The Weberian Strategy for Studying Experts

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In the late 60s, a graduate student in Southern California decided he wanted to study the police. John Van Mannen went around on patrol armed with other police. He used a fake name and told everyone that he encountered who he was and why he was there. The Watts Rides became a touchstone for civil unrest based on racism and police brutality. "If you want to look at wealth inequality, which is what interested me, don't look at the people who just benefit from it"

The modern world is large and interconnected, and there are a lot of systems that might be important to how it functions but about which most people are barely aware. One of these is the offshore wealth management network, which wealthy individuals can use both legitimately (to invest and plan their money) and less legitimately (to avoid taxation or hide questionable practices generally). Brooke Harrington is a sociologist who has studied offshore wealth management, including by training to be one. In a recent paper, she and colleagues analyze networks of offshore wealth managers as a complex system, uncovering power-law behavior and interesting nation-dependent network structures.

Web site with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/05/22/237-brooke-harrington-on-offshore-wealth-as-a-complex-system/

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Brooke Harrington received her Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University. She is currently a professor of sociology at Dartmouth College. Among her awards are the IPM Outstanding Book Award from the American Sociological Association. She is the author of Capital Without Borders: Wealth Management and the One Percent.

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