 Hello, I'm Philip Cohen, here today with an introduction to the sociology of social problems. I'm going to introduce sociology and social problems, outline some common theories and theoretical perspectives used in this area, and then give a little bit of information about common research approaches to sociology in general and social problems in particular. What is sociology? Sociology is the study of society, the science of society, the study of individuals, groups of individuals, and social structures that emerge out of the interaction of individuals in their groups. We study the relationship between individuals and society, in other words, and the role of social structures that people create in creating problems and even solutions to problems. So that's the goal anyway, that's where we're going with this. What are social problems? Problem is a condition or pattern of behavior that has negative consequences. So it's something bad for individuals, for the social world, like families with the education system or the economy, or the physical world, like housing or the environment, and the way individuals interact with their social and physical worlds. So it's something bad in our social world. How do we know what they are? Well, you could ask people, here's what happened when the Gallup Organization asked people and the Americans in 2020, what do you think is the most important problem facing this country today? Well, August 2020 is not just any time. As you can see, by far the most common response was coronavirus, the pandemic. Next was the government, which is closely related, and then the economy in general, which is also closely related right now. All these other things that would normally have been much more important social problems in the point of view of the public fell in importance because of the overwhelming importance of the pandemic. So that's one way you could think about social problems. What do people think are social problems? But that gets at a tension in the definition or creation of social problems, which is the relationship between the objective reality of a problem and the subjective reality. Do people think it's a problem? So 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, and it's causing all kinds of problems. Okay, so that's objective reality, but do we think it's a problem? And how do we shape or define that problem in our minds, in our collective minds, in our social mind, if you will? So what do we think the problem is? 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? Or what? What is the problem? And of course, there are lots of these. This conversation goes on constantly, defining and identifying problems and how they work through the social imagination. So social constructionism is the view of social problems that they only become problems when they're perceived to be problems. That is, if a meteor hit us and we were all obliterated, that wouldn't really be a social problem. That would just be the end of all problems. So it's called constructionism because it's basically acknowledging that social reality just is the meaning we attach to it. There is a reality out there beyond our consciousness, but in terms of society, what matters is what society, whatever society means, how we construct that. What do we think is the problem? How do we define it? How do we define what aspects of it are a problem? And how do we think about what we're going to do about it, or whose fault it is? And all that. So we want to keep that process in mind, that process of going from an objective reality to a subjective reality. And that's back and forth. That's iterative. We're going to have problems that sometimes emerge rapidly out of nowhere like a pandemic, and sometimes problems that emerge over a long time and are with us for a really long time like racial inequality in the United States. And then the process of defining and identifying that as a problem and putting an attaching blame to it and defining solutions and fighting over those solutions, that's an ongoing process. So there's an objective and some objective duality there, and the process is always ongoing. OK, so we can think about this process in stages, how we get from an objective reality to a social conception, and back and forth and back and forth. These aren't really stages in a linear sense of one, two, three, four, but they're useful for categories for thinking. And you'll see that some problems don't go linearly one, two, three, four. OK, stage number one with that caveat, emergency claims making. Somebody has to come forward and say or demonstrate somehow that this is a problem and call their attention to it. In the case of a pandemic, that just might be it's in the news, the government takes action, everybody gets agitated about it, and everybody's talking about it. And there isn't really one social actor that's trying to define this as a problem. This is very obvious, but what about aspects of the problem? What about racial disparity and the consequences of the problem or so on? So someone is standing up and saying this is a problem and trying to call public attention to it. Stage two is giving some weight to that call and especially getting the government to define it as a problem also. In the case of the pandemic, we have government agencies and structures that are ready to accept this definition and take on that role of being involved in identifying a problem. So if we want something to be considered a social problem, we have to first get the public on board to some degree. And then we have to bring along some authorities, especially the government. As the government starts responding or other powerful actors start responding, there's a negotiation, a power struggle. Is this response adequate? Is it going in the right direction? Is it effective? And so the public or public actors and sofa groups and individuals are involved in this negotiation of, wait a second, that's not what we meant. Are you pushing into the wrong direction or this is great