-publish it, unless it turns out to be some legal problem.”

31:04 The moderation standard, stated as a list.

“We have a group of volunteer moderators. We review the papers very lightly, that is, we don’t read the papers all the way through and verify whether they’re true or good. We simply verify that they are research papers, that they’re written by who they say they’re written by, that they’re categorized correctly, that they’re legible, that they’re in a proper format for reading. And we can do that review even using automated translation in many cases.”

31:53 What acceptance does not mean.

“Posting a paper on SocArXiv is wonderful. It is a sign of your productivity. It means you’ve done something, you’ve done some work. However, it is not an indicator of the quality of the work. It’s not an accomplishment that it was accepted by SocArXiv. You have done the work and you can use it to show your productivity, but the publication of it is not the accomplishment to be rewarded.”

32:25 And the admission, in his own words rather than paraphrase.

“I am happy to admit that there are bad papers on SocArXiv. It’s not like a journal where if there’s a bad paper it makes all the other papers look bad. We don’t want there to be terrible work that’s not real research, but we’re not there to verify the quality. It’s a different model of dissemination.”

32:50 “Of course, a lot of our work is wonderful and excellent and very impactful, such as my own.”

38:41 On journals that forbid preprints: “I think it’s worth asking whether or not they’re really working in the public interest, and maybe we want to devote our efforts to journals that are more compatible with our values. That’s my personal opinion.”

41:12 The CC0 joke. “You can take this talk that I’m giving and you can sell it to somebody for a million dollars, and I have no claim to stop you from doing that. If you do, please let me know, because I will be impressed.”

46:50 An argument for open licenses that nobody else makes. Restrictive licenses get a paper excluded from meta-science corpora, because the software analyzing a large body of literature cannot evaluate whether it has permission, “so they end up just excluding it.”

48:05 To a student whose supervisor chose the more restrictive license: “I don’t know the ages of the people involved, but the older people are often more cautious about these things.”

55:43 The hiring signal, four months before the version I have from the Scholars Strategy Network.

“If we’re hiring somebody for a faculty position, and they share their preprints, we’re experts, we can, and we’re interested in hiring the person, it’s worth it for us to spend an hour reading the paper. And knowing that it is in public on a preprint server signals that the person is taking accountability and transparently opening themselves up to evaluation. So it sends a very positive signal for things like hiring and grants.”

57:41 On article processing charges, careful: “I don’t want to cast aspersions on open access journals or journals that use APCs, but it raises the issue.”

58:32 Plan U, which he describes as the counter-proposal to Plan S: post a preprint and the access problem is solved, and anyone who then wants to publish and sell it takes nothing away from anybody.

1:02:00 On open peer review, and the reviewer’s incentive: “If I’m a reviewer on a paper, I might do some data analysis as part of my review, I might write an interesting essay in response. If I know that people are going to read that, I might put more work into it.”

1:03:37 A participant asks him to name a disadvantage.

1:03:54 “There is always a risk with exposing your work. What if it’s bad? What if you make mistakes?”

1:04:09 The junior scholar problem: “sometimes very early scholars are rushed to publish their work that maybe in ten years from now they’re not excited to have in the public anymore.”

1:04:34 And the conflict it creates: “It’s very often a junior scholar says, my mentor says I shouldn’t post a preprint, what do I do. That’s a complicated relationship you have to negotiate.”

1:04:59 The takedown refusal, with the phrase.

“People come to SocArXiv and say I posted a paper and I found a mistake and I would like to take the paper down, and in that situation we say we’re sorry. We’re not providing a service just to the author but to the whole research community. You’ve posted that paper, it’s part of the scholarly record. It happened. As we say, you can’t un-ring the bell. However, you can post a new version. You can also post essentially a retraction.”

1:07:15 “So you asked me for downsides, and then I immediately turn around and give advantages.”

1:07:29 The host asks whether SocArXiv has any plan for disinformation.

1:07:59 The answer.

“We do not have a plan or a strategy for responding to disinformation, and I think it would raise the question of whether we would take down work that we knew to be deliberately untrue. We haven’t encountered that. I think we would have to consider that.”

1:08:23 “There certainly have been preprints that have turned out to be fraudulent, not on SocArXiv but on the other servers. We’re just too small. No one has noticed if that’s happened on SocArXiv.”

1:08:48 The engineered-origin paper as his example: an early COVID preprint comparing the virus to HIV and concluding it must have been made by humans. “Thousands of people read that paper, and many people used it to express the conspiracy view. It was easier to publish that as a preprint than in a journal, because once real experts read it the errors became fairly obvious.”

1:09:36 The futility argument.

“In the world today, if I want to commit fraud and publish bad research, if I put a paper on my website and I say this is a paper, Google Scholar will find that paper and index it, just because it’s on my website which has .edu. There are private organizations, foundations, think tanks, journalists, so many people publishing information including disinformation on so many platforms, that the idea of stopping it completely is not realistic.”

1:10:18 The screen, described as a joke and functioning as a boundary statement.

“When we screen the papers we’re not reading and evaluating them, but we’re flipping through to look for people selling products, or hiding pornography, things that are obviously abuses of the system. But that does not include reading all the text to make sure that it’s not deliberately fraudulent.”

1:12:41 The junior scholar and data, with the line that names his own position.

“There are people, especially junior scholars, who put their life into collecting their data, and it’s very important to them that they have their publications, to get a job, to get promoted, before somebody else comes along. If you post that data, someone like me, old and experienced, I could write a paper in two days and undermine you.”

1:13:41 The blinded link he has used. On the Open Science Framework you can create a version that serves the data and code with the metadata names hidden, “and I said in the paper that I submitted to the journal, a blinded copy of the data and code is available at this link, so the reviewers could look at it but they can’t cite it, at least ethically.”

1:16:51 The republication vulnerability, which appears nowhere else in the file.

“One thing that could happen with preprint servers: you put it up with an open license, somebody could publish it in a journal, and they could say it’s peer-reviewed. American sociology journals all say they will not publish work that has already been published and peer reviewed. So if somebody takes my preprint and publishes it in their journal, they could even peer review it without telling me. They could say, we have a peer-reviewed article here by Philip Cohen, and put it in their journal. I can’t stop that from happening. I would then have to convince the journal I want to publish in that I had nothing to do with it, and they might still choose not to publish it.”

1:18:21 “Especially with the technology making it so easy to capture and republish work, things like this are going to happen, and we have to think about the infrastructure to protect ourselves as a community. It’s a case where the library people and the information professionals and the researchers and the funders need to work together, because we should not be waiting until some catastrophe like that strikes.”

1:19:33 The close, cutting across the host’s summary.

“There’s strength in numbers. If we all do it together, then you’re not taking an individual risk. It’s a community standard at that point, and that’s very important.”

The first key moment is 31:04. In October 2021 the moderation standard could be written down, and he writes it down, in five criteria, to a room of librarians: it is a research paper, the named author wrote it, the category is right, it is legible, the format permits reading. That is the rule. Set it beside the paper that arrived in the winter of 2025, which had an abstract, real citations, competent models, a matching title, an ORCID, and public code. It satisfied every one of those five. And set it beside the policy his committee published on March 9, 2026, which declines to state a rule that could be written down completely and commits the moderators to judgment made by people using perception and experience.

You now have both ends of the collapse in his own words, dated, from the same man describing the same institution. The stated rule turns out to be five properties of a document, all of them cheap to produce once producing documents is cheap, and none of them about whether anybody meant it.

The second is the disinformation exchange from 1:07:59. A Czech librarian asks in 2021 whether the archive has a plan for deliberate falsehood, and he says no plan, no strategy, has not encountered it, would have to consider it. Then, unprompted, he gives the futility argument: anything on a .edu domain gets indexed by Google Scholar, think tanks and foundations and journalists publish across every platform, so stopping it is not realistic. That is the same argument he uses in February 2026 to refuse the detection arms race, four and a half years earlier, applied to human fraud rather than machine output. The March 2026 refusal is not a position arrived at under pressure. It is the position he already held, and the pressure only tested it.

The screen he describes at 1:10:18 completes the picture. What moderation catches is product sales and hidden pornography. What it does not do is read the text. The boundary was published in 2021 and the machine walked through it.

Then the thing nobody has noticed, at 1:16:51. He imagines a predatory journal taking his openly licensed preprint, running a peer review he never sees, and publishing it under his name, at which point his real journal might refuse it. He says he cannot stop it, that the technology makes capture and republication easy, that this kind of thing will happen, and that the community needs infrastructure before a catastrophe rather than after. That is the form of scholarship reproduced without the substance, named as a risk of cheap reproduction, in October 2021. The infrastructure was not built. The problem arrived from the other side of the pipe.

The hiring passage at 55:43 is the better version of the February 2022 line about believing in openness without being able to prove it, because here he names the audience. The signal gets read by hiring committees and grant panels. Experts reading experts. No public appears anywhere in the sentence. That belongs in the expertise and democracy essay, where the argument is that his influence has run through professional intermediaries and never through the public his book imagines. Here he says what the signal is for, and it is a guild.

Two self-implicating lines are new. At 21:16 he explains why he answers the phone when a reporter calls about a preprint, and the third reason is that he wants his name in the newspaper. At 1:12:58 he tells a room of junior researchers that if they post their data, someone like him, old and experienced, could write a paper in two days and undermine them. That is a man naming his own advantage over the people he is asking to be open, in the middle of asking them.

He is asked for a disadvantage and says so himself at 1:07:15: asked for downsides, he immediately turns around and gives advantages. His answer to the scooping worry rests on cases he can think of. His answer on fraud is that the archive is too small for anyone to have noticed.

He gives arXiv’s origin as Cornell, which is where it moved in 2001; Paul Ginsparg (b. 1955) started it at Los Alamos in 1991. He gave this on October 30, 2021, one week before publishing his resignation from the American Sociological Association on November 6. There is no ASA anywhere in eighty minutes. Three months later, to an American professional audience, the association is captured by Sage and interested in change only for public relations. Whether he was holding the indictment for the American venue or declining to air it abroad, the register is a function of the room, which is now the third recording where that holds.

The prepared half repeats June 2020. Everything worth having came from the questions.

Transcript flags. Every instance of soch archive, search archive, social archive, sai archive, and psi archive is SocArXiv or PsyArXiv; archive alone is arXiv; bioarchive and med archive are bioRxiv and medRxiv. Copic 19, kobit 19, cobit, and covet are COVID-19. At 17:44 fraser at all is Fraser et al. At 7:51 asap bio is ASAPbio. At 28:56 socious is Socius. At 28:12 hypothesis is Hypothes.is and at 28:15 the plaudit plugin is Plaudit. Orchid and orcid id are ORCID. At 15:45 epmc is Europe PMC. At 38:20 sherpa romeo is correct, and at 38:01 e-life is eLife. At 56:33 welcome is Wellcome. At 53:45 abc is APC. At 58:32 plan u and plan s are correct. Masaryk University appears as massachusetts university, maasai university, and massacre university. At 1:05:20 the bell has been wrong is the bell has been rung. At 49:03 the host’s sentence around disintegrate is unrecoverable. The arXiv annual figure at 15:11 and the 400,000 total at 16:10 should be checked against his slides, which he says are posted.

‘Abortion and Abortion Rights lecture for Social Problems sociology class’ (Dec. 7, 2021)

0:07 Frames the topic as two things at once, a personal matter many people have their own experience of, and a public policy, political, and legal question.

0:58 The naming problem, handled fairly to both sides.

“Neither side in this debate wants to be described as anti-something. They both want to be described as pro-something. So that’s why we have pro-choice and pro-life. If you ask the pro-choice people, they would say we are pro-choice and the other side is anti-abortion. But the pro-life people don’t want to be anti-anything. If you ask the pro-life people what to call the pro-choice people, they don’t see it as choice, they see it as abortion. They think the other side should be called pro-abortion.”

2:12 The country is roughly split on the identity question, a little under half calling themselves pro-life, with the distinction he insists on.

“The country is about split on this, which does not mean that the country is about split on the issue. The country is about split on the question of how people identify themselves.”

2:41 Roe polling: about a third say they want it overturned, roughly 60 percent do not, which is more than the share who call themselves pro-choice. His inference: some self-identified pro-life respondents do not want states allowed to ban abortion.

3:45 Legality polling with a middle option, and the effect of offering one.

“This allows people, when you give people a more sort of middle-ground position, they often take the middle-ground position. So half the people say it should be legal in certain circumstances.”

4:20 The 19 percent, and the logical argument he builds on it.

“You really only get 19 percent as of right now who think abortion should just be illegal, right, like murder. The pro-life politics often speaks of abortion as if it is murder, or a holocaust, but it’s a small minority of people who want to treat it that way in terms of the law. If abortion is murder, then it does not matter why or how the person became pregnant. In the case of rape or incest, which is a common exception, that doesn’t matter. The unborn child is still innocent, if you think abortion is murder.”

5:17 What the middle-ground respondents are picturing: very young mothers, rape or incest, early pregnancy. And the conclusion he draws, that anyone taking those exceptions is not treating abortion simply as the taking of a human life.

5:48 The three questions he wants kept apart.

“There’s a question of what’s your identity, I’m pro-life, I’m pro-choice. There’s a question of what do you want to do about the law. And there’s the question, do you want to criminalize abortion, in the sense of put the doctor in jail, put the pregnant person in jail.”

6:18 Group breakdowns: 62 percent of women and 56 percent of men favoring legality in all or most cases, small gender gap; Black and Asian respondents somewhat more favorable than White and Hispanic; younger more than older, more educated more than less, religiously unaffiliated the most favorable, White evangelicals the least.

8:00 Catholics, and the aside he does not walk back.

“The majority of Catholics think abortion should be legal. The majority of Catholics use contraception. The majority of Catholics think divorce should be legal. American Catholics are not good Catholics. They disagree with the Pope. What can you say. It’s not my opinion, good or bad. I’m just saying they disagree with the Pope.”

8:34 Measurement, which is the strongest section in the lecture.

“One thing to say about abortion is, we don’t measure it that well. If you just do a survey and you ask people did you have an abortion in the last year, some people don’t answer you, some people don’t give you the true answer. There’s shame and stigma. There’s also no federal registry. We have a registry of births in the country, so we measure every birth quite well, but there’s no registry of abortions. So any number on abortions is based on an estimate.”

9:24 The Guttmacher figures for 2017 as the best available: a little under a million abortions, about 13.5 per thousand women of childbearing age, so about 1.4 percent of such women in a given year, and almost 40 percent of them medication abortions.

10:22 About 18 percent of pregnancies excluding miscarriages ending in abortion, with the rate falling for forty years.

11:21 His explanation for the decline, offered as the one thing he can say clearly.

“Teenagers and very young women are getting pregnant a lot less than they used to, and that’s one big reason that the abortion rate has fallen. The age of marriage has gone up, and people are allowed to be single mothers now in the culture much more than they used to be. There’s less unintended pregnancy among young women, who are the group most likely to have abortions.”

11:59 Roe as a 1973 decision recognizing a right to decide, with states permitted to limit it around viability, then about 28 weeks.

12:54 The basis, and why the argument never ended.

“The basis for Roe v. Wade was privacy. Privacy is not in the Constitution. So the Supreme Court had to do some interpretation here, and that’s what allows them to still be arguing about it today. They did not say everybody has a right to have an abortion. They said women have a right to make the decision about abortion. That’s why pro-choice people are called pro-choice, because that’s the way they won Roe v. Wade.”

13:37 The line of privacy cases behind it: contraception first, and what he calls the same principle later applied to gay sex, with the morality laws that once restricted birth control to married couples.

14:43 The Hyde Amendment and the distinction it exploited.

“They didn’t say you have a right to have an abortion like you have a right to vote. You have a right to vote, and that means the government has to make it equally possible for everybody to vote. In the case of abortion, you have a right to decide about an abortion, and the government has to let everybody have equal access to that decision, but they don’t have to pay for it. So Congress passed the Hyde Amendment: fine, you want legal abortion, it could be legal, but the federal government’s not going to pay for it. So this right is not going to apply to poor people.”

16:07 Casey in 1992, with medicine having pushed viability earlier, permitting states to ban after viability where a fetus could survive outside the body.

17:32 Dobbs, argued the previous week, and the origin of the Mississippi statute.

“That is the case in Mississippi, which was passed in Mississippi just for the purpose of getting to the Supreme Court, so that the new Trump-appointed judges could have an opportunity to overturn Roe v. Wade.”

18:09 The precedent problem, stated in a way that gives the overturning argument its due.

“Each of these decisions reaffirmed Roe v. Wade. It said we’re not overturning Roe, we’re just clarifying it. But the abortion right is still not in the Constitution, so it’s really just a matter of Supreme Court precedent. And so the Supreme Court can change its mind, can change precedent if they want to. Usually they’re pretty cautious about doing that, and that’s what they’re arguing about now.”

18:44 The Mississippi law at 15 weeks, before viability, and his forecast.

“If the Supreme Court says this law is okay, to one degree or another they are overturning Roe v. Wade, and it will depend on the wording of what they say how severe that is. But to some degree that’s going to happen.”

19:37 On Casey, answering a student who is evidently unconvinced: it affirmed Roe explicitly, and after it you still could not ban abortion outright. “It seems semantic, but it turns out to be kind of important.”

20:19 The Texas Heartbeat Act at six weeks, and the terminology.

“Six weeks, most women don’t know they’re pregnant. They call it a Heartbeat Act because there’s an electrical signal discernible in the fetus at that point. It’s not a heartbeat. There’s no heart pumping blood, but there are the electrical firings, the organ is beginning to form. That’s very semantic, but that’s how they like to describe it.”

21:07 The enforcement design: private suits for ten thousand dollars rather than criminal prosecution, which he says would end provision because no provider could absorb the litigation.

21:50 Why the Court’s handling of that case was the signal.

“Prior to this court, with six Republican judges, the Supreme Court would have obviously thrown that out and just said this obviously violates Roe, we have a precedent, so we’re throwing it out. Instead the Supreme Court said, ah, interesting, we’ll discuss it. That was a very big moment, because that’s when it became clear where we’re probably headed.”

22:50 Declining access, which he treats as a separate track from the law: funding restrictions making practice hard to sustain, plus protesters and the risk of violence narrowing the pool of providers.

23:38 The county maps: in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Missouri more than 75 percent of women live in counties with no abortion provider.

24:36 The catalogue of state restrictions: physician-only requirements, hospital or admitting-privileges rules, gestational limits in 43 states, so-called partial-birth bans in 21 states, prohibitions on state funding and in some places on private insurance coverage, waiting periods in 25 states, mandatory counseling, and parental consent or notification for minors.

27:09 The analogy he lands on for what kind of right it is.

“It’s not like we have a right to abortion in some universal sense. There are lots of restrictions on the right. It’s more like you have a right to drive a car, but they can do all kinds of things to limit that. Not like voting. Voting you have a right to do, period.”

27:38 Bans on abortion for sex selection, with the obvious objection supplied: “Of course, how could they know what your reason truly is.”

28:10 Gestational timing: 79 or 80 percent of abortions before 10 weeks, the largest group under six weeks, very few in the later weeks.

28:42 What the late ones are.

“All of the abortions that take place after the age of viability, if hypothetically a fetus is 24 weeks along and usually a 24-week-old can survive, then if you’re going to do an abortion at 24 weeks it is only going to be if that baby cannot survive. It’s when they discover an abnormality which is so extreme it can’t survive, or something that would not allow the mother to survive or would greatly threaten her.”

29:22 Why that distribution mattered to the movement.

“You can see why feminists were not so distressed at the idea that states would only allow abortions before 24 weeks. That did not seem like the end of abortion rights, because that’s not what we’re talking about in the vast majority of cases.”

29:55 A campaign video for Plan C, played in full, on medication abortion, the FDA restrictions, Aid Access, and the three demands it makes of viewers.

31:30 His comment on it, which includes the legal risk.

“Right now in Texas, if you want to use this method, it’s pretty easy to get the pills and do it, but somebody could sue whoever provides the person getting an abortion with those pills under the Texas Heartbeat Act. So it’s risky.”

32:08 The trigger-law forecast: a number of states already have statutes written to ban abortion the moment Roe falls.

32:40 Relative risk, introduced through the counseling requirements.

“It has always been the case that abortion bans don’t stop rich people from getting abortions. The number of deaths per birth is 20 out of every 100,000, and the number of deaths per abortion is less than one half out of every 100,000. It should be obvious that having a baby is more dangerous than having an abortion.”

34:02 The argument that reversed, which he flags as a genuine turn.

