Social Studies skills

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Social Studies Skills

See also:

• Geography vocabulary
• Geography Fun Facts & Oddities
• Geography Bee study guide

Article Objective

• conceptual tools for the Social Studies
• tools for development higher-level thought
• tools for student appreciation and engagement of Social Sciences

These tools provide the conceptual framework for understanding the Social Studies

• students may apply these tools towards any subject in the Social Studies
• >>asdf

Distinctions

• "in distinction is learning"
• a primary tool for understanding the Social Studies content is the ability to distinguish
  • moving students from generalization to distinction is core goal for thoughtful approach
  • student logic and writing is frequently marred by the absence of effective distinction
  • examples
    • "Egypt was unified because of the Nile"
      • this statement makes no distinction between the Nile and other rivers, thereby it assumes that all civilizations along rivers will be unified
    • >> to do>> more examples at higher levels

Geography

Note: change to separate category and entry for Geography or leave here as a skill and add new entry /category for Human Geography

Isolation

• details

Movement

• geographic barriers to movement =
  • inhibitors / barriers to movement
• geographic catalysts for movement =
  • facilitators of movement
• examples:
  • barriers: mountains, deserts, crossing rivers, jungles, deserts, canyons, waterfalls (cataracts), extreme climates
  • distance = barrier to movement and cultural diffusion
  • different climates = barrier to movement and cultural diffusion
• facilitators / aids to movement
  • examples: valleys, going along rivers, flat lands, mild climates
  • similar climate = aid to movement
  • both:
    • a river as "both a highway and a moat"
    • a coastline as both inhibitor and facilitator of movement
    • woods, lakes, and rivers as
      • barriers during warm weather
      • and facilitators in cold weather (ice, lack of underbrush during winter, etc.)
• examples
  • Wallace line see Wallacea

Regions

• definition = areas of something in common,
  • defined by:
  • geography/ movement, which defines:
    • language, religion, culture, etc.
    • political control
  • regions contain sub-regions and sub-regions to that:
    • USA = East coast, Midwest, West Coast, South, New England, etc.

Natural Resources

• details

Climate

• details

Causality

Necessary v. Sufficient Causes

to do:

• short term cause
• long term cause
• mono-causality/ multi-causality

Contingency

• = conditions and choices
• = the idea that things didn't have to happen the way they did

"Packages"

• the conditions necessary for certain outcomes, such as
  • Agricultural Package
  • Civilization Package
  • Industrial Package
• "packages" are useful for students to understand distinctions in historical places, eras, and outcomes
  • ex., the industrialization "package" of the 1870's United States included the Civil War, immigration, laissez-faire governance, plentiful resources, etc.,
    • whereas the industrialization "package" of 1870s India included plentiful resources, high population, British governance and colonial resource manipulation,
    • thereby India did not industrialize in the 1870s the same way as did the U.S.

Grandfather paradox

• the idea that time travelers who changes the past may erase their own future lives, thus themselves
• was expressed in 1931 in a reader letter to a science fiction magazine that discussed:

"the age-old argument of preventing your birth by killing your grandparents"

Cultural Diffusion

Definition

• spread and mixing (diffusion) of people
  • cultures, technologies, disease, religions, identities,
• through Trade, Migration & Warfare
• See also: Movement

Geography & Cultural Diffusion

• isolation
• crossroads
• rivers as both "a highway and a moat"
• see geographic barriers: inhibitors to movement
• see geographic catalysts: facilitators to movement
  • spreads more readily across similar climates and latitudes (east - west)
    • rather than across different climates (north - south)

Technology & Cultural Diffusion

• boats
• bridges
• horses
• roads
• rails (pre-steam)
• mechanized transit, including
  • railroads
  • steamboats
  • automobiles
  • telegraph / telephone
  • radio / TV
• See also
  • Human Geography
  • Movement

Cultural Diffusion as Historical Agent

• mixing of cultures, technologies, language, relgion, etc.
• Do the conquerors conquer the conquered or do the conquered conquer the conquerors?, examples:
  • Mongol conquerors of China became Chinese (Yuan Empire)
  • Turk invaders of Anatolia became Muslim
  • Norman invaders of England became English
  • Ptolemaic (Greek) rulers of Egypt

Distribution of Power

Social organization

>> todo: see J Diamond social organization chart

• Dunbar's number:

"Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person"
from [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number Dunbar's Number (wiki)]]

