bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Breaches in the Conflict
Authors: Tolan John , Veinstein Gilles , Laurens Henry
Published: November 2017

This chapter demonstrates that ideological antagonism regularly yielded to political realism or commercial pragmatism, which, of course, did not eliminate the antagonism but at least bracketed it. It argues that breaches existed in the wall of hostility, and that centuries of coexistence could not be reduced to an uninterrupted succession of violent acts and confrontations. Other temperaments, such as a taste for exoticism, intellectual curiosity, or philosophical speculation could more effectively break down the ideological barrier, but they undermined it only to a very limited degree during the period under consideration. Moreover, their consequences on the dominant ideology were uneven in their gravity. The ideology thus remained in the background but was never far off.
The Great War and the Beginning of Emancipation
Authors: Tolan John , Veinstein Gilles , Laurens Henry
Published: November 2017

This chapter looks at the Muslim world and Europe during World War I. The mechanisms of the political alliances in Europe during the twentieth century, combined with national passions and the sense among many that war was inevitable, reveal how, this time, European diplomacy was unable to avoid a war whose intensity and capacity for destruction was unimaginable. The chapter looks at the major players from the Islamic world who had become involved in the war, particularly as tensions between the European nations as well as the Muslim states chafing under their domination. Hence, the chapter also looks at the Muslim efforts at emancipation from European rule during this time.
Innovation Drives the Economy—an Old Idea with New Implications
Authors: Berman Elizabeth Popp
Published: November 2017

This chapter begins by introducing market-logic experiments undertaken in the mid-1970s. Like earlier efforts, these practices encountered limitations and did not, at the time, look poised to take off. But this time, things would be different, as a new idea started to gain influence in the policy realm. While economists had been looking seriously at the impact of innovation since the 1950s, policymakers' attention to the issue was limited before 1970. A spurt of interest in innovation in the early 1970s fizzled out when the economy rebounded briefly, but as the economy lost steam mid-decade, industry leaders, concerned with indicators suggesting that the United States was losing its technological leadership, began to push the idea that government needed to act to strengthen innovation. In the latter part of the decade, the innovation issue would become politically salient and influential, and would shape a variety of policies meant to strengthen the U.S. economy.
Faculty Entrepreneurship in the Biosciences
Authors: Berman Elizabeth Popp
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the development of a new market-logic practice in academic science, namely faculty entrepreneurship in the biosciences. It begins by reviewing the origins of this practice, then tracks its early development as well as limits to its growth and spread. It then goes on to examine policy decisions that removed these limits and replaced them with incentives, and considers how political concern with the economic impact of innovation contributed to these decisions. The chapter concludes with a look at the subsequent takeoff of this practice, followed by a discussion of the conditions that appear to have been necessary for this takeoff to occur.
Democracy Minus Disagreement, Civic Skills Minus Politics, Blank “Reflections”
Authors: Eliasoph Nina
Published: November 2017

This chapter opens with a passionate dream of many organizers: to encourage youth volunteers to care about politics and “the big picture.” Doing so would require discussion and possibly lead to conflict, which most organizers consider depressing and difficult, not inspiring and easy. Yet there is hardly enough time for reflective discussions anyway. As such, the youth programs all merely conduct projects with which no humane person can disagree—gathering mittens and cans of tuna for the poor, but not asking why there is hunger, for example—thus severing any connection between civic volunteering and political engagement, and tending to breed, paradoxically, hopelessness about finding any solutions beyond one mitten at a time.
Publicly Questioning Need: Food, Safety, and Comfort
Authors: Eliasoph Nina
Published: November 2017

This chapter focuses on the desires that organizers are at pains to avoid referring to as “needs”: food, safety, and comfort. Part of an organizer's job is to make participants question their feelings, and to treat all desires as “choices.” Empowerment Projects invite participants to draw on deep, intimately comfortable feelings, but also to challenge these feelings, and never take anything for granted. The projects put participants' feelings on display, where organizers can, without offending any of the program's multiple audiences, say that their participants do not have any unmet “needs” or any bad habits and desires, or even explain why participants had any unmet needs or bad habits or desires in the first place.
Drawing on Shared Experience in a Divided Society: Getting People Out of Their “Clumps”
Authors: Eliasoph Nina
Published: November 2017

