[Note: This mostly defunct blog is not, in any way, a baking or cooking blog. But I needed somewhere to host this recipe, so here it is!]

Pumpkin Breadsmith Challah

Adapted from Breadsmith Challah & Pan de Calabaza in “A Blessing of Bread” by Maggie Glezer.

Notes

This recipe aims for the bakery-style lightness of the Breadsmith Challah with the gorgeous orange tint and Fall flavors of the Pan de Calabaza. Ideal for a sandwich loaf with a similar texture to a traditional loaf of white sandwich bread, but delicious instead of boring. The recipe requires a lot of work – but thankfully, the hardworking stand mixer does most of that work for you. Yields 2 9×5 loaves.

Ingredients

3 Tbsp Vegetable Oil
570g (A bit more than 4 cups) bread flour
70g (1/3 c) white sugar
1 tsp instant yeast
2 large eggs (one for the dough, one for the glaze)
1 cup cold water (210 g)
½ tsp cardamom
½ tsp ginger
1.5 tsp table salt (8g) + a pinch
115g (1/2 cup) pumpkin puree

Directions

1. Mix together the vegetable oil and 70g of flour in a small bowl (this step makes it easier to incorporate the oil later).
2. Add the remaining flour (500g) and all of the white sugar (70g) and yeast (1 tsp) to a stand-mixer bowl. Mix together with the paddle attachment of the stand-mixer for a few seconds.
3. Add one egg to the flour-sugar-yeast mixture and beat with the paddle attachment until incorporated. Switch to the dough hook attachment.
4. Add the cup of water, and the ½ tsps cardamom and ginger to the above mixture and mix with the dough hook on low for about 5 minutes.
5. Add the 1.5 tsp salt and mix for another 30 seconds to combine.
6. Add the pumpkin puree and oil-flour mixture from step one to the mixer bowl. Mix with the dough hook on high (as high as it will reasonably go) for about 10 minutes. You might need to add a little more flour, if the mixture does not come together and start clearing the bowl. The dough will be sticky at the end, but hopefully not unworkably so.
7. Transfer to an oiled bowl or rising container and cover. Let ferment for 1.5-2 hours.
8. Lightly oil two 9×5 loaf pans.
9. Separate the dough into six equal pieces. Form into balls and let rest for a couple minutes.
10. Roll each ball out into a strand, ideally about 10″ long. You may need to use a fair bit of flour to roll out the dough.
11. Make the first loaf by braiding together three of the strands. Place inside the first 9×5 loaf pan. Repeat for the second loaf.
12. Cover the loaf pans lightly with plastic wrap and let the dough proof again for 1.5-2 hours. Turn the oven to 350 at some point in there.
13. Beat final egg in a small bowl with a pinch of salt. Brush loaves with egg wash. Bake at 350 for 25-35 minutes until outside is golden and inside registers 190 degrees.
14. Remove from loaf pans to cool on rack. Wait about an hour before cutting into them!

Human attributes, talents, and qualities are also scarce, but we must be careful not to regard them as wealth. The reason for the distinction is that the person who possesses the unusual gift or talent is first and last a human being, whose personality is to be respected and whose well-being is the goal of all economic activity. If we class the talents of the gifted as wealth, it is a short and easy step to regard the possessors of these gifts as existing mainly for the services which they render, and not as free and independent persons. Under slavery, the talents of the slave might have been regarded, properly enough as part of the wealth of the owner. It is inconsistent with the principles of human freedom, which we now hold sacred, to confuse man as a means for the production of wealth with man as the end of economic action. No person should be degraded to the position of a mere means to the enjoyment of others. We might be in danger of doing this if we regarded human qualities as wealth, scarce though they might be.

The first author, Lutz, was no crazy radical, but rather a respected tax economist who worked on various government committees and taught at Oberlin, Stanford, and Princeton. And yet it’s hard to imagine a more strident rejection of human capital as a metaphor than calling it “inconsistent with the principles of human freedom.” A different economics for a different time.

* If you’re into that sort of thing, at least.

TO: Grand Maester Pycelle

FROM: Cersei Lannister

SUBJECT: Issues w/Various Houses

We need more coercive diplomacy with respect to Greyjoy and Bolton. If they mess up the North, it will delay bringing our troops home.

We also need to solve the Tyrell problem.

And Dragonstone doesn’t seem to be going well.

Are you coming up with proposals for me to send around?

Thanks.

Needless to say, we are all very excited to see how none of this will get solved this season.

Here’s another slice at the topic. I used JStor’s Data for Research database (all articles in their collection) and restricted the sample to research articles published between 1980-2012.** Then I looked at the percentage of articles that mention inequality** that also mention: race, sex/gender, or both race and sex/gender.*** Here’s the resulting graph:

Percentage of research articles that mention social, economic, income, or wealth inequality in JStor that also mention race, sex or gender, or both.

