“Mario L. Small and Devah Pager’s article “Sociological Perspectives on Racial Discrimination”.For our three required reading responses this semester, I’ve selected articles in the Journal ofEconomic Perspectives by people who are, to some degree or another, not “economists”! Thegoal is to further our learning goal to critically analyze economic models rather than justaccepting them as they are: each reading response will hopefully let us engage in somecomparative study of the “economic approach” versus the approaches taken in other disciplinesto similar questions.In this case, Small and Pager are sociologists.
A companion article in the same issue of thejournal talked about the economic approach to studying racial discrimination, but this one iswritten to highlight the key ways in which the authors think that economics could benefit byincorporating ideas from sociology.
Please write 300-500 words on your reflections on the article (for comparison, this whole promptis 380ish words).
Please don’t just summarize the article—we’d like to get your reaction andwhat you took from it! You can write about whatever ideas or connections came to you onreading, but here are some suggestions for things you could consider, if you need some help toget started:
What surprised you, particularly interested you, or confused you about the reading? What doyou think it suggests about the ways that the economic approach might differ from otherdisciplines? How does that relate to what we’ve been studying in the first couple of topics in our course?
