[iroh2727]

This kind of purely statistical investigation (quite prevalent in modern academia) is just so bad at investigating holistic causal forces.

E.g. in the intro it mentioned “malicious envy” as a motive accounting for 50% of people’s desires to redistribute wealth. But could not “malicious envy” be caused/increased by outside forces? Is that stable over time and across countries, for example? (I doubt it is.)

These are precisely the kinds of fallacies or at best partial explanations that founders of sociology like Durkheim so clearly cut through. And yet here we are > 100 years later.

I mean, I’d rather have science that sacrificed its significant p-value for a little perspective and philosophy. What good is a correlation with no idea of the causation or overall perspective? For us humans this kind of result is at best a conversation starter (doesn’t really show us anything).