This chapter demonstrates the organizers' efforts to persuade their socially diverse youth volunteers to bond quickly, easily, and comfortably. Such efforts are based on the hope that the act of sharing their personal tastes, habits, and desires would help build stronger bonds, but the only desires that these youths have claimed to share were for pizza and blue jeans. Paradoxically, these exercises show the participants just how uncomfortable people of diverse, unequal backgrounds feel when they are thrown together. This chapter thus reveals an important sociological lesson in just how deep social divisions go. Though it is an important lesson in and of itself, it is not what the programs had aimed to teach.
Celebrating … Empowerment Projects!
Authors: Eliasoph Nina
Published: November 2017

This chapter describes the bewildering, over-stimulating form of empowerment projects' public events. In roughly similar words, all flyers for these events invite people to “celebrate our diverse, multicultural community.” Organizers would not specify what the celebrations were about, intentionally leaving it “open and undefined.” Nonetheless, anyone who attends a few of these events will know exactly what to expect: a jumble of nonprofit, activist, and government programs, making the celebration of “our multicultural community” seem like a public service announcement offering instruction in how to avoid the heartbreaks that disproportionately touch the poor and the ill. “Our diverse, multicultural community” thus becomes, in everyday usage, a way of avoiding a conversation about poverty, and simultaneously, of celebrating empowerment projects.
Mere Possibilities
Authors: Stalnaker Robert
Published: November 2017

It seems reasonable to believe that there might have existed things other than those that in fact exist, or have existed. But how should we understand such claims? Standard semantic theories exploit the Leibnizian metaphor of a set of all possible worlds: a proposition might or must be true if it is true in some or all possible worlds. The actualist, who believes that nothing exists except what actually exists, prefers to talk of possible states of the world, or of ways that a world might be. But even the actualist still faces the problem of explaining what we are talking about when we talk about the domains of other possible worlds. This book develops a framework for clarifying this problem, and explores a number of actualist strategies for solving it. Some philosophers have hypothesized a realm of individual essences that stand as proxies for all merely possible beings. Others have argued that we are committed to the necessary existence of everything that does or might exist. In contrast, this book shows how we can make sense of ordinary beliefs about what might and must exist without making counterintuitive metaphysical commitments. The book also sheds new light on the nature of metaphysical theorizing by exploring the interaction of semantic and metaphysical issues, the connections between different metaphysical issues, and the nature of ontological commitment.
Dynamic Linear Anti-windup Augmentation
Authors: Zaccarian Luca , Teel Andrew R.
Published: November 2017

This chapter introduces several algorithms for dynamic direct linear anti-windup (DLAW) compensation, with particular emphasis on algorithms with global performance and stability guarantees. It considers a generalization of the static linear anti-windup scheme wherein the matrix gains are replaced by a linear dynamic anti-windup compensator F with internal states. The static case is recovered by this dynamic generalization when the size of the anti-windup filter state is zero. The interconnection of the dynamic anti-windup filter resembles that of the static case. The chapter first describes key state–space representations of the control systems before discussing the factorization of rank-deficient matrices. It then examines anti-windup algorithms providing global and regional gurantees, including those that lead to compensators of the same order as the plant and algorithms for the design of reduced-order compensators.
The Infinite-Range Spin Glass
Authors: Stein Daniel L. , Newman Charles M.
Published: November 2017

This chapter introduces mean field theory, both as a general class of models and in its specific incarnation in spin glasses, the Sherrington–Kirkpatrick model. This is undoubtedly the most theoretically studied spin glass model by far, and the best understood. For the nonphysicist the going may get a little heavy in this chapter once replica symmetry breaking is introduced, with its attendant features of many states, non-self-averaging, and ultrametricity—but an attempt is made to define and explain what all of these things mean and why replica symmetry breaking represents such a radical departure from more conventional and familiar modes of symmetry breaking. While this is a central part of the story of spin glasses proper, the nonphysicist who wants to skip the technical details can safely omit certain sections in the chapter and continue on without losing the essential thread of the discussion that follows.
Benfordʼs Law in the Natural Sciences
Authors: Hoyle David
Published: November 2017

