Samuel Cohn

Professor of Sociology Texas A & M

Specialties: History, Economic Development, Gender

Author of All Societies Die How To Keep Hope Alive (Cornell 2021)

[Samuel Cohn @Samuel__Cohn]

Those Who Forget the Lessons of History Are Doomed to Repeat Them.

(paraphrase of George Santayana)

[Samuel Cohn @Samuel__Cohn]

Steve Rattner's charts on the crisis in individual indebtedness are excellent.

Give credit where credit is due.

😝😝😝😝😝😝😝😝

[Craig Calhoun @craigjcalhoun]

@SteveRattner is rolling out a series of good charts with a common message: Americans have been driven to assume too much debt. This burdens them and weighs on economy and society more generally. Much of the borrowing follows from making education, health and other once public support matters for private payment.

[Samuel Cohn @Samuel__Cohn]

95% True.

There are a limited number of settings where a neoclassical market does apply.

Think of the neoclassical market as being the same as Lewis Carroll's Clock that is Completely Stopped.

The Clock that is Completely Stopped is Absolutely Correct Two Times a Day.

[Relearning Economics @RelearningEcon]

"I am often asked what I would keep of Neoclassical economics in a new paradigm. My answer is that I would keep as much of Neoclassical economics as modern astronomy kept of Ptolemaic astronomy – which is to say, nothing at all."

-Steve Keen

[Jose Morales-Villagomez @josemoralesv_]

This is true. An overlooked feature of the Chinese economy is that it created massive Leontief multiplier effects. Suggests that growth in high tech sectors reach far, to many other local sectors

Our calculations showed China has the highest industrial multipliers by far

[Samuel Cohn @Samuel__Cohn]

Alec Nove's Economics of Feasible Socialism (Discusses the intellectual tasks states can and can not do)

Any book on the Asian Developmental State

Any Marxist work on class fractions and the state. 18th Brumaire if you want old school. Poulantzas still applies today.

Greta Krippner Capitalizing on Crisis on how finance capital captured the state. She explains the political sociology of why the state was vulnerable to capture. Most later works just complain about the capture.

[Mike McCarthy @its_mccarthy]

In the beginning stages of thinking about a grad seminar on "the state," what are your favorite books and / or articles?

[Samuel Cohn @Samuel__Cohn]

This is not different from other fields of human endeavor.

How many record albums ever became big sellers?

How many restaurants fold after one year?

How many athletes make the pros and then quietly disappear?

[Christopher Derick Varn @TheRealVarnVlog]

Between 40% and 50% of all peer reviewed research is never cited, in the humanities this ratio doubles. All the anecdotes from peer-reviewers (which is work I have done when I was an academic), ignore these stats. People trying to defend pre-AI status quo in academia by anecdotes are bizarre to me if you know the stats.

[Samuel Cohn @Samuel__Cohn]

You are on a high speed trip to enlightenment.

Do your chanting and look at the tranquil countryside until you open up the light that is within you.

Movement and Being Stationary Are One and the Same.

[Yiming Ha 哈一鳴 @HistorianHa]

Completely stopped outside of Avignon for the past 20 minutes …high speed indeed 🤣

[Samuel Cohn @Samuel__Cohn]

An intellectual who can draw from scholars from a wide range of political and stylistic positions has the potential to massively increase his or her creativity and capacity for synthesis.

No scholar is completely wrong. No scholar is completely right.

Wide grazing is liberating

[Sam Haselby @samhaselby]

@g_shullenberger It's a bit strange Pinker has all these right-wing intellectual sympathies but is still a liberal Dem.

[Samuel Cohn @Samuel__Cohn]

Calhoun is fully correct.

However reluctance to tax the rich comes from more than rich people's own resistance to such a concept.

Poor people have fantasies of being rich, not unlike winning the lottery. They don't want to be taxed when they get their billions.

Unions are great at reorienting such debates.

The union movement in the United States is crippled.

[Craig Calhoun @craigjcalhoun]

Important.
And important for those who hesitate about the (pretty modest) wealth tax to ask seriously whether they have a better way of reducing socially destructive inequality. The tax is certainly not perfect, but it could help.

https://t.co/b14JKOUYMT via @NYTOpinion

[Samuel Cohn @Samuel__Cohn]

You made all the people in Midland and Odessa Texas Cry.

[Vlad Tarko 🌐 🏗️ @vladtarko]

Dallas to El Paso probably even worse. As you leave Dallas there are signs for El Paso because there's nothing else in between. If you're on that road they know where you're going.

[Samuel Cohn @Samuel__Cohn]

In two weeks, I am going to one and only one city.

I pick what ever city I want and stay in that region.

I would random number select from Berlin, Rome, London or Paris.

Can't go wrong either way.

[Josh Barzon @JoshuaBarzon]

You just won a 2-week, all-expenses-paid vacation. But there’s a catch: you have to stay within one region the whole time. What are you picking?

[Samuel Cohn @Samuel__Cohn]

Closing libraries is very 21st Century.

MIT is ahead of the game in realizing that text has moved into virtual form.