Obviously, mentioning inequality, race, or gender anywhere in the text of an article is a much lower threshold than mentioning things in the title. So, this slice at the corpus of academic research is more like a lower bound on interest in intersectional inequalities, while Phil is looking at something like an upper bound (articles that go so far as to include those terms in their title). Also, here I am looking only at those articles that mention inequality of some sort to see which kinds of inequality are mentioned (“inequality articles” for short). Given that, we can see two clear trends: inequality articles are much more likely to mention both race and sex/gender in recent years (doubling from around 17% in 1980 to around 34% in 2012). In the meantime, discussion of race and gender in general have also increased significantly (from 33% of inequality articles mentioning sex or gender in 1980 to 59% in 2012; and 29% to 45% for race).

With this data, we can also compare the observed co-occurrence of race and sex/gender to the rate we’d expect if mentions were independent. That is, given that 33% of inequality articles mentioned race and 29% mentioned in sex/gender in 1980, we’d expect about 9% to mention both simply by chance. The actual rate is 17%. For 2012, the “expected” rate based on independence is about 27% compared to an observed rate of 34%. So, the overall increase in articles mentioning race and sex/gender is pretty consistent with the increase in mentions of the two terms separately.

What do you all think?

EDIT: Inspired by Philip’s comment, I made another simple chart looking at research articles in JStor. Here I look at the percentage of article that use both the terms “racial inequality” and “gender inequality” as a percentage of articles using either term. Here’s a plot of a 2-year moving average of those results.

JStor research articles mentioning “racial inequality” and “gender inequaliy” as a percentage of articles mentioning either, 1990-2012.

I restricted the time period here to 1990-2012 (1989-2012 considering the 2 year average) because of sharp uptick in gender as a term in the 1980s and the relatively small N of any mentions of gender inequality from the 1980s (i.e. just 2 articles in 1980). Mostly, not a lot of trend here. Are these the right terms though?

* JStor’s database excludes many publications for a couple years after publication, so the sample size drops considerably for the last two years.
** Specifically, any of the phrases “social inequality”, “economic inequality”, “wealth inequality”, or “income inequality.”
*** In the early part of the 1980s, “gender” was still much less commonly used than sex (cf. nGrams). I use “sex/gender” to refer to articles containing at least one of sex or gender.

Regulators, much like market actors, rely on categorical distinctions. Innovations that are ambiguous to regulatory categories but not to market actors present a problem for regulators and an opportunity for innovative firms. Using a wide range of primary and secondary, qualitative and quantitative sources, we trace the history of one class of innovative financial derivatives—interest rate and foreign exchange swaps—to show how these instruments undermined the separation of commercial and investment banking established by the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933 even as overt political action failed to do so. Swaps did not fit neatly into existing product categories—futures, securities, loans—and thus evaded regulatory scrutiny for many years. The market success of swaps put commercial and investment banks into direct competition and, in so doing, undermined Glass–Steagall. Drawing on this case, we theorize that ambiguous innovations may disrupt the regulatory status quo and shift the political burden onto parties that want to maintain existing regulations. Our findings also suggest that category-spanning innovations may be more valuable to market participants if regulators find them difficult to interpret.

Many readers of this blog gave us helpful advice over the past four years; thank you all very much! And let us know what you think of the paper.

And here’s Johnson:

I wonder what Steve Medema would say.

This phrase came to mind today as I was reading through a March, 1932 interview with Senator La Follette* about the need for better economic statistics to improve economic planning in the midst of the depression. The interview is chock full of great quotes that give you a flavor of what it was like to live in a time before the CPS, NIPA, and all the other routine, standardized, official data we take for granted. For example:

It is a sad commentary on our statistical information that in the third winter of the depression we have absolutely no authoritative official figures on unemployment. The only data we have are those collected by the census in 1930 for the country as a whole and for certain cities in January 1931.

The authoritative bit here was to be important, too, as FDR and Hoover fought in the 1932 campaign over whose (partial, non-standardized) unemployment figures were better.

The belief that gets me, though, and that seems to be widely shared across the political spectrum at this point, is that just having good data will fix all kinds of ideological disputes. It was this belief, in part, that motivated the founding of the NBER, and it was this belief that animated Hoover to work to produce all kinds of economic reports in the 1920s and early 1930s in concert with economists and businessmen (e.g. Recent Economic Trends, Recent Social Trends, etc.). La Follette was a Republican also, but later founded the Wisconsin Progressive Party, and clearly believed in less business-led solutions to economic problems than Hoover, but he had the same attitude of statistical optimism. A quote from the end of the interview about the potential for authoritative statistics to prevent future depressions struck me as especially relevant and, from a post-2008 perspective, ironic:

Suppose late in 1928 some authoritative body in Washington had publicly emphasized the fact that there was an excess of private houses on the market. Suppose it had pointed out that construction figures showed an appreciable falling off in the building of new houses. Surely in the light of such warnings people would not have continued investing their hard-earned savings in first and second mortgage real estate bonds thus increasing the supply of new capital for speculative building which continued into 1929.

