The recent Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme debacle highlights that social networks can impose costs. In a series of articles, the New York Times has sketched how a group of insiders, mainly wealthy Jewish families from the New York region, sought to invest in Madoff’s investment fund. Trust in Madoff as a man may have reduced effort in conducting due diligence to investigate whether his returns were too good to be true.
Social networks also offer large benefits. Successful executives and academics network constantly. How much of the returns to attending an Ivy League university are due to access to valuable social networks rather than what one learns from leading professors? An Ivy League graduate named Caroline Kennedy may soon be named the U.S Senator from New York. Her family and social connections appear to distinguish her from other ambitious professional politicians seeking the same senate seat such as Carolyn Maloney.
The fundamental challenge for empirical social scientists who want to study the causes and consequences of social networks is to identify who is the same network and to collect data on important outcomes that could be plausibly affected by participating in a network. For the last seven years, we have focused on the causes and consequences of social networks in a distinctive setting: the U.S Civil War. 2009 is the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. What can we learn about social networks and social capital by studying the lives of enlisted men who fought for the Union Army?
In our new Princeton University Press book, Heroes and Cowards: The Social Face of War, we examine the war experience for Union Army soldiers. We weave a single narrative from the life histories of 41,000 Union Army soldiers, diaries and letters, and government documents. Our core questions are not those typically asked in a military history. When are men willing to sacrifice for the common good? What are the benefits to men of friendship? How do communities deal with betrayal? And what are the costs and benefits of being in a diverse community?
One summer we both read Robert Putnam's thought-provoking book Bowling Alone. We were fascinated by Putnam's account of the decline in American civic engagement over time. Putnam emphasized the growing popularity of television as a pivotal cause of the decline in social capital and community participation, but we wondered whether an unintended consequence of the rise of women working in the paid labor market was that PTAs and neighborhood associations lost their "volunteer army." We started to write a paper testing whether the rise in women's labor force participation explained the decline in residential community participation. To our surprise, we found little evidence supporting this claim. Instead, our analysis of long-run trends in volunteering, joining groups, and trust suggested that, all else equal, people who live in cities with more income inequality were less likely to be civically engaged. These results contributed to a growing literature in economics documenting the disturbing fact that people are less likely to be "good citizens" when they live in more diverse communities.
In the summer of 2001, we realized that the American Civil War provided the ideal "laboratory" for studying the costs and benefits of social networks. The setting was high stakes - roughly one out of every six Union Army soldiers died during the war. Unlike people in civilian life today, Union Army soldiers could not pick and choose their communities. For each of the 40,000 soldiers we observe key outcomes and choices. If a man deserts, if a man dies in a POW camp, if a man survives the war but chooses not to move back to his county of enlistment after the war, we observe each of these choices and outcomes. By studying how the probability of each of these outcomes varies as a function of individual solider attributes and the characteristics of the 100 men in his war community (his company), we quantify the role of social networks in a high stakes setting.
In our next post we will discuss our unique data set and why it is so difficult to create such a data set today.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Empirical Social Networks Research
- Social Networks and Their Impact after the U.S Civil War
- Social Networks during War Time:
- The Nobel Laureate Robert Fogel’s Union Army Sample
- An Overview of Heroes and Cowards: The Social Face of War
- Heroes and Cowards:
I am really excited to read your posts this week!
I'm skeptical of the notion that what does or does not occur in different societies is automatically transferable to our own. On the other hand, there is nothing wrong with a measured dose of skepticism.
I ordered the book last week and look forward to reading it.
I hope you will expand on what you mean here, since my reading tends to indicate otherwise. In Iowa at least, the volunteers enlisted in a particular company. When the volunteers enlisted, they joined a company from their own community, or a nearby community and were enlisted as a unit. Company G of the First Iowa were all members of the Turner society. When the Germans from (IIRC) Keokuk could not form a company on their own, they joined with the Germans from Burlington to form a Company rather than Join an all Keokuk company.
I have added your book to my "books to consider getting" list and am looking forward to your posts.
The second is studies of evolving complex networks. It examines how "nodes" with the most connections to other nodes tend to acquire still more connections, and thus the "rich get richer" in a way that challenges the operations of a market that might otherwise have a leveling effect.
The third are studies of the herd behavior of people in large organizations, where social connections become more of a basis for power than market transactions of the kind examined by monetary economic theory.
When organizations are too interconnected or play the same strategies, they begin to function like a single large monopoly. A market can operate among organizations but not within them. When organizations become too large, too well-connected, or too many adopt the same strategy, they overwhelm the corrective influence of the marketplace and we get crashes. But it all begins with refusing to communicate with others when one doesn't expect to persuade or be persuaded, and thus do the Cassandras get ignored until it is too late.
The problem is characteristic of any system whose principal operating components have a restricted information throughput. The bottlenecks of verbal and written communication and cognitive capacity among human beings limits the decision rates attainable by any system composed of them. Many of the critical systems in our lives are possible only because computers have enabled us to remove humans from impeding information and decision flows. Much fast breaking decisionmaking would be impossible for systems consisting only of humans, no matter how skilled they might be. The U.S. Congress today provides a case study of a system that is being tasked with having to process more information than it can, and that is a potentially catastrophic situation.
My grandfather is dead fewer than 10 years, and the man you refer to as your "unique data set" was his grandfather. And Mr. Cahoun's rat population study is applicable? Perhaps so, but I don't have to like it.
I do, however, appreciate your attention to this important subject and am withholding judgment until the facts are in. Let's just call the above comment a "first impression."
As the general said, regular Infantry was gone. Which is to say that almost all the Infantry in the Civil War was raised by the states, which frequently meant a particular regiment would be from a particular area within the state. The South had no regulars at all.
Nod to ChrisIowa and Richard Aubrey. That is my impression of Civil War enlistment though I'm willing to see if Costa and Kahn have some different data.
I'd like to bring up the flip side of their coin, though. How many residents of say, South Central LA, would choose to live there if they hit a big lotto prize? Certainly people with sufficent resources (or maybe no other choice) choose their communities but that statement seems to define being unable to relocate as making a 'choice' to live where you happen to be.
Much of the population in the northwest (the states of Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and the Kansas and Nebraska Territories) at that time would have recently (after say 1850) moved into the area mostly from Germany, Ireland, or New England and would have just made the choice to relocate.
In any event, I am looking forward to the upcoming posts.
And I ordered the book.
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