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This paper argues that there are no insuperable obstacles to making quantitative science-aided comparisons of the welfare effects of economic policies on different people. This contradicts the belief commonly held by economists that in principle meaningful interpersonal utility comparisons cannot be made.
The paper is intended as a contribution to the theory of governmental decision-making with respect to social redistribution problems. Examples of such problems include a) taxation and welfare transfers, i.e., who among the citizens should retain which portions of the national product; and b) population policy, i.e., how many people should be allowed to become claimants to the national wealth. The paper is not intended to cast any light whatsoever on positive consumer choice theory or the psychological study of decision-making. The approach described here is generally consistent with the recent discussion of 'social indicators'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years numerous discussion of urban communities have given great weight to themes of disorganization and disorder. This paper critically examines several important conceptual, procedural, and substantive issues inherent in most treatments of community disorganization. To illustrate such fundamental problems as ‘overgeneralization’ and dominant group bias five specific topics—migration, disasters, slums, ghettos, and collective violence—were selected for intensive analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents authors personal thoughts on the pursuit of sociological problems. The author intends to retrace his steps along one path of his intellectual career--the path that links two books, titled, "Social Change in the Industrial Revolution," and "Theory of Collective Behavior," and a number of recent articles and papers on sociological theory and psychological theory. The main emphasis in the article was on the need for a determinate synthesis of the several classes of variables that are essential for the explanation of collective behavior such as cultural, social, psychological, ecological and other variables. In attempting to sort out the major influences on his choice of sociological problems, he resorts to a device that he find congenial and helpful: to arrange these influences in a series extending from very general, predisposing influences which have steered his intellectual interests to the very specific, immediate influences that have determined a particular strategy of analysis in working on a sociological problem.

The concept of ‘generalized symbolic media of social interaction’ was introduced by Parsons five years ago in his two articles on the concepts of power and influence. I believe that it represents a theoretical development of the first importance, which has received much less attention—particularly in my own field of social anthropology—than it deserves. The purpose of the present paper is to review and criticize the concept itself and to point out its relevance to certain problems in social anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]