{"id":201104,"date":"2026-08-22T22:31:04","date_gmt":"2026-08-23T06:31:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=201104"},"modified":"2026-08-22T15:47:25","modified_gmt":"2026-08-22T23:47:25","slug":"the-moral-economy-of-contemporary-social-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=201104","title":{"rendered":"The Moral Economy of Contemporary Social Science"},"content":{"rendered":"

The phrase “moral economy” comes from two authors. E. P. Thompson<\/a> (1924-1993) used it in 1971 for the customary expectations that governed what an eighteenth-century English crowd would tolerate from a grain market. A merchant could hold a legal right to charge what the market would bear and still violate the moral economy<\/a>, because the offense lay in breaching an unwritten understanding about what people owed one another. Lorraine Daston<\/a> (b. 1951) carried the term into the history of science in 1995, defining a moral economy as a web of affect-saturated values that regulates practice from the inside. She insisted on two features. Such economies are historically specific, arising and dissolving with the disciplines they govern. And they live in the practitioner, who experiences them as the sense that a finding smells wrong.<\/p>\n

Robert Merton<\/a> (1910-2003) described the scientific ethos in terms of universalism, communalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism. Those are rules for evaluating claims once claims are on the table. A moral economy operates earlier. It is a schedule of prices attached to hypotheses. Two explanations can carry comparable empirical support and impose sharply different costs on the scholar who advances them.<\/p>\n

Contemporary social science has such an economy, and Amy Wax’s 2010 paper on family structure<\/a> violates it. What produced the hostility was the sense that the paper was doing something illegitimate with the materials.<\/p>\n

The central rule it broke was that responsibility flows uphill while causation flows downhill.<\/p>\n

When certain people had bad outcomes, explanations that locate the cause in institutions, markets, discrimination, history, neighborhoods, schools, employers, or policy carry a presumption of legitimacy. Explanations that locate any part of the causal chain in genetics, behavior, norms, preferences, family organization, self-command, or cognition face a surcharge. The first class directs attention toward actors with power. The second appears to blame the victim.<\/p>\n

The surcharge shows up as a difference in the price of evidence, and Wax<\/a>\u2019s own review of her field displays it. The marriageable-men hypothesis of William Julius Wilson<\/a> (b. 1935) attributes the collapse of Black marriage to the disappearance of stable working-class employment. By the estimates of demographers across the methodological spectrum, male earning power and sex-ratio imbalance account for somewhere between five and twenty-five percent of the racial gap, with several estimates far lower. The hypothesis explains a fifth of the phenomenon at its best, and it remains the default account on syllabi. Arline Geronimus<\/a>\u2019s argument that early nonmarital childbearing constitutes an adaptive response to compressed life expectancy rests on a restricted counterfactual, comparing early nonmarital births to later nonmarital births while never comparing nonmarital to marital, on a sample unrepresentative of the population it describes. It circulated for two decades. Neither survives a week at that standard of fit if the conclusion runs the other way.<\/p>\n

Scientific racism, eugenics, and theories of inherited inferiority gave behavioral and genetic explanation a bad reputation after the Nazis. Franz Boas (1858-1942) and his students displaced that anthropology by establishing culture as the explanatory unit, and the displacement was not accomplished through the accumulation of evidence. <\/p>\n

The decisive American episode arrived in 1965 with Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) and his report on the Black family. William Ryan (1923-2002) supplied the phrase “blaming the victim” that outgrew the controversy that produced it. To describe a behavior that contributed to disadvantage was shifting responsibility from the society that produced the conditions to the people living under them. Wilson wrote later that the controversy made liberal social scientists reluctant to describe behavior that might be regarded as stigmatizing, and that fear of the accusation discouraged investigation of the genetic, cultural and behavioral dimensions of urban poverty. <\/p>\n