Physical books are becoming inefficient and expensive to store.

PDFs are lighter and cheaper.

BUT

God help us if the internet goes down semi-permanently.

[Lawrence Zhang 張樂翔 @HistorianZhang]

This kind of abandonment of basic infrastructure in higher ed is difficult to reverse

[Samuel Cohn @Samuel__Cohn]

Whether or not you agree with Megyn Kelly's political values and policy preferences,

She is a sharp observer of factual political process.

When she makes a strong prediction, take it seriously.

[The Megyn Kelly Show @MegynKellyShow]

"HELL NO"

@MegynKelly: "I'm saying it on the record - it's not going to happen. I think Paxton is going to win and win easily... I disagree, Cook Political Report. You may know political races, but I know Texas. I know that state and I know the voters down there. There's no fucking way they're going to vote for this guy..."

[Samuel Cohn @Samuel__Cohn]

Heating in the winter was on the challenging side.

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

This is one of the greatest medieval castles in England.

Originally constructed by William the Conqueror in 1068 and later rebuilt in stone, Warwick Castle has been standing for nearly a thousand years. It’s older than the Aztec Empire.

[Samuel Cohn @Samuel__Cohn]

Achilles is athletic, capable of running at high speeds for long distances in full armor and handsome as hell.

He is completely self absorbed and has no interest in the larger interests of Greece.

Selfish + Narcissistic + Strong + Handsome makes him the perfect celebrity.

[William Hogeland @WilliamHogeland]

The notion that Homer conceived of Achilles as that all-American, post-WWII sociological concept the "role model" is absurd--and anyway it has nothing to do with great man theory.

[Samuel Cohn @Samuel__Cohn]

Not a problem!

I own Bitcoin and $Trump!

😝😝😝😝😝😝😝😝😝😝

[Relearning Economics @RelearningEcon]

"The value of a yellow metal, originally chosen as money because it tickled the fancy of savages, is clearly a chancy and irrelevant thing on which to base the value of our money and the stability of our industrial system."

-Dennis Robertson

[Samuel Cohn @Samuel__Cohn]

The reshuffling of ___________ leadership has become ever-more rapid and disruptive.

Everyone hates incumbents.

Everyone is looking for gotchas.

No one considers the structural constraints those incumbents face.

[Craig Calhoun @craigjcalhoun]

The reshuffling of academic leadership has become ever-more rapid and disruptive. Guskiewicz career exemplifies the sad trend - which is much wider and at odds not only with stability but with productive change.

[Samuel Cohn @Samuel__Cohn]

Regulations against fraud and against inaccurate weights and measures are not attractive targets for libertarians.

[Arin Dube @arindube]

PSA to libertarian-leaning friends: if you're trying to extol the virtues of the unregulated market, avoid talking about the healthcare sector.

It's not gonna work out well for your argument. It just won't.

[Samuel Cohn @Samuel__Cohn]

God help the poor woman who has to dust that.

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

There is a room in Málaga that was built to be the closest thing on earth to standing inside heaven.

It is called the camarín of the Virgin of Victory, and it is hidden at the top of a tower inside the Santuario de la Victoria. To reach it, you climb and the ascent is the entire point...

The building you are climbing through was completed in 1700, and it was designed as a single argument made in stone. At the bottom lies a crypt: a black chamber crowded with white plaster skeletons, a meditation on death and the brevity of life.

From there a staircase rises, and as you climb it the light grows stronger and the imagery changes from bones to saints. The architects of the time understood this ascent as the soul's own journey, the dark crypt as the stage of penitence, the staircase as the stage of spiritual progress, and the room at the very top as the final stage: the union of the soul with the divine.

That room at the top is the camarín, and its dome is one of the most extraordinary interiors in Spain...

Every surface is covered in white and gold plasterwork. There is no empty space anywhere. The Baroque called this horror vacui, the horror of the void: the conviction that a space meant to represent heaven should not contain a single bare patch of stone.

Out of that plasterwork emerge angels, flowers, birds, and mirrors. The mirrors are not decoration alone. They catch the light pouring in through the windows of the drum and throw it around the chamber, so that the gold seems to move and the whole room appears to shimmer and breathe.

This wonder was built by people who believed that if you wanted to show a human being what heaven might feel like, you did not describe it to them. You built a room, and you let them climb into it...

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[Samuel Cohn @Samuel__Cohn]

Except for those Marxists who do not argue that the rate of profit falls.

Not everyone is a Kautskyite.

[Chris Taylor @chrisjudetaylor]

Look, the only way to separate Marxist from non-Marxist profs is for everyone to submit a one-page position paper on the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Time to stop playing games here

[Samuel Cohn @Samuel__Cohn]

You need to reread Mao Tse Tung's brilliant discussion of the bourgeois class basis of AI.

I got this citation from AI.

[Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein]

@Samuel__Cohn Not if their brains, in childhood, have been systematically un-wired for creative thought.

You sound like a propagandist, maybe in Mao's Cultural Revolution.

https://t.co/r6Pwp35a1n