“What goes around comes around. Feminists said we need reproductive rights because we need to be able to control our lives, if you make us have babies then we won’t be able to have careers. One of the things that happens in the legal cases now is the anti-abortion people say, tons of women have children and successful careers. You don’t need to not have a baby in order to have a successful career anymore, so why do we still need this protection?”

34:42 He introduces and plays Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s safe-haven exchange from the Dobbs argument, pausing first to explain what safe haven laws are, and telling students to listen to what she is actually saying.

35:44 Barrett’s question in full, on whether relinquishment after birth answers the burden-of-parenting argument, and her acknowledgment of “an infringement on bodily autonomy which we have in other contexts, like vaccines.”

37:04 His restatement of her argument before the answer.

“What she’s saying is, if the law now says 23 weeks, and we overturn Roe, we’re making women basically only be pregnant for 15 more weeks, then they can put the baby in the fire station, and so it’s really not that big of a burden.”

37:22 The lawyer’s answer, that adoption was available in 1973 too, and that pregnancy imposes unique physical demands beyond the burdens of parenting.

38:03 His reading of Barrett, which gives her the argument on its own terms.

“We understand that if we say an abortion is a human life, and you cannot just terminate a human life at will, that we are imposing on women, on their bodily autonomy, where the law is intervening and saying you don’t get to do exactly what you want with your body. Just like with the vaccine rule. She was just using an analogy to another case where that’s obviously considered acceptable nowadays. So they are saying, you don’t get to do whatever you want with your body if there’s a public interest.”

39:09 What he thinks the lawyer left out: that carrying a pregnancy and relinquishing a child is a process people often do not want to go through, rather than thirty weeks of lost work time.

40:00 The concession he makes to the other side, at length.

“There is a sense that you cannot avoid the fact that in this policy we are in fact balancing the well-being of fetuses with the well-being of the people who carry them. You can’t pretend that there is no issue there.”

40:27 The viability standard as a drawn line, and what it concedes on both ends.

41:23 The limits of science in the argument.

“Some people would like to not have a debate about abortion that recognizes that there’s a continuum of life here. If you have a very religious view, you can say every fertilized egg is a human life and they’re all completely equal, but science is never going to say that. On the other hand, science can’t draw a line and say at this moment it becomes a human being. That’s why this viability standard is a ballpark attempt, and in a reasonable world something like a viability standard would maybe not be unreasonable.”

42:08 Catharine MacKinnon’s position, offered as the argument most pro-choice people will not make.

“Most pro-choice people don’t want to say that, or they don’t agree with it. But even if they did agree with it, they don’t want to say it, because nobody wants to say you’re allowing infanticide.”

43:05 A discussion of an evidently dystopian novel from the 1980s, on how quickly rights can be withdrawn: women’s bank cards stopping, an emergency rule, a rapid crackdown, soldiers enforcing it.

44:13 The closing, which is the most careful thing he says on any contested subject in the file.

“I just want to say to you all, younger people, in some ways these are disturbing times. Even if you are unsure about, or against, abortion rights, there are aspects of this politics which are disturbing to most people. It’s only nineteen percent of Americans who think abortion should always be against the law. I would never tell religious people what to believe. But there are absolutely trade-offs between some people’s rights and other people’s rights, and the way we manage those things is with politics. So there’s no easy answer. This is just my way of saying I understand this is difficult, so I’m sorry.”

This is the hardest test in the file and he mostly passes it.

The structure of the lecture is the same structure he used on functionalism in August 2020. State the position, give it its strongest form, then examine the logic. He does this to the pro-life argument at 4:20: if abortion is the taking of an innocent human life, the circumstances of conception are irrelevant, so a rape exception is a concession rather than a principle. That is the argument the most serious pro-life thinkers make against their own movement’s political compromises, and a student who came in pro-life would recognize it as the hard question rather than a caricature.

Then he does the same thing in the other direction. At 34:02 he reports that the workplace-access argument feminists won on has been turned around and used against them. At 40:00 he says the policy balances the well-being of fetuses against the well-being of the people carrying them and that you cannot pretend otherwise. At 41:23 he tells the class that science will not settle it in either direction, which forecloses the most common move on his own side. And at 42:08 he puts up Catharine MacKinnon (b. 1946) saying abortion should be legal even granting that a fetus is a human life, and notes that most people who agree with him will not say it out loud.

The Barrett passage is the strongest evidence in the whole file against reading him as a man who only prosecutes. He plays the audio, stops it, explains safe-haven laws neutrally, restates her question in its strongest form, plays the answer, and then explains her bodily-autonomy analogy sympathetically before saying where he thinks the response fell short. That is what teaching a contested question looks like, and it is a different man from the one who plays montages of a president lying.

Three places where a pro-life student would have a fair complaint.

The Catholics passage at 8:00 is the worst moment. He says American Catholics are not good Catholics, then says it is not his opinion, then, in the part the transcript catches mid-stumble, appears to say that it does make them bad Catholics. Whatever he meant, he has made a judgment about the authenticity of somebody’s religious practice from a lectern, on a subject where a good number of his students are the people being described. It costs him nothing to have said instead that American Catholic opinion diverges from Church teaching, which is the same fact without the verdict.

The Plan C video at 29:55 is the third time in this file he has handed the microphone to an advocacy organization. Paid sick leave in April 2020, the stimulus bill in September 2020, and now abortion pills. All three clips are accurate on their numbers. All three arrive with framing and a call to action in somebody else’s voice, and none is identified for students as advocacy rather than reporting. The pattern is consistent enough to be a finding: he is careful in his own voice and outsources the argument at the edges of his expertise.

And the coda at 43:05 is the loosest thing in the lecture. He uses a 1985 dystopian novel as a warning about the direction of American politics, describing soldiers stoning women. He flags it as fiction from the 1980s. He does not flag that the distance between a Mississippi 15-week statute and that scenario is enormous, and a student inclined toward the other side would hear the comparison and stop listening. The closing three minutes are so careful that the coda is the only part working against them.

On the record, his forecasting is his best in the file. On December 7, 2021 he said the Court would overturn Roe to some degree, that the wording would determine severity, and that trigger laws in a number of states would fire immediately. Dobbs came down on June 24, 2022. Every part of that held. He also said the medication route would go underground and become the practical center of the fight, which is what happened, with the shield-law and mail-order disputes that followed. A demographer making a confident prediction about a constitutional case is outside his expertise, and he read it correctly from the Court’s handling of the Texas procedural posture rather than from the merits, which is the right signal to have watched.

One methodological complaint of the kind he would make about someone else. The 19 percent figure carries a lot of weight in his argument, and it comes from a poll option reading illegal in all circumstances. Someone who believes abortion is homicide but accepts an exception where the mother’s life is at risk will not choose that option, and there is no contradiction in that position. So the gap between what people believe and how they answer the question is smaller than his inference implies. The inference is still substantially right, and he presents an estimate as though it measured the thing exactly, which is the move he audits others for.

For the biography, this lecture belongs in the same paragraph as the March for Life photograph. Together they make the case that on subjects inside sociology he can hold a contested question open in front of students who disagree with him, and that the register changes when the subject moves to a named political actor. The difference is whether there is somebody to accuse.

Transcript flags. At 17:32 “doubts what we’re calling doubles” is Dobbs, and every variant of “roe versus wage,” “robert’s weight,” and “brokers his ways” is Roe v. Wade. At 9:24 “goodmaker institute” is the Guttmacher Institute. At 15:29 and 16:02 “hype amendment” and “the harris decision” are the Hyde Amendment and Harris v. McRae (1980). At 19:37 “planned parenthood” is Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992). At 2:24 “protrusions” is pro-choice or. At 4:07 “milligram position” is middle-ground position. At 20:36 “most women don’t know their credit” is don’t know they’re pregnant, and the sentence is unusable as transcribed. At 24:42 “licensed position” is licensed physician. At 34:47 “amy coney barrett” is correct (b. 1972); the lawyer she is questioning, transcribed as “miss rickleman,” is Julie Rikelman, then of the Center for Reproductive Rights. At 36:12 “amiki” is amici. At 42:15 “kathryn mckinnon” is Catharine MacKinnon, and you should pull her sentence from the original rather than the transcript, since the version here is garbled around “I can’t follow that.” At 31:24 “plancypills.org” is plancpills.org. At 43:05 the novel is Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), which he never names. The 13.5 per thousand, 39 percent medication, and 18 percent of pregnancies figures all match Guttmacher’s 2017 estimates, and the 79 percent before ten weeks matches CDC surveillance, so those are safe.

‘Open Social Science and Public Engagement’ (Feb. 18, 2022)

0:03 Sophia of the Scholars Strategy Network NYC chapter opens, describing SSN as connecting scholars to policymakers, civic leaders, media, and the public, with roughly 37 or 38 chapters nationally.

1:32 She introduces him, including the Trump blocking lawsuit, which she says she wanted to make sure to mention.

2:11 He notes the session is scheduled for 90 minutes and asks for questions in the chat, warning he will not see them while sharing slides.

3:03 SocArXiv’s funding position, stated more bluntly than in print.

“It’s now run out of the University of Maryland libraries, which means I serve at the pleasure of the dean of the libraries, basically. And that means they pay for it. Not that much, but not to diminish their contribution. It’s a low-budget operation.”

3:34 The audience he assumes: social scientists who want influence on policy, politics, other scholars, or the public, in the context of an enrollment crisis, budget problems, and a crisis of democracy.

4:14 His formulation of the goal.

“The way for us as scholars to address these goals is to combine being public in our intellectual life and intellectual in our public life. I’m looking for ways to integrate these two aspects in ways that strengthen them both.”

4:44 The principle underneath the whole talk.

“We have to have a level of accountability in all of the communication that we do, and the key principle for accountability in science and social science is openness. It doesn’t mean everything is always open to everybody, but openness is a key aspect of our accountability and the trust that we ask people to put in us.”

5:25 Publication lag at the association’s journals, which he says he ballparked from first-round review plus one revision plus production, excluding the author’s own revision time: about twenty months at Sociological Theory, around seven at the fastest, an average near nine months.

6:18 The paywall, framed as friction rather than only cost: shared PDFs, temporary logins, paying extra for an open version.

6:50 An interruption from the host asking him to fix his screen share, and his response that he had thought he already had.

7:56 Market concentration: of the five thousand most recent sociology articles he checked, 80 percent came from five publishers, with Sage the largest.

8:12 On his former association, in the sharpest phrasing he uses anywhere.

“Our association, the American Sociological Association, is pretty well captured by Sage, and organizationally not interested in changing this beyond what might be necessary for tinkering, daily functions, and PR.”

8:44 Preprints as a workaround rather than a solution: a way to address the problems without waiting for the system to be restructured.

9:15 The servers, with a pronunciation note that the X in bioRxiv is a Greek chi, and the 2016 arrival of SocArXiv and PsyArXiv.

9:46 What a preprint is, and the qualification that not everything on his archive fits the definition, since some items are accepted versions of peer-reviewed papers.

10:10 The framing he prefers for a social science audience.

“A preprint is like what we would call in social science historically a working paper. It’s a formal scholarly output, it’s permanent and citable, and it’s a research event when it’s published. It happens, like publication in a journal, and becomes part of the record.”

10:37 Three reasons: efficiency, engagement, inclusivity.

10:44 The waiting problem, described from the author’s side.

“You’ve all probably experienced the frustration of doing work that you’re excited by, and then it enters into this doldrums period where you’re just waiting. And the frustrating thing is you’re waiting for people who are having their arms twisted to read it, while you suspect, or you hope, that there are people actually out there who want to read it, and they have to wait.”

11:22 Access as principle rather than convenience: the public supports the work through grants and salaries, and “we don’t aspire to have our work hidden from the people it most affects.”

11:56 The third reason, which he says is underrated: the same friction that blocks the public also slows connection between scholars, and engagement means building collaborative spaces rather than broadcasting.

12:28 Volume: approaching 400,000 preprints a year across the major servers, about 14 percent of the annual article count in Web of Science, with the caveat that the denominator is imperfect.

13:49 The Fraser et al. finding on COVID preprints, and what he takes from it.

“They followed some of these papers to see what they looked like when they were published in journals, and very often they were published with hardly any substantive change, or no change in the main findings. That was in a way reassuring. It implied the preprint system was accelerating the distribution of research without producing tons of junk. However, of course some of it is wrong.”

15:07 The concession he makes in the same breath, which he has not made this plainly elsewhere.

“Some peer-reviewed work is wrong, some preprints are wrong. Probably more preprints than peer-reviewed papers are wrong.”

15:35 The medRxiv caution notice, and whether the press ignoring it was bad.

“Mostly not, because there was also great journalism happening. The good journalists were using other indicators of reliability. Who are the researchers, they would interview other experts. You would see an article in the New York Times or the Washington Post about some preprint with three top experts interviewed, and that’s essentially what we get out of peer review, but in the space of a few hours.”

16:49 Preprints that carried the pandemic: excess mortality, which introduced the concept to a general audience, and the finding that delayed lockdowns cost lives, published in a journal six months later with the main finding intact.

18:28 The legacy workflow, laid out as a sequence of submissions and rejections, and then the three functions journals perform: establishing the record and precedence, promotion and distribution, and the signal that experts reviewed it.

20:37 The preprint workflow, and what it does to those functions.

“It’s separating the functions of what journals now do, and taking part of what journals now do and moving it earlier in the process.”

22:06 On whether this sacrifices trust, answered by widening the frame to the whole research life cycle.

23:03 His argument that evaluation happens at many points, and the one that is least often named.

“If you have a job, if you have tenure, if you’re a graduate student, your status has already been adjudicated to some degree. You don’t want to assume that someone from one school’s work is better than another, but we do carry a reputation which contains within it some assessment of our veracity as a scholar.”

24:35 The broader open-science agenda: preregistration, sharing materials and code, and a note that NIH had announced a data management and sharing requirement the previous day.

25:18 SocArXiv’s scale: ten thousand papers since 2016, which he says is small against 400,000 preprints a year, and which he says does not matter for the individual decision.

26:01 A walkthrough of one paper on the platform, using his own divorce decline paper: download count, hypothes.is annotation, Plaudit endorsement, unlimited supplemental materials, two DOIs linked so citations aggregate, license options, taxonomy from ASA section names, and versioning.

29:12 Why versioning matters, and the detail that the paper shown is on version five with all earlier versions retrievable, since the American Community Survey data updates annually.

30:08 A second example, the Stone Center working paper series, and a Branko Milanović paper posted in July 2020 and published in Review of Income and Wealth ten months later, downloaded about 800 times in between.

32:39 Objections, taken one at a time. First, the fear that a paper is not good enough.

“A lot of people think it’s not good enough, or they think they need to have peer review before they feel permitted to share their work. If you look at the difference between peer-reviewed work and initial drafts, usually this concern is not borne out. I think more people err on the side of being too cautious. That’s my personal view.”

33:55 Second, that posting will block later journal publication, which he calls a vanishing problem and directs people to check on Sherpa Romeo.

34:41 Third, that ideas will be stolen, where he inverts the objection and then adds the part that is the most valuable sentence in the talk.

“I think the problem of stealing ideas probably happens more in people’s inner circles, especially their mentors and advisers and committee members and journal peer reviewers. The people who are stealing ideas are usually not getting them from the public square. They have some private access to your ideas, and they’re abusing that position of trust. So in a case like that, posting it publicly can help you.”

35:52 When to post, presented as four cut points by nervousness: whenever you want feedback, at conference submission, at journal submission, or at acceptance.

37:06 On the last option, and the practice it should replace.

“You see this all the time on social media. I’m so happy I got my paper accepted, in a few months I’ll share it with you, or send me an email and I’ll share it with you. People think that’s a friendly, nice thing to say, but it actually gets you a lot fewer readers than if you just put up a link.”

38:37 The disclaimer that governs the whole open-science pitch.

“I do not mean to imply here that everything must be shared with everyone at all times. There are times you do need to keep things private. Sometimes you have preliminary results that you’re really not sure about and you don’t want to share outside of a circle. That’s totally fine. It’s just a question about being purposive in how you do this.”

39:58 The modular workflow he actually uses: shared and unshared folders, working out of the unshared ones and dropping files across when ready.

41:17 On tools, and the line that got the biggest reaction.

“We don’t build the tools that we’re using, by and large. People love Google, Google Drive, Google Scholar. Google is not really your friend. It’s okay to use Google tools because they’re awesome, but they won’t love you back in the end.”

42:43 The old convention that no longer holds: mailing a draft marked do not quote or cite without permission.

43:25 What replaced the audience.

“The audience is less the people that you’re speaking to, and now much more a network. It’s the people that you are reaching right now and the people that they’re reaching right now, and you don’t know who they’re going to be.”

43:57 Who is now reading: journalists who do their own data analysis, and journalists who marshal peer review by calling three experts before filing.

“That is not violating the principle of peer review, that’s actually honoring the principle of peer review, if they do it well.”

44:32 The chaotic disciplinary mashup, where an economist shares a sociologist’s paper and an unexpected audience arrives.

44:56 The argument against trying to control it.

“We do not get to choose whether we want to share things just with our friends and not with our enemies. It’s very hard to share something and have it be completely insulated. So we want to get on top of it instead of trying to restrict it, because that’s a losing battle, and if we succeed we don’t really want to live in that world where so few people read our work.”

46:31 The claim he flags as unproven and believes anyway.

“It’s hard to empirically prove this, but I really believe it. Even if people do not read your data and code and validate everything you do, the fact that it’s available says a lot. It says that you are open to being held accountable, that you are open to collaboration, that you’re not trying to slow other people’s work down, that you’re not trying to own the work more than necessary. I think openness is part of the accountability that we need to communicate in order to earn trust, and I think it’s important even if nobody ever replicates your work.”

48:32 The correction he offers to his own field’s language about dissemination.

“When we say we want to use social media to get our work out there, we also want to get other people’s work in here, and we want to hear from other people. Social media, if used well, is just as much about listening as it is about speaking.”

49:19 A story from Twitter about a reviewer plagiarizing a paper, and what he draws from it.

“If the incentives were different and the communication structure were different, that person who stole your idea, if you had connected with them earlier in a more transparent and collegial environment, you might have become collaborators. It’s a shame when the only opportunity to communicate you have with people is an anonymous peer review.”

51:03 First question, from Heath, on journalists and editors trained to cite only peer-reviewed work.

52:24 His answer, that the premise is out of date, with the list: think tank reports, in-house data journalism at FiveThirtyEight, Vox, and the New York Times, Pew.

53:47 The questioner pushes back, arguing the elite outlets are the exception and that reporters and editors under thirty at smaller outlets remain risk-averse and would benefit from education. Cohen concedes the point and adds one of his own.

“There’s a business interest in maintaining this distinction, because the publishers want to reinforce this distinction all the time. If you want their PR help, or your university’s PR operation, they might insist that things are peer reviewed.”

56:34 Second question, from Alicia, on whether journals object to preprints and on the cost barrier to open access. His answer walks through author agreements, the point at which publishers start to feel they have added value, and the Sage and Wiley default permitting the accepted manuscript on a nonprofit repository.

59:26 Where a bad agreement bites, with a consequence most people miss.

“Some will say only 12 months later, and that would be a worse agreement, because in the worst case the revisions that you did for the journal corrected some important errors, and you don’t want to keep circulating the wrong one.”

1:00:02 An administrative fact he had not published anywhere.

“We have never received a request from a journal to take down a preprint. We have to take it down if we get an appropriate request under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and we’ve never received one.”

1:00:27 On what moderation does and does not do: authors click a box saying they have permission, and the archive does not check author agreements, but rejects a submission that looks like a publisher’s PDF with a copyright line.

1:01:04 Why journals are coming around, with the bioRxiv direct-submission button and the citation arithmetic behind it.

1:03:05 Third question, from a demographer at Columbia teaching dissemination, asking what to advise students. His answer opens with a policy he had not mentioned.

“When you post a paper on SocArXiv you can’t take it down later. We don’t let you say I decided this was bad and I want to take it down, because we have a commitment to the scholarly record, and it happened, and you can’t unring the bell.”

1:04:20 The cut point he recommends for students, and the standard he attaches to it.

“If you’re standing up and giving a research presentation for fifteen minutes at PAA, I think there should be a paper behind you that you’re willing to share. That’s just important accountability. I also think that paper should have data and code behind it, but even if it doesn’t, you should be prepared to say, you know that graph you put up with the hundred coefficients that no one can read, they should be able to read that on their own time.”