This chapter focuses on the occurrence of Benford's law within the natural sciences, emphasizing that Benford's law is to be expected within many scientific data sets. This is a consequence of the reasonable assumption that a particular scientific process is scale invariant, or nearly scale invariant. The chapter reviews previous work from many fields showing a number of data sets that conform to Benford's law. In each case the underlying scale invariance, or mechanism that leads to scale invariance, is identified. Having established that Benford's law is to be expected for many data sets in the natural sciences, the second half of the chapter highlights generic potential applications of Benford's law. Finally, direct applications of Benford's law are highlighted, whereby the Benford distribution is used in a constructive way rather than simply assessing an already existing data set.
The Principle of Public Relevance and Democratic Persuasion
Authors: Brettschneider Corey
Published: November 2017

This chapter proposes a “principle of public relevance,” which claims that when beliefs, expression, and practices conflict with the ideal of free and equal citizenship, they should be changed to make them compatible with that ideal. There are two ways to fulfill the principle of public relevance, consistent with a respect for rights. The first way, “reflective revision,” emphasizes the duty of citizens to incorporate the ideal of free and equal citizenship into their own set of beliefs and practices. The second way is “democratic persuasion.” It gives the state and citizens two duties: they should convince other citizens to adopt the ideal of free and equal citizenship, and they should criticize policies and positions that oppose free and equal citizenship. Together, reflective revision and democratic persuasion specify how the principle of public relevance can be realized.
Wheat Prices and Trade in the Early Roman Empire
Authors: Temin Peter
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses how there is little of what economists call data on markets in Roman times, despite lots of information about prices and transactions. Data, as economists consider it, consist of a set of uniform prices that can be compared with each other. According to scholars, extensive markets existed in the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire. Even though there is a lack of data, there are enough observations for the price of wheat, the most extensively traded commodity, to perform a test. The problem is that there is only a little bit of data by modern standards. Consequently, the chapter explains why statistics are useful in interpreting small data sets and how one deals with various problems that arise when there are only a few data points.
Financial Intermediation
Authors: Temin Peter
Published: November 2017

This chapter deals with the mobility of capital. Romans made many investments in agriculture, cities, and roads, all of which are capital. They accumulated the needed capital with the help of Roman banks, which were remarkably similar to the first modern commercial banks in eighteenth-century London. In order to evaluate the sophistication of the Roman financial market, the chapter inquires about the presence of credit intermediaries—institutions that mediated between borrowers and lenders, obviating direct contact between them. It then presents a theory of financial intermediation to describe the hierarchy of financial sources and its relation to the functioning of the economy as a whole. This facilitates an abstract evaluation of the Roman evidence, but not a historical one.
Appendix to Chapter 3
Authors: Temin Peter
Published: November 2017

I employ descriptive regressions of the price of each commodity over time to examine the long-and short-run variation in prices as a whole. The results of estimating equations in the text show that contemporaries could not have predicted future prices; descriptive regressions can tell later observers what actually happened. The first such regression evaluates the long-run trend of prices. It models the relationship between each commodity’s log price and the year, year squared, year cubed, and three dummy variables for different intervals:...
Appendix to Chapter 10
Authors: Temin Peter
Published: November 2017