or et cetera. So that's an ongoing negotiation. That's a renewed process of identifying the problem and what needs to be done. Then you get to a point where not always, but you can get to a point where the groups involved that are heavily invested in the problem and dealing with the problem and the solutions believe that the government's not working. The established system is not producing the results that they want. And they either have to radically change the government or do work outside the government. Not every social problem gets to that stage, but that's a that's a particular point that you can get to when sort of society spills out over the boundaries of the government and says, we have to do something different. And this can be pushed by social actors, by activists and other groups to push the problem in that direction of we need to take this larger, so to speak. When we teach social problems, we often focus on protests. And that's partly because that's when people get together and literally express their desire to have something to find as a social problem and have the government usually take some action to address the problem. So it's very the most explicit version of this process happens when people literally protest about the problem. So this is a picture I took at the Women's March, which was the day after President Trump was inaugurated in 2017. And people bring their signs and they bring their friends and their relatives and they say, this is what we think is a problem. And this is what has to be done or some variety of that. So in this case, it was a lot of it was focused on Trump. By later in the year 2017, there was a lot of protests focused on racial justice, as there is again this year. I mean, you can see that the process is still going on. People come together. They're having a protest. Somebody organized the protest. Somebody announced the protest. People come to the protest or they're lending weight to that definition of the problem that the protest organizers defined. And then they also bring their signs to say what we think should be done. White privilege exists. Black lives matter. People in positions of power get to decide what is etc. So they're like making their claims literally in the form of a protest. In this process of making claims and having protest, 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. And that's sort of the formation of a social group comes out of that process of making this demand that something be considered a problem. This is a picture I took at the March for Life in Washington, D.C. where especially teenagers from religious schools came from all over the country to march on Washington and make demands that the government and the practice of abortion to stop stop women from having abortions. And 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 are really into it together. And it's it's building solidarity and identity. So the process of working around social problems is very important for the overall sort of construction of society and social identity. This identification of social problems turns out to be fundamental to the very concept of what sociology is. And for this, we draw on the American sociologist, C. Wright Mills, who wrote a book called The Sociological Imagination, in which he tried to lay out sort of a foundational intellectual perspective or orientation that would help us do sociology. And it's really built around social problems. Sociology, in his view, is all about understanding the link between personal experience and the social world. So you can't just understand individuals and you can't just understand the social world in some abstract larger sense. You have to look at how they're related. He described this as the intersection of biography and history. My personal story and the flow of history and how they interact. That's where sociology happens to do that. When we're interested in social problems, we have to draw the line between or make a distinction between things that are personal troubles and things that are 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. OK, but it's still one person 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 essentially. And these pictures show something about the scale of the food crisis that occurred during the pandemic. That's a picture of cars lined up to get free food in San Antonio, Texas. And the other one is a picture of the bags of free food being lined up for food drive in Des Moines, Iowa. So the point at which something becomes social becomes larger. It affects a lot of people. Then we can identify, OK, this starts to be fertile ground for the definition of a social problem. And that's really where sociology is at that intersection of its individual, its social, how they interact. That's sociology. OK, so let's define some theories, some. Ways of thinking about these subjects that will help us categorize and organize our thoughts to help understand this process and what we might do about these social problems. We're going to use the word theory here to mean a set of assumptions or propositions that we use to explain or predict or understand things. So we they're sort of an abstraction. It's a set of ideas, assumptions and propositions. And we're going to organize them and systematize them and state them explicitly and then using those ideas, we're going to be able to explain what's happening, maybe be able to predict what's going to happen next and understand what things mean. OK, so it's a process of taking in information and producing systematic ways of thinking. Facts, events happen, there are patterns of facts. The pattern of that could be a pandemic. Look, a lot of people are getting this disease. OK, we need a way to understand that. We can have if we if when an event like that happens, we already have theories for understanding. Oh, we know something about how public health works. We know something about how the biology of viruses work. We can put this event that we're observing into our