1:05:14 The parallel test for journal submission: if you think it might be embarrassing to share, it is probably not ready for the reviewers either.

1:05:53 A follow-up on journals whose author guidelines forbid posting at submission, and his answer that guidelines and agreements should not conflict, that the agreement governs, and that he would not recommend ignoring it.

1:07:15 The blinding problem, and the delicate position it creates.

“An editorial assistant may Google the title, find the preprint, and say you have to take this down because it’ll mess up the blinding. Then you’re in that awkward position where you don’t want to annoy them and make them your enemy, but they’re wrong. It may mess up the blindness, but they probably don’t have a policy that you actually have to take it down. It just makes them uncomfortable, or they’re old.”

1:08:12 On blind review as a value rather than a rule.

“Blind peer review is not a sacred principle. It’s a good idea, it has some benefits, it has some downsides. Anonymity protects evildoers among the reviewers, and if they were being held accountable, it might be a fair trade-off.”

1:09:56 A question relayed from a public health co-chair on participation rates from public health and medical fields, which he cannot answer numerically and works through aloud, ending with an admission: “I guess I don’t know exactly what the difference is between medical and public health.”

1:11:36 A question from Sarah on the annotation tool, and a candid answer about a feature he does not promote.

“The author is not notified when you put a comment on their paper. I really wish they were. I don’t promote this feature that heavily, because I’m not sure people want to post their papers and have comments appear that they’re not notified of. If somebody posts a whole thing about why your paper is wrong, I’d like to know right away.”

1:13:23 The overlay journal idea, spelled out: solicit reviews through the annotation layer, publish a list of papers that pass, and you have a journal sitting on top of the archive.

1:14:12 A question on licensing, and his walkthrough of CC0, CC BY, and the non-commercial, no-derivatives, and share-alike variants, with the ethical point that CC0 does not license plagiarism.

1:15:56 What he uses and why, including a publisher that repackages open-access articles into books.

“It’s offensive, it violates our norms, but it doesn’t really hurt you. The open access version is still open. It’s a shame if they’re fooling people into paying for something they shouldn’t be paying for, but it’s not really your job to stop that.”

1:18:13 The last question, from the host, on qualitative research and the ethics of sharing data from vulnerable populations.

1:18:47 His answer, which distinguishes papers from materials and then works through options: naming participants where they consent, sharing interview guides and coding guides and recruitment materials, and blinding transcripts.

1:20:27 The proposal he arrives at in real time.

“I think we should have a way for reviewers to have access to everything but not the public. An intermediate category where ten people can read all your notes and transcripts, but under an agreement that they won’t share it beyond that. We do that with confidential quantitative data to some degree. I think we could do that with transcripts and qualitative materials also.”

1:21:40 And the concession to the ethnographers that closes the session.

“There’s the other issue with ethnographers, which is that just because you read my transcripts doesn’t mean you can analyze my data. The data is me. I was there, it’s the experience. There’s no such thing as reproducibility, because you couldn’t have the interaction and the experience that I had as me at that moment. So reproducibility is not really the issue. But maybe something like accountability is. You still might have lied in what you reported, or been wrong.”

Eighty-two minutes, 109 views, and it is the single most useful recording in the file for anyone trying to describe what he believes, because the question period breaks him out of the prepared pitch four separate times.

The prepared half is the June 2020 talk with better slides. The unprepared half is where things happen.

Start with 1:21:40, because it is the largest concession he has ever made in public on the question he is most associated with. An ethnographer’s data is the ethnographer. Reproducibility is not the issue. That is the ethnographic position, stated by the man whose census arithmetic against Alice Goffman is the thing his critics in that camp will never forgive. He does not abandon anything: he replaces reproducibility with accountability, and holds that a reader still needs some way to check whether the account is honest. But he grants the premise, unprompted, at the end of a long session, to a friendly questioner. Anyone writing about the Goffman affair should have this passage.

And the proposal at 1:20:27 is the constructive version nobody has built. A restricted-access tier where a small number of vetted readers can see transcripts under agreement, on the model of Census research data centers. That is the obvious answer to the qualitative transparency fight that consumed political science after 2015, and he arrives at it live, says it is not his area, and says it would be neat. Six years on, the Qualitative Data Repository at Syracuse does roughly this and he cannot remember its name until a listener supplies it, which tells you how far the idea had traveled inside his own field of vision.

Three other places where the questions produce better material than the slides.

At 15:07 he says, flatly, that probably more preprints than peer-reviewed papers are wrong. That is the sentence missing from the June 2020 version of this talk, where he listed errors on both sides and declined to say which side had more. Here he says it. It costs his own project something and it is almost certainly true.

At 34:41 he identifies where idea theft actually happens: advisers, committee members, and anonymous reviewers, people with private access abusing a position of trust. That is the strongest argument for preprints anybody makes. The usual pitch is speed and access. This one is protection for the powerless against the people who supervise them, and it converts an open-science talking point into a labor argument about graduate students. It is also, quietly, an argument against the anonymity he goes on to question at 1:08:12.

And the Heath exchange from 51:03 to 55:05 is the only moment across every recording in this file where somebody pushes back on him in real time and he loses the point. He says the peer-reviewed-only rule is not reality anymore and reels off the Times, Vox, FiveThirtyEight, Pew. The questioner answers that those are the elite outlets with data staff, and that a twenty-five-year-old reporter with a thirty-year-old editor at a local paper is risk-averse and untrained, and that the education opportunity lies there. Cohen concedes. He is right about the national press and generalized from it, which is a sampling error of exactly the kind he catches in others, and the correction came from a listener rather than from him.

The self-implicating material is thick here. At 3:03 he says the archive is a low-budget operation and that he serves at the pleasure of a library dean, which is the honest description of the infrastructure position he was later given a prize for. At 46:31 he says the value of open data is hard to prove empirically and that he believes it anyway, and asks the room what they think, which is the same admission I flagged in his December 2025 audit: the connection between availability and correctness is asserted rather than demonstrated. At 1:11:36 he explains that he does not promote his own annotation feature because it notifies nobody, which is a product manager saying his own product is broken. And at 1:10:15 he simply does not know the answer to a question about his own platform’s disciplinary composition and says so at length rather than guessing.

Two weaknesses.

The association line at 8:12, that it is captured by Sage and interested in change only for PR, is delivered to a professional audience as a settled fact three months after he resigned. It is a characterization of motive, unsourced, about people who cannot answer. It is also the register he uses for institutions and not for individuals in this talk, which is a distinction worth noticing: nobody is named.

And the workflow advice from 39:58 is thin. Shared folders and unshared folders, drop a file across when ready. That is a personal habit rather than a system, offered to a room asking how to build one, and it sits oddly beside eighty minutes on infrastructure.

For the biography, this recording supplies three things the current draft lacks: the low-budget line, which grounds the SocArXiv paragraph in what the operation is; the private-access argument about idea theft, which is his best original contribution to the open-science case; and the ethnography concession, which belongs in the Goffman paragraph as the thing he came to grant later.

Transcript flags. Every instance of “social archive,” “search archive,” “site archive,” “cyrica,” and “sai archive” is SocArXiv or PsyArXiv; “bio archive” and “med archive” are bioRxiv and medRxiv. At 1:14 “a long and brilliant cd” is CV. At 3:20 “not that much” is his own aside about the budget and should be quoted carefully. At 14:08 “fraser at all” is Fraser et al. At 26:43 “plotted endorsement” is Plaudit. At 31:08 “milanovich” is Branko Milanović. At 33:44 “not worn out” is not borne out. At 44:06 “marshall peer review” is marshal. At 48:24 “pentagonation” appears to be his own coinage and he says he does not know why; treat it as a joke rather than a term. At 59:52 “sherpa romeo” is correct. At 1:10:32 “copic 19” is COVID-19. At 1:21:36 “quality of data repository syracuse” is the Qualitative Data Repository. The host is identified only as Sophia and the questioners as Heath, Alicia, Gilly or Jilly, Sarah, and a relayed question from Diana Hatto; none of the surnames are recoverable from the audio, so describe them by role rather than naming them.

‘Posting Ivermectin Research to SocArXiv (Cohen & Pardo-Guerra)’ (Mar. 7, 2022)

Hosts Joseph Cohen of Queens College and Jason Tougaw; guests Philip Cohen and Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra of UC San Diego. 177 views.

2:34 The chronology begins before the tweet. The steering committee had known about the paper since 2021, and Pardo-Guerra had already asked why it was not retracted and the authors banned for life.

3:06 The operation described, with the staffing.

“SocArXiv is a low-budget operation. I’m the director, unpaid. We have zero staff. What we have is a handful of volunteers who are academics around the world. We vet the papers when they come in, and our question is: is this research, is it plausibly correctly categorized, and is the author identified. A very low level. There’s no quality control in our review. That’s our mission.”

3:31 How he found out. “It must have been November, December. I got an annual report from our platform host, the Center for Open Science, and it just listed the top URLs on the platform. I don’t normally study the metrics. The most clicked-on paper of the twelve months ending last June was this paper, and it was only uploaded in May. So it was only up there for one out of the twelve months and it was the most viewed thing on our platform, and I hadn’t even seen it. It was approved by one of our other moderators. Not to pass the buck, but every day we have a different person on shift.”

5:32 What the platform is, and the criterion.

“SocArXiv is not peer review. It’s openness is the watchword, but we do have some screening criteria. It has to be what we say scholarly or scholarly engaged.”

6:05 Asked how far ahead of the second-most-downloaded paper it was.

“I don’t. It’s actually what I meant when I said we’re a low-budget operation. I can’t even press a button and get that information. But I can tell you it’s definitely in the top ten of our papers of all time.”

Pardo-Guerra’s account of the program, 6:25 to 9:12: Mexico City’s health ministry decided in September 2020, with no vaccines in prospect, to distribute kits containing ivermectin, aspirin, paracetamol, and a pulse oximeter to people with positive tests; distribution ran from January to September 2021 and reached about 200,000 people; the decision was made in consultation with unnamed experts and unreviewed papers found online. “So they did their research. And using their research they justified giving 200,000 people these kits.”

8:34 How he found it. “I only discovered this two weeks ago, when a local newspaper published something about the cost of this intervention. So what initiated the controversy in Mexico was that they were spending money on ivermectin, not the fact that they were giving ivermectin to people, which I find more shocking. When I went back and saw that the paper they were using was on SocArXiv, I felt personally attacked.”

9:12 The host on gatekeeping, invoking the Sokal Squared hoax and noting that sociology journals rejected all of the fake papers.

10:09 Pardo-Guerra’s demand and its grounds: withdrawal and a ban, on undeclared conflicts of interest, absent informed consent, and the statistical claims.

12:47 Cohen on what the officials exploited, which is the sentence to lead with.

“What they took advantage of was ambiguity about what the platform is. We’ll tell anybody who asks us that if your work is on SocArXiv, that does not mean it’s good. It’s a weird thing to say about your own product. Our brand is: it might not be good.”

13:06 The mistranslation, and his own discomfort with it.

“When we ended up withdrawing it, it became, an American editorial board retracts or rejects this paper, as if it was a journal retracting an article. And I wanted to say, yes we did, but it’s not like we ever peer reviewed it.”

13:22 Governance, stated as informally as it exists. “I’m the director. I’m just on the faculty here. And the steering committee, we just consult each other when there are decisions to be made. Usually the platform just runs. We don’t have a lot of policy stuff that comes up.”

13:59 The general position, which is the one he repeats through 2025 and 2026.

“Peer review is not about preventing research from seeing the light of day. It’s about assessing its quality and validity. Journals and peer review can’t stop people from saying words on the internet. All we can do is try to tell people if it’s good.”

14:18 The procedural admission that matters most.

“We never withdrew a paper before over the author. Authors have withdrawn their own papers, but we never did it before. So I said, look, we don’t have a policy, but I can think of four reasons why we might want to withdraw this paper, and then have to work up a policy.”

14:37 Reason one, misinformation.

“However wrong it is, and there’s lots of stuff on our platform probably that’s wrong, this one is being used to spread misinformation, and we have to take a do-no-harm approach. This seems to actually be part of a worldwide campaign to spread this misinformation, which is politically about big pharma, and in the case of Mexico about imperialism. It’s not really about ivermectin, it’s about this campaign.”

15:08 Reason two, and the dilemma he sets out for the program itself.

“If giving ivermectin to people was research, it was unethical research, because they didn’t go through the protocols of a trial. If it was medicine they were giving people, it was unethical medicine, because it was unproven. So they had to choose: are we doing an unethical study or an unethical medical intervention. They ended up choosing the intervention. They said at the time it was justified, so we didn’t need to tell people it was experimental, because it was not an experiment.”

16:23 The hole analogy, which is the best thing in the episode and is his own.

“If I dig a hole and I want to study whether people falling in holes is bad, if I dig a hole and then I put a camera there and I measure it, that’s unethical research. But if Juan Pablo digs a hole and I put a camera there and study people falling into the hole, I’m not doing unethical research, I’m studying a problem in society, which is people falling into holes. You can’t be both people and claim that you’re doing two separate things. Try to tell your IRB: we’re going to generate data, then we’re going to switch hats and analyze this anonymized data that we had nothing to do with, it’s just data.”

17:14 Reason three, conflict of interest. They listed affiliations in the title but did not check the conflict of interest box.

17:32 Reason four, and the concession inside it.

“It really was medical research, and we don’t do medical research. We never should have accepted it. But the tricky thing is we do accept public health research. If you did a program to hand out electric blankets in the wintertime, you could put that paper on SocArXiv. But if you’re talking about a drug, that’s medical research. They described it as a public health program, but their results were all, ivermectin works. We should have caught that disjuncture, that they were making medical claims off a public health style research project.”

18:03 What they did and did not say. “We didn’t say we’re doing this because it’s poor quality. But we did say it’s poor quality, and we wanted to be clear about that. We do also think this is garbage research.”

19:28 The seventh author, who left. He apologized, retracted his share, said on Twitter that this was p-hacking and not ethical research, and had already been fired before the scandal broke. “So does that discredit him or discredit them? It’s unclear.”

20:24 The design problem, explained carefully and without the ivermectin question being begged.

“In December 2020 the wave was crashing through Mexico City and hospitalization rates were rising, and right at the peak, the end of December, they started giving out these kits, and then the hospitalization rates started to fall. Not because of the kits. That wave was already cresting when they started the program.”

21:28 And the honest version of the residual.

“Even after, there is a slightly lower rate of hospitalization among the people who got the kit than the people who didn’t. That’s the stuff you’d want to study. Who decided to get the kit? It wasn’t random. It could be that the kit did change their behavior in some way. Maybe it made them feel safer about staying home instead of going to the hospital. Maybe the pulse oximeter had some role. It is theoretically possible that taking the ivermectin made a difference. It’s just so far down the list of possible explanations that the idea that this was a study that showed the effectiveness of ivermectin is really wrong.”

22:25 The origin of the craze, told as a methods story.

“At the very beginning of the pandemic the approach of scientists was, we’re going to throw every chemical we have on the shelf in a dish and sprinkle virus particles in there and see what happens, which is a very reasonable thing to do with a brand new pathogen. And they found, it’s sort of like Trump and the bleach, they found that the virus died in the dish with the ivermectin in it, at a concentration a hundred times greater than you could ever get by taking ivermectin at a safe dose.”

26:04 On the design label, and the joke that does the work.

“They called it a quasi-experimental paper. It’s sort of like, we threw water out the window on the west side of the building, we didn’t throw it out the east side, now we measure the rate of car accidents on the two sides. It’s quasi-experimental.”

Pardo-Guerra on the politics, 27:05 to 29:18: the mayor of Mexico City is the likely front-runner for the presidency, the story was framed nationally as deliberate experimentation on citizens, and the lead author asked SocArXiv to reinstate the paper.

28:05 The charge against the archive, in Pardo-Guerra’s telling. “The main author had this request for SocArXiv to reinstate the article, because this was a colonial action that was against the principles of science.”

29:49 The host asks Cohen directly whether he plans to subvert the Mexican government. The answer.

“No. And the funny thing is, it’s really not my aspiration to meddle in the affairs of any government. Lots of governments have lots of policies that I don’t like all around the world, and it’s really not my job to complain about them. I complain about Israel, I have a personal connection. I complain about things where the United States is involved. But I’m not trying to do that, because I actually think it’s pretty serious. I don’t want to do that. I’ve done a little research on China, so I’ll say something about China, but it’s just not my job.”

30:33 What he does think is his business, and the two-sided trap.

“This issue of the political use and the politics of science gatekeeping is really a big one. And I think it added fuel to the fire that my American-ness and the fact that it was an American platform. On one side it was fetishizing the American scientists as being the real scientists: oh, an American journal retracted this paper, so ha ha, your terrible Mexican scientists, you’re embarrassing Mexico. On the other hand there was, you’re colonialists. There’s not a lot of upside to either one of those lines of argument.”

31:20 Pardo-Guerra on the cost: a week of lost productivity doing radio and television.

32:05 The rumors, flagged as rumors: that the paper was submitted to and rejected by medRxiv, and, unconfirmed, that a version with the mayor as co-author went to The Lancet and was rejected.

34:20 Cohen on the smear against him, and the concession at the end of it.

“When people try to smear me they say, oh, you work at the University of Maryland, Maryland gets research money from the FDA, so obviously you’re in the tank for big pharma. Which, I’m part of that system. It’s not crazy if I say the FDA says we shouldn’t be using ivermectin, and you say, but you’re part of the government. So yes, there’s no pure science positionality. There’s science, evidence, and so on, but there’s no one whose hands are unimplicated.”

35:57 The host’s challenge, which is the sharpest question anyone puts to him in your file.

Joseph Cohen: “I’m wondering if this is partly a problem of what we’re all doing, shopping our findings early and circulating our preprints and being willing to talk to journalists before peer review is done. Are we part of the problem?”

36:32 The answer, and where it lands.

“I don’t want to fetishize peer review. Peer review is very important, but it doesn’t just happen at journals before something is published. If you go to a conference and present a paper, your paper is accepted by somebody. You yourself have been peer reviewed to some degree based on your previous work.”

37:36 The journalist as reviewer, with the self-mocking clause.

“The good journalists pick up the phone. They can do the best peer review you’ve seen, because people want to get quoted in the New York Times. I’ll drop everything and spend an hour reading a preprint so I can get quoted in the New York Times. And of course I’m the world’s greatest peer reviewer, so if you can get my attention, that’s great.”

38:35 The concession, and then the refusal.

“I do think mistakes matter. If you’re saying I think drinking bleach might be a good idea, you don’t want to share that publicly, especially if there’s a movement to drink bleach and people will die tomorrow if you post it. But I think holding our stuff back probably hurts us more than it helps us. I admit it’s an empirical question.”

40:09 Pardo-Guerra’s diagnosis, which locates the failure somewhere Cohen does not.

“The fact that people were downloading a medical paper from a social science archive should have been a red alert. Why isn’t this published in a peer-reviewed journal if it’s reporting seventy-six percent reductions in hospitalizations? That’s really where I think the failure is. It’s not in the preprint world. It’s really in how it’s weaponized outside of these communities.”

41:20 On labeling status, and the problem with the disclaimer model.

“One of the suggestions for us was, should we say more explicitly the peer review status of different work. medRxiv and bioRxiv only accept things that are preprints, and they have a big disclaimer on their home page. I think that’s mostly good. It’s a little bit bad when that exact same article, word for word, is accepted and peer reviewed and published in a journal, and it’s still sitting on bioRxiv with a big disclaimer on it, even though not a word has changed.”

42:04 The verdict on the authors. “They didn’t lie. But they took advantage of the ambiguity of our platform.”

42:16 A question about formatting: was it single-spaced with design elements? No, eight and a half by eleven, single column. “But they also had a press conference, they showed their slides. They presented it as finished work.”

42:35 The host’s ideal, and the tension he names.

“In the best case scenario it’s a place where professional researchers can show each other our work and we can trade notes and get things into shape to be shipped out. I don’t even know how much we should be reacting to that, because we’d be destroying an asset that we have for someone else’s misuse of it.”

43:06 The chocolate argument, which is his best objection to the bioRxiv model.

“MedRxiv and bioRxiv also don’t accept review articles or theory articles, only specific empirical. So the public is always upset: first they said chocolate was good for you, now they say it’s bad, so science is terrible, they can’t make up their minds. And medRxiv and bioRxiv actually play into that, because they’ll publish both of those chocolate papers, but they won’t publish the review paper that says there have been fifty studies of chocolate and this is the answer. So those papers don’t get accelerated through the preprint system, and you do get this ping-pong bouncing around thing.”

