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Vital City | How the Sausage Gets Made: A Primer

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In his 2011 book “Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer,” Duncan Watts notes that as a former physicist, he understood rocket science — that famously challenging discipline — to be relatively easy. Predicting where a rocket would go was a combination of physics and mathematics that was, for the most part, predictable. When he attempted his hand at social science, he realized that predicting human behavior was far more challenging. He had a point. Social science has three potential goals, which are related to one another: describing the way the world works, establishing cause and effect and predicting future behavior. Accurate description, tough in and of itself, is probably the easiest of these tasks; establishing cause and effect is more challenging; the hardest of them all is attempting to predict future behavior based on the first two. The methods available to social scientists to achieve these goals are very different than those available to rocket scientists. We don’t h

A social science research glossary for the uninitiated In his 2011 book "Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer," Duncan Watts notes that as a former physicist, he understood rocket science — that famously challenging discipline — to be relatively easy. Predicting where a rocket would go was a combination of physics and mathematics that was, for the most part, predictable. When he attempted his hand at social science, he realized that predicting human behavior was far more challenging. He had a point. Social science has three potential goals, which are related to one another: describ

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