In 2010, the same year Wax circulated her paper, Mario Luis Small, David Harding, and Mich\u00e8le Lamont announced in the Annals that culture was back on the poverty agenda. The new cultural sociology analyzed frames, repertoires, identities, perceptions, and meaning-making, in interaction with structural circumstances. <\/p>\n

Culture was readmitted under conditions. It could influence how people perceived their options. It could supply repertoires that made some actions easier to imagine. It could mediate responses to structural disadvantage. What stayed hard to say was that some norms and habits produce worse outcomes than others at securing ends that nearly everyone in the population wants.<\/p>\n

Wax published into that environment and crossed the line in four places at once. She puts characteristics of actors inside the causal model. She entertains average differences among sociodemographic populations. She describes recurring patterns of conduct as self-defeating even when the people engaged in them are poor. And she argues that traditional moral norms performed useful work because they restricted individual choice.<\/p>\n

The fourth is the one that stings. Wax describes pre-1960s sexual mores as heuristics. Clear rules about marriage, fidelity, parenthood, and divorce reduced the foresight and self-command required to produce a stable family. Their removal transferred the burden of regulation from institutions to individuals. People who could supply their own discipline adapted. People who leaned on the external script did not.<\/p>\n

That makes the paper more disruptive than a conventional appeal to personal responsibility. Wax asks what arrangements let ordinary people avoid solving the optimization problem at all. Her account of norms runs parallel to behavioral economics. A default enrollment rule gets people to save without requiring them to compute an optimal savings path every payday. A marriage norm does similar work. It sustains a long-term cooperative strategy.<\/p>\n

The two paternalisms sit in different places in the moral economy. Automatic retirement enrollment gets called choice architecture and sounds technocratic. Marital fidelity gets called a social norm and sounds moralistic. Steering people away from sugar is public health. Attaching shame to abandoning one’s children is judgment. The behavioral logic is the same in each pair. Only the vocabulary and the price differ. Contemporary social science is full of paternalism. What it will not tolerate is paternalism that speaks in moral language.<\/p>\n

A second asymmetry runs through the treatment of individual traits. Dispositional explanations of high-status outcomes are welcome, marketable, and honored. A large body of work on grit, growth mindset, and delay of gratification explains professional and academic success by traits located inside the successful, and it sells to the parents of the successful and gets taught in their schools. Angela Duckworth (b. 1970) and Carol Dweck (b. 1946) built careers on it. The marshmallow paradigm of Walter Mischel (1930-2018) circulated for four decades as a story about what self-command does for a child’s future.<\/p>\n

Hold the variable and the measurement constant and point them at the bottom of the distribution, and the reception inverts. Self-command explaining why the children of professors do well is a finding. Self-command explaining part of a group gap is a provocation requiring extraordinary evidence. The methodological critiques of the marshmallow work that arrived after 2018 raised real questions about socioeconomic confounding, and I do not dispute their substance. What tracked the variable’s migration from one use to the other was the energy behind them.<\/p>\n

A standard that depends on the status of the population explained rather than on the evidence is a standard of manners. And the manners run in a direction: agency is a compliment paid to people already doing well, and its withdrawal is the courtesy extended to people who are not.<\/p>\n

Lee Ross (1942-2021) named the fundamental attribution error in 1977. Observers over-attribute conduct to disposition and under-attribute it to situation, reliably, and worse for people they do not know. <\/p>\n

This protects subjects. Findings about populations get used, and the use is rarely gentle. Publish that a group’s members exhibit shorter time horizons and you have produced a sentence that will appear, stripped of qualifications, in the mouth of someone who wants to deny that group a loan.<\/p>\n

And it buys access. Ethnography runs on entr\u00e9e. Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas interviewed a hundred and sixty-two single mothers in Philadelphia and produced a book whose empirical value survives its interpretive frame. They could not have done that work while publishing that the central obstacle was the conduct of the men these women chose. The interviews record the women saying so, at length, about infidelity, violence, drug use, and desertion. The book attributes the conduct to bad schools and absent opportunity. The gap between what the subjects said and what the authors concluded is the price of admission, paid in explanatory currency, and every fieldworker knows the exchange rate without having seen it posted.<\/p>\n