43:53 The deflation he closes on.

“Scientists aren’t necessarily clairvoyant tellers of truth or dirty liars. They’re kind of like engineers or whatever who live down the street, talking about issues of professional concern. Sometimes there’s a fetishization of us and what we’re doing. We’re not that smart.”

45:13 What he is working on: COVID work on births, marriage and divorce, the high-heel injury data, “which fell a lot, fewer people got injured by wearing high heels in the last couple of years,” and then the book.

45:38 “I’m writing a book called Citizen Scholar, which is about the whole public intellectual thing, about doing your research in the public eye and doing your public-eye-ness with your research. I’m supposed to finish it in about six months, and I have a fighting chance.”

I’ve had the ivermectin withdrawal as one sentence in the Pinsof essay, offered as evidence that his enforcement is not simply partisan, with the note that he said he was blissfully ignorant of the Mexican political context. That reading holds and this recording makes it much stronger, because you can now see the reasoning, and the reasoning is entirely procedural.

The four reasons at 14:37 are the thing to use. Misinformation campaign, unethical program with the researchers inside it, undeclared conflict of interest, and out of scope. Not one of them is that the paper is wrong. He says so at 18:03: they did not withdraw it for poor quality, though they said separately that they thought it was garbage. That distinction is the whole of his position on what an archive is, and it is the first time in your file that the position gets tested against a live case with a real cost.

Then the admission at 14:18, which is the sentence that reframes the March 2026 policy. They had never withdrawn a paper over an author’s objection, they had no policy, and he generated four candidate reasons and told the committee they would have to work up a policy afterward. So the sequence at the archive is: act on judgment, then write the rule. That is exactly what happened again in 2026, and the 2026 document was drafted by a subcommittee and revised by the full moderation team after the fact. Your Douglas and Turner essays both treat the 2026 policy as a break. This makes it a repetition. The archive has never had a rule in advance of a hard case, and the man running it has said so.

And 17:32 is the concession that nobody has ever put to him. It was medical research, we do not do medical research, we never should have accepted it. That is a scope violation caught only after ten thousand downloads and a foreign political scandal, on a platform whose moderation criteria are, in his own words at 3:24, is this research, is it categorized plausibly, is the author identified. The paper satisfied all three. The failure was that the category itself was wrong and the check that would have caught it does not exist. That is the same structural failure as the 2025 machine submission: stated criteria met, the thing that mattered unstated. Four years earlier, with a human author, and he named it himself.

Two other things.

The colonialism charge at 28:05 and his answer at 30:33 are the one place inmy file where his program collides with a non-American political context and he has to say something about his own position. He refuses to claim jurisdiction over another country’s policy, names his own American-ness as an aggravating factor, and describes the trap in both directions: his intervention gets used to humiliate Mexican scientists by one faction and to indict him as a colonialist by another. He also, in passing at 30:12, distinguishes the countries he will criticize from the ones he will not, on the ground of personal connection. That is a rule about the limits of his own standing, stated aloud, and it is more restrained than anything in the Wilcox or Stone material.

And 35:57 is a real challenge from a fellow sociologist who is not hostile: are we, collectively, part of this problem, by shopping findings early and talking to journalists before review? Cohen’s answer is the one he gives everywhere, that review happens at many points and the journalist’s phone call is a form of it, and he concedes at 38:35 that holding back would sometimes be right and that the net is an empirical question he cannot settle. Pardo-Guerra then answers differently at 40:09, locating the failure in weaponization outside the community rather than in the preprint system, which is the more comfortable answer for both of them. Nobody in the conversation entertains the possibility that a platform which issues DOIs and calls things papers is doing part of the weaponizing, which is the thing the Mexican health department was actually using it for. The host almost gets there at 42:35 and then talks himself out of it: we would be destroying an asset for someone else’s misuse.

Two weaknesses.

The misinformation reason at 14:37 is the weakest of the four and the one he lists first. He grants that lots of material on the platform is probably wrong, and then distinguishes this case by the paper’s use rather than its content. That makes the withdrawal criterion the political consequences of a paper’s circulation, which is a criterion nobody can apply consistently and which would in principle reach a great deal of contested work. He never says how he would prevent the reason from generalizing, and the policy he said would have to be worked up afterward is not, as far as I can find, a public document.

And 32:05 is the passage to handle carefully. The medRxiv rejection and the Lancet submission with the mayor as co-author are both introduced as rumors, one of them explicitly unconfirmed, in an episode that was covered as a scandal. Cohen builds on it two minutes later at 41:32 by saying he is not surprised it was rejected there “if that is true,” which is properly hedged and still moves an unverified claim along.

At 3:31 he learned his platform’s most-downloaded paper of the year from an annual report he does not usually read, and at 6:05 he cannot retrieve the second-place figure at all. That is the strongest available picture of what twelve thousand dollars a year buys, and it belongs beside the budget line from the ASAPbio call.

And 45:38 dates Citizen Scholar. February 2022, six months from a promised finish, “and I have a fighting chance.” It came out from Columbia in January 2025.

Transcript flags. The two Cohens are Philip Cohen and the host Joseph Cohen of Queens College; the co-host is Jason Tougaw, rendered as “jason tuga.” Pardo-Guerra appears as “jp pardo guerra” and “juan pablo,” both correct. Every soch archive, social archive, search archive, and soak archive is SocArXiv; met archive, medicare, and med archives are medRxiv; bio archive is bioRxiv. Ivermectin appears as iver mekten, ivermecta, cyber mectin, iromating, ivermitten, fibromyactin, and hypnomic; check any sentence where the drug name is mangled before quoting, since 17:57 in particular is unreliable as transcribed. “Zifromycin” at 20:14 is azithromycin. At 9:19 “the so-called squared controversy” is the Sokal Squared or grievance studies affair of 2018. At 5:41 and 18:57 “plot it button” is Plaudit. At 14:15 “if it’s voracious or whatever thoracicists good” is veracious, and the passage is unusable as transcribed. At 21:02 “lokatel” is LOCATEL, the Mexico City public information line. At 28:00 and 19:19 “mourinho” is the lead author’s surname and should be checked against the retracted paper’s byline before printing. At 27:11 the mayor referred to is Claudia Sheinbaum (b. 1962), who became president of Mexico in October 2024, which is worth noting since Pardo-Guerra predicts it here in February 2022. At 25:16 “revista” is Spanish for journal, which is the mistranslation under discussion. At 22:33 “covid sars kobe 2” is SARS-CoV-2. At 45:07 “brown war” is Pardo-Guerra’s own joke about transliterating his surname. The recording date of February 15, 2022 places this three days before the Scholars Strategy Network talk of February 18, 2022, which makes the two the closest pair in your file and worth reading together: the ethnography concession and the ivermectin withdrawal came out of the same week.

‘Philip Cohen: Does It Make Sense To Talk About Generations?’ (July 25, 2024)

What is new is a market argument he has not made anywhere else in the file, a concession about American cultural dominance he makes only because the interviewer is Portuguese, a demographic argument that runs in the opposite direction from his complaint, and a citation that partly closes the evidentiary gap he admitted to the National Academies in 2019.

0:59 Who uses the labels, and the tell.

“They’re used less by researchers and more by journalists, people in marketing and business. So you can tell I’m already critical by the way I say that.”

1:17 The best case for them, which he states before attacking them: an attempt to capture a collective experience people have by virtue of being born in a common era, over a span in the range of a human generation.

2:53 Generations in the family sense, and himself in it. “I am a third generation immigrant, that is, my grandparents were immigrants to my country. In that sense it’s not a measure of years, it’s a measure literally of generations within a family.”

4:37 Why the labels have shortened, first pass, and the technological version.

“You can talk about the different generations of the iPhone. It’s generational in the sense that it’s a new period and it replaces the previous one, or the previous one becomes older and out of date, like human generations. Those can be any length. Apple can come out with a new model ten times a year if they want to.”

5:47 The scissors, which is a compact and portable line.

“So they’re kind of going in opposite directions. These generations are getting shorter, and in real human reproductive terms our generations are getting longer, because the age at childbirth is rising.”

6:22 The core objection, stated as a rule about science.

“If you’re going to use categories, and social science has to use categories, that’s always been a central feature of science, creating categories out of chaos. If you’re going to create categories you have to have a reason, and there is no reason for the division between Generation X and Millennial.”

7:12 The market explanation, which is the thing here he has not said elsewhere.

“It’s become a competitive process, like in the world of marketing and business, where if you can announce a new generation and get the label to stick and become a viral concept, then you win, and you can sell books or other products.”

7:51 The permission he grants, and the condition.

“We use arbitrary definitions all the time. Years have a basis in the solar system, that’s not crazy, but in some cases we use years just because data is arranged that way. If you’re going to use some arbitrary definition, you have to explain: this is arbitrary and we’re using it for convenience.”

9:03 “Once you create categories, give them names, and fix their boundaries without any basis in reality, then you’re really at risk of creating false realities.”

10:04 The concession he makes only because the interviewer is Portuguese, and it is the strongest sentence in the interview.

“In that sense it’s an instrument of cultural hegemony, or imperialism. It’s not reasonable from the point of view of science at all.”

10:27 The baby boom dated precisely: it began not just in 1946 but in July of 1946, timed to soldiers returning, and did not fall back below that birth rate until 1964.

11:41 Class and race inside the stereotype, which is new and specific.

“When people say Millennials like avocado toast, or they spend too much money on coffee, there’s a class and race bias in that perception of the group. Obviously Millennials in Gaza don’t have the same issue. There’s a risk of not just collapsing reality but collapsing it around the dominant perspective.”

13:01 What the baby boom did have in common, given fairly: crowded schools, and a marriage squeeze, “because men like to marry women who are a few years younger, so when there’s a huge increase in birth rates all of a sudden you have a group of men who don’t have enough women a few years younger.”

13:30 The accident, in its 2024 phrasing.

“The fact that the baby boom was eighteen years long may be why we got off on this whole generation thing, because it was about the length of a generation, and when it was over people started looking for something to call the next group of people.”

13:55 The etymology of Generation X, which he does not mention anywhere else in the file. “It was X because it was a forgotten generation. It was in the shadow of the baby boom, it was a smaller group. So there was a logic to the initial rollout of these concepts. Not that anybody sat down and planned it, but it emerged culturally with some cultural logic.”

14:16 The internal split, which is the same argument he made with fertility and employment curves in 2019, here made with the draft.

“If you were born in 1946 you had a much higher chance of serving in the Vietnam War than if you were born in 1964. One of the things that really defines the baby boom is how much life changed for them. If you look at women’s rights, women’s employment, education levels, the difference between 46 and 64 is totally transformative.”

15:11 The pandemic version. “Graduating in 2020 and entering the labor market is very different from entering first grade in 2020.”

16:32 The citation, which matters because of what he told the National Academies.

“There’s a good paper by Andrew Lindner and colleagues about this, where people who are in the middle of their generation are pretty good at identifying their generation according to the Pew Research categories, and when you get near the edges the accuracy declines quite a bit.”

16:54 The kids-these-days point, with the professor’s version of it.

“People say, my students today don’t read books. Instead of saying kids these days don’t read books, they’ll say Generation Z doesn’t read books. We don’t really know if that same group will not read books when they’re forty, in the same way that Millennials read books when they’re forty. So it becomes kids these days, the stereotype attaches to them, and in a way they live the rest of their lives in the shadow of that stereotype.”

17:50 The irritation, admitted as irritation.

“It frustrates me that people spend a lot of time and energy worrying about the stereotype. This constant churning and worrying and debating about whether or not people belong in these categories, which are really quite pointless. It’s life, but it’s frustrating sometimes.”

19:19 Where the line falls, stated more carefully than usual.

“If you do research and you identify characteristics of a group, and you can put some boundaries around it and they fit some model, then go ahead and give it an appropriate name. But I would not, based on some marketing or consumer behavior or a particular piece of technology, identify an entire group and assume that the commonality of their experience on this one thing, like do they have iPhones, extends to other aspects of their life, like their labor market experience or their marriage or family outcomes.”

20:39 Astrology again, and this time he uses it correctly rather than correcting somebody.

“If you look at the common popular lists of stereotypes, it’s a little bit like astrology, in that they may be self-centered but altruistic, they may be lazy but extremely dedicated to certain issues.”

21:16 Stereotype instability, illustrated. The baby boom had a reputation for driving social change, Vietnam protest, women’s rights, civil rights, “and then at some point the stereotype of them flipped, and they became old, lazy liberals who don’t really think critically anymore.”

22:11 Generation Z as anxiety, attributed: “this is the Jonathan Haidt version, about how social media is ruining their lives and their mental health. These things are not crazy, they’re not unrelated to experience.”

23:11 The life course insight he insists on preserving.

“If you were twelve years old in 2005 versus twelve years old in 2015, that second group had social media in middle school, and it may have changed their lives forever. If you entered the labor market during the pandemic you may earn less for the rest of your life, because the first job you took was not advantageous, versus entering during a boom year.”

23:51 The guardrail, which is the concession the 2019 talk buried.

“Anything bad I say about the generation concept should not be taken to undermine the powerful insight of what we call life course theory, or the idea that the timing of events affects everything that comes after.”

24:27 The give and take, honestly stated. “One reason they are so powerful and have such currency in the culture is because they capture this insight.”

25:02 The Pew campaign, and the rule that came out of it.

“We wrote to the Pew Research Center and said, we beg you to stop framing all of your research in terms of generation labels. They’re very effective science communicators and they do really important research. They did subsequently change their practice, and they now only describe people in generational terms when they have generational data.”

25:35 The distinction, cleanly put.

“If you’re just doing a survey today and you say old people read the newspaper and young people get their news from TikTok, that’s age, that’s not necessarily cohort. It becomes a cohort phenomenon when that carries with them through their lives.”

26:15 “Forcing things into the generational frame can limit your ability to understand the phenomena you’re actually looking at.”

27:29 The method, and the thing he says grouping does to people.

“I would start with something that’s deliberately arbitrary and clearly arbitrary, like decades. And then you’ll see people say things like, well the seventies didn’t really end until 1982, based on fashion or music. Or the sixties really started with the first Rolling Stones concert in 1962. So you can start to see that people start manipulating the categories.”

28:41 The sequence he insists on. “That comes from the research, it doesn’t precede the research as a settled question. It has to be handled theoretically and empirically, not predetermined.”

30:51 Why age groups are less separate than they were, and the self-deprecating illustration.

“The idea of one age group having a unique experience separate from another one is less the case than it used to be. I use TikTok. I’m old. I look at TikTok, I make videos of my pets and I put them on TikTok. There’s no world where a young person lives in a TikTok world and an old person completely does not.”

31:52 Instruments aging out of their assumptions, which is his signature move applied to two federal conventions.

“The Census Bureau publishes all their statistics on education for people aged 25 and older, assuming they’re done. Well, that’s not the case anymore. For fertility and birth rates, it used to be that above 39 we’re not going to even measure fertility, because women don’t have babies after age 40. Well now it’s, how about 49?”

33:07 The consequence for the whole enterprise.

“If you’re unemployed and single and living at your parents’ house, if you’re 36 versus 21, you have certain things in common even though you’re a very different age. Maybe the 36-year-old is in a more stigmatized category and is more ashamed of their status, but in some ways they have something in common with a 21-year-old living in their parents’ basement. So the idea of fixing it around the birth year doesn’t make sense at that point.”

34:12 Official status, answered directly. “They’re not official categories, at least not in the US. The baby boom was a demographic event which produced baby boomers. The subsequent categories have no official status.”

34:39 On Pew’s own explainer, and what he thinks it conceded.

“They had some vaguely empirical bases about September 11th or the internet or something. But they basically said, we know they’re arbitrary, but once you name them and use them they start carrying their own weight, so we’re going to use them in a consistent way.”

35:24 Official markers move too: the voting age lowered from 21 to 18, the drinking age raised to 21, the retirement age on a schedule to rise. “Even to the extent that there are official markers, they’re in flux.”

36:19 The teen pregnancy passage, which is from his other research area and connects straight to the 2017 Berkeley talk.

“If you look at teen pregnancy in the 1950s, they almost all got married between the pregnancy and the birth. People were not upset about teen births if the woman was married. So the distress over the social problem of teen pregnancy was really only in the context of not marriage, and specifically in a context where women had other opportunities. When we were upset about teen pregnancy in the eighties and nineties, it was partly because women could go to college, and if they were having a child at 17 or 18 their chance of going to college and having a lucrative career was negatively impacted.”

37:40 “In some senses, biologically it works pretty well. It’s only a problem if it’s not consensual, if it has negative consequences, if they don’t have adequate social support, if it’s not what they want, which is often the case.”

38:56 The Gen Z hiring stereotypes, listed and dismissed: they look at their phones during the interview, they bring their parents, they make unreasonable demands about coffee machines and snacks. “This spoiled, privileged attitude, of course very socioeconomically specific, and also quite wrong.”

39:41 The National Academies study reframed, and this reframes his own 2019 appearance.

“There was a study on the use of generation categories in employment, hiring and personnel management. There’s a whole industry of consultants basically who will tell employers, this is how you should deal with kids these days if you want to recruit the best talent. It’s a combination, like a lot of business consulting, of stereotyping and certain kinds of insights.”

40:19 “It can be very pernicious and harmful if you’re applying stereotypes based on age or birth year without considering the realities of the person in front of you.”

41:15 The universal design analogy, offered as the constructive alternative: alt text and curb cuts help everybody, “but the idea of rigidly attaching those to age categories is where it becomes harmful.”

42:36 The naming market, and the argument that competition shortens the categories.

“You already see a scramble for naming rights. The person who names them and has their name stick can become a popular consultant and sell books. One thing that happens is that in the competition to name the next generation they tend to get shorter, because one comparative advantage in that competition is to get your label to stick sooner, so you have to roll it out quicker.”

43:36 The score he gives himself, and the resignation attached to it.

“Reasonable social scientists have made some progress. I think we have successfully stigmatized the use of the categories in serious research without empirical basis, in some quarters at least. But I don’t really believe we’re going to stop this practice, and in the long run it’s not that important, as long as we realize the possible downsides.”

44:12 On what follows Alpha: “Nobody’s going to want to be B. Beta just sounds terrible. Nobody wants to be that.”

44:45 The literature count, which is the one piece of new evidence in the interview.

“I looked at the occurrence of terms in the social science literature, and it really is quite concentrated in business and psychology now, and business is really taking off. My knock on business research is it’s often not serious research, it’s sort of fatty, it has to do with people trying to generate attention for their consulting jobs. It’s a total stereotype and completely unfair, so I apologize. But it seems to be concentrated highly in business.”

45:25 “I’m happy that economists and sociologists and historians are not using these terms very much.”

45:52 The vertical argument, which runs against the whole complaint and is the most interesting thing he says.

“Human generations are getting longer, and because of low birth rates, in some ways the generations are getting closer together, in that parents have fewer children and grandparents have fewer grandchildren, and their lives are longer. A grandparent may now have a fifty-year relationship with two grandchildren. That could develop into a very meaningful adult relationship over a long period of time and can actually draw generations closer together. If grandparents have twenty-five grandchildren, they can’t even remember all their names, and they die when they’re sixty.”

47:06 His own family, in the 2024 version.

“In our family there are no baby boomers. My parents were born before the baby boom and me and my sibling were born after the baby boom. That’s not so unusual. My parents were slightly older when they had their children, and the baby boom squeezed right into that moment for them.”

48:11 What the labels do to his own work.

“The labels mostly occur as noise. As soon as you start using the categories you have to pull them apart and see if they make sense, and then maybe they do and maybe they don’t, but it would just be random at that point. It introduces noise and aggravation without introducing any clarity.”

49:03 “Is this category concealing very important variation? Am I splitting Venus and Serena Williams in a way that undermines my ability to understand what was happening in the 1980s?”

50:03 The last analogy, offered with a hedge. “I don’t want to say anything about biology, but the identification of species is a big issue in biology, and it’s not always cut and dry. You definitely don’t want to assume your categories before you do the research.”

50:36 On his own archive of the subject: the generations tag on Family Inequality, “where you’ll see all the many, many rants and tirades I’ve written.”

Four things earn the hour.