If only it were so.

Though, I suppose, in fairness to La Follette, what he called for was not simply the creation of better data but also the creation of an institution – a national economic council, somewhat of a precursor to what ended up being the Council of Economic Advisers – that would have the authority to interpret data, not just collect it. Still, the optimism is palpable, and from our vantage point, tragic.

* La Follette is important in my work because he introduced a resolution in 1932 which called for the creation of the first** official US national income estimates.
** Well, he thought they were the first, and so do most people. The FTC actually produced an estimate in 1926, but almost no one knows about it, and no one did much with it then either.

The 2014 Junior Theorists Symposium is just three weeks away! Below, please find an updated schedule. JTS 2014 will be held at the University of California Berkeley in 60 Evans Hall. A complete list of paper abstracts is available here (pdf link). If you have any questions, please contact Jordanna Matlon and myself at juniortheorists@gmail.com.

Junior Theorists Symposium
University of California (Berkeley)
60 Evans Hall
August 15, 2014

8:30 – 9:00 | Coffee and Bagels

9:00 – 10:50 | Culture, Action, and Difference
* Michael Halpin (University of Wisconsin – Madison) – “Science and Sociodicy: Neuroscientific Explanations of Social Problems”
* Ellis Monk (University of Chicago) – “Bodily Capital: Capturing the Role of the Body in Social Inequality”
* Daniel Sherwood (The New School) – “Acting Through the Margin of Freedom: Bourdieu as a Social Movement Theorist”
Discussant: Omar Lizardo (University of Notre Dame)

10:50 – 11:00 | Coffee

11:00 – 12:50 | Measures of Worth
* Alison Gerber (Yale University) – “Tradition, Rationalization and Worth: A Theory of Decommensuration”
* Katherine Kenny (University of California – San Diego) – “The Biopolitics of Global Health: Life and Death and Neoliberal Time”
* Brandon Vaidyanathan (Rice University) – “A Cultural Theory of Differentiation”
Discussant: Marion Fourcade (University of California – Berkeley)

12:50 – 2:00 | Lunch

2:00 – 3:50 | Place and Perspective
* Hillary Angelo (New York University) – “From the City as a Lens to Urbanization as a Way of Seeing: Refocusing Social Categories for an Urban Planet”
* Jennifer Carlson (University of Toronto) – “Citizen-Protectors: Guns, Masculinity and Citizenship in an Age of Decline”
* Victoria Reyes (Princeton University) – “Global Borderlands: A Case Study of the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, Philippines”
Discussant: Saskia Sassen (Columbia University)

4:00 – 5:30 | After-panel: The Boundaries of Theory
* Stefan Bargheer (University of California – Los Angeles)
* Claudio Benzecry (University of Connecticut)
* Margaret Frye (Harvard University)
* Julian Go (Boston University)
* Rhacel Parreñas (University of Southern California)

5:30 – ? | Theory in the Wild: Beer, wine, and good conversation (off-site)

The Junior Theorists Symposium is an open event. In order to facilitate planning, please RSVP by sending an email to juniortheorists@gmail.com with the subject line “JTS RSVP.” We suggest an on-site donation of $20 per faculty member and $10 per graduate student to cover event costs.

First, a bit of housekeeping. I’ve been officially recruited onto the Scatterplot blogging team. So, for the time being, substantive posts about sociology and related topics will likely be posted over there (e.g. this piece on clarifying the debate over replication in the social sciences). I’ll save this blog for more personal updates and shameless self-promotion.

Speaking of which… I’m very excited for this year’s ASA in SF! If you want to hear what I’m up to or say hi, you can find me at two fantastic events. The first is the Junior Theorists Symposium, which I’m co-organizing with Jordanna Matlon. We’ll be posting the paper abstracts and further details next week, and I’ll make sure to link them here. Please RSVP if you’d like to attend! JTS will be held at the University of California, Berkeley on Friday, August 15 (the day before ASA proper begins in earnest). Old announcement with details here.

The second is a panel on “Credit and Inequality: Interdisciplinary Perspectives.” Greta Krippner and I will be presenting our first paper from a new collaboration on the politics of pricing in insurance and credit. This paper looks at the fascinating legal and legislative contention in the 1980s over the use of gender in risk-based pricing of life and auto insurance.* The panel is Sunday, 2:30-4:10pm.

Hope to see you all there!

* Ok, I admit, few people would normally use “fascinating” to describe any aspect of “insurance pricing.” But believe me, it’s a really rich space to see the workings out of various logics of fairness, discrimination, and the meaning of “individual treatment” in the context of statistical models of risk – questions that rate to be ever more relevant as more and more aspects of our lives are connected to predictive algorithms.