This appendix reproduces figures 10.2–10.4 in algebraic form, allowing for the extensions of the model described in the comparison between ancient Rome and the Industrial Revolution. I represent all relations as linear, which makes the model simpler. Since it has been hard to verify the shape of these relationships in historical data, these linear equations can serve as approximations to the “true” relations in the neighborhood of equilibrium, y* and n*. I adopt the convention that all coefficients are positive, so that negative relations are in the sign of the equation, not of the coefficient....
The Protestant Ethic
Authors: Scaff Lawrence A.
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the significance of Max Weber's time in Pennsylvania, and particularly his experience of the Fifth Day Quaker service, to his thesis about the Protestant ethic. It first describes Max and Marianne Weber's itinerary in the District of Columbia before discussing Max Weber's two engagements: a meeting with the president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), Samuel Gompers; and an opportunity to observe the religious service of the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church. It then considers some of the main arguments put forward by Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, and how the Quakers' Fifth Day service influenced his written work. It also analyzes Weber's meeting with scholar William James in Cambridge, Massachusetts, along with their thoughts on two fundamental issues: the problem of the relationship between ideas and action, and the question of the “rationality” of experience.
The Discovery of the Author
Authors: Scaff Lawrence A.
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses the successful reception and dissemination of Max Weber's work beginning in the 1920s. It shows that interest in Weber's work led to the gradual translation and incorporation of his thought into the social science disciplines, college and university curricula, and even public discourse. The chapter examines the necessary conditions for the successful reception and propagation of Weber's writings, including the “institutionalization” of his thought, research problems, and conceptual language in curricula, undergraduate courses, and advanced graduate research seminars in American colleges and universities. It also considers the role played by the “clusters” of scholars in the diffusion of knowledge about Weber. Finally, it analyzes how the translation, publication, reading, and diffusion of Weber's work influenced the disciplines, scholarship, and intellectual life generally in the United States.
The Uses and Abuses of Time
Authors: Nadeem Shehzad
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines how transnational companies make use of what it calls time arbitrage—the exploitation of time discrepancies between geographical labor markets to make a profit. The extension of work hours through global outsourcing raises the possibility of a 24-hour work cycle. This means long hours for offshore Indian workers. The other option is the direct adoption of Western timings in offshore offices. This translates into permanent night shifts for workers as spatial and temporal disorientation are neatly combined. The chapter considers the impact of offshore workers' long, busy, and odd hours on family and friends as well as mental and physical health. It highlights the tension between the network time of corporate globalization and the prosaic rhythms of ordinary life. It shows that time arbitrage has resulted in long work hours, an intense work pace, and temporal displacement among Indian offshore workers.
The Rules of the Game
Authors: Nadeem Shehzad
Published: November 2017

This chapter traces the offshoring of work from the United States to India as it occurred at one company. It considers the types of work being moved and the labor conditions under which they are performed. While the complexity of services offered from India is increasing, there are presently limits to how high subsidiaries and subcontractors will move up the so-called value ladder. That is, they depend on standardized work for the bulk of their revenues. This translates into extreme levels of work rationalization, or the Taylorization of information work, and consequently, high turnover. The chapter also emphazies two points: first, the Indian outsourcing industry is not terribly innovative; second, Indian workers are innocent of the knowledge of what to do and must be told. It argues that outsourcing workers do not take “ownership” of their work for a variety of reasons beyond an ingrained lack of initiative.
Vagabond Reverie
Authors: Wokler Robert , Brooke Christopher
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses Rousseau's escape from the mundane crises of his life through reverie, where he could dissolve all difference between recollection and invention. Transported by his own imagination and carried with it into a celestial domain of pure bliss, he could inhabit alternative worlds of perfect serenity uniquely fit for him. In his major writings, and the various disciplines they address, he sought to give substance to such ideals by expunging all the institutions which obstructed their fulfillment, so that through a process of sublime negativity he could illuminate realms of unprosaic speech and unembellished music, of human nature without society, an education without teachers, a city without theatres, a state without rulers, a divine presence without a church. By way of such regressions, Rousseau not only posited diverse visions of men's self-realization in a condition of unfettered freedom. He also disengaged himself more dramatically from his own age of Enlightenment, appearing less circumscribed by the presuppositions and conventions of its discourses than any other major thinker of his day.
Rouseau’s Reading of the Book of Genesis and the Theology of Commercial Society
Authors: Wokler Robert , Brooke Christopher
Published: November 2017