already existing way of thinking in the process. We're going to learn new things. But right now we've got we've got some ideas. We've got new facts coming in and we use our ideas to process those facts. And we may even be able to make predictions. Oh, well, we've seen pandemics before. We understand that they're likely to take a certain course and are if we could already in January or February say some intelligent things about what was likely to happen is because we had experience and we already had theories about how pandemics work in sociology. We make a distinction between macro theories and micro theories. And if it's not so clearly one or the other, but there's a continuum between macro and micro macro theories are sort of why does why is this happening in society? Why is this happening in one society versus another? Or why is this happening now versus the olden days? So the social level, why is one society have more wealth than another society? Something like that. And then there's micro theories, which is why am I or why are individuals going to get in line at that food drive? And we're going to end up putting them together. But we have explanations for the behavior or the fact patterns that we see sort of at that micro level and that macro level. Oh, there's certain situations in which wars tend to occur between countries. I know there's certain situations in which individuals tend to go get in line at a food bank, right? So there's micro theories and macro theories. And we'll we'll make that distinction now and then as we go. So we're going to have a few main theory theories or theoretical perspectives and social problems, which are simplifications of the way sociologists do their work to sort of categorize the types of theories that we have that are useful really for students in understanding sociological thinking about social problems. Number one, functionalism, functionalism. We trace this back to Emile Durkheim, a French sociologist writing in the late 19th and early 20th century, who the way we understand his work now is using is that he was using the human body as a metaphor for society. In the human body, there are organs with specific functions and they work together to maintain the whole body in a certain kind of balance. Art, lungs, kidney livers, et cetera, skin, bones. And altogether, this creates a human body and they all sort of have to be working although they play different roles. OK, so in society, we have institutions in Durkheim's view like the family, the political sphere, religion, that which are also working together in some kind of harmony to harmony to meet social needs. Of course, it's not perfect. And that's why we have social problems in this view. One of the key problems from the functionalist perspective is change itself 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 in to the changing social order. This produces a state that Durkheim described as anomy or normlessness that is sort of being dislocated or disconnected from what's going on in society, which makes people prone to having social problems. For example, crime and violence or economic dislocation or the generally alienation from each other and from society. So when things are changing very rapidly, Durkheim observed, we can have this problem of anomy more than at other times. But a key feature of functionalism is that it's suspicious of social change. It doesn't love social change. It wants social change to be sort of packaged in an orderly way rather than sort of running wild and going rapidly. The functionalist theory tends to be macro. That is how society creates and maintains social order. So how, why is it that? How is it that people know what to do every day? How is it that we have a direction in society? Our economy is growing. We're developing new institutions and so on at sort of at the social level. Not so much individual behavior. Functionalists tend to ask questions like, OK, we have a social problem. Where did it come from? And is it serving some function? That is, is there a process going on that is the social body working out some problem that it has in the direction of a solution? Is there something about the problem that is serving the needs of society? When the human body gets an infection, it produces a fever. The fever is about defeating the infection. At least that's the idea. The tricky thing here is that sometimes problems are bad for some people and good for other people. The sociologist Robert Merton came up with this term dysfunctionalism, which is that some things that seem to be problems actually have positive consequences or positive functions at the social level. So a common example here is crime. Well, crime seems to be bad who wants crime and violence. On the other hand, maybe crime is doing something positive in society like helping us understand the difference between good and bad behavior, helping us identify and punish people who are bad in our view so that other people will know how to behave better. You can say the same thing about poverty. Well, maybe poverty serves this function of motivating people to get their act together so they don't starve and die. Okay, well, it's kind of cold-hearted, but there's a logic to it, which is if you're seeing something big happening in society, let's look for the reasons that it is. There's a potentially faulty logic to this, which is if you see something happen in society, you sort of assume there must be a good reason for it. Well, okay, 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. Because 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, try to explain why they're good, working from the assumption that they are good. So this tends to be politically a conservative theory because it tends to be describing this status quo as somehow good and it's suspicious of rapid change. Rapid change is problematic. In contrast to functionalist theory is conflict theory, sort of its opposite. And when we teach sociology, we build up this opposition to make opposites