This bold and lively essay is one of those rarest of intellectual achievements, a big small book. In its short length are condensed enormous erudition and impressive analytical scope. With verve and self-assurance, it addresses a broad, central question: How can we improve our understanding of the large-scale processes and structures that transformed the world of the nineteenth century and are transforming our world today?

Tilly contends that twentieth-century social theories have been encumbered by a nineteenth century heritage of “pernicious postulates.” He subjects each misleading belief to rigorous criticism, challenging many standard social science paradigms and methodologies. As an alternative to those timeless, placeless models of social change and organization, Tilly argues convincingly for a program of concrete, historically grounded analysis and systematic comparison.

To illustrate the strategies available for such research, Tilly assesses the works of several major practitioners of comparative historical analysis, making skillful use of this selective review to offer his own speculative, often unconventional accounts of our recent past.

Historically oriented social scientists will welcome this provocative essay and its wide-ranging agenda for comparative historical research. Other social scientists, their graduate and undergraduate students, and even the interested general reader will find this new work by a major scholar stimulating and eminently readable.

This is the second of five volumes commissioned by the Russell Sage Foundation to mark its seventy-fifth anniversary.

"In this short, brilliant book Tilly suggests a way to think about theories of historical social change....This book should find attentive readers both in undergraduate courses and in graduate seminars. It should also find appreciative readers, for Tilly is a writer as well as a scholar." —Choice

CHARLES TILLY is at the New School for Social Research.

Standard economic theory is built on the assumption that human beings act rationally in their own self interest. But if rationality is such a reliable factor, why do economic models so often fail to predict market behavior accurately? According to Richard Thaler, the shortcomings of the standard approach arise from its failure to take into account systematic mental biases that color all human judgements and decisions. Economics assumes behavior is consistently rational, when it is, in fact, only partially, or quasi-rational.

The papers collected in Quasi-Rational Economics represent a significant sampling of this innovative approach, written by a leader in the field along with co-authors Thomas Russell, H. M. Shefrin, Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetsch, Werner De Bondt, Eric Johnson, Charles Lee, and Andrei Shleifer. Thaler and his colleagues challenge established economic theories in such areas as consumer choice and financial markets, offering empirical evidence and alternate models based on behavioral research about how economic decisions are actually made.

Quasi-Rational Economics deals with a number of intriguing questions. Why do people have trouble ignoring sunk costs and recognizing opportunity costs? How do people’s preferences for already endowed possessions suppress trading volume and keep markets from clearing? What are the effects on market behavior of consumer attitudes about fairness? How do people’s mental accounting procedures lead them to behave in economically inconsistent ways? Why do investors’ tendencies to overreact to past trends cause losing firms to outperform winners in the stock market?

In offering answers to these questions, Quasi-Rational Economics provides an essential introduction to a new field. It mounts a trenchant critique of current practice in economics and calls for richer, more realistic approaches to formulating and testing economic theory. More than just a call for reform, this book provides numerous illustrations of how the call can be answered.

"Richard Thaler's book offers great evidence for the importance of quasi rational behavior in economic settings, thus stimulating the reader. Its broad coverage makes an interesting introduction to a new field, as well as informing about further applications and methods." —Kyklos

RICHARD H. THALER is Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Economics and director of the Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision Research, Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University. He is research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Modern financial markets offer the real world's best approximation to the idealized price auction market envisioned in economic theory. Nevertheless, as the increasingly exquisite and detailed financial data demonstrate, financial markets often fail to behave as they should if trading were truly dominated by the fully rational investors that populate financial theories.

These markets anomalies have spawned a new approach to finance, one which as editor Richard Thaler puts it, "entertains the possibility that some agents in the economy behave less than fully rationally some of the time." Advances in Behavioral Finance collects together twenty-one recent articles that illustrate the power of this approach. These papers demonstrate how specific departures from fully rational decision making by individual market agents can provide explanations of otherwise puzzling market phenomena.

To take several examples, Werner De Bondt and Thaler find an explanation for superior price performance of firms with poor recent earnings histories in the tendencies of investors to overreact to recent information. Richard Roll traces the negative effects of corporate takeovers on the stock prices of the acquiring firms to the overconfidence of managers, who fail to recognize the contributions of chance to their past successes. Andrei Shleifer and Robert Vishny show how the difficulty of establishing a reliable reputation for correctly assessing the value of long term capital projects can lead investment analysis, and hence corporate managers, to focus myopically on short term returns.