The first is 7:12 and 42:36 together, and they are the same argument in two places. He explains that the labels shorten because naming them is a competitive market with a prize attached: the person whose coinage sticks gets books, consulting work, and attention, and one way to win is to get your label out before somebody else does. That is a supply-side explanation for a phenomenon he had previously explained only by demand, in the 2019 talk, through Pew’s addiction to clicks. It also completes the argument he begins in 2019 with the eleven-years counterfactual. There the generations exist because a real demographic event happened to run about the length of a human generation. Here they proliferate and compress because there is money in naming them. Those two claims together are a full account of how a measurement artifact became a cultural industry, and nobody has credited him with either half.

The second is 10:04, and he says it only because the man asking is in Portugal. Cultural hegemony, or imperialism, and not reasonable from the point of view of science at all. The 2019 talk was to an American committee about American labels and never once asked what happens when a scheme built on the American postwar birth spike gets applied to countries that had no such spike. Lopes supplies the case: Portugal was not a belligerent, had no comparable casualties, and had no baby boom, and the labels are used there anyway. Cohen agrees immediately and hands over a stronger word for it than the interviewer used. Whatever you make of the term, this is a case of him conceding on the spot to a question nobody in his own country had put to him, and it is the pattern I keep flagging in your file: the register and the substance both change with who is in the room and whether they can push.

The third is 45:52, and it is the passage that would surprise anyone who knows him only as the man against generations. Fertility falls, longevity rises, so a grandparent now has a long relationship with two grandchildren rather than a short relationship with twenty-five, which draws family generations closer together rather than further apart. That is an argument that the real generational relationships are strengthening at the same moment the fake ones are proliferating, and it is his own demography rather than a complaint about somebody else’s. It also sits beside the point at 5:47 about the two senses of generation moving in opposite directions. Neither appears in the 2019 talk. If you are looking for the constructive half of a subject he usually handles by subtraction, this is it.

The fourth is 44:45, and it is countable. He says he went through the social science literature and found the terms concentrated in business and psychology, with business rising. That is a small piece of original evidence, offered in an interview and apparently nowhere else, and it changes the shape of his complaint. If sociologists, economists, and historians have largely stopped, then the campaign is against a management-consulting genre rather than against a discipline, and the thing he told the National Academies about most sociologists not using the labels as real categories has held up. He then delivers a stereotype about business researchers and apologizes for it inside the same sentence, which is either self-awareness or a way of having it both ways.

Now the two places this document changes what you can say about the 2019 talk.

At the National Academies, a committee member asked him whether any research shows that generation language promotes stereotyping, and he said he knew of none, that most sociologists do not use the categories in their research, and that somebody should run the experiment. That concession is in your essay as the moment his founding claim gets downgraded to an intuition.

Here at 16:32 he cites Andrew Lindner and colleagues. The Lindner finding is that people in the middle of a birth range can identify their own generation reasonably well and accuracy falls off at the boundaries. That is evidence about identification, not about harm, and it partly cuts against his 2019 use of the Pew self-identification number, since it suggests the labels are more legible than the forty percent figure implied. The 2019 gap, whether the labels cause stereotyping or bad outcomes, is still open in 2024, and he does not claim otherwise. What he does instead is shift the ground at 39:41, from harm in general to age discrimination in hiring, where a legal framework already exists and no new empirical claim is required.

And 43:36 is a retreat. He does not believe the practice will stop, and in the long run he does not think it is that important. Set that beside 24:01 in the 2019 talk, where he ranked the whole complaint below his real work, and you have a man who has now said twice, in public, that the campaign he is best known for outside his field is not the thing he thinks matters.

Two weaknesses of the kind he audits in others.

At 16:20 he says most people can pick their generation off a list. In July 2019 he told the National Academies that only about forty percent of Millennials picked Millennial from a list, and used that as evidence the categories were not real to people. He now cites a paper suggesting identification is decent in the middle and poor at the edges, and describes the picture as most people can do it. That is a reversal on his own headline evidence, delivered as though it were the same position, and he does not flag it. It may well be that the newer research is better and the labels became more legible between 2015 and 2024. Either way, an argument he made from a survey number in 2019 is being made from the opposite direction in 2024, and the man who spends his Decembers checking whether other people’s claims can be inspected did not say so.

The other is the counting at 44:45. He looked at the occurrence of terms across the literature, reports a concentration, gives no source, no database, no window, no numbers, and no code. It is a good finding and it is exactly the kind of claim he asks other people to ship a replication package for.

Two smaller things for the file.

At 10:19 he apologizes for a noise and says it is his rabbit. At 31:03 he says he makes TikTok videos of his pets. Neither is analytically key and both are the sort of detail that makes a paragraph in a profile land.

Cohen recorded this for The Dissenter, a heterodox interview channel, on June 6, 2024. If you sit through the credits, the patron roll from 51:21 to 53:28 includes, as far as the transcript can be trusted, David Pinsof, William Buckner, and a name rendered as “Charles morray.”

Transcript flags. At 18:31 “sudo science” is pseudoscience. At 22:16 “the Jonathan hate version” is Jonathan Haidt (b. 1963). At 16:34 Andrew Lindner is at Skidmore; find the paper and cite it properly rather than relying on the audio. At 25:22 “Chang” is change. At 31:57 “umay” is unrecoverable and from context is emerging adulthood or delayed adulthood. At 35:57 “imp atives” is imperatives. At 14:01 “in the sh of the baby boom” is shadow. At 1:24 “the col” is collective. At 43:11 the sentence beginning “if if if if” is a stutter that resumes cleanly. At 50:26 “Philip nen.com” is his website, and he specifies Philip with one L. The 1946 to 1964 dates, the July 1946 start, and the education and fertility measurement conventions at 31:52 all check out. The host is Ricardo Lopes and the show is The Dissenter; the sponsor read at 51:09 is Enlites. Recorded June 6, 2024, posted July 25, 2024, which puts it about eight months before the Wisconsin talk and about ten before the Bluesky line.

‘Going Back? Gender, Work and Family in 2025’ (1/24/25)

6:09 The opening, which sets his posture for the hour. “I did not get a lot of great suggestions on Bluesky about what I should talk about, so I am very open to where the conversation goes.”

6:35 Citizen Scholar, published that month, described in one line: “not about gender, work and family, but about being a scholar in the world today and how to make a career with public engagement.”

7:38 The origin story, and it is new.

“When I first took a course called gender, work and family in the nineties, one of the things that struck me was that people were marrying, or spending less time in marriage, faster than they were changing the way marriage works. If you did a little decomposition, the total housework done by women declined more because they were married less than it did from changing their behavior within marriage.”

8:09 What happened when he wrote it down.

“When I put that in a footnote to a paper, the late great Harriet Presser wrote in the margins, are you sure you’re not a demographer? Just because I, like, invented decomposition.”

8:24 The general form of it, which is the thesis under most of his career.

“How the structure of families is us voting with our feet collectively, and what that means about what matters to people, and how they work around the constraints that there are.”

8:42 The joke, delivered to the previous speaker. “It’s funny you say the myths we’re taught, this DIY society. I thought we lived in a DEI society. What’s this DIY thing, I don’t get it.”

8:56 What he is thinking about now, and the political claim inside it.

“The very latest things I’m thinking about are fertility decline and pronatalism, and that ties back to the billionaires and the political moment. They don’t care about a lot of things, and a lot of stuff is just noise to rev up their movement. They mostly just want to get rich and stay rich. But one thing some of them really care about, especially Musk, is this is the future of humanity and population so-called collapse.”

9:29 The historical generalization, stated flatly.

“It happens to line up with the fact that throughout history basically all authoritarians have pronatalist ambitions. They all want women to have more babies. Trump doesn’t talk about this himself yet, but it’s in there, and it’s like territorial expansion, which we were also led to believe he was not interested in. All authoritarians work their way around to that also. So pronatalism and territorial expansion are going to be on the agenda.”

9:58 The syllabus detail. “I just retooled my gender, work and family syllabus to have two weeks on reproductive rights. I didn’t used to have two weeks on reproductive rights. A couple of years ago, how naive was I.”

18:17 Asked whether the gender revolution has reversed, and the answer is the most restrained thing said on the panel.

“We don’t really ever go backwards, just because that’s not the way time works, but things come back around. If we’re going to say that things we thought were settled, like Roe v. Wade or birthright citizenship or Johnson’s affirmative action executive order, turn out to be not settled, then the other stuff we considered victories, same-sex marriage, no-fault divorce, access to contraception, may be at risk also. So there’s some sense in which it looks like backwards, but things are different when they come back around.”

19:23 On tradwives, and the reporters.

“I really think we have to watch the tradwife thing. A couple of reporters have called me about this, and I think I managed to not end up in any of the stories.”

19:40 The measurement point, which is the one place he dissents from the panel’s framing.

“We have to watch out for polarization and the general proliferation of narratives out there. If something like that becomes popular, it doesn’t really mean that lifestyle is becoming more popular. It means those people have figured out how to reach us on TikTok. That’s not inconsequential, but it’s not a big social trend, in my opinion. I’m willing to be wrong about that.”

20:12 On the stall thesis. “The whole stall narrative I kind of have bought into over time. But I think it’s more the case that we have different worlds living together in terms of culture and attitudes, or living in the same society anyway.”

29:05 The frame, and it is the best thing in the recording.

“One thing about marriage promotion: the idea that we should promote marriage never worked, and they never cared that it didn’t work. It reminds me of the criminologist Jeffrey Reiman, who had a book called The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison that I used to teach. He had this idea of the pyrrhic defeat. A pyrrhic victory is you win, but it’s so terrible that it’s a loss. The pyrrhic defeat is you lose, but the way you lose is so profitable that you keep it up.”

29:41 The application, extended past marriage to two other cases.

“That’s the way it is with promoting tradwives, or marriage promotion, or pronatalism. It never works, but the function of it is not to actually achieve the goal. The function of it is the ideological project and the movement that it supports. They don’t really want to get rid of crime. They love criminals. Criminals are their bread and butter. They just want to have crime there as something to complain about.”

42:00 The child tax credit again, and this time with the professional conclusion he drew from it.

“I keep coming back to the child tax credit. We had all this work, and we knew we could reduce child poverty by giving poor families money if they had children. And then we did it, and then it worked, and then they took it away.”

42:22 What he decided as a result, which is the descriptive turn given its motive.

“I decided a long time ago that it was more important for me to find ways to describe and communicate about inequality than to figure out new deep insights into how inequality works. In my life anyway, the science was ahead of the politics. We had solutions, great solutions, that nobody cared about and nobody wanted to hear about and nobody was going to implement. What we needed was the politics to actually make somebody do them.”

43:21 The Chomsky comparison, which is odd and revealing.

“I like to compare myself to famously more important people than me, like Noam Chomsky. He spent a lot of time on politics for the last seventy years that he could have spent on linguistics, and he would have been more interested if he’d spent more time on linguistics. To him politics is kind of boring. It’s the same all the time. Yes, America is still doing this. And yet he still decides it’s the most important thing for how he spends his time.”

43:54 “It’s not always about just figuring things out. Part of what we have to figure out is how to make our ideas actually make a difference.”

44:35 The concrete version, aimed at the researchers in the room four days into the administration.

“If you’re right now planning to do some data collection with federal money, and you’re going to have more than two genders, you might not be doing that data collection next month. We can’t turn it off.”

44:50 The methodological complaint, which is new and portable.

“There’s a tendency to bracket the major big historical events. My paradigmatic annoying example is that the FBI doesn’t count the 9/11 deaths as homicides in the homicide statistics. Just, well, this was off the charts. Or people who study mortality but skip the pandemic, because it was so complicated and such a huge event, so we’re just going to ask, what is the trend? The big things are piling up, but that’s our actual reality, and we can’t pull ourselves out of that and say, I just want to understand these underlying things and not get wrapped up in what’s happening today.”

50:13 The coalition analysis, credited.

“There is the coalition that Trump is building. This was David Wallace-Wells saying this yesterday in the Times podcast: very rich people and people without college degrees. He said the working class, but you know what they sort of mean when they say that. Sort of against us, the professional managerial class. Universities are the problem for them. The truth business, the truth industries, and knowledge are major impediments for them.”

51:01 The sentence that is the sharpest limit he has ever put on his own program.

“We can’t just truth our way out of that. We can’t just publish even more awesome research to get us out of that pickle. If we don’t have the social connections to get that work to more people more of the time, in some way that resonates with them, we’re just going to be another annoying interest group that’s richer than them, to a lot of people.”

55:34 The reembedding argument, in its shortest form.

“Local is key, and local can be online, could be local to a specific group. It’s also a way for us to have a moment of reembedding, where we take these normally distant, disembedded experts in peer-reviewed research, and if we can show up in the right place at the right time with some legitimacy to be in that space and say, and also I happen to have done all this research and I know these things that might be helpful, that can be better than just shouting it out the window of your office and hoping somebody hears.”

56:14 And then, in four words, the qualification. “I say that hypothetically.”

1:08:39 On precarity and delay, answering a question about artificial intelligence and feminized occupations.

“If you opt out, if you delay, if you are cautious or trepidatious, you can’t come back and try again at the same age. If you’re eighteen and you don’t want to pursue a serious relationship because you don’t know where this is going, and then you go get yourself more education or figure some things out, when you come back you’re not eighteen anymore. All these things get moved to later and later, and with fertility, later means fewer.”

1:09:38 The other half, stated without hedging. “It’s great for marriages, in terms of the odds of divorce. Getting married older is good. It’s probably good for women’s equality generally, if they have careers and education first.”

1:10:08 “The dynamic of uncertainty and delay, any kind of instability or inability to predict the future, just encourages people to not make long-term commitments, and that means doing it later.”

1:16:00 On South Korea and the 4B movement, and the term he introduces.

“One thing about Korea, where the fertility rate is the lowest in the world, is the sometimes violent hostility to feminism. One thing that happens with authoritarianism, and that we’re going to see amplified by falling birth rates, is that pronatalism becomes more of the hostile kind, of fear-natalism, the kind that also denies your abortion rights or access to contraception. I can’t make predictions about trends and social movements, but the ground is laid for a very bad patch of anti-feminism.”

The pyrrhic defeat at 29:05. My file has him explaining the persistence of marriage promotion three different ways across fifteen years: the 2017 Berkeley talk says the responsibility frame is how liberals sell welfare to white voters, the Heath review in 2015 says the movement can succeed at reproducing inequality while failing at marriage, and the 2023 Wilcox post says crisis creates demand for advocates. Reiman’s term gathers all three into one thing and gives it a name. A program that fails at its stated goal, and whose failure is more profitable to its sponsors than success would be, will not be corrected by evidence, because evidence about the stated goal is beside the point.

That is the precise structural claim Turner and Pinsof make about beliefs following interests. Cohen arrives at it from criminology, from a book he taught, and applies it to his opponents. What he never does is turn it around and ask what his own persistence at the counting produces for him.

The second thing is 42:22. In February 2025 at Wisconsin he says he has taken a descriptive turn and that the profession punishes it. Here, five weeks earlier, he says why: the science was ahead of the politics, we had solutions nobody would implement, so the useful work was describing and communicating rather than discovering. That is a claim about the marginal value of new social science that most social scientists would not make out loud, and it is the missing sentence in your account of the turn.

Then 51:01. We cannot truth our way out of this. He has spent a decade arguing that openness earns trust, that transparency is the secret weapon, that a checkable claim travels. Four days into the second administration he tells a room of colleagues that more research will not do it, that the obstacle is social connection rather than evidence, and that without the connections they are another interest group richer than the people they are addressing. Read that beside the elevator argument at 55:34 and the “I say that hypothetically” at 56:14, and you have the whole difficulty in ninety seconds: the reembedding proposal is right and it does not scale, and he knows it does not scale, and he says so with a joke.

The FBI point at 44:50: Researchers routinely exclude the catastrophe from the series because it wrecks the model, and the exclusion is a choice that gets made silently. That is the same argument as the mandatory reporters vanishing from the child maltreatment data and the observers vanishing from the family violence counts, applied to the analyst rather than to the instrument. It generalizes past his field.

And the Presser anecdote at 8:09. His first idea, in a course in the nineties, was that women’s total housework fell more because they were married less than because marriage changed. Harriet Presser (1936–2012) read it and asked whether he was sure he was not a demographer. That is the moment the career turned, told against himself, and it is the same insight he was still teaching in the marriage chapter in March 2025.

Two weaknesses.

The tradwife dissent at 19:40 is his best contribution to the panel and he does not follow it. A viral aesthetic is not a behavioral trend, and the evidence that it is one is that we have seen it. That is exactly the objection he made to Hanna Rosin in 2012 and to generation labels in 2019, and it applies with equal force to the panel’s premise. He says it once, hedges it, says he is willing to be wrong, and drops it. Nobody engages. Two speakers later the tradwife trend is back in the discussion as a fact about the world.

And 9:29 is the passage a hostile reader will take. All authoritarians throughout history have pronatalist ambitions, and territorial expansion is coming. Both are large historical generalizations offered without a source, in the same paragraph where he attributes motives to named living billionaires. He would want a citation for either claim in somebody else’s paper. It is also the closest thing in your file to prediction as political warning rather than as demography, and he knows the difference, because at 1:16:33 he says he cannot make predictions about trends and social movements.

The other three panelists speak in a register of shared conclusion: billionaires forced us to DIY society, we have to consider who wins, the trends are part of larger projects to keep us precarious. Cohen’s contributions are the ones with hedges in them, the ones that say a popular thing may be a media artifact, that we do not go backwards because time does not work that way, and that he is willing to be wrong. He also supplies the panel’s most partisan single passage at 8:56. Both are true of him and they sit in the same hour, which is the pattern across my whole file: the caution attaches to empirical claims in his own field and drops away when the subject is motive.

Transcript flags. At 8:11 “the late great Harry oppressor” is Harriet Presser (1936–2012), the Maryland demographer, and this should be confirmed against the audio before printing, since the name is badly mangled and she was his colleague. At 29:29 “the criminy olist Jeffrey rean” is the criminologist Jeffrey Reiman (b. 1942), and the book is The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison, first published 1979. At 43:23 “n Trump” is Noam Chomsky (b. 1928), which the transcript has garbled beyond recognition and which the following sentence about linguistics makes certain. At 50:37 “David wellwells” is David Wallace-Wells (b. 1982) of the New York Times. At 17:07 “Professor HOA hell” is Arlie Hochschild (b. 1940), and the reference is The Second Shift (1989). At 18:42 “Row versus weight” is Roe v. Wade. At 1:16:21 “fr natalism” is fear-natalism, which appears to be his own coinage; check the audio, because if it is his it is worth attributing. At 2:16 “Philip Cohan” and at 45:37 “philli” are Cohen. Panelist names: Pilar Gonalons-Pons (rendered “parar Gales paes,” “polar,” “P”), Gayle Kaufman (“Gail,” “gal calman,” “Gil”), Jessica Calarco (“Jessica karco,” “Jess”), LaToya Council. At 1:17:20 the Lisa Wade article is “Rethinking the Stalled Revolution” in Signs. At 1:10:26 “bran gold Cher’s” is Frances Goldscheider, and the book is New Families, No Families? (1991). At 1:00:36 the moderator’s reference is E. Franklin Frazier (1894–1962), The Negro Family in the United States (1939). The date is January 24, 2025, four days after the inauguration and the month Citizen Scholar appeared, which places it five weeks before the Wisconsin workshop already in your file and makes the two worth reading as a pair.

‘Race and Racism in America’ (Sep. 27, 2020)

There’s no YT transcript.

‘Family Sociology Lecture: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration, part 2’ (Feb. 11, 2025)

0:03 Opens the second half of a lecture on chapter three of his textbook, noting that people who found it on the internet are welcome to follow along.

0:42 Whites as a group with internal ethnicities, the most common ancestries reported being German, English, and Irish.

1:28 Why those boundaries sit differently.

“White groups do not have the same kind of boundaries around them, especially with regard to families and intermarriage, that some other groups do. It’s not such a big deal if someone with German great-grandparents marries someone with English great-grandparents. Not nearly as much of a big deal as it is to cross the more recent boundaries.”

2:00 Census composition from 1970 to 2020: the White share losing numerical dominance, the Latino population the fastest growing and above 60 million, and the non-Hispanic White population peaking and declining slightly between 2010 and 2020, which he calls largely symbolic.

2:46 The arithmetic behind it, worked out for a single day in 2023: about 6,300 White deaths against about 4,900 White births, so roughly 1,400 fewer Whites a day before immigration, against a natural increase of a few thousand among everyone else.

3:40 The correction to his own framing, which is the substantive point of the section.

“Natural increase, or the difference in birth rates and death rates, is not really what’s driving our ethnic composition in the US. It is mostly immigration.”

