The Problem of Reference Groups

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

No group of people competes with the entire universe of other people for status and sociology we call this the problem of reference groups. We choose or are given in in life certain reference groups against which we compare ourselves family neighborhood school friends and now because of social media we have lots of other groups we can choose as our reference groups like fans of Kim Kardashian so those are the yardsticks we use to measure our status. So while we may be I don't know compared to the universe of people of the world well paid well off we're not going to feel well paid well-off or high status unless we're doing well compared to our reference group.

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/

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

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.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.