The End of the American Dream as we know it

It appears that the American Dream is a thing of the past...Newer generations do not believe in it.       

from The 2013 Economic Values Survey by the Public Religion Research Institute and Governance Studies at Brookings.

feminisms

From a questionnaire of the French feminist movement Les Petites Marguerites (active in the 70s):

Question: “Who is best suited to decide the number of children you have?"
(a) The pope, who doesn’t have any;
(b) the president, who’s having a hard enough time with his own;
(c) the doctor, who values the life of your fetus more than your own life;
(d) your husband, who plays with them for a few minutes each day when he returns from work;
(e) you, who carry, bear, and raise them.”

(from The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s by Richard Wolin)

Psychology is biased. At least. Perhaps it is wrong at all

Is psychology a form of Western dominance?
Does it have anything relevant to tell us about humanity in general or merely few words about a small non-representative segment of Western society?

Yet psychologists base most of their generalizations about human nature on studies of our own narrow and atypical slice of human diversity. Among the human subjects studied in a sample of papers from the top psychology journals surveyed in the year 2008, 96% were from Westernized industrial countries (North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel), 68% were from the U.S. in particular, and up to 80% were college undergraduates enrolled in psychology courses, i.e., not even typical of their own national societies. That is, as social scientists Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan express it, most of our understanding of human psychology is based on subjects who may be described by the acronym WEIRD: from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies. Most subjects also appear to be literally weird by the standards of world cultural variation, because they prove to be outliers in many studies of cultural phenomena that have sampled world variation more broadly. Those sampled phenomena include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, punishment, biological reasoning, spatial orientation, analytic versus holistic reasoning, moral reasoning, motivation to conform, making choices, and concept of self. Hence if we wish to generalize about human nature, we need to broaden greatly our study sample from the usual WEIRD subjects (mainly American psychology undergraduates) to the whole range of traditional societies.

Excerpt from Jared Diamond, “The world until yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?“, Viking: 2012

in defence of social sciences

Charles Lane has written an op-ed in the Washington Post in which he argues that the NSF should cut funds for social sciences:

Though quantitative methods may rule economics, political science and psychology, these disciplines can never achieve the objectivity of the natural sciences. Those who study social behavior — or fund studies of it — are inevitably influenced by value judgments, left, right and center. And unlike hypotheses in the hard sciences, hypotheses about society usually can’t be proven or disproven by experimentation. Society is not a laboratory.
The NSF’s budget includes $247.3 million for social sciences. At a time of trillion-dollar deficits, and possible cuts to defense, food stamps and other vital programs, this is a luxury we can live without. Cut the NSF’s entire social science budget. Use half the savings for hard science and the rest to reduce the deficit.

Is there a need to write an apology for sociology as a social science? I don't think so. As long as sociology empowers - as it did for Martin Luther King Jr., BA in Sociology, informs - look at any poll from the Pew Research Center, challenges - go to a meeting of the World Social Forum and provides insights about the world we live in, I am confident in its future.
To oppose soft to hard sciences represents a meaningless activity. It means not to know what a social science is, what constitutes its field of study and how social actors make sense of the developments in social sciences in order to understand and change the social world.
At the same time, I think, Charles Lane is not familiar with the "objectivity of the natural sciences" either. Even a superficial reading of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions or a distant familiarity with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle would provide him with the understanding that science in general is a human enterprise subject to errors and limitations.
Further, I think society is a laboratory. Not in the sense that you can operate with people as with stones or rats, but in the sense that society represents in many ways series of patterns of action and interaction that repeat themselves or vary over time. Institutions, inequalities, relations of class, gender and race, all of them are subject to these processes of reproduction and variance. A laboratory existing in the real time. As for the ethical concerns related to scientific practices, that what IRBs are for.
Finally, a somewhat personal point. The argument of sacrificing social sciences to other needs - technology, defence, food resembles the Soviet argument about the need to ignore social sciences as bourgeois (i.e. ideologically biased, as Charles Lane suggests) and to focus efforts on the space race, the factories and the huge nuclear arsenal. The end of that story is well known - unable to communicate with its own society and to understand its tensions, the Soviet Union simply collapsed. And its citizens remained as hungry and defenceless as they were before.



Here is an answer from the Pol Sci community. 

social sciences and humanism

Few of the social science theories we employ in our disciplines model human beings in ways that justify for account for ... humanistic moral and political beliefs. Few representations of the human in social science theories make it at all clear why such objects should be bearers of rights, equality, or self-determination. If anything, much theory portrays humans as essentially governed by external social influences, competing socially for material resources, strategically manipulating public presentations of self, struggling with rivals for power and status, cobbling identities through fluid assemblies of scripted roles, rationalizing actions with post hoc discursive justifications, and otherwise behaving, thinking, and feeling in ways that are commonly predictable by variable attributes and categories according to which their lives can be broken down, measured, and statistically modeled. Perhaps all this is true. But that picture does not obviously justify belief in human rights, social justice, equality, tolerance, and emancipation.

Christian Smith talks  in What is a Person? about the tension between the ideal of objectivity in social sciences and the moral appeal they should contain.