This chapter raises the question of why the themes and images so central to Rousseau's account of our natural goodness and social corruption are not to be found in the most seminal exposition of his philosophy of history. It addresses this question with regard to the still extant fragments of the Discours sur l'inégalité, in so far as they shed light on its original framework and the range of topics in it that Rousseau initially intended to develop. Just as the Contrat social distilled only a number of themes from a larger treatise he at first planned to call the Institutions politiques, so the second Discours embraces only a part of his philosophy of history, whose elaboration elsewhere can be traced to both early and intermediate sketches of the text, of which the manuscript submitted for publication has been lost.
Group-to-Individual Problem-Solving Transfer
Authors: Laughlin Patrick R.
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines group-to-individual problem-solving transfer, the effect of experience in cooperative group problem solving on subsequent individual problem solving by the group members. Both specific and general group-to-individual transfer may be assessed in a three-stage IGI versus III design. In the IGI experimental condition participants solve problems as individuals (I), then as groups (G), and then as individuals (I). In the III control condition the participants solve the same problems three times as individuals. Group-to-individual transfer is demonstrated by better third-stage performance for individuals in the IGI condition than in the III condition. This IGI versus III design also allows assessment of group versus individual problem solving on the second administration, and also model-fitting analyses of the social combination processes by which the groups map known distributions of correct and incorrect members on the first administration to a correct or incorrect group response.
Consolidation, Stagnation, Breakup
Authors: Collier Stephen J.
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines Soviet developments in the industrial city of Rodniki. Development in Rodniki was delayed even longer than in Belaya Kalitva. A city plan was not approved until the late 1960s; and a 1987 review of the plan's implementation, noting works that were left incomplete and imbalances in urban development, concluded that Rodniki's general plan had “not been fulfilled.” However, it also found that “[o]verall construction took place in accordance with [the general plan's] proposals” and did not violate planning decisions. The chapter then concludes that, at least in small cities, to the extent that urban modernity took shape, it conformed to the norms and forms of city-building.
Budgets and Biopolitics
Authors: Collier Stephen J.
Published: November 2017

This chapter focuses on budgetary reform. In debates about neoliberalism and neoliberal reform, the government budget is often viewed as a key locus in which it is possible to observe the absolute antinomy between substantive provisioning and formal rationalization. “Budgetary austerity”—understood as a key component of structural adjustment and, thus, of neoliberal reform—presents an image of social welfare goals sacrificed to demands of scarcity (or the demands of international capital markets). However, seen in a somewhat broader view, it becomes apparent that the government budget—far from being a site in which these two forms of rationalization are opposed—is among the most critical sites in which the tricky relationship between formal rationality and substantive provisioning is constituted as an explicit target of technocratic reflection and management in modern states.
Liberalism
Authors: Ryan Alan
Published: November 2017

This chapter explains what liberalism is. It is easy to list famous liberals, but it is harder to say what they have in common. John Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Thomas Jefferson, John Stuart Mill, Lord Acton, T. H. Green, John Dewey, and contemporaries such as Isaiah Berlin and John Rawls are certainly liberals. However, they do not agree on issues such as the boundaries of toleration, the legitimacy of the welfare state, and the virtues of democracy. They do not even agree on the nature of the liberty they think liberals ought to seek. The chapter considers classical versus modern liberalism, the divide within liberal theory between liberalism and libertarianism, and liberal opposition to absolutism, religious authority, and capitalism. It also discusses liberalism as a theory for the individual, society, and the state.
The Liberal Community
Authors: Ryan Alan
Published: November 2017