Revolution paradox

• Tocqueville observed "that the most dangerous time for a bad government is usually when it begins to reform."
  • from "The Old Regime and the Revolution" (1856)

Tocqueville effect

• or "Tocqueveill paradox"
• Alexis de Tocqueville noted that

"The hatred that men bear to privilege increases in proportion as privileges become fewer and less considerable, so that democratic passions would seem to burn most fiercely just when they have least fuel. I have already given the reason for this phenomenon. When all conditions are unequal, no inequality is so great as to offend the eye, whereas the slightest dissimilarity is odious in the midst of general uniformity; the more complete this uniformity is, the more insupportable the sight of such a difference becomes. Hence it is natural that the love of equality should constantly increase together with equality itself, and that it should grow by what it feeds on."
- Tocqueville, Alexis de (1840). "Chapter III: That the sentiments of democratic nations accord with their opinions in leading them to concentrate political power". Democracy in America

>> todo: bring in Mancur Olson and Theory of Groups >> see wiki entry Mancur Olson about how interests tend to coalesce over time and focus on protection of gains, stifling innovation... organizations become "congealed" (from("How Phil Falcone Was LightSnared" WSJ, Homlan W. Jenkins, Jr. 2/18/2012") and resist competition and protect the status quo

Order & Chaos

• see below for certainty v uncertainty
  • order = certainty
  • chaos = uncertainty

Order

• social structures are primarily designed to bring stability to human interactions
• order advantages
  • stability
  • predictability
    • especially for commerce, food supply, peaceful existence
• order disadvantages:
  • inequities inherent in any large social structure
  • inability to self-correct
• consequences of too much order:
  • lack of feedback and information
  • dissolution and atrophy
  • systems decline, can't adjust to change
  • may lead to unintended negative consequences

Chaos

• chaos is either cause or effect of change
• chaos as "change agent"
• benefits of chaos:
  • correction
  • challenging inequities or inefficiencies in an overly-structured system

ideal balance of order & chaos

• healthy systems combine elements of both
  • creating predictability and stability
    • while mitigating harms of overly structured system
• feedback and self-adjustment without a need for drastic change

Certainty v. Uncertainty

Ritual

• to bring certainty to uncertain events
• rituals can
  • appeal to god(s) for desired outcome
  • predetermine events by acting them out "ritualistically" (such as a hunt)

Divine Intervention & Explanations for Events

• The Winter Solstice marks the sun's lowest trajectory
  • why is this important?
    • that the sun has descended and that it will commence its rise again to higher points in the sky
    • = rebirth, a new start = celebration and deep life-cycle significance
• At the Battle of Marathon (Greeks v. Persians), the Athenian commander (War Archon) Callimachus promised to sacrifice a kid (baby goat) to the goddess of the hunt, Artemis. Having killed 6,400 Persians, the Athenians had to kill 500 goats a year in her honor for more than a decade. (source: "The Greco-Persian Wars" by Peter Green; p. 32)
  • after losing ships to a storm prior to the battle of Thermopylae, Persian king Xerxes ordered his Magi to placate the weather with offerings and spells; the storm subsided
  • Herodotus, the first Greek historian, noted, "or, of course, it may just be that the wind dropped naturally" ("The Greco-Persian Wars" by Peter Green; p. 124)
• Babylonian king Hammurabi wrote on Hammurabi's Code that the laws were given to him by his gods in order to protect the people he ruled (divine justification)
• in ancient world outcomes were explained by divine intervention
• victors in war or power struggles were thought to have been selected by gods (divine choice)

Legitimacy

• favorable outcomes = divinely determened = therefore divinely chosen = legitimacy of outcomes
• unfavorable outcomes = loss of legitimacy
• examples
  • break-down of Old Kingdom pharonic rule in Egypt following reduced flooding of the Nile
    • pharoahs lost legitimacy and social, political, and religious rules were freely broken as result of widespread famine and social collapse
  • Xerxes punishes the Hellesepont for disobeying him
    • after a storm wrecked his boat-bridge across the Hellesponte, Xerxes ordered soldiers to whip its surface in punishment for insubordination

risk v. reward

• social choices
  • social organization
• unintended consequences
• opportunity costs
• comparative advantage
  • examples:
    • farming v. hunting gathering
    • war: Pyrrus v. the Romans
• conditions v. choice

Food <<>> Population Cycle

• in agrarian societies, the relationship between food production and population
• in industrial societies, the relationshiop between labor and economic output
• in post-industrial societies, the demographic strain of aging, population static societies