3:53 The long series from 1900: a previous peak near 15 percent foreign-born around 1910, overwhelmingly European and Canadian, that cohort dying out across the century, then a new influx after 1965 from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia, bringing the share back above 14 percent.

4:49 American Indians. Something like seven million before European arrival, reduced by roughly two thirds by 1900 through disease, war, and what he calls the genocide of conquest.

5:23 His explanation for the recent growth in the count, which is a measurement point rather than a demographic one.

“That rapid growth over the last century is due largely to the greater desire of those with mixed ancestry to express that identity. We have a lot of people who have some Indian and some non-Indian heritage, and a lot more of them are now coming forward, especially on the census.”

5:51 About one in five living on reservations, mostly rural, far from centers of economic opportunity, with poverty, isolation, diabetes, alcoholism, obesity, and family violence, which he describes as a continuation of the conquest.

6:28 Pandemic mortality, and the measure he chooses to illustrate it: about 600 per 100,000 American Indian children who lost a caregiver.

7:00 African Americans, and W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), the first African American to take a Harvard doctorate, and his Philadelphia study.

7:40 What Du Bois concluded about the marriage rates he found.

“He tried to understand how this was happening. He definitely saw this as problematic, and his conclusion was it was the legacy of the oppression of slavery, and then the discrimination that they experienced later in urban ghettos, that had devastating consequences for Black family life.”

8:24 The competing account, and the reversal in it.

“An analyst like Daniel Patrick Moynihan produced reports that essentially reinforced racist stereotypes about these problems by attributing racial inequality to family structure rather than the other way around. Rather than saying the family structure resulted from inequality, as Du Bois had said, he tended to look at it the other way.”

9:29 The family resilience perspective, presented as the Du Bois tradition: adaptive, fluid family structure as a response to persistent oppression rather than a cause of poverty, and the historical point that nuclear and separate-spheres arrangements were limited for Black families in the twentieth century by the same poverty, immobility, and mortality that had limited them for Whites in the nineteenth.

10:28 Segregation, illustrated with three maps he made of the same area of Milwaukee in 2021, one for each population.

11:01 The Great Migration from about 1910 to 1970, Black workers leaving southern agriculture for northern factory work, and the segregation that met them.

11:38 Deindustrialization, and the reversal it produced.

“The fact that they had moved historically into these cities, good opportunity at the time, boomeranged and became a bad situation when they were stuck in de-industrialized cities.”

12:31 The family profile: lower college completion, about 70 percent of Black children born to a mother not married at the time against 40 percent overall, higher poverty.

13:14 The trend line since 1950, and the inference he draws from it, which is the analytical core of the lecture.

“34 percent of Black and 51 percent of White adults are married as of 2021. But if you go back to 1950, these rates were much more similar. So this is not a direct consequence of slavery, in the sense that we always had this big gap in marriage rates. The gap in marriage rates has in fact opened up, and the de-industrialization story that I told on the last slide is a big part of it.”

13:59 The marriage market argument, his own research area, delivered to freshmen.

14:24 The four-city comparison, and how the measure is built.

“It’s the number of employed unmarried Black men for every hundred unmarried Black women. So the idea is Black women are thinking about who to marry, as are White women, and they’re thinking about marrying a man with a job. It’s kind of a traditional, slightly sexist assumption, but not crazy. And so the combination of health problems, incarceration, poverty, and unemployment is what creates that relative shortage of men.”

15:23 Latinos as the largest minority group, with the aside on Puerto Rico.

“Puerto Rican people are US citizens but are still considered immigrants from Latin America. It’s just a colony that we have, that America happens to have, in Latin America.”

16:07 Recent arrivals driven by economic crisis, political violence, and natural disasters, and the argument he builds on the continuous flow.

“That continued flow of immigration in general helps maintain cultural continuity. If you drop a population of people from one place to another and don’t have a flow of new migrants, you can imagine their culture kind of dissipating over time. If you have a steady stream of new people arriving bringing with them their cultural ways, then you end up with more cultural continuity.”

17:05 Familism defined as family obligation high in the priority order, self-sacrifice for family well-being, intergenerational ties, and extended household living.

17:31 Profiles for Mexican, Central American, and Puerto Rican populations: lower college completion, similar nonmarital birth shares, high foreign-born shares among Central Americans, higher poverty among Puerto Ricans.

18:03 Asian Americans and educational attainment, and the two explanations offered in order.

“One, you’ll hear this a lot, has to do with the Confucian background, the tradition of striving for educational excellence, the strong parental support for education. On the other hand, that can be overplayed in the analysis, and it’s also the case that many Asian Americans have come from immigrant families who had higher education, or came here to continue professional careers they had already started. So they already had advantages when they came, in many cases.”

19:04 The selection point behind it: immigration law privileges high-skilled arrivals, so the flow itself is selected.

19:30 Profiles for Chinese, Filipino, and Asian Indian populations, with the exception noted for Chinese Americans, a longer-settled population with higher poverty.

20:08 Racism, prefaced by a warning against overgeneralizing, since some Southeast Asian groups have higher poverty and blue-collar employment.

20:42 The Chinese Exclusion Act and the fear of labor competition, then the other edge of it.

“The model minority stereotype, the idea that Asian Americans are inherently or automatically successful, good students and so on, which is a form of stereotyping which seems positive but also comes back to be not so positive for people who don’t achieve that standard, and also for people who just want to be treated as individuals.”

21:28 The pandemic rise in anti-Asian racism, which he attributes in part to presidential language about the Chinese flu.

21:59 Immigration proper: almost 15 percent foreign-born, about a quarter of the population in an immigrant family counting the children of immigrants.

22:33 A consequence he names that is rarely mentioned: immigrants now live in places that had few before, so “we’ve had a lot of people meeting immigrants in large numbers for the first time in the last few decades.”

22:51 The 1965 law, family reunification, and the end of the quota system.

23:26 The two-sided effect, given without a thumb on the scale.

“This has allowed immigrant communities to thrive and be rejuvenated by the influx of recent arrivals. But that has the possible consequence of increasing social distance. You have more people arriving who don’t speak English, you have more communities building up around the influx of new groups, instead of more dispersed, more integrated groups integrating into the rest of the society.”

24:00 The legal history, framed as a seesaw of crackdowns and welcomes, beginning with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.

25:03 United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), the San Francisco-born son of Chinese immigrants stopped on return from China.

25:30 The Fourteenth Amendment standard, and the live argument he sees coming.

“Anybody born here is an American citizen, as long as they are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States at the time they are born, which is basically everybody born here unless your parents are diplomats or you’re part of an invading army. That’s what Trump is going to say when his case comes to the Supreme Court about ending birthright citizenship. He’s going to say that today’s undocumented immigrants are part of an invading army, so their children should not be considered US citizens when they’re born.”

26:16 The 1924 restrictions, the Bracero program and its temporary permits for millions of Mexican workers alongside deportations, and the 1965 reopening.

27:00 The border-policing irony, which is the most portable thing in the lecture.

“One ironic consequence of more strict policing of the border is that more migrants decide to stay here. When it’s easier to cross the border, people kind of come and go for jobs and work. When you make the border hard to cross, people are afraid to go back, so they end up staying.”

27:22 DACA, described as administration policy rather than statute and therefore vulnerable, with the dreamers’ position unclear.

28:05 The wall period, then the Biden-era asylum surge, and the people now facing possible mass deportation.

28:47 Acculturation defined as immigrants learning the ways of the new country.

29:16 Assimilation defined as something else, which is the distinction he most wants students to hold.

“Assimilation is the reduction of ethnic distinction between immigrants and the mainstream or host society. Not just the immigrants changing, but the two populations moving toward each other. Assimilation can only work when the host society is welcoming and accepting of the new group. If you eat Mexican food now and you are not of Mexican ancestry, that’s part of assimilation. It’s not just Mexican immigrants and their descendants changing, it’s the mainstream society changing as well.”

30:10 His own grandmother, photographed in front of the bar and liquor store his grandparents ran, and an earlier photograph of her with her siblings and mother around the time they came from Poland.

30:32 The generational taxonomy: the 0.5 generation arriving at retirement age, the first generation as working-age adults, the 1.5 generation arriving as children, the second generation born here, and the third.

32:01 On the 1.5 generation and what it does to a family.

“If you’re 40, or 35, and you come here with your six- or ten-year-old child, that child’s going to learn English faster than you do and is going to end up being more American than you. This produces some generational conflict, but also opportunities for those children.”

32:43 The third generation, and himself in it.

“The grandchildren of immigrants, like me. We may retain our identity as part of an immigrant family, but we come to see that ethnicity as family history rather than our experience. I don’t have an immigration experience. I had grandparents who had a Yiddish accent.”

33:08 Intermarriage as the measure, and why the course spends time on it.

“You could say intermarriage is a litmus test of racial and ethnic difference. If people don’t marry each other, then they really are more separate. If they do marry each other, then they start to grow closer together.”

33:57 Loving v. Virginia (1967), with the note that most African Americans lived under anti-miscegenation law through the middle of the twentieth century.

34:28 The denominator problem, explained carefully.

“Through 2017, 8 percent of Black marriages involved Black people marrying White people. Is that a lot? I don’t know. But the percentage of Whites marrying Blacks is less than 1 percent. That’s because the White population is bigger, so the same number of marriages is 8 percent of Black marriages and less than 1 percent of White marriages.”

35:16 Attitudes, from the General Social Survey: in 1990, close to 70 percent of Whites over 35 somewhat or very opposed to a close relative marrying a Black person, half of younger White adults; by the recent data, a little under one in five over 35 and less than one in ten under 35.

36:04 Social distance defined as the level of acceptance one group holds toward another, with both the attitude decline and the intermarriage rise read as declining social distance.

This is the textbook being taught by its author in 2025, and it is the recording that shows what he does with the material his critics find hardest.

The Du Bois and Moynihan passage from 7:00 to 9:29 is the whole family-structure argument in ninety seconds, and it is more honest than the way the same argument runs on his blog. He gives Du Bois the founding position, that family patterns followed from oppression. He gives Moynihan the reversal, that family patterns became the cause. Then he gives the resilience perspective as the Du Bois tradition continued. What is missing is any acknowledgment that a serious version of the second position exists among people currently working, which is the position he fights Brad Wilcox over every year. A student leaves this lecture knowing there are two accounts and knowing which one the professor holds, without knowing the second is live.

But then he does something at 13:14 that repairs a good deal of that, and it is the best analytic moment in the lecture. He puts up the marriage rate series back to 1950 and shows the Black and White rates were close then, which means the gap opened after 1950 and cannot be a direct inheritance from slavery. That is an argument against a lazy version of his own side’s story, made with a chart, in front of students who would never have caught it. And it sets up deindustrialization as the explanation, which is Wilson’s argument and is checkable.

The marriage market passage at 14:24 is where his own research enters the syllabus, and the way he handles the assumption inside it is worth noting. He says women are looking for a man with a job, calls the assumption traditional and slightly sexist, says it is not crazy, and moves on. He neither hides the normative content of his own measure nor pretends it is neutral. That is a small thing done correctly, and it is the thing he demands from other researchers.

Two places where an unsympathetic student would have a fair objection.

At 21:28 the anti-Asian racism section attributes the rise in part to the president’s language, and the slide apparently carries his picture. That claim is defensible and contested, and it arrives without the treatment he gives contested claims elsewhere in the same lecture. Compare it with 23:26, where the effects of the 1965 law are given as thriving communities on one hand and increased social distance on the other, with no verdict. He can hold a live question open. He does it three times in this lecture. He does not do it for this one.

And 25:30 is a prediction about a legal argument that had not been made yet, stated as what Trump is going to say. He turned out to be broadly right about the shape of the birthright citizenship fight, and in February 2025 it was a forecast delivered as a certainty in a course where students are being graded.

The lecture also contains one of the better lines of political demography anyone has offered undergraduates, and he tosses it away. At 27:00 he explains that harder borders increase the resident undocumented population, because circular migration stops and people who cross stay. That is a finding with a large literature behind it, it runs against the intuition of everyone on both sides of the argument, and he gives it fifteen seconds without a citation.

Two notes.

At 30:10 he puts his own grandmother in the textbook and in the slide deck, in front of her Polish family photograph and in front of the liquor store she and her husband ran, and at 32:43 he places himself in the third generation, with grandparents who had a Yiddish accent. That is the only time in any of these recordings where he uses his own family as course material rather than as blog material, and it belongs beside the passage about his mother in any profile.

And the measurement reflex is everywhere, unprompted. The American Indian population growth is explained as identification change rather than demography at 5:23. The intermarriage percentages get a denominator lecture at 34:28. The Asian education finding gets a selection explanation at 19:04 that undercuts the cultural one offered first. He cannot teach a number without teaching where it came from, and that is the thing his students will retain longest.

Transcript flags. At 0:36 “New Mina middleast North African” is the new MENA category. At 7:24 and 9:14 “web Deo,” “W EB de Bo,” and “Deo” are W. E. B. Du Bois. At 8:53 “Daniel Patrick Mahan” is Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927–2003), and the report is the 1965 The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. At 11:07 “Doug rate migration” is the Great Migration. At 25:12 and 26:15 “Wong Kim Arc” and “won Mark” are Wong Kim Ark, United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898). At 26:32 “bercero” is Bracero. At 24:36 “the 1980 the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act” is 1882, self-corrected. At 27:28 “daaka” is DACA. At 34:14 “it did not become illegal to ban intermarriage until 1967” is what he means and the sentence as delivered is tangled; Loving v. Virginia was decided June 12, 1967. At 35:46 “in 1900” is 1990. At 35:20 “litness test” is litmus test. At 12:59 “at the time they get married” is at the time of the birth. At 3:19 the daily figures around “40 42 new ones who die” are garbled and should be read off the slide.

‘Philip N. Cohen, Citizen Scholar: Public Engagement for Social Scientists’ (Mar. 1, 2025)

0:05 Opens by dating the book against the political calendar: proposal written just after Biden’s election, draft finished as Trump was winning the 2024 primaries.

“It’s really an interregnum product, and now all of a sudden the new world has arrived, and we can stress test the book and see how we think it works.”

0:48 A self-deprecating framing of what follows: you reach an age where you tell the same story over and over, and he is going to formalize that.

1:07 SocArXiv, described modestly.

“We were trying to make sort of modest increments on the system of scholarly communication. Like a preprint server. We’re not replacing journals, not eliminating peer review, we’re just trying to make the system better.”

1:33 The shift in his own research, stated more plainly than anywhere else in the record.

“In my research I’ve taken a pretty descriptive turn. I’m less about trying to discover new theories and mechanisms, and more about trying to figure out what’s actually happening, and find ways to communicate about that to other scholars and various publics.”

1:54 Fertility as the current example, and the answer he keeps having to give journalists.

“I keep getting journalists and other people who ask me, what works to raise fertility? And I’m trying to communicate, nothing that we know of works. The dot on each one of these lines is the lowest point on the line, and they’re mostly at the end. So for most countries, the lowest low is now.”

2:24 Pandemic work he says he was not prepared to do, including the correlation between Trump vote share and vaccination rate, which he calls grotesque and says cost thousands of Republican lives for no good reason.

3:00 A description of his public register that nobody else in the file would give him.

“A lot of my public work is sort of in the category of debunking, or being a crank and complaining about things. Trying to be more constructive than just that, but that’s a recurring theme.”

3:35 On the lawsuit and what it raised.

“I call this activism. I guess it’s activism if you’re expressing your political opinions in public. It’s pretty lightweight activism, me complaining about Trump on Twitter. But it did lead to me being part of a lawsuit. And that raised the question, is this discrediting, is this crediting, is this good or bad for our integrity, our reputation, our discipline.”

4:14 The book’s origin with editor Eric Schwartz at Columbia, and the title.

“I hit on this concept of citizen scholar, which I’m aware is quite pretentious sounding. Who calls himself a scholar nowadays? But I kind of want to reclaim that a little and make it less pretentious and more just descriptive. The citizen scholar is somebody who accepts the duties of a scholar in society. It’s in the practice of citizenship that we generate knowledge.”

5:03 The political situation that arrived after the book was finished, and what he says is new about it.

“The idea is quite foreign to those of us who’ve been around for a while, that we live in a modern democratic capitalist society where, at the highest levels of power, their perception is that the main problem with our society is too much higher education, too many universities, universities where they don’t pursue knowledge and truth, they pursue deceit and lies.”

6:01 The concept he says he underweighted in the book: common sense as the populist substitute for evidence, in the second inaugural address and in the response to the Washington plane crash.

“That is how the authoritarian fills the vacuum that results from the attack on scholarship and university and science.”

7:03 A preamble on trust, built up in three stages. Fish follow the nearest fish because they have no memory of which fish is reliable. Humans add reputation through gossip, which he calls a collective memory. And then institutionalization.

8:07 The double edge of the institutional stage.

“You walk out there with a sign on you that says I work at a major university, and some people will believe you because of that. On the other hand, some people won’t.”

8:36 Do your own research as a meme, and what he says it means.

“Doing your own research is not trusting experts and science and the accumulated wisdom of that institutional framework. And we now know that people who do their own research know less than people who don’t do their own research. You keep using that phrase, and I don’t think it means what you think it means.”

9:16 The elevator, which is the governing image of the talk. Nobody knows how one works, and everyone trusts them.

9:36 The distinction he wants to draw, which is the most useful idea in the lecture.

“More than a fact check, which is a particular fact that something is true, we have veracity, which requires systemic trust. The fact may or may not individually be true, but it comes in a package which has some trustworthiness.”

10:06 Anthony Giddens on disembedded systems, applied to the elevator certificate.

“The person who inspected the elevator might have their name on the certificate, but nobody’s telling us how it works, and that they checked it that day, and that they know it’s still going to work. There’s no statistics on elevators. The person that we’re trusting is not there. They’re disembedded. They’re part of an institutional framework, not an individual person.”

10:38 Why that matters: modern economies and democracy run on trusting people who are not there, and the absence of a person who can be trusted is a fragility in the system.

11:26 The book’s central proposal, which follows from that.

“One thing we can do is be reembedding agents. We can show up at that moment, sort of in the elevator, and say, you don’t have to worry about this, because we’ve figured this out and here’s how we did it. And I’m a person who lives in your community, and I have some firsthand knowledge, and you can trust me for some reason. So a moment of reembedding.”

12:15 A two-by-two of democratic against scientific, with China in one corner and the current United States in another, and his own preference for secular democracy stated as such.

14:01 Riding the wave, and the lag problem.

“It takes time to do projects. Grants, data collection, analysis, peer review takes years. If you’re making decisions about what you’re going to publish in three years based on something that somebody started working on five years earlier, academics can really lag.”

14:52 The exact moment he understood the pandemic: March 2, 2020, reading about Washington state cases with no known origin, and looking at a map of planes in the air.

15:22 The citation spike: on a log scale, social science articles keyed to pandemics rising from about a hundred a year to ten thousand in one year, alongside earlier spikes for hurricanes after Katrina and terrorism after 2001.

16:10 What the life sciences did: shorter papers faster, first-time preprint use, media sourcing them, hundreds of special issues, publishers dropping paywalls, and real rather than nominal interdisciplinarity.

17:25 Description as the thing he wants elevated, illustrated with the New York City Health Department’s 1913 parade of statistics, where people stood in the rain to watch statistics go by on floats, and with Du Bois’s charts of marital status around 1900.

18:40 The research life cycle with description overlaid, and the loop he wants it to run in: listen to what people care about, gather what exists, do descriptive work, push it back out, find out what people think now.

20:17 The professional cost of that, and his explanation for why academic prose sounds the way it does.

“One of the things about the tendency of academic work to be dismissed as jargon-written and elitist is partly that we don’t credit descriptive work. If you have a descriptive finding, it’s considered to be less than, in a lot of academic circles, and so we end up doing more puffery just to make our work sound like it’s not just descriptive. Very off-putting to the public, in my opinion.”

20:52 The county-spike example: sudden rural case clusters he traced to prisons, meatpacking, and nursing homes, written up fast in a minor open access journal.

21:32 Why he did it, said without embarrassment.

“I wanted to plant a flag that says here’s this data, you can get it from me, here’s a quick analysis of something I think we should be paying more attention to. To try to get myself on the radar as somebody that people might want to talk to about this.”

21:55 Openness, introduced through the fraud cases, and the argument he builds on them.

“We found out they were frauds because other people checked their work. We were able to check their work because of the norms of transparency that were required in their discipline. And more important than that, practically, is that people know that they can. We’re working in an environment where somebody can check our work, and it’s one of our secret powers. The willingness to have our work scrutinized separates us from a lot of other professions.”