As a testing ground for assessing the empirical accuracy of behavioral theories, the successful studies in this landmark collection reach beyond the world of finance to suggest, very powerfully, the importance of pursuing behavioral approaches to other areas of economic life. Advances in Behavioral Finance is a solid beachhead for behavioral work in the financial arena and a clear promise of wider application for behavioral economics in the future.

RICHARD H. THALER is Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Economics, and director of the Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision Research, Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Lawrence M. Ausubel, Victor L. Bernard, Fischer Black, Navin Chopra, David M. Cutler, Werner F. M. De Bondt, J. Bradford De Long, Jeffrey A. Frankel, Kenneth R. French, Kenneth A. Froot, Josef Lakonishok, Charles M. C. Lee, James M. Poterba, Jay R. Ritter, Richard Roll, Hersh M. Shefrin, Robert J. Shiller, Andrei Shleifer, Meir Statman, Jeremy Stein, Lawrence H. Summers, Richard H. Thaler, Robert W. Vishny, and Robert J. Waldmann

Winner of the 2009 Otis Dudley Duncan Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Social Demography

Winner of the 2009 Distinguished Contribution to Research Award from the Latino/a Section of the American Sociological Association

Winner of the 2009 Pacific Sociological Association's Distinguished Scholarship Award

Honorable Mention 2009 Thomas and Znaniecki Award from the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association

Foreword by Joan W. Moore

When boxes of original files from a 1965 survey of Mexican Americans were discovered behind a dusty bookshelf at UCLA, sociologists Edward Telles and Vilma Ortiz recognized a unique opportunity to examine how the Mexican American experience has evolved over the past four decades.  Telles and Ortiz located and re-interviewed most of the original respondents and many of their children.  Then, they combined the findings of both studies to construct a thirty-five year analysis of Mexican American integration into American society.  Generations of Exclusion is the result of this extraordinary project.

Generations of Exclusion measures Mexican American integration across a wide number of dimensions: education, English and Spanish language use, socioeconomic status, intermarriage, residential segregation, ethnic identity, and political participation. The study contains some encouraging findings, but many more that are troubling. Linguistically, Mexican Americans assimilate into mainstream America quite well—by the second generation, nearly all Mexican Americans achieve English proficiency. In many domains, however, the Mexican American story doesn’t fit with traditional models of assimilation. The majority of fourth generation Mexican Americans continue to live in Hispanic neighborhoods, marry other Hispanics, and think of themselves as Mexican. And while Mexican Americans make financial strides from the first to the second generation, economic progress halts at the second generation, and poverty rates remain high for later generations. Similarly, educational attainment peaks among second generation children of immigrants, but declines for the third and fourth generations.

Telles and Ortiz identify institutional barriers as a major source of Mexican American disadvantage. Chronic under-funding in school systems predominately serving Mexican Americans severely restrains progress. Persistent discrimination, punitive immigration policies, and reliance on cheap Mexican labor in the southwestern states all make integration more difficult. The authors call for providing Mexican American children with the educational opportunities that European immigrants in previous generations enjoyed. The Mexican American trajectory is distinct—but so is the extent to which this group has been excluded from the American mainstream.

Most immigration literature today focuses either on the immediate impact of immigration or what is happening to the children of newcomers to this country. Generations of Exclusion shows what has happened to Mexican Americans over four decades. In opening this window onto the past and linking it to recent outcomes, Telles and Ortiz provide a troubling glimpse of what other new immigrant groups may experience in the future.

EDWARD E. TELLES is professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

VILMA ORTIZ is associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Times Square, in its heyday, expressed American culture in the moment of vivid change. A stellar group of critics and scholars examines this transitional moment in Inventing Times Square, a study of the development of New York's central entertainment district. A fascinating visit to Times Square, from its christening in 1905 to its eventual decline after the Depression, the book explores the colorful configuration of institutions and cultural practices that propelled Times Square from a local and regional entertainment center to a national cultural marketplace.

Changes in the economy, in religion, in leisure culture, and in aesthetics gave birth to a geographical space that fostered Vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley, Flo Ziegfeld and Billy Rose, the spectacle of the Hippodrome and the bright lights of the Great White Way. Out of this same place eventually came national network radio and many Hollywood films. Though conceived as a public space, Times Square was quickly transformed into a commercial center. Power brokers wielded their influence on a public ready to succumb to consumerism. Theatrical entertainment  became a large-scale national business based in, and operated out of, Times Square. A new commercial aesthetic travelled with Joseph Urban from Vienna to Times Square to Palm Beach, bringing to society a sophisticated style that will forever say "Broadway."