Scarcity & Surplus

• scarcity = state of not having enough
  • generally regards food supply
  • condition of scarcity
  • impact of scarcity
    • competition over resources / food supplies
    • population growth limited to available food supply
• surplus = state of having more then enough
  • generally regards food supply
  • condition of scarcity
  • impact of surplus
    • population growth
    • trade
    • social stratification
• balanced food supply
  • self-sufficiency = state of having just enough food / resources
  • stable food supply
  • hunter-gatherers can be seen to maintain a balanced food supply
    • nomadic lifestyle = to maintain food supply by following/ finding food sources
      • in ideal state maintain balanced food supply for stable population
• sources:

Identity

• details
• sources:

Literature & Arts

• links

Social, Political and Economic Structures

Social Structures

• social classes
• identity
• religion
• family
• gender
• citizenship v. subject
• sources:

Political Efficacy

• concept
• definitions
  • internal
  • external
• utility
• Machiavelli on the political efficacy from "Discourses on Livy":
  • NOTE: Machiavelli did not use this term

•  "Whoever undertakes to govern a people under the form of either republic or monarchy, without making sure of those who are opposed to this new order of things, establishes a government of very brief duration. It is true that I regard as unfortunate those princes who, to assure their government to which the mass of the people is hostile, are obliged to resort to extraordinary measures; for he who has but a few enemies can easily make sure of them without great scandal, but he who has the masses hostile to him can never make sure of them, and the more cruelty he employs the feebler will his authority become; so that his best remedy is to try and secure the good will of the people."

  • Source: Machiavelli, Niccolo; Burnham, James; Detmold, Christian E. (2010-11-25). Discourses on Livy (with a study by James Burnham) by Niccolo Machiavelli, Christian E. Detmold, James Burnham.

From Discourses on Livy, CHAPTER XVI

• select expand to see quotation

Economics

Comparative Advantage

• Definition: A particular economic advantage, resource or ability a country possesses over either its own other economic situations or those of another country.
• the term "comparative advantage" was
• origin of the idea:
  • late 1700s Scottish philosopher Adam Smith (1723-1790)

click EXPAND for Adam Smith quotation on "absolute advantage":

''If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it off them with some part of the produce of our own industry employed in a way in which we have some advantage. The general industry of the country, being always in proportion to the capital which employs it, will not thereby be diminished ... but only left to find out the way in which it can be employed with the greatest advantage.'' (Book IV, Section ii, 12)

• • Comparative advantage means concentrating on what your country is good at making/doing in order to get what other countries are better at making/doing."
  • early 19th century British economist David Ricardo (1772-1823):
    • argued for specialization as basis for national wealth and increased trade
    • = laissez-faire, free-trade
    • related comparative advantage to the concept of "opportunity cost"
      • i.e. what is lost by not engaging in an activity
      • Ricardo argued that it would be more costly to for country A to attempt to produce something that country B can more efficiently create than to focus on what that country A itself does better (its comparative advantage) and simply purchase the other goods from country B
      • and by doing so, both country A and B will benefit from the trade

click EXPAND for David Ricardo's quotation on comparative advantage:

it would undoubtedly be advantageous to the capitalists [and consumers] of England… [that] the wine and cloth should both be made in Portugal [and that] the capital and labour of England employed in making cloth should be removed to Portugal for that purpose.

• • British colonizer of Australia and economist Robert Torrens independently developed the idea of comparative advantage

click EXPAND for Robert Torrens' quotation on comparative advantage from 1808:

''if I wish to know the extent of the advantage, which arises to England, from her giving France a hundred pounds of broadcloth, in exchange for a hundred pounds of lace, I take the quantity of lace which she has acquired by this transaction, and compare it with the quantity which she might, at the same expense of labour and capital, have acquired by manufacturing it at home. The lace that remains, beyond what the labour and capital employed on the cloth, might have fabricated at home, is the amount of the advantage which England derives from the exchange.''

• Examples:
  • • Is it advantageous for the U.S. to import oil from Saudi Arabia or to rely only on its own oil production?
• see also
  • The discovery of the comparative advantage theory (on James Mill, 1821)

Opportunity Cost

• Definition: The value of the next best choice one had when making a decision.
  • i.e., the trade-off of a decision.
  • Opportunity cost is a way of measuring your decisions: if I do this, would having done something else been more or less expensive? What did I give up in my decision?
  • Examples:
    • If you own land on an urban road, and you decide to build condos on it, what else might you have done, and what would that have cost -- or earned -- for you?
  • Questions:
    • If the U.S. imports oil from Saudi Arabia, is the U.S. giving up the potential of its own oil industry?
    • If Saudi Arabia relies on oil, what is the cost of that reliance?