Mancur Olson (1932-1998) argued that enforcement of a norm is a public good. The benefit diffuses across a population that includes almost nobody the enforcer knows. The cost concentrates on him, in the room, at the time: the awkwardness of judging a colleague’s divorce, the risk of saying in a seminar that children do better with a father at home, the demotion that attaches to anyone who moralizes about sex. Every individual therefore has reason to withhold enforcement while hoping others supply it, and provision settles below what even the enforcers privately believe correct. The same arithmetic governs the scholarly version. Each researcher who declines to publish the uncomfortable finding gains a private benefit and imposes a small diffuse cost on the field’s stock of knowledge. Nobody defects from the economy because defecting is expensive and the returns go to strangers.<\/p>\n

Joanna Kempner, Jon Merz, and Charles Bosk (1948-2020) documented how the enforcement runs. They interviewed forty-one academic researchers about knowledge considered too sensitive, dangerous, or taboo to produce, and found that the constraints were largely informal and self-imposed rather than codified. What marked the boundaries were the narrative legacies of past controversies, which working scientists used to locate the lines. Researchers learned where the edges were when their own work or a colleague’s drew rebuke.<\/p>\n

This is how a moral economy should operate. Graduate students observe which questions make advisers uneasy. Scholars learn which formulations require three paragraphs of disclaimer. Referees demand alternative structural accounts with more insistence when the conclusion is uncomfortable. Investigators anticipate the reaction and redesign the project before anyone has to object. <\/p>\n

The costs.<\/p>\n

A class of true propositions becomes unpublishable, and a field that cannot publish a proposition cannot test or correct it. Suppression does not produce silence on a question. It produces relocation. The question migrates to writers with no data, no training, no review, and no stake in the population’s welfare, who answer it badly and loudly to an audience that has noticed the professionals declining to speak. Wilson said as much about the years after Moynihan.<\/p>\n

Theories with poor fit survive on moral standing. A field that keeps the marriageable-men hypothesis at the center of its account while a fifth of the variance supports it has stopped optimizing for fit, and has lost the ability to tell whether it is making progress.<\/p>\n

The economy patronizes. Powerful people get treated as agents. Disadvantaged people get treated as respondents to conditions. The employer discriminates, the landlord excludes, the school fails, the market dislocates, the neighborhood constrains, and the disadvantaged individual adapts. Sometimes that is what happened. When the grammar becomes a default theory of causation, agency itself becomes stratified: people at the top hold enough of it to cause social outcomes, and people at the bottom hold enough to experience outcomes without helping to cause them. Orlando Patterson (b. 1940) has pressed this from a position that makes it hard to wave off, arguing that the refusal to discuss culture and conduct among Black Americans amounts to a denial that they are agents in their own lives.<\/p>\n

And morally congenial explanations have victims. Suppose a destructive behavior responds strongly to norms and weakly to the economic variable researchers prefer. A generation spent improving the economic variable while declining to investigate the normative one does not protect the affected population. It withholds a useful explanation from them. Compassion attached to the wrong causal model is not compassionate in its consequences.<\/p>\n

Where the moral economy causes the most damage is in the conflation of explanation with exculpation. Discrimination contributing to an outcome leaves open whether every person experiencing it acted wisely. Behavior contributing to an outcome leaves open whether discrimination is present. A norm proving socially useful leaves open whether those who violate it are wicked. A population differing on average in some trait leaves open where the difference came from, whether it is mutable, and what anyone owes anyone else about it. None of these propositions entails the moral conclusion habitually attached to it.<\/p>\n