Times Square as the "center of the universe" had its darker sides as well, for it was the testing ground for a new morality. The packaging of sexuality on the stage gave it legitimacy on the streets, as hotels and sidewalks became the province of female prostitution, male hustling, and pornography.

At the center of New York City, Times Square's commercial activities gave full rein to urban appetites and fantasies, and challenged and defied the norms of behavior that prevailed elsewhere in the city. Cultural history at its finest, Inventing Times Square portrays the vibrant convergence of social and economic forces on Forty-second Street.

WILLIAM R. TAYLOR teaches history at State University of New York at Stony Brook and is program director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Jean-Christophe Agnew, Betsy Blackmar, Peter Buckley, George Chauncey Jr., Peter A. Davis, Lewis A. Erenberg, Richard Wightman Fox, Philip Furia, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Gregory Gilmartin, David Hammack, Ada Louise Huxtable, Margaret Knapp, Eric Lampard, William R. Leach, Brooks McNamara, William Wood Register Jr., Laurence Senelick, Robert W. Snyder, William R. Taylor.

The social survey has become an essential tool in modern society, providing crucial measurements of social change, describing social life, and guiding government policy. But the validity of surveys is fragile and depends ultimately upon the accuracy of answers to survey questions. As our dependence on surveys grows, so too have questions about the accuracy of survey responses.

Authored by a group of experts in cognitive psychology, linguistics, and survey research, Questions About Questions provides a broad review of the survey response problem. Examining the cognitive and social processes that influence the answers to questions, the book first takes up the problem of meaning and demonstrates that a respondent must share the survey researcher’s intended meaning of a question if the response is to be revealing and informative. The book then turns to an examination of memory. It provides a framework for understanding the processes that can introduce errors into retrospective reports, useful guidance on when those reports are more or less trustworthy, and investigates techniques for the improvement of such reports. Questions about the rigid standardization imposed on the survey interview receive a thorough airing as the authors show how traditional survey formats violate the usual norms of conversational behavior and potentially endanger the validity of the data collected.

Synthesizing the work of the Social Science Research Council’s Committee on Cognition and Survey Research, Questions About Questions emphasizes the reciprocal gains to be achieved when insights and techniques from the cognitive sciences and survey research are exchanged.

"these chapters provide a good sense of the range of survey problems investigated by the cognitive movement, the methods and ideas it draws upon, and the results it has yielded." —American Journal of Sociology

JUDITH M. TANUR is professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She is co-chairperson of the Social Science Research Council Committee on Cognition and Survey Research.

CONTRIBUTORS: Robert P. Abelson,  Herbert H. Clark,  Robert T. Croyle, Robyn M. Dawes,  Cathryn S. Dippo, Jack F. Dovidio,  Russell H. Fazio,  Judith Fiedler,  Ronald P. Fisher,  Nancy H. Fultz,  Anthony G. Greenwald,  Robert Groves,  Brigitte Jordan,  Mark Klinger,  Jon A. Krosnik,  Elizabeth F. Loftus,  Elizabeth Martin,  Janet L. Norwood,  Robert W. Pearson,  Kathryn L. Quigley,  Michael Ross,  Michael F. Schober,  Kyle D. Smith,  Lucy Suchman, Judith M. Tanur.  

Honorable Mention, 1989 William T. Goode Award, Family Section of the American Sociological Association

Changes in family and household composition are part of every individual's life course. Childhood families expand and contract; the individual leaves to set up an independent household; he or she may marry, raise children, lose a spouse. These transitions have a profound effect on the economic and social well-being of individuals, and the relative prevalence of different living arrangements affects the very character of society.
 

American families and Households takes advantage of the large samples provided by the decennial censuses to document recent major transformations in the individual life cycle and consequent changes in the composition of the American population. As James Sweet and Larry Bumpass demonstrate, these changes have been dramatic—rates of marriage and childbirth are down, rates of marital disruption are up, and those who can are more likely to maintain independent households despite the rapid acceleration of change during recent years, however, the authors find that contemporary trends are continuous with long-term changes in Western society.
 

This meticulous work makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the American Family and the individual life experiences that are translated into the larger population experience.
 

"Jim Sweet and Larry Bumpass provide detailed descriptions of three components of the households and families of Americans: family transitions; the prevalence of different family and household arrangements; and the economic and social circumstances of people living in different types of families and households....As a reference work, the volume is a gold mine, with many rich veins of useful information....Anyone interested in American families and how they have been changing will want to refer to this volume." —American Journal of Sociology
 
JAMES A. SWEET and LARRY L. BUMPASS are professors of sociology at the Center for Demography and Ecology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

A Volume in the RSF Census Series

Since the mid-1980s, as public discourse has focused increasingly on the troubled economy, many social scientists have argued the need for more analysis of the social relationships that undergird economic life. The original essays in Explorations in Economic Sociology represent the most important work in this renewed field and employ a rich variety of research methods—theoretical, ethnographic, and historical—to illustrate its key concerns.