because it's easier to learn that way. Rather than defining society by order, which the functionalists tend to do, how is this working in a positive way? How is society holding together like the human body? Conflict theorists tend to see the opposite, which is what makes society what it is, is not that it's stable and position a status of order, but it's conflict. It is held together not by cooperation and agreement between people and groups in society, but through power and coercion. And in fact, the social problems that we see are often emerging out of the conflict between those groups, between the powerful and the less powerful or between two powerful sets of actors. So how you identify with or define a society at a given point in time is by seeing the groups that are in conflict and seeing how the conflict between them defines the society. Sort of an opposite world from the functionalist view. When we talk about social problems, in fact, we often see that they are the result of inequality created by conflict or conflict created by inequality. So we have racial conflict, conflict between marginalized minority groups and the dominant group and that conflict, that inequality and the conflict that it produces is a defining element of our society. Certainly that's easy to see today. On the other hand, rather than being afraid of or having negative feelings about social change, conflict theorists tend to be pretty positive about social change, especially if they can see a way to harness the tension of a conflict and turn it into positive change or even radical change. So we've got this inequality between capitalists and workers, between factory owners and the people who work in factories and between farm owners and farm workers and they've had this conflict between them and fighting that out, especially if the less powerful people win in the point of view of conflict theorists is how we get positive change, okay? To understand this and where this came from, we have to go back to Karl Marx. Karl Marx was not an academic, not an academic sociologist. He was a writer and philosopher and really a political activist in the 19th century. He wanted to change society in what he saw as a progressive direction. But his framing and the way he identified the way society works is really the basis for what we're now sort of simplifying into conflict theory today. He saw the economics director of capitalism, our economic system as generating an inherent conflict between workers, people who own nothing but their bodies and their ability to work and owners, people who own, in his day, machinery and factories and so on and needed workers to operate them. They were called the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in the writing of his time, workers and owners. Workers own nothing but their labor, owners own capital and don't really do any labor. That's Marx's view. So they have to get together in order to produce stuff and have society work but the way they get together is not consensual. It's not voluntary and it's not equal. The bourgeoisie has all the power, brings the workers in to work for them and creates this conflict. That conflict in Marx's view is also the possibility, creates the possibility for progressive change. In that relationship between capital and labor, there is a process of alienation or a status of alienation, a condition of alienation. And this is actually somewhat parallel to Durkheim's view of anomie or normlessness but Marx sees it as coming from a very different social process. In the process of work, when capitalists own the capital, all the factories and the machinery and all that and workers own nothing, the work process is alienating. That is the workers don't control the process because the capitalist makes all the rules and they don't own the product of their work because they don't have enough money. So they're producing stuff essentially for other people. Okay, this is simplified of course, workers also do buy stuff and so on but you can think of the most extreme version of this as iPhone factory workers in China where they can't afford iPhones and they definitely don't define the process and say how the factory should be run. In fact, they're producing iPhones for other societies or people in other societies. So they're alienated from both the process and the product of their work. There's an inherent tension there and it produces something similar to what Durkheim would call enemy which is a state of disconnection from the social order. If you will, they're not invested in the social order because they have no control over it and they don't get to control the product of it. So they are in Marx's view and in the view of a lot of political activists, these are the people who are ready to make change. So when people identify that their role in the case of Marx, it's workers and owners but you can think of this as happening in any unequal relationship that creates conflict in society, that creates a consciousness of that problem, of that status especially for the subordinate group, the weaker group. When they get 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 in the conflict here. Now, Marx was writing a long time ago. He was very concerned about the new industrial capitalism of the 19th century, workers and owners and so on. We can apply his kind of thinking to other sorts of conflicts. Here I'll talk about feminist perspectives which are not all focused on conflict but do identify inequality as a core central issue for their way of thinking. Any feminist perspective is gonna define gender as a source of social inequality, a source of group conflict and the engine of some social problems. Again, here's the women's march again from 2017. Feminists are not inherently tied to conflict or functionalist or as we'll see interactionist perspectives. They tend to lean toward the conflict because they're interested in this inequality intention between the genders, but not necessarily 100%. They're focused on the