Wax’s empirical case for population differences in local and global decision-making runs far weaker than her theoretical model. She concedes that the time-discounting literature is messy, that the measurements are inconsistent, and that the evidence linking psychological traits to intimate conduct is thin. That is where to attack the argument. Are the traits measured well? Do the group differences survive controls? Which way does causation run? How much variance do they carry? Can the model outperform its rivals out of sample? Does the normative environment change conduct through the route she specifies?<\/p>\n

Those are scientific objections. That hypothesis blames the victim is a statement about the hypothesis’s position in a moral economy.<\/p>\n

Researchers choose subjects because some outcomes weigh more with them than others. Societies regulate experiments because knowledge is not worth every price. What a science can demand is that the ledgers stay separate.<\/p>\n

The causal ledger asks what produces the outcome. It lets institutions, incentives, history, culture, norms, cognition, personality, choice, inheritance, developmental feedback, and chance compete for explanatory power. No variable earns immunity because its implications are unpleasant, and none earns a presumption because its implications are humane. The moral ledger opens afterward and asks what people owe one another given what turns out to be true.<\/p>\n

Separation works because human dignity does not require causal innocence. A poor man need not be a passive product of structures to deserve help. A man who made a disastrous choice keeps his claim on compassion. A group difference is not deserved merely because behavior mediates it. An institution is not innocent merely because individuals act. A society can ask responsibility of people while recognizing that the capacity for responsibility is partly socially produced. Grant those propositions and most of the moral pressure on causal explanation drains away.<\/p>\n

Notes<\/p>\n

On the term. E. P. Thompson<\/a>, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century<\/a>,” Past and Present<\/em><\/a> 50 (1971): 76-136. Lorraine Daston<\/a>, “The Moral Economy of Science<\/a>,” Osiris<\/em><\/a> 10 (1995): 2-24, at https:\/\/www.journals.uchicago.edu\/doi\/abs\/10.1086\/368740<\/a> and https:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/301910<\/a>. Daston\u2019s definition of a moral economy as a web of affect-saturated values is the sentence the essay leans on, and her insistence that these economies are historically specific is what makes the present one a subject rather than a scandal. For the concept\u2019s wider career, Norbert G\u00f6tz, “\u2018Moral Economy\u2019: Its Conceptual History and Analytical Prospects<\/a>,” at https:\/\/www.tandfonline.com\/doi\/full\/10.1080\/17449626.2015.1054556<\/a>. Robert Merton<\/a>\u2019s four norms come from “The Normative Structure of Science” (1942), reprinted in The Sociology of Science<\/em><\/a> (1973).<\/p>\n

On the Wax paper and its field review. Amy L. Wax<\/a>, “Diverging Family Structure and \u2018Rational\u2019 Behavior: The Decline in Marriage as a Disorder of Choice<\/a>,” University of Pennsylvania Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper No. 10-17, at https:\/\/ssrn.com\/abstract=1592424<\/a>. Her demolition of the structural accounts runs through the paper\u2019s third section, and her own summary of the demographic estimates on marriageable men appears at notes 30 and 31. The Wilson hypothesis is stated in The Truly Disadvantaged<\/em><\/a> (1987), whose opening chapter also carries Wilson\u2019s account of the professional silence that followed the Moynihan report. Kathryn Edin<\/a> and Maria Kefalas, Promises I Can Keep<\/em><\/a> (2005), is the ethnography discussed above.<\/p>\n

On the Moynihan aftermath. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action<\/em><\/a> (Office of Policy Planning and Research, U.S. Department of Labor, 1965). William Ryan<\/a>, Blaming the Victim<\/em><\/a> (1971), supplied the phrase. Readers who want the controversy reconstructed rather than summarized should start with James Patterson<\/a>, Freedom Is Not Enough<\/em><\/a> (2010).<\/p>\n