24:17 The collective action problem: openness benefits the community and is not in any individual’s immediate interest, which is why it needs institutions. Brian Nosek’s pyramid of infrastructure, then community, then institutionalization.

25:02 The cost he refuses to minimize.

“It does also make us vulnerable. Anytime anybody can read our work, it makes us vulnerable to whatever they might react to. Particular bad actors and people who really don’t like us can create misinformation or harass us. I don’t minimize that at all.”

25:57 Peer review, where he says he is being deliberately provocative.

“Peer review is an accepted language of trustworthiness. Even Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is going to say he’s got peer-reviewed research that shows whatever nonsense he’s talking about.”

26:47 The scale of it: millions of articles, tens of thousands of full-time equivalents of labor.

27:10 The claim about ownership.

“We, the cogs in that machine, don’t have to let the owners of that machine define and control that process to the extent that they do. We can recognize the principles involved in peer review and say, actually, what we are trying to do is peer assessment. Assessment by experts who know about particular topics, making public their evaluation of the work. Some of it happens in journals, but it doesn’t all have to happen in journals.”

27:45 What has changed, which is the strongest passage in the talk.

“This is especially important in the new world where publishing is essentially free, where peer review can no longer stop bad research from appearing in the world. It used to be that printing was expensive and difficult, and you could use peer review to decide what was going to be printed and shipped and bound and stuck on a shelf. That is not the case anymore. You cannot stop bad research by just saying it’s bad. That’s not how it works, and that’s not the goal of peer review anymore. What peer review is doing in real life today is filtering or curating and labeling research as good or bad. We’re not gatekeeping in the sense of preventing things from appearing. We’re helping people evaluate and decide what to read. It’s a very different job, but it’s the same principle.”

29:20 Generation labels as the example of something peer review never touched, since the terms came from marketing.

30:05 The Pew campaign, told with the credit given.

“I like the Pew Research Center a lot. They do really good work. They just got addicted to generation clicks, which has happened to a lot of people. Whatever your research is, if you put millennial in the title it gets more clicks. And then eventually they changed their process. Minor victory. Didn’t stop the train of generations, unfortunately.”

30:52 What he is trying to do with his own public complaining.

“I’m trying to elevate what looks like us just complaining about stuff in public to a higher level of value, and say, no, actually what we’re doing is important. We’re discussing other people’s research.”

31:16 His rules for it: find a role, behave well, be constructive, practice accountability, listen as well as speak, and be open to admitting your own errors.

31:38 Social media, and the metaphor he rejects.

“The megaphone is a very common metaphor for this, and it’s terrible. It’s a terrible way to communicate, except in very specific situations, like when you need to make an announcement. At one point I reviewed three books on public sociology and they all had some version of the megaphone on their cover.”

32:39 Rogers Brubaker on hyperconnectivity, and the four problems he takes from it: abundance, miniaturization and context collapse, convenience that serves bad actors equally, and a quantification treadmill.

34:24 A discipline-and-quality problem, where scholars become trapped in the engine of their own engagement and define themselves on its terms.

35:43 The advice on promotion, which cuts against academic manners.

“Many academics feel like it’s improper, or that it makes them look bad, if they’re always running around saying, hey, this reminds me of my own work, pay attention to me. That’s exactly what you should do. When you write an article, that’s what you’re doing. The article is not the research. The article is the description of the research. The article is telling people that you did the research. Same as a tweet.”

36:44 On punching down, and on sharing paywalled material.

“Sharing paywalled stuff should be considered taboo more than it is. You can make your reputation much more positive just by sharing open links.”

37:34 On practice, with a disclosure about the talk itself.

“You get to practice and develop your voice and find out what works. I tried explaining it this way and nobody cared, I tried explaining it this way and it worked better. You can delete your old tweets that nobody liked. This is the fourth time I’m giving a version of this talk, and I’m trying to pay attention to what works and what doesn’t.”

38:49 Activism, where he places himself.

“I don’t think activism is bad for your scholarship or for your reputation as a scholar. Life is too short not to speak out as a citizen. It’s our job in life to be active citizens, whether that means literally protesting or not. Imposing silence on ourselves is not appropriate or good.”

39:47 The duality he wants to keep, offered to people who reject it: as a citizen you take a position, as a scholar you are pressured to maintain distance, and both can go too far.

40:57 What exposure buys.

“If you go around speaking your opinion all the time you’re taking a risk, and that’s part of the value of what you do. When you stand up in a meeting and say this is what I think, the fact that you’re exposing yourself is part of what makes it valuable.”

41:39 The asymmetry between the roles, which is the distinction the book turns on.

“If you’re an activist, it’s not your job to list all the ways that you’ve been wrong before and all the ways you might be wrong right now. It might make you better in your activism, but it might also slow you down. Different from our role as scholars: being wrong is good and important in our scholarship.”

42:14 Positionality, where he takes a middle position.

“I don’t think I need to state my political opinions in every demography article that I write. On the other hand, I think that should be available to people, and I want people to be able to say, wait a minute, I think your work is not trustworthy because I happen to know something about your political beliefs. I think we can work with that tension instead of trying to avoid it.”

43:00 The challenge he says he must accept.

“If somebody wants to say, you’re biased because you think poverty is bad and we should spend the money to eliminate poverty, so I don’t trust your research, that’s a challenge I should be willing to accept.”

43:33 The policy implications section, taken apart.

“You finally publish an article and you get two or three paragraphs to state your policy implications at the end. This feels like a great privilege, and it is, it’s sort of a courtesy. You’ve done all this work and they’re going to let you attach a few paragraphs of opinion to it. But it’s not really very effectual. If you look at actual policy implications that I have, they’re often so broad that anybody could have written them about almost anything. I find that kids in poverty do worse in school, therefore we should eliminate inequality. You could have said that already. It’s not really a result of your research.”

44:44 The case that proves the point.

“The terrible recent example is the expansion of the child tax credit in 2021, which lifted millions of children out of poverty. We had research to back that policy, the policy worked, and then they cancelled it. So just getting the research out, even with the policy implication section, is not enough. We have to actually do politics. The reason I invoked Du Bois is because he looked at that problem over many years and concluded that sometimes you just can’t wait for the last word of science. You have to actually do the politics.”

45:36 His own Twitter campaign, described as strategy rather than impulse: a theory of what line would be effective, a large platform, a favorable algorithm.

46:14 Why the identities did not separate.

“I was doing it not separately from my scholarly identity, but as a sociologist. It doesn’t mean that I went out there every day and said, I’m a sociologist and my research shows that Trump is corrupt and incompetent and authoritarian. But I was putting my reputation on it. Part of the lesson of the social media chapter is you don’t get to have different identities in different contexts unless you really work at it, with anonymity.”

46:42 The line the room laughs at.

“So I sued the president. Of course I did. Sociologist sues the president. I can’t tell you how many times people said something like, of course you did.”

46:55 The defense, with the risk named.

“I don’t think it undermined my research that had nothing to do with those topics, although it would not be hard for somebody to find one of my articles on divorce and post a thing about it on Twitter with some antisemitic comment.”

47:19 Why he was selected as a plaintiff, described without vanity.

“They chose me through the reality show process they use to choose plaintiffs for these things: reasonable person, professional career, peer-reviewed research, responsible citizen, doesn’t shout profanity or throw ketchup on the Mona Lisa. For better or worse, that’s the role I played in that group.”

47:55 The theoretical question underneath it.

“We show our good acts in one area to help generate legitimacy in another. Sort of the Bourdieu question of the exchange rate between different types of capital. Do I get to write an op-ed about Trump because I have written articles about divorce rates? I could be wrong about this and I’m happy to argue about it either way.”

48:26 Why he thinks hiding will not work.

“When Vance says the universities disseminate deceit and lies, it’s really the social sciences and humanities, and maybe the climate people and public health, that they’re going after, because that’s the work that’s intelligible to their followers. But what they’re really doing is undermining the whole system. If we cowered in the corner, if we stopped mentioning diversity or structural racism in our work, it would not help. They would find another way, because we’re not actually the target. We’re the target they use, but the actual target is the whole system of knowledge. I don’t think we can win the battle by hiding.”

49:40 The conclusion on roles: interdependent rather than opposed, since one person holds all of them and a career and a life do not divide.

50:24 The last point, on credit for public work, and the position that separates him from most people making his argument.

“I care more about having a university that protects my right to speak than one that agrees with me. I’m not trying to get my university to put out a statement about Palestine. I’m trying to get my university to put out a statement protecting people who make statements about Palestine. I’m not trying to get them to agree with me. That’s a losing battle.”

51:24 And the reason he does not want the credit.

“There is a neoliberal trap, in the sense that once you start trying to get credit, now you’re negotiating and you’re going to end up playing a game you might not want to play. I don’t think we should just get paid for being a good citizen. If you’re out there talking to people and learning new things and having interactions with real people, your work will become better, your writing will be better, you’ll be more successful without getting credit for your public work.”

This is the book’s argument in fifty minutes, delivered by a man who knows he is about to be tested on it, and it is the most self-aware document in the file.

Three things here are new.

The first is the elevator. The distinction at 9:36 between a fact check and veracity, and the Giddens point at 10:06 about disembedded systems, is the theoretical spine of everything he does, and it explains why he is so preoccupied with replication packages. A fact check certifies one claim. A working elevator certifies a system, and nobody involved in certifying it is present when you step in. What Cohen wants from open science is what an elevator inspection certificate is meant to be: a promise that a stranger could check, from a system that has to keep working after everyone who built it has gone. And the reembedding proposal at 11:26 is the answer to the question I have been raising across these notes, which is what the dormant right to check is for. His answer is that it is a signal rather than a service. Availability tells you the system expects to be inspected. That is the argument, and here he states it explicitly rather than assuming it.

The second is the peer review passage at 27:45. Print scarcity was what made gatekeeping possible, print scarcity is gone, and therefore peer review can no longer prevent bad work from existing. What it can do is label. That reframes the whole open-access argument from access to curation, and it is a more honest description of what journals now do than journals give of themselves. It also, quietly, concedes the objection to his own archive: if peer review is labeling, then a repository with no labels has given up something real, and the March 2026 AI policy is him discovering exactly that a year later.

The third is 41:39. An activist who catalogues his own past errors is a worse activist. A scholar who does not is a worse scholar. The two roles have opposite relationships to being wrong. That is the actual tension, it cannot be dissolved by disclosure, and he does not pretend otherwise here. Anyone writing about the April 2020 lecture, where he crossed from one role to the other in front of a captive class, should put this passage beside it, because he has named the problem himself with more precision than his critics have.

Now the places where the talk works against him.

At 3:00 he calls his own public work debunking and being a crank. At 21:32 he says he wrote up the prison and meatpacking finding partly to get himself on the radar. At 45:36 he says the Twitter campaign was strategic, that the algorithm favored him, and he says congratulations to me. At 37:34 he tells the room this is the fourth version of this talk and that he is watching which lines land. That is an unusual quantity of visible self-interest, all volunteered, and it will read to a hostile audience as either disarming honesty or as a man who has worked out that admitting the thing inoculates him against the charge. I lean to the first reading because none of it is flattering, and the second is available.

Two arguments are weaker than they sound. The claim at 8:36 that people who do their own research know less rests on a body of survey work with real measurement problems, and he states it as settled. And the two-by-two at 12:15 is a set of assertions with a joke attached; he apologizes for it in advance, which is the right instinct, and then uses it anyway.

The most consequential passage for my purposes is 50:24. He says he wants a university that protects his speech rather than one that agrees with him, and he uses the Palestine example to make it concrete. That is a position with costs on both flanks in February 2025, and it is the clearest evidence in this file that the citizen-scholar argument is a procedural commitment rather than a partisan one. It also sits oddly with the man who told an introductory class not to listen to the president, and he does not reconcile them.

For the biography, this recording supplies the theoretical vocabulary the current draft lacks. The essay describes what he does. This is where he says why, in terms borrowed from Giddens, and where he names the descriptive turn as a deliberate choice rather than a drift.

Transcript flags. At 1:09 “soci archive” is SocArXiv. At 11:29 “in utions” is institutions. At 18:20 “WB de boys” and at 45:19 and 45:23 “a boy” and “the boys” are W. E. B. Du Bois. At 4:22 “Eric Schwarz” is Eric Schwartz. At 22:08 “Franchesco Gino Michael Lor dri staple” is Francesca Gino, Michael LaCour, and Diederik Stapel; get all three names right if you use the passage. At 24:39 “Brian noek” is Brian Nosek. At 32:43 “Rogers Brewbaker” is Rogers Brubaker, and the book is Hyperconnectivity and Its Discontents (2022). At 34:19 “the ordinal Society” is Fourcade and Healy’s The Ordinal Society (2024). At 48:00 “the Bordan question” is Bourdieu. At 10:07 “Anthony giddens” is correct. At 39:47 to 40:57 there is a gap of roughly thirty seconds in the transcript where the audio drops mid-sentence; if you quote around it, note the break. At 46:24 “corrupt and comp competent” is corrupt and incompetent, echoing his 2017 tweet.

‘Philip Cohen: The Family, Chapter 7: Love and Romantic Relationships’ (Mar. 13, 2025)

0:00 Opens a recorded lecture on chapter seven of his textbook, love and romantic relationships, and tells viewers to follow along.

0:11 Social scripts, defined as a commonly understood pattern of interaction that serves as a model of behavior in familiar situations.

0:32 What a script does, and why it is shared rather than private.

“The key thing about a social script is it helps you enter into a new social interaction without having to reinvent it from scratch. You don’t have to figure out what kind of situation you’re in, decide how to act, decide what your role is in relation to other people. A script is not something you have secretly. A script is something that is shared socially.”

1:46 The store example: you are a customer, this is a store, the relationship will be superficial, and all of that is settled before anyone speaks.

2:16 Where the scripts have thinned.

“When it comes to relationship formation, we still have scripts, but they are becoming less clear as starting and building relationships is becoming more diverse. There’s more different kinds of situations and different kinds of relationships, so communicating about them has become more complicated.”

2:47 Four reasons: the rigid mid-century dating system is gone, cohabitation is now a stage that has to be negotiated rather than assumed, more divorced and older single people are in the market and some have children, and the technology keeps changing.

4:05 Love, and the evolutionary account he gives for it.

“We made an evolutionary trade-off where we produce babies with giant heads. In order to make a baby that has a giant brain, its body is very underdeveloped, so babies need tons of love and support or they will die. And the only way to get adults to reliably provide that, from the point of view of evolution, is a set of emotions that we could call love.”

5:20 The inference he draws from that, which is the frame’s payoff.

“Loving a child is probably the original love.”

5:27 Love defined as deep affection and concern for another person with whom one feels a strong emotional bond, and romantic love as passionate devotion and attraction.

6:05 Ann Swidler on the modern romantic ideal as mythical, with its traits: unambiguous, unique, permanent.

6:38 The role of obstacles.

“People prove and demonstrate their love at the same time by overcoming obstacles in the quest for love. When somebody has to overcome obstacles, has to outcompete somebody else, has to fly around the world, has to do something dramatic to demonstrate this, they are both proving and demonstrating their love in a way that reinforces it for both people involved.”

7:04 How the marriage structure used to underwrite the ideal: one person, chosen young, faithfully, forever.

7:32 The historical caveat.

“We should acknowledge, historically speaking, that the idea that spouses would really love each other is a modern ideal. This is not the way humans always structured their families, certainly not in premodern societies where marriage was much more practical or economic or religious, and was not all about passionate love.”

7:56 Utilitarian love, defined as the practical, rational dedication of one person to another based on shared understanding and emotional commitment, and described as less cosmic and more down to earth.

8:42 The parallel he draws, which is the most ambitious claim in the lecture.

“It parallels the growth of rational science replacing irrational religion as a way of explaining the world, and also the spread of democracy instead of monarchy. We choose our leaders rationally instead of having them just be born leaders. Science is a rational system, a list of pros and cons of all the evidence that we have, rather than a religious dogma or doctrine that is just handed down to us.”

9:20 Romantic relationships defined generically as mutually acknowledged ongoing interactions with heightened affection and intensity, including married and unmarried, not necessarily sexual.

9:52 Why the definition has to stay loose.

“In modern relationships there’s not necessarily a fixed beginning or end. There’s not a formal status, and they might not even be called the same thing. One person says this is my boyfriend, the other person says they’re not sure what they are, or they say different things to different people.”

10:19 Mate selection defined, with the note that the term applies even where no literal mating occurs.

10:45 Why the concept carries so much weight in the course.

“Mate selection is the building block of families, and the elements of mate selection will determine other social things like the level of inequality, inclusion or exclusion of certain groups. If poor people marry rich people, if certain religious groups exclude other religious groups, if you have a process that leads you to have older men with younger women, that will change the way the relationships evolve.”

11:29 The mid-century dating system, and the figure he uses to convey how routinized it was: a survey showing college women going on an average of twelve dates a month with five different men.

12:13 What replaced it: a date as a single event, dating as a more stable relationship, and language that is less formal and more open to negotiation.

12:36 Online dating, with about 20 percent of young adults having met a current partner through an app.

13:05 Who benefits most.

“It’s especially important for people who are members of small groups or marginalized groups, where you can’t just walk into a bar or walk into a crowded room and find somebody who is like you or meets your criteria.”

13:24 What the technology does to the model of love.

“It does promote utilitarian models. Once we have the metrics, the app can list and rank people for you, and that’s really utilitarian thinking. You’re not looking for just a spark, you’re sorting and searching on a whole set of criteria: age, sex, race, weight, occupation, whatever else.”

13:52 The commitment worry, flagged as unresolved.

“There is a concern, and this is hard to pin down, whether or not this is a legitimate concern, that it reduces commitment. If it’s so easy to meet new people all the time, then maybe people will be reluctant to commit to the person right in front of them, because in the back of their mind they’re always thinking, yeah, but there’s another person just a click away.”

14:23 Hookup culture, drawing on Lisa Wade, and the framing point that it is an environment people live in whether or not they participate.

14:57 The distribution, which cuts against the usual picture: more than a third of college students in a survey about ten years old reported no hookups, and only a small number reported ten or more.

15:16 Hookups defined as casual sexual or romantic contact without implied commitment or exclusivity, with the definition acknowledged as subjective and locally variable.

15:38 The finding that most surprises students.

“College students who do this, whatever this is, hookup culture, they’re just as likely as those who don’t to think of themselves as in a committed relationship, or to think of themselves as heading toward committed relationships. It is a way of meeting people. The difference between dating and hooking up is the expectation of sexual contact on the very first encounter. So what you’re dealing with is people who have a sexual encounter before they get to know each other, rather than the other way around.”

16:11 Wade’s interactional work, and what it consists of.

“There’s this interactional work that often goes on afterwards where people try to establish that it didn’t mean anything. So you first have the hookup, then you communicate to each other what you mean to each other, and often that’s about not meaning a lot to each other, to sort of extricate themselves from the situation.”

16:33 The risks: sexual contact between people who do not know each other well, accentuated by alcohol and drugs.

16:54 Beauty as a sociological object, and why it belongs in a mate selection chapter: norms, expectations, culture, and power.

17:29 The argument against reading attraction as biology.

“A beauty characteristic may be common, but that doesn’t mean its attraction is biological. Many of the traits associated with attractiveness in modern Western society have nothing to do with health or reproductive fitness. It’s not as simple as people find beautiful the bodies of people who will produce healthy babies. In some cases what has been considered attractive by mainstream society has been so unhealthy that it’s really just implausible that evolution would have produced it.”

18:48 The gender asymmetry, and the account he gives of it.

“Historically, and in the scholarship on this, the focus has often been on what defines beauty for women, partly because men, as the more powerful people in society, were choosing their spouses. The more powerful the man, the more choice he had. So it was a situation where powerful men were choosing women and women were being chosen, and the beauty standard was the way that women worked in that sexist milieu.”

19:53 High heels as the worked example, which he notes is his own research area: they change how a woman walks, limit mobility, and that limitation was itself found attractive.

20:30 The mechanics: altered posture, accentuated hip and pelvis movement, attention to the waist-to-hip ratio, and long-term physical damage.

21:03 The function he emphasizes.

“One of the things high heels do is help establish the difference between men and women, taking whatever differences there are naturally and accentuating them, so men and women seem more different. In terms of the theory of symbolic interaction, high heels are one way that women perform femaleness and that men perform looking at femaleness.”

22:00 Foot binding in China as the comparison case, with the class signal it carried.