This chapter focuses on the “liberal-communitarian debate.” It argues that the conflict between liberalism and communitarianism that the “debate” supposes is a figment of the imagination; many paradigmatic liberals have been communitarians, and many paradigmatic communitarians have been liberals. In support of this claim, the chapter emphasizes some illiberal-sounding remarks of T. H. Green and L. T. Hobhouse. It then considers how epistemological, methodological, psychological, and moral issues have been muddled together, and when they are unmuddled, it emerges that there is no one general issue at stake. Nonetheless, these issues are connected, and the chapter says something about how they are connected. It proceeds by describing a liberal community and its social, economic, and political attachments, identifying several tensions that could properly be called tensions between liberty and community. It concludes with a discussion of the relationship between community and democracy.
Deweyan Pragmatism and American Education
Authors: Ryan Alan
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the connection between John Dewey's pragmatism and his ideas about education, and how his conception of philosophy is related to his views about the character of modern society in general, and modern American society in particular. It first considers the difficulty that many readers have in knowing quite what Dewey wanted to say about philosophy, education, and many other subjects, before expounding on his educational ideas. The focus is on Dewey's early writings—that is, what he wrote during the ten years he was in Chicago and in the years immediately after that. The reason is that on education, these were the years of his greatest inventiveness, and thereafter he mostly defended himself against misunderstanding. On Dewey's politics, the chapter explores his views on American nationalism in the context of World War I.
The Romantic Theory of Ownership
Authors: Ryan Alan
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the characteristic concerns and claims of the so-called “Romantic” theorists of work and ownership, arguing that what they have in common is best highlighted by a contrast with instrumental and utilitarian accounts of these matters. The chapter's main assertion is not that there were particular conclusions about the gains and losses of work, or about the legitimacy of private ownership, to which Romantics came and instrumentalists did not, but that the route by which they got to their conclusions was very different. Utilitarianism does not find the possessory relationship intrinsically interesting, either as a matter of morality or as a matter of social psychology. Here lies the heart of the contrast with Romanticism. The chapter considers Immanuel Kant's views on property rights and compares them with those of G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and Thomas Carlyle.
Justice, Exploitation, and the End of Morality
Authors: Ryan Alan
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines exploitation—what it is for somebody to be exploited, in what ways people can be and are exploited, whether exploitation necessarily involves coercion, what Karl Marx's understanding of exploitation was and whether it was adequate. In particular, it considers whether Marx thought capitalist exploitation unjust and how the answer to that question illuminates his conception of morality in general. It also explores the nature of morality and asks what Marx proposes to put in the place of moral judgment, and what kind of assessment of the horrors of capitalism he provides if not a moral assessment. The chapter argues that Marx's denial of eternal moral truths, and of justice eternelle along with them, makes the status of his own distributive principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” problematic.
Ecology of Climate Change
Authors: Post Eric
Published: November 2017

Rising temperatures are affecting organisms in all of Earth's biomes, but the complexity of ecological responses to climate change has hampered the development of a conceptually unified treatment of them. In a remarkably comprehensive synthesis, this book presents past, ongoing, and future ecological responses to climate change in the context of two simplifying hypotheses, facilitation and interference, arguing that biotic interactions may be the primary driver of ecological responses to climate change across all levels of biological organization. The author's synthesis and analyses of ecological consequences of climate change extend from the Late Pleistocene to the present, and through the next century of projected warming. The book's investigation is grounded in classic themes of enduring interest in ecology, but developed around novel conceptual and mathematical models of observed and predicted dynamics. Using stability theory as a recurring theme, the book argues that the magnitude of climatic variability may be just as important as the magnitude and direction of change in determining whether populations, communities, and species persist. It urges a more refined consideration of species interactions, emphasizing important distinctions between lateral and vertical interactions and their disparate roles in shaping responses of populations, communities, and ecosystems to climate change.
Pleistocene Warming and Extinctions
Authors: Post Eric
Published: November 2017

This chapter explores the dynamics of plant and animal species and species assemblages during the Earth's most recent period of rapid warming to garner insights into the potential consequences of future rapid climate change. From the perspective of climate change ecology, the Late Pleistocene and the Pleistocene–Holocene transition are relevant because they represent the end of a prolonged period of climatic fluctuation on multiple temporal scales followed by rapid warming. Not only did Earth's major biomes undergo extensive compositional changes during the late Quaternary and near the termination of the Pleistocene epoch, they also underwent geographically large-scale redistributions, and did so rapidly, in some cases on the scale of decades. If rapid warming during the Pleistocene–Holocene transition contributed to—or even acted as the main driver of—mass extinctions, such a scenario would seem to suggest that contemporary climate change has a similar capacity to precipitate species losses.
Community Dynamics and Stability
Authors: Post Eric
Published: November 2017