On culture readmitted under conditions. Mario Luis Small<\/a>, David J. Harding<\/a>, and Mich\u00e8le Lamont<\/a>, \u201cReconsidering Culture and Poverty<\/a>,\u201d Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science<\/em> 629 (May 2010): 6-27, at https:\/\/papers.ssrn.com\/sol3\/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2131376<\/a>, with the Harvard open copy at https:\/\/scholar.harvard.edu\/files\/lamont\/files\/reconsidering_culture_and_poverty.pdf<\/a> and the full volume at https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/reconsideringcul0629unse<\/a>. The volume includes a contribution from Wilson<\/a>. Note the timing: this appeared the same season Wax circulated her draft, which makes the pair a natural comparison for anyone who wants to see the permitted and the forbidden versions of the same move side by side.<\/p>\n

On how the boundaries get enforced. Joanna Kempner, Jon F. Merz, and Charles L. Bosk, “Forbidden Knowledge: Public Controversy and the Production of Nonknowledge<\/a>,” Sociological Forum<\/em> 26 (2011): 475-500, at https:\/\/onlinelibrary.wiley.com\/doi\/abs\/10.1111\/j.1573-7861.2011.01259.x<\/a>, with an open copy here<\/a>. The earlier and shorter statement is Kempner, Clifford Perlis, and Merz, “Forbidden Knowledge<\/a>,” Science<\/em><\/a> 307 (2005): 854, at https:\/\/science.sciencemag.org\/content\/307\/5711\/854<\/a>. Their finding that most constraints are informal or self-imposed, and that memories of past controversies mark the lines, is the empirical backbone of the argument here. For the collective-action engine, Mancur Olson<\/a>, The Logic of Collective Action<\/em><\/a> (1965).<\/p>\n

On the trait literature and its asymmetric reception. Walter Mischel<\/a>, Yuichi Shoda<\/a>, and Philip Peake\u2019s original delay-of-gratification papers ran in Science<\/em><\/a> (1989) and Developmental Psychology<\/em><\/a> (1990). The conceptual replication is Tyler Watts, Greg Duncan, and Haonan Quan, “Revisiting the Marshmallow Test<\/a>,” Psychological Science<\/em><\/a> 29 (2018): 1159-1177, at https:\/\/journals.sagepub.com\/doi\/abs\/10.1177\/0956797618761661<\/a>, with an open copy here<\/a>. Their bivariate correlation ran half the size of the original and fell by two thirds under controls for family background, early cognitive ability, and home environment. The exchange that followed is worth reading in full, since it shows the field arguing about controls rather than about politics: Armin Falk, Fabian Kosse, and Pia Pinger, “Re-Revisiting the Marshmallow Test<\/a>,” here<\/a> with the Watts and Duncan reply on confounding and construct clarity. Lee Ross<\/a>\u2019s “The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings” (1977) is where the attribution error gets its name.<\/p>\n

Further reading. Orlando Patterson<\/a>, The Ordeal of Integration<\/em><\/a> (1997) and Rituals of Blood<\/em><\/a> (1998), argue the agency point from inside the sociology of race; his 2006 New York Times<\/em> essay “A Poverty of the Mind<\/a>” states it compactly. On the demographic side of the family argument, Andrew Cherlin, The Marriage-Go-Round<\/em><\/a> (2009), Charles Murray, Coming Apart<\/em><\/a> (2012), Robert Putnam, Our Kids<\/em><\/a> (2015), and Melissa Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege<\/em><\/a> (2023). Philip Tetlock<\/a>\u2019s work on sacred values and taboo tradeoffs supplies a psychology for the reaction described here, and readers who want it should start with “The Psychology of the Unthinkable<\/a>” (2000). For a companion piece on who selects a normative regime and who bears its costs, see the essay on status hierarchy and normative selection that shares this argument\u2019s premises.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The phrase “moral economy” comes from two authors. E. P. Thompson (1924-1993) used it in 1971 for the customary expectations that governed what an eighteenth-century English crowd would tolerate from a grain market. A merchant could hold a legal right … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42934],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-201104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-amy-wax"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=201104"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":201122,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201104\/revisions\/201122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=201104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=201104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=201104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}