It’s just after mid-year 2018 and I am looking at retirement in about a year. It is a perfect time to consider my investments, my future living expenses, my general state of health, my past earnings, and the viability of social security and other public benefits. When so much is on your plate, you are forced to come up with some crystal ball prognostications for whatever these are worth. After all, every smart advisor warns you to come up with a plan. You are counseled against living longer than your money.

It is like ordering a nice dinner but remembering that you only have enough money for the appetizer and pretty soon there will be ruckus and you will be charged with enjoying dinner under false premises. So, a plan it is.

It should also be noted here that politically, this moment is also one of great turmoil. I don’t write this as a liberal or as a conservative. I think most informed Americans can agree that we are in middle of some great upheaval, a resorting of values and priorities. For some, this seems like a great recalibration, a return to a social order that should be. To others, it seems like wrenching away of core principles that promised more diversity and equality at the price of a disruption of the existing social order.

So, as I look to the future and secure my true north, I aim to be thinking clearly about the path ahead. Even though I am trained as a PhD sociologist and have completely drunk the Kool-Aid about sociology being the queen of the social sciences, as Comte argued, I regret to share my forecast of a bearish market for sociology stocks. In any hyper-capitalist moment, sociology can lose value. Not because its analysis is weak or underperforming but instead because economics can explain away any sin of the market. So, with its concerns about inequality and social injustice, about the structuring of opportunity and with its focus on the backstage of complex social systems, sociology is bound to fall in favor during times like these.

A smart investor will weather this storm and hold onto his sociology stocks, taking a short-term hit in the market now in the knowledge that stocks will rise again when the public is in the mood to really understand what is going on in the economy and society.

I am not predicting here that economics will sustain a major crash in the near future; I am suggesting that the cyclical fluctuations in the market and in the larger social order will provoke more and more of our citizens and investors to recognize that, “it is not just the economy, stupid.”It is the community and the common weal and a larger purpose we all have to build a social order that relies neither on luck nor the largesse of the wealthy. Trickle-down theories have run their course, it seems to me. And after all, we are talking about a trickle here not a river of investment and opportunity.