Herbert Stein's Law

• "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop"
• in economics and history, this concept is important for students to appreciate
  • cycles
  • non-linear paths of events
  • change
• Herbert Stein's Law may serve as a good discussion point for evaluating choices in history
  • example: why did such-and-such policy fail over time?
  • source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Stein

Jevons Paradox

• also called "Jevon's effect"
• law that states that increases in efficiencies lead to more and not less use of a resource
  • also: greater efficiencies lowers cost, which increases demand
• from William Stanley Jevons who in 1865 noticed that more efficiencies in coal-power generation led to more use of coal
  • see Jevons paradox
• interesting historical tool
  • controversial in the 2000s regarding energy use
    • see New Yorker article on subject Dec/ 2010 >> to confirm

Other useful Economics and "Political Economy/-ics" terms and concepts

• top-down v. bottom-up
• Emergent order
• Public goods
• Rent-seeking
• Client politics
• Regulatory capture
• Externalities
• Scarcity v. Surplus
• Tragedy of the Commons
• Regression to the Mean (return to the mean)
• Diminishing Returns
• Pareto Principle
• 80/20 rule
• Risk mitigation

Milton Friedman's "Four ways to spend money"

• late 20th century Economist Milton famously defined the "Four ways to spend money":

• Table format

Who spends the money	Money is spent on whom	Efficiency of Outcome
You	Yourself	seek highest value with lowest cost = maximum efficiency
Someone else	You	seek highest value no concern for cost = lower efficiency
Someone else	Someone else	* seek lowest value no concern for cost = lowest efficiency

Logic

necessary and sufficient conditions

• necessary conditions
  • = without which something is not true
    • example: "John is a batchelor" informs us that John is a male, unmarried, and an adult
• sufficient conditions
  • = condition is sufficient to prove something is true
  • however, sufficiency does not exclude other conclusions
    • example: "John is a bachelor" is sufficient evidence to know that he is a male

Occam's Razor

• original latin = lex parsimoniae
  • = the law of parsimony, economy or succinctness
• = idea that the simplest explanation is most often the best
• = best solution or option is that which assumes the least variables or assumptions
• origin
  • William of Ockham (c. 1285–1349) English Franciscan friar and logician
    • practiced economy in logic
    • "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity"
• term "Occam's Razor" developed later
  • "razor" = knife to cut away unnecessary assumptions
• Occam's razor for students:
  • to evaluate opposing theories
  • to develop own theories
  • to evaluate Myths & Conspiracies outline
  • to develop logical thought
    • see also sufficiency in logic
• note: Occam's Razor has been used by philosophers to deny any explanations that include God or religion (see "Blame it on Calvin & Luther," by Barton Swaim, Wall Street Journal, Jan 14, 2012)

Heinlein's Razor

• todo
• “Never assume malice when incompetence will do”
  • from wiki: A similar quotation appears in Robert A. Heinlein's 1941 short story "Logic of Empire" ("You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity"); this was noticed in 1996 (five years before Bigler identified the Robert J. Hanlon citation) and first referenced in version 4.0.0 of the Jargon File,[3] with speculation that Hanlon's Razor might be a corruption of "Heinlein's Razor". "Heinlein's Razor" has since been defined as variations on Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but don't rule out malice.[4] Yet another similar epigram ("Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence") has been widely attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte.[5] Another similar quote appears in Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774): "...misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent."

Fallacies and logical tricks

• Kafka Trap
  • coined by Eric Raymond as "Kafkatrapping" in 2010 article

• Motte-and-Bailey fallacy
  • named after the Motte and Bailey castle)

Standards/ Standardization

Money

notes to do:

Money & trade

trade = geography movement scarcity/surplus technology technological and cultural diffusion

History of money

“I understand the history of money. When I get some, it's soon history.” What must money be?