Explorations in Economic Sociology forges innovative social theories of such economic institutions as money, markets, and industry. Although traditional economists have identified markets as driven solely by the forces of supply and demand, social factors frequently intervene. Sales at auction are determined not simply by a seller's personal knowledge of customers. Shareholder attitudes and employee organization influence everything from the way firms borrow money to the way corporate performance is measured. Firms themselves operate in social networks in which trust is a crucial factor in settling the terms for cooperation or competition.

Throughout the essays in this volume, the contributors point the way to developing a more healthy economy by fostering productive industrial networks, avoiding disintegration at management levels, and anticipating the consequences of the shift from manufacturing to service industries. Explorations in Economic Sociology is a pioneering work that bridges the gap between social theory and economic analysis and demonstrates the importance of this union in achieving an effective understanding of economic issues. The book should stimulate new interest in economic sociology by bringing together many of its most fundamental voices.

RICHARD SWEDBERG is professor of sociology at the University of Stockholm.

CONTRIBUTORS: Ronald S. Burt, Mark Granovetter, Paul M. Hirsch, Mark Lazerson, Patrick McGuire, Marshall W. Meyer, Mark S. Mizruchi, Charles Perrow, Frank Romo, Charles F. Sabel, Michael Schwartz, Charles W. Smith, Linda Brewster Stearns, Richard Swedberg, Michael Useem, Harrison C. White, and Viviana A. Zelizer

America's current system of health insurance, which relies almost exclusively on employer-sponsored coverage, is in danger of collapse, and this problem is not limited to the poor and working class. An increasing number of middle class Americans do not have employer-provided insurance and—due to skyrocketing premiums—cannot afford to purchase coverage for themselves. Reinsuring Health, by economist Katherine Swartz, examines this growing national crisis and outlines a concrete plan to make health insurance accessible and affordable for all Americans.

Reinsuring Health documents why the number of uninsured Americans—now 45.5 million people—has grown in the last twenty-five years. Swartz focuses on how labor market changes—such as the decline of domestic manufacturing, decreased unionization, and the growth of non-standard work arrangements—have led U.S. employers to retreat from providing health insurance for their workers. These trends, combined with the increasing costs of medical care, have led to an explosion in health insurance premiums and a decline in coverage, particularly among the middle-class. Since those who seek insurance as individuals are generally most likely to need health care, private insurers charge higher premiums in the individual (non-group) markets than to people who obtain group insurance. This makes individual health insurance less attractive to the young and increasingly unaffordable for middle-class Americans. Similarly, insurers charge higher per person (or per family) premiums to small firms than to large companies, so many small firms do not sponsor coverage for their employees. Reinsuring Health shows how these problems can be overcome if the federal government provides a new reinsurance program which would protect insurance companies that provide small group and individual health insurance against the possibility that their policy-holders will incur very high medical expenses. By assuming some of the risk that people will face extremely costly medical bills, the government will make insurers less hesitant to offer coverage to high-risk individuals, and will help drive down premiums for others. Reinsuring Health demonstrates that this form of government reinsurance has worked in the past, helping to establish smooth running private markets for catastrophe insurance and secondary mortgages.

Today, growing numbers of middle class Americans lack health insurance. Protection against the possibility of falling ill or getting hurt and having to pay extraordinary health care bills should not be a luxury available only to the very rich and the very poor. Reinsuring Health proposes a straightforward solution that would bring health insurance back within the reach of the increasing ranks of the uninsured, particularly those who are in the middle class.

KATHERINE SWARTZ is professor of health policy and management at the School of Public Health, Harvard University

Two sociologists and a lawyer examine here the attitudes of both survivors and attorney on various problems surrounding inheritance—from will-making through estate settlement. Within a legal frame of reference, this book is a study of what happens within a family at death—and why. The authors use the "inheritance unit" as the basis for looking at the functions of inheritance in intergenerational family continuity and the general patterns of family relationship.

MARVIN B. SUSSMAN is professor and chairman of the Department of Sociology at Case Western Reserve University.

JUDITH N. CATES is research associate of the American Psychological Association.

DAVID T. SMITH is professor of law at the University of Florida.