Dan Hirschman

About

Dan Hirschman is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Cornell University and a member of the graduate field in Science & Technology Studies. He contributes to the sociology group blog scatterplot and has previously maintained an individual blog. His current research focuses on "The Costs of Climate Change," investigating how much climate change will cost and how these costs can be understood. This project examines how experts, particularly economists and engineers, have constructed climate change as a social and economic problem, emphasizing how their valuation techniques have influenced public discourse and policy debates. Hirschman highlights a significant divergence between economic experts and climate scientists regarding the urgency of climate action, focusing on two main causes of this divergence: damage functions and mitigation cost estimates. He argues that high estimates of mitigation costs combined with low estimates of damages have led economic experts to advocate for slower climate action, thereby fueling "climate delay" discourse. The first working paper from this research project is available online.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Social Science
• Political Science
• Law
• Positive economics
• Economics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Epistemology
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• The person of the category: the pricing of risk and the politics of classification in insurance and credit

  Theory and Society · 2022 · 39 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• "Controlling for what?" Folk economics, legal consciousness and the gender wage gap in the United States

  2021-11-12 · 5 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Studies of the political power of economic knowledge have tended to foreground the role of causal claims in the form of grand theories or more narrow findings produced by experimental methods. In contrast, scholars have paid relatively little attention to the role of economic experts' descriptions. This article highlights one category of influential, quantitative descriptive claim: stylized facts. Stylized facts are simple empirical regularities in need of explanation. Focusing on the example of…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• We Fly Congress: Market Actions as Corporate Political Activity in the U.S. Airline Industry

  2020-03-30 · 3 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  The literature on corporate political activity (CPA) generally views nonmarket actions aimed at influencing political actors (e.g., lobbying or campaign contributions) as related but separate activities from market actions. This study demonstrates how firms’ core market actions (e.g., market entry or geographic expansion) can function as CPA. We theorize two mechanisms through which firms leverage market actions as CPA: “pork” (i.e., ones that primarily benefit a politician’s constituents) and “…

  PublisherDOI

• Controlling for What? Movements, Measures, and Meanings in the US Gender Wage Gap Debate

  History of Political Economy · 2022-08-03 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Studies of the political power of economic knowledge have tended to foreground the role of causal claims in the form of grand theories or more narrow findings produced by experimental methods. In contrast, scholars have paid relatively little attention to the role of economic experts' descriptions. This article highlights one category of influential, quantitative descriptive claim: stylized facts. Stylized facts are simple empirical regularities in need of explanation. Focusing on the e…

  PublisherDOI

• On the Authority of the Market

  2021-08-26 · 1 citations

  preprintSenior author

  This paper examines “the market” as a source of authority in valuation debates. We argue that the market offers two interrelated forms of authority: epistemic and coercive. Markets have epistemic authority insofar as prices are interpreted as unique measures of otherwise unobservable preferences. In turn, markets have coercive authority because making economic decisions according to market prices is understood to be obligatory. Invoking the authority of the market thus diffuses responsibility fr…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ellen Berrey

  University of Toronto

  14 shared

• Russell J. Funk

  University of Minnesota

  11 shared

• Elizabeth Popp Berman

  8 shared

• Laura Garbes

  University of Minnesota

  6 shared

• Isaac Ariail Reed

  6 shared

• Prabhdeep Singh Kehal

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  4 shared

• Min‐Seok Pang

  3 shared

• Emily Adlin Bosk

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  3 shared

Similar researchers at Cornell University

• Matt Hallh-80
• Barum Parkh-62
• Bryan L. Sykesh-59