problem of inequality between women and men. In more recent times, naturally, everything is not binary between women and men, but the feminist framework is still giving us that issue of inequality between genders, let's say. I'm gonna key concept from the feminist perspective is patriarchy. It's a social system, you could say a whole society that's male dominated or any subsystem like a family or a workplace or a school which is based on male domination. Historically, patriarchy comes from the family, the idea of the patriarch or the man of the family run and being in charge of the family. Feminists have extended this concept to describe whole societies as patriarchal. Okay, so the feminist perspective, from our point of view sort of overlaps a lot with the conflict perspective but it doesn't have to 100%. Now, in contemporary times, feminism has developed. It has interacted with politics and a set of feminists have identified the problem that thinking about genders specifically, women specifically doesn't really adequately address or help us understand the politics of different forms of inequality. The way different forms of inequality interact in people's lives, especially women's lives. So the focus originally of intersectionality or intersectional feminism was race and gender, especially the position of the black woman or black women that they were writing about and has expanded to include the intersection of different kinds of types of identity and inequality, especially class and sexuality. I'm not gonna talk about this that much. I'll give you some names of people you can go look up and read their stuff and we'll return to talk more about this later. One is Patricia Hill Collins, an academic sociologist, actually retired from working in my very own department, who generated the idea of, or synthesized the idea of black feminist thought where race and gender were combining to produce a new feminism. Angela Davis, who was initially a political activist coming out of the 1960s and moved into academia and wrote many books about intersectional feminism and other ideas related to race, class, and gender. Audre Lorde, a writer and activist and poet who has put into words for a lot of us some of the key concepts of intersectional feminism. This is just to give you sort of a little bit of the range of people behind intersectional feminist with an emphasis on black women, which is really, who were really the driving force behind the development of this kind of intersectional thinking, although it now is expanded to all kinds of ideas and identities and types of people and so on. And one of the interesting things about this is for something that kind of came from academia, intersectionality or 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. Okay, after functionalism and conflict theory with a tangent into feminist theory, which is usually a kind of conflict theory, we have the third of the big three social problems theories, which is interactionist theory. Interactionist theory is mostly a micro level theory about individuals and their interactions, and it focuses on how we create and maintain social reality through language words and symbols. So this is how society emerges from really individual interaction and the mechanics of interaction are the language that we use, which are words and words are symbols and other symbols, not all symbols are words, but words are symbols and a lot of symbols are words. So it's the micro level building blocks of society that are not just don't occur in isolation, it's not a person doing something alone, it's the interaction between people that creates society. This emerges from the work of George Herbert Mead an early 20th century social scientist who brought us the concept of society as the organized and pattern interaction among individuals. So there is such a thing as society, which is a macro level thing, but it's built by the interaction between individuals and those are not random interactions, but they're patterned. So we have symbols, we attach meaning to those symbols and those help us decide how to act, how to interpret situations and to behave in ways that can systematically be understood as society. A key concept in this kind of work and the reason why we think of this work in the air as being related to social psychology is the self. The self is both a mental and a social process. That is, it's something that happens internal to your brain, but it is shaped by and reflects the social interactions that people have. So you can't have a self if you never interact with anybody else, essentially, at least not from the point of view of social science. Our ability to see others in relation to ourselves is reflective. That is, once we have social interactions and they shape our identity and our personality, we know when we act a certain way, when we say something 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 in the view of this theory. So it's the intersection between mental and social processes and it's based on the human's ability because of our awesome intelligence to project onto other people how they see us. The emergence of the mind and the self comes out of the use of symbols. I'm not gonna get too much into that, but part of this is language itself and what things mean, but part of it is, but we sort of extend that to other kinds of symbols that may be behavioral, like you act a certain way or dress a certain way, or sort of structural like the design of our physical environment or whatever. Okay, so self and society through the processing of the individual mind is where we get interactionist theory. Okay, to summarize our sociological perspectives, we had functionalist, we have conflict slash feminist and we have interactionist, the functionalist being more macro and the conflict slash feminist theory is also tending to be macro, the interactionist more micro. The functionalists focus on order as their key concept, how do we get order? What determines order? What is the threat to