- Money must be scarce - Money must be transportable >>Micronesia currency of large limestone coins...9-12ft diameter, several tons... put them outside the houses.. great prestige... but they weren’t transportable, so tokens were created to represent them, or parts of them... Tokens = promises - Money must be authentic (not easily counterfeited) - Money must be trusted >>government sanction >>language/ writing - Money must be permanent (fruit and goats die...) problem with barter.. perishability

“Money can be anything that the parties agree is tradable” (Wikipedia)

Early monetary systems: 75,000 bc ... shells >>scarce and rare cattle crops/ herbs/ spices... specialty crops >>see definitions above, what money must be) Early civilization: spices = currency (crops, esp. pepper) gems, gold, rare minerals Early Discovery Age: Rum became a currency (more stable than gold) In prisons, cigarettes become currency

History of Coinage: starts with the “Touchstone” ... touchstone...rub against it to measure purity (trust, value)

• void ab initio = fraud from the beginning taints everything the follows

Phoenicians: created currency Representative Money: paper money = coin value Fiat money = back by a promise only

Culture and Cultural & Technological Achievements

• deatils
• sources:

Historiography

• using sub-headings or bullets, discussion of the historical sources and historiography of this subject

Historical Biases

• confirmation bias

primary sources

• contemporaneous = "of the time"
• original documents, including
  • letters
  • official papers
  • newspapers

>> to do OPLV / >> to do HAPP >>hist. context/ audience /purpose /point of view

archeology & other historical evidence

>> to do

Cognitive biases, effects/effects & syndrome/syndromes

Dunning–Kruger effect

• the cognitive bias of overestimation of one's own competency and lack of awareness of one's own limited competence
• an error in self-awareness whereby a person cannot evaluate his or her own competency
  • called "illusory superiority"
  • the effect also shows that people of high ability tend to underestimate their own competence
  • original study was entitled, "Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence"
    • "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."
    • the authors later explained that the Dunning–Kruger effect "suggests that poor performers are not in a position to recognize the shortcomings in their performance"

Peter principle

• the idea that people within an organization tend to rise to their "level of competency"
  • started as a satirical observation of how companies promote people
    • the observation is largely accurate that people will be promoted to higher levels until they are no longer able to demonstrate competency at some level, and will therefore not be promoted again
• the Peter Principle may help explain why historical actors rise and then become mediocre at their pinnacle

Confirmation bias

• observer bias limits observations to expected or desired outcomes

Observation bias

• also known as "observer effect"
• when the observer changes the actual event / object being observed

Other/ todo

• alleged certainty fallacy
• attribution to experts fallacy
• unbroken leg fallacy

External Resources

Websites

• Prentice-Hall Social Studies Skills Tutor
• Trumbull County Educational Service Center Social Studies Tools with links organized according to Social Studies areas
• Reading Quest "Making Sense in Social Studies

See Also

• bulleted link to other related internal or web articles
• bulleted link to other related internal or web articles

Lesson Plans & Teaching Ideas

Sub Heading

• details
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  • etc.
• sources:

Sub Heading

• details
  • details
• details
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  • etc.
• sources:

Other Student Projects and Investigations

• ideas for student work / engagement with the topic

Readings for students

• Active Reading
  • apply Prior Knowledge as you read: "what do I already know about this?"
  • identify New Knowledge about what you read: "oh, that!"
  • develop questions about the New Knowledge as you read: "Okay, but what about...?"

• links and more ideas here

>> see SocialScience-EssentialSkills11.wpd

• Comparative Advantage exercise: Tuvulo & Nauru comparison
  • Possible economic choices for Nauru and Tuvalu include:
    • phosphates
    • oceans/fishing
    • tourism,
    • .tv domain registrations (Tuvulu)
    • technology
    • foreign aid
    • banking center
    • leaving the island
  • Questions:
    • Is it advantageous for Nauru to produce phosphates?
    • Is it advantageous for other countries to purchase phosphates from Nauru?
    • it advantageous for Tuvalu to develop an Internet domain name?
    • Is it advantageous for other countries to use that domain (.tv)
    • What should Nauru have done instead of relying on phosphates?
    • What would Tuvalu be giving up by relying on foreign aid?

Logic

• todo

>synthesis: Hegelian dialectic: # The thesis is an intellectual proposition. # The antithesis is simply the negation of the thesis. # The synthesis solves the conflict between the thesis and antithesis by reconciling their common truths, and forming a new proposition. wiki: In classical philosophy, dialectic is an exchange of proposition (theses) and counter-propositions (antitheses) resulting in a synthesis of the opposing assertions, or at least a qualitative transformation in the direction of the dialogue. It is one of the three original liberal arts or trivium (the other members are rhetoric and grammar) in Western culture.

other to do

• Anachronism
• Apocryphal