“What it communicated from the point of view of the family was, in our family the girls don’t have to work in the fields, we are richer than that. And so that was the desirable quality in the marriage market.”

22:54 The disanalogy he supplies himself.

“Obviously it’s very different. Wearing high heels is voluntary, for one thing. It’s not something which young girls are locked into before they’re old enough to have any say. But there’s a socialization element here, and I think it’s a fair comparison, at least to discuss.”

23:15 His own research on the injuries: on the order of 40 or 50 women a day in American emergency rooms before the pandemic, with foot, leg, knee, and hip injuries from falling and twisting.

23:45 The 2020 drop, and the check he ran on it.

“Either a lot fewer people were getting injured because they weren’t going out to parties and bars and work and wearing heels, or it’s also possible they weren’t going to the hospital when they got injured because they were afraid because of the pandemic. One of the things I checked was, are the injuries more severe during the pandemic? They were not really more severe. So it’s not that people with minor injuries were staying home.”

24:24 The line he closes the section on: “One good thing about the pandemic is fewer women were breaking their ankles from wearing high-heeled shoes.”

24:33 Homophily, defined as the principle that similar people have more contact with each other, visible in friendship, collaboration, and romantic relationships.

25:25 Endogamy and exogamy defined, with the etymological note that gamy is marriage.

25:59 Why the second matters.

“Exogamy is good for the gene pool, it’s good for biological diversity, it’s good for cultural diversity. So you need some exogamy, even if people are more comfortable with endogamy.”

26:19 The closing observation, which loops the two halves of the lecture together.

“It’s interesting that nowadays, when we have this concept of utilitarian love, it often reinforces endogamy. If you’re making that checklist of things that you want, it often ends up producing people who are kind of like you. Same religion, same area, maybe same social class background. Unless you’re trying to get away from all that, then you could be making a list thinking, I don’t want someone from my religion, I don’t want someone from my town. It still can feed into the utilitarian view, but more often the similar person shows up on the checklist.”

Thoughts

Twenty-seven minutes, 272 views, and it contains the single best argument in the file, which he builds across the lecture without announcing it and lands in the last thirty seconds.

The structure runs like this. Romantic love is a mythical ideal: unambiguous, unique, permanent, proved by obstacles. Utilitarian love is its modern counterpart: a checklist, a weighing of pros and cons, parallel to science replacing religion and election replacing inheritance. The dating apps push people toward the second, because sorting on age, income, and education is what the interface is built for. And then at 26:19: utilitarian love reinforces endogamy. The checklist returns people to their own kind.

That is an argument with teeth. Assortative mating on education is one of the better-documented contributors to household income inequality over the past forty years, and here is a route to it that nobody would have predicted. The rationalization of intimacy, which reads as liberation, produces more marrying within one’s own group than the mythical version did, because a spark can cross a line that a filter cannot. He gets there in one clause and does not stop to admire it.

It is also the same argument as his work on marriage markets and the divorce decline. Marriage becomes rarer, more deliberate, and more concentrated among people who already have resources. The sorting mechanism he describes in this lecture is how that happens at the individual level. The lecture and the research program are the same claim at two scales, and he does not say so.

The evolutionary passage at 4:05 is done correctly, which is rare. He gives the adaptive story for why humans love, grounds it in the obstetric trade-off, and then extends it outward: the original love is love of a child, and pair-bonding love is derivative. Then at 17:29 he uses the same evolutionary frame against itself, pointing out that the beauty standards actually in circulation are frequently incompatible with reproductive fitness, so the just-so story does not work as an explanation of attraction. That is using biology where it explains and refusing it where it does not, in the same lecture, without hedging in either direction.

And the hookup section at 14:57 is the corrective a nineteen-year-old most needs. More than a third of students in the survey had none. The heavy participants were a small group. And the students who do participate are just as likely to want committed relationships. Every part of that runs against what a freshman believes about his own campus, and it comes from Lisa Wade’s own data rather than from reassurance.

Three weaknesses.

The high heels material runs about five minutes in a twenty-seven minute lecture, and he says himself at 21:03 that he uses the example because he has spent a lot of time on it. That is a researcher’s hobbyhorse taking a fifth of a compressed lecture. He also introduces his own injury paper into the class, which is fine and which he does not flag as his own until midway through.

The foot binding comparison at 22:00 is where a student would push back hardest, and he anticipates it well: voluntary, adult, not irreversible, and he says the comparison is fair to discuss rather than fair full stop. That is close to the right handling. What is missing is any account of why women wear them, offered from women who do. The entire passage runs on what heels communicate to men and what they do to bodies. A student who wears them would recognize nothing of her own reasoning in it.

And the parallel at 8:42 between utilitarian love, science replacing religion, and democracy replacing monarchy is a large modernization claim dressed as a definition. It carries the assumption that rational selection is the later and more developed form, which is precisely what his own closing point about endogamy calls into question. He has the material to complicate his own frame and does not use it.

For the biography, this is the recording that shows him teaching theory rather than data, and it shows the same reflex that runs through everything else: define the concept, give its strongest form, then find the case where it fails. Swidler’s romantic ideal, then the observation that premodern marriage was never about it. The evolutionary account of love, then the beauty standards it cannot explain. Utilitarian love as modern rationality, then the finding that it sorts people back into their own groups.

Transcript flags before you quote. At 6:09 “Anne swidler” is Ann Swidler (b. 1944), and the relevant work is “Love and Adulthood in American Culture” (1980) and Talk of Love (2001). At 7:38 “spors” is spouses. At 14:35 Lisa Wade’s book is American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus (2017), which he does not name. At 24:33 and 24:39 “homop” is homophily, and the classic reference is McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Cook, “Birds of a Feather” (2001). At 25:04 “common Mercers” is unrecoverable and appears to describe a photograph on the slide. At 19:57 and 22:58 “ey heel” and “high deals” are high heels. At 20:59 “Dage” is damage. At 25:38 “gami is marriage” is his own etymological aside, correctly. The twelve-dates-a-month figure comes from mid-century survey data cited in his textbook and should be checked against the book before you print it, since the number sounds implausible without its source. His high heels paper is on medRxiv, which he mentioned in the February 2022 talk, and the emergency room data come from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System.

‘Philip Cohen: The Family, Chapter 8: Marriage and Cohabitation’ Mar. 27, 2025

0:00 Opens a recorded lecture on the first half of chapter eight, marriage and cohabitation.

0:13 Kristin Perry and Sandra Stier, the couple who sued for the right to marry in California, used to open the chapter and to make the point that marriage carries both symbolic and legal weight.

“It matters to people that their marriage counts, that other people consider them to be married, and it also affects their rights and obligations, reciprocal duties between them and society.”

0:56 The organizing question: how cohabitation has changed the meaning of marriage.

1:21 Diversity, in three items: about two-thirds of people who marry have lived together first, more same-sex couples marrying and cohabiting, and a large rise in remarriage, so more married couples arrive carrying a prior marital history.

2:30 Inequality, opened with the cost of a full-service 2023 wedding, itemized down to the videographer and the stylist, arriving at about $47,000 for 117 guests.

3:10 The connection he draws from it.

“Weddings are expensive, and the people who get married are increasingly richer. Couples are increasingly pairing up by education level, both high and low, but more often high. Marriage is now more common for people with college degrees, and marriage is less likely among people who are poor.”

3:44 A second form of inequality: the lack of social recognition for same-sex couples.

4:07 Social change, framed as the growth of modern individualism.

“The growth of individualism in our culture and the goals of individual self-fulfillment associated with it have weakened the ties of marriage. Fewer people getting married, fewer people staying married than in the old days. Not necessarily more and more divorces every year, but the ties of marriage are weaker than they used to be.”

4:36 The legal side of it: the law increasingly treats people as individuals rather than as families or couples, married or not.

5:26 Three key trends: falling marriage rates, sharper decline among African Americans, and marriage concentrating among the richer and better educated.

6:19 The 1970 to 2021 comparison, by age and sex. Among men aged 20 to 24, about 45 percent had ever married in 1970 against about 8 percent now. Among women, about 64 percent against about 12 percent.

7:02 The correction at the other end of the age range, which is the analytic point.

“If you go all the way out to age 45 to 54, the decline has been much more modest. It was 93 percent of men ever married by the time they were about 50, now 83 percent. Among women it was 94 percent, now about 86 percent. So it’s not so much that people are not getting married ever, but they’re getting married later than they used to, and somewhat less altogether, but definitely much less in their 20s and 30s.”

7:38 The annual rate: close to 100 marriages per thousand unmarried people in 1950, down to about 30 now.

8:16 The figure that does the most work in the lecture.

“In 1960 the average American could expect to be married for 29 of the years between age 18 and 55. Now it’s only 18 of those years. So a big drop in the amount of time people spend married in that core adulthood age range.”

9:00 Why marriage declined, beginning with the cultural explanation and then turning it over.

“Is it just individualism and self-centeredness, people don’t want to be married anymore? Maybe they don’t care as much about marriage. But on the other hand, maybe they care more about marriage. Maybe they idealize marriage more than they used to, so they are less eager to get into it because they have put it on a pedestal. They don’t think their life or their relationship is worthy of a marriage. Maybe they delay marriage not because they don’t want to, but because they want a better marriage.”

9:53 The version of it that applies further down the income distribution.

“Among poorer people, working-class people, the long-term commitment may be postponed by a sense of insecurity or uncertainty. They’re not sure what their income or their living situation or their job or their education is going to be in the future. They’re not sure what their partner’s is going to be. And so they’re reluctant to make a long-term commitment that would lock them into something they’re not sure about.”

10:26 Economic independence, especially women’s, reducing the perceived need for marriage, and the corresponding change for men who can no longer assume a wife devoted to the home.

11:09 The puzzle that follows, and his answer to it.

“If it was just about independence, then you might think rich people wouldn’t get married. So why are rich people getting married more than poorer people? Well, they don’t need to get married as much, but more people want to marry them. They’re more sought after in what we’re going to discuss as the marriage market.”

11:51 The calculation for people without resources, delivered with an unusual amount of self-awareness about how it sounds.

“Marriage for them may seem like a commitment that brings more burden than benefit. If you’re relatively poor, marrying somebody who’s relatively poor, what do you gain from it? That’s a perception anyway. Most poor people want to get married, but they’re either not persuaded by the prospects they have, or they can’t find someone who they can persuade to marry them. It’s a harsh way of putting it.”

12:51 A demographic case: the baby boom producing a shortage of slightly older men for women coming of marriage age about twenty-five years later, which squeezed marriage rates for reasons that had nothing to do with attitudes.

13:46 First marriage rates across the five major groups, with about 49 per thousand for never-married Asian women at the top and Black Americans at the bottom, and the observation that women’s rates exceed men’s in every group except Black Americans.

14:46 The marriage squeeze explained through deindustrialization.

“The loss of manufacturing jobs meant that men without college degrees had a harder and harder time finding steady work. One of the things that makes people willing to take the plunge in marriage is feeling secure that they or their partner has a good financial future. Losing all those manufacturing jobs undermined that, especially in urban Black communities. So for those poor urban women, their chances of finding and marrying men with decent jobs were reduced.”

16:02 Incarceration compounding it, with the scarring point.

“Even if they’re only incarcerated for a few years in their early adulthood, that affects them negatively, and affects their chances of getting married and getting a good job ever.”

16:40 The trend line, and what it rules out.

“In 1950, Black and white Americans had very similar rates of ever being married, and the gap really opened up after that. There’s that period in the 70s and 80s when the Black marriage rate was falling much faster than the white marriage rate. There’s now a very big gap that really was not present in the 1950s, sort of in the heyday of our manufacturing industrial economy.”

17:15 His own research with Joanna Pepin, now at Toronto, plotted as a scatter of metropolitan areas.

17:35 How to read it.

“Each dot represents one metropolitan area for either Black or white women. The vertical line shows that in areas on the right there are more unmarried men than unmarried women, ages 20 to 45. Most white young adults live in metropolitan areas with more unmarried men than women, and the opposite holds for most Black women. The clouds drift up and to the right, which means that in places where there are more unmarried men, women are more likely to get married.”

18:41 Why people still marry, starting with what they say. Pew in 2019: love first, then companionship and the desire to make a commitment, then children, with financial sense, convenience, and pregnancy well down the list.

19:24 Then the structural reading of the same question: state and federal rights and benefits, employer incentives like health insurance, and informal pressure from parents and others.

20:22 The last route, offered tentatively.

“Especially in a world with so many legitimate or acceptable choices, people sometimes do make major decisions just out of imitation. The obvious example is a celebrity endorsement for a product. You’re a very good football player, so maybe I’ll trust your judgment on what kind of car to buy. That ends up also happening with major life choices. People don’t really literally think that way, but sociologically we can track these traces through the culture.”

21:23 Marriage markets, illustrated with the Obamas and the Trumps.

21:47 What makes it a market, in the economists’ terms he attributes to Gary Becker: it must be voluntary, and there must be competition.

22:50 The two couples read against the model. The Trumps as an exchange across dimensions. And the Obamas as the opposite case.

“In the case of the Obamas it’s a very different situation, much more equal in the sense that they were both already professional, Ivy League educated, employed lawyers in the same city. So their marriage market, if you will, was much smaller, in the sense that if they wanted to marry another successful Black lawyer in Chicago, there just weren’t that many to choose from.”

23:50 The criticisms of the market frame, which he gives at length. Desires conflict rather than reducing to one currency.

24:15 And the harder objection.

“Maybe more fundamentally, if you look at all the bad decisions people make, it really is hard to describe their behavior as something like rational, the way you might think of it in terms of car shopping, if indeed that is rational either. It’s not reasonable to assume that spouses reflect a conscious choice from many alternatives, because they have fewer choices than you might think.”

25:05 His verdict on the frame, which is the model of how he handles a theory he half accepts.

“In some ways this marriage market framing doesn’t work for everything, but we teach it because it helps understand certain kinds of decisions that people make, and it may be one of several factors in play.”

25:19 Endogamy by race and ethnicity: 2 percent of new marriages crossing major group lines in 1960, about 20 percent now, a tenfold increase.

26:25 The qualification he attaches to that.

“That rate of 20 percent is still quite low compared to the potential for intermarriage that we have as our society has become more and more diverse. If people married without regard to race and ethnicity altogether, we would see a number quite a bit higher than 20 percent. So there’s still selection into marriage going on within these major groups.”

26:49 His own tabulation from people who reported marrying in the previous year, 2021, read along the diagonal: 86 percent of white men married a white non-Hispanic spouse, 69 percent of Black men a Black spouse, 28 percent of American Indian men an American Indian spouse, 68 percent among Asian and Pacific Islanders, 71 percent among Hispanics.

27:49 The size explanation for the outlier.

“You would expect that smaller groups would have higher rates of intermarriage. The American Indian population is the smallest group here. If they walk out the door and marry somebody, they’re less likely to marry somebody from their same group.”

28:14 The sex comparison across the table, ending on the case that reverses.

“Black women have higher rates of marrying within their own racial ethnic group than men do, and they’re the only group on the chart that has that. So that partly explains the lower marriage rates among Black women, that they’re less likely to marry somebody outside their group. And there’s racism and all kinds of other factors that contribute to that.”

29:35 Educational endogamy, with the social observation attached.

“Choosing a spouse of the same education level is not only common but expected at this point, especially for people with higher levels of education. People with a college degree who marry somebody without a college degree raise some eyebrows. It’s not normal or commonly expected as much as it used to be.”

29:59 The figure: in 2022, about 77 percent of married couples were either both college graduates or both not, three quarters of American couples on the same side of the college divide, and higher than it was historically.

30:25 Why that follows from the ideal.

“This is consistent with the modern ideal of marriage as a companionship of equals. The idea that people have compatible tastes, and in the pursuit of individual goals that they will have somebody they have a lot in common with. It’s not surprising that education is one of the key factors.”

30:52 Same-sex couples as the exception to like marrying like, with the measurement problem he has raised elsewhere.

“Most states do not even report data on the sex or gender of people getting married. They may list two people, but they don’t tell you their genders, or report statistics on how many couples were different gender versus same gender, including big states like California and New York. So we don’t have official statistics, we have to go by surveys.”

31:45 The Census estimate: under one percent of married couples, fewer than a million same-sex married couple households, and a knowledge base still being built.

This is the chapter where his own research is the syllabus, and the interesting thing is how much of the lecture is spent undermining frames he needs.

Watch the individualism section from 9:00. He states the standard cultural explanation, that people are more self-centered and care less about marriage, and then inverts it in the same breath: maybe they care more, maybe they have put it on a pedestal so high that their own relationship does not qualify. That is the Edin and Kefalas finding delivered without the citation, and it does something politically unusual. It hands the decline-narrative side its strongest evidence, that Americans revere marriage more than ever, and turns it into support for the structural account. People who idealize marriage and lack the security to enter it will postpone it.

Then he does the same thing to the marriage market. He teaches Becker, applies it to two famous couples, and then spends ninety seconds at 23:50 taking it apart: desires conflict, people make bad decisions, nobody has the range of alternatives the model assumes, and shopping for a spouse is not shopping for a car, “if indeed that is rational either.” And then the verdict at 25:05, that they teach it because it explains some decisions and may be one factor among several. That is how a professional uses a model he does not believe, and it is the intellectual habit that most distinguishes this lecture from a partisan one.

The strongest empirical passage is 14:46 through 17:15. The Black and white marriage rates were close in 1950 and diverged afterward, which rules out any direct inheritance from slavery and points at the postwar collapse of urban manufacturing plus mass incarceration. Then the Pepin scatter arrives as the individual-level route: most white women live in metropolitan areas with a surplus of unmarried men, most Black women in areas with a deficit, and marriage rates track the ratio. That is the same argument he makes against the success sequence, delivered to freshmen as a chart rather than as an accusation, and it is far more persuasive in this form.

The number I would steal is at 8:16. Twenty-nine of the years between eighteen and fifty-five spent married in 1960, eighteen now. That converts an abstraction about declining marriage into a quantity a general reader can hold, and it does something the marriage rate cannot: it captures later entry, lower entry, and divorce in one figure. He gives it fifteen seconds.

Three weaknesses.

The Trump paragraph at 22:50 is beneath the lecture. He describes a rich man who may or may not be the most attractive man in the world paired with a poorer woman who is above average attractive. That is a real illustration of Becker’s exchange model and it is also a professor making a joke about the appearance of two named living people in a course recording. The Obama half of the comparison is analytically much better and needs no dig.

The imitation passage at 20:22 is the weakest reasoning in the lecture. Celebrity endorsement of a car is a documented advertising phenomenon; celebrity marriage prompting ordinary marriage is not something he cites, and he says outright that people do not think that way, and then keeps it anyway. It is a mechanism proposed and disclaimed in the same breath.

And the whole lecture takes for granted that cohabitation is a stage in a sequence, without asking whether cohabitation is doing what marriage used to do for the people who never reach it. He tells students the chapter’s organizing question at 0:56 is how cohabitation changed the meaning of marriage, and then spends thirty-two minutes on marriage. Presumably the second half of the chapter answers it.

Two items for your file. At 30:52 the same-sex marriage measurement complaint appears for the third time across these recordings, in 2020 to Pepin and again here in 2025, unchanged: states record two spouses and not their sexes, so the administrative record cannot answer the question. Five years and it has not moved, which is itself a finding about how administrative data changes.

And the educational sorting figure at 29:59, three quarters of couples on the same side of the college line, is the marriage half of the argument he made in the chapter seven lecture about utilitarian love reinforcing endogamy. He builds the same case twice, two weeks apart, from different starting points, and does not tell students they are the same case.

Transcript flags. At 0:13 “Christian Styer and Sandra Perry” is Kristin Perry and Sandra Stier, and the case is Hollingsworth v. Perry; the names are transposed in the transcript. At 17:19 “Joanna pepen” is Joanna Pepin. At 22:38 Gary Becker (1930–2014) is correct. At 26:13 “by 1921” is 2021. At 28:59 “133% of them marry a white man” is 13 percent. At 1:33 “cooptation” is cohabitation. At 3:31 “marriag” is marriage. At 25:58 “meic and Venezuelan” is Mexican and Venezuelan. At 30:03 “34s or 77%” is three quarters. At 30:57 “most people marry somebody of the same gender” is a slip and should be a different gender; the sentence as transcribed reverses his meaning and is unusable. At 16:33 “reduce the shortage” should be produce or create the shortage. The $47,000 wedding figure and the 117 guests come from an industry survey reproduced in his textbook and should be sourced to the book rather than stated flatly.