order? The conflict and feminist theories are interested in conflict. How do we define the society? What are the big conflicts in the society? What are the engines of social change and how are those related to the conflicts in society? The interactionists, interaction. How are people interacting with each other? How are they defining each other? How are they anticipating each other's behavior? How are they creating, how are they using those expectations to shape their own ideas about themselves and their own future behavior? The functionalists tend to see society held together by institutions. The conflict theorists tend to see society held together by tension and coercion and very prone to change, often in a positive way if we can harness that energy. And they're gonna ask, these perspectives will tend to ask different questions. Key thing is most people are not one or another of these theories, but we use different kinds of ways of thinking to ask different kinds of questions. When we're thinking like a functionalist, we'll ask questions like, how does this problem come out of social structure? How does this problem reflect changes in the social institutions around us? And how might the functions and dysfunctions of this problem show us sort of where it comes from and who might be benefiting from this problem? Remember the examples of crime and poverty. The conflict theorists tend to ask questions like, okay, we see a problem. Let's get at what are the competitions, intentions and inequalities that are producing this problem? Who are the groups that are in competition and how can we identify the possible positive changes that will come from this conflict? The interactionists will ask, how is the problem defined? How is it constructed as a problem in our minds? You go back to that social constructionist view I mentioned at the beginning. How do we learn this behavior that is producing this problem? How does that come out of the interactions between people? And how are we labeling and defining that problem? And how is it relating to our sort of sense of self and sense of identity? Finally, a little bit about how social scientists and sociologists do research. Not just on social problems, but if we're thinking about social problems, we can think of some examples that are related to social problems. The most common kind of sociology research probably is survey research. Basically, you ask a lot of people the same questions and analyze their responses. The advantage is you can ask a lot of people very efficiently and get big answers like, do old people support Trump more than young people? You got to ask a lot of people to answer that question. It's not a very rich question. It doesn't tell you all about their hopes and dreams and what they're thinking and their life experience and so on, but it can answer some questions. And we can ask other questions too. We can also ask, what are your hopes and dreams? Okay, now the survey's taken a little bit longer to ask. Most sociologists are not actually doing those surveys, but we're using the surveys that other people have done. That's what we call existing data analysis or secondary data analysis. So if someone has done the survey, we'll pull all of our resources like through the government and say, let's do a big survey. And then we'll all analyze it. So I do a lot of research using surveys. I don't conduct a lot of surveys, I conduct a Q, but mostly I'm getting the data that someone else has collected and analyzing it. In a very different vein is experimental research. This is less common in sociology because we're dealing with humans, that there are ethical issues, it's difficult to construct experiments. Experiments are not necessarily reflective of the whole world around us, but very useful and very interesting for some kinds of work. You assign individuals to different conditions. Some people sit in a blue room, some people sit in a red room, some people are exposed to antagonism and some people are exposed to love. And then you test for the effect of what happens. Those are kind of ridiculous examples, but the idea is experimental condition, like you've heard about it in science in general, applied to humans that can test sort of very specific questions. How do people respond to interacting with somebody when they have different amounts of resources? How do people learn under conditions of more supportive versus less supportive environments? Things like that. A lot of sociologists will do qualitative research as opposed to quantitative, like the survey research we're using numbers. In qualitative research, you're doing something more like in-depth interviews, interviewing people at more length rather than just asking fixed questions like in a survey. Maybe it's observational, you're going out somewhere into the social world and seeing what happens with your own eyes. Maybe it's even participatory, you're participating in that world to experience the interactions and see how the roles and behaviors that people adapt are creating the outcomes that you're interested in. Qualitative research, it's much more time intensive in the sense of you're spending a lot of time on studying a relatively small number of people and there's a lot of interpretation that has to go into making these results meaningful. A final kind of method is the historical and comparative methods. And this is really just to say sociologists can be historical. We can compare very large things like two different countries or one country at two different points of time. So it's sort of a sociological approach to something more like what you think of as history. Why did some societies become rich and some poor? What causes civil wars? Let's look at a hundred different civil wars and see if we can figure out the causes of that. Why did, what happens when society gets electricity or clean water? What happens when democracy breaks down? These are sort of big social level questions that we answer using historical or comparative methods.