This chapter explores the implications of climate change for community composition, dynamics, and stability. It also looks at further examples in which climatic variability mediates interactions among species, in some cases degrading community stability and in other cases promoting it. Ecological theory offers contrasting predictions regarding the consequences for species coexistence and community stability of environmental variability. For instance, short-term instabilities in community composition owing to, for example, high-frequency environmental disturbance may promote the long-term coexistence of species by preventing competitive exclusion of one species by another. Other work suggests, however, that the stability of biological communities in stochastic environments is only possible if there is sufficiently strong self-regulation at one or more trophic levels, or if self-regulation is strong while species interactions are weak, because environmental erosion of population stability at one trophic level may contribute to instability of the community as a whole.
Biodiversity, Distributions, and Extinction
Authors: Post Eric
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the relationship between species diversity and ecosystem function and stability. This subject is currently one of the most intensely studied topics in ecology. It is also of paramount importance in the study of the ecological consequences of climate change, most probably because of its obvious relevance to ecosystem goods and services. More classically, however, the subject of biodiversity response to climate change relates to what factors set limits to the upper and lower bounds of species diversity and how those factors might be altered by rapid climate change. Of the two processes generating diversity—speciation and immigration—the latter obviously operates at shorter time scales and is likely to respond more immediately to climate change. Of the processes reducing local diversity—extinction and emigration—the latter is, again, likely to operate at shorter time scales, but both processes are likely to be influenced by climate change, although at potentially different timescales.
The Global Perspective
Authors: Acs Zoltan J.
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the American economy and American-style capitalism in the context of the global economy. It first provides an overview of American exceptionalism before revisiting who the Americans are and comparing the American model of liberal democracy with that of East Asia and the European Union. It then reflects on what America's future looks like and what the world will look like in 2050. It concludes with an assessment of whether the American model that is spreading around the world in bits and pieces could be better promoted. The chapter suggests that American-style capitalism, with its interplay between entrepreneurship and philanthropy, on the one hand, and its balancing act between wealth and opportunity, on the other, should be encouraged despite the unequal distribution of wealth entrepreneurship creates.
The Politics of Communist Economic Reform
Authors: Padgett John F.
Published: November 2017

This chapter compares the political, economic, and social-network dynamics of major economic reform campaigns within communism itself by Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Mikhail Gorbachev. Over their histories, Soviet, Chinese, and East European communisms frequently had tried to reform themselves economically in a wide variety of ways. The dynamics of economic reform in the climactic 1980s were not as different from what had preceded it as is commonly assumed. It was the outcome more than the process that differed. Hence, the chapter analyzes the transition from communism to “capitalism” not from the outside perspective of capitalism but from the internal perspective of communism.
Deviations from Design
Authors: Spicer Andrew
Published: November 2017

This chapter is an overview of Yeltsin's economic reforms, with a focus on the financial markets and banks associated with privatization. The architects of Russian reform hoped that private activity could be rapidly and irreversibly severed from the polity such that a “depoliticized” market would quickly fill the void left by the rapid destruction of the state planning system. In contrast, the emergence of a new market system actually evolved through a gradual process of economic experimentation and political settlement where the domains of states and markets were inextricably intertwined. Market reform policies helped dismantle the economic and political structures of the Soviet regime, but they did not dictate what emerged in its place.
The Emergence of the Russian Mobile Telecom Market
Authors: Yakubovich Valery , Shekshnia Stanislav
Published: November 2017

This chapter features a case study of the emergence of the cellular phone industry in Moscow and St. Petersburg. These are local stories about how fragments of the old Communist state—in particular traditional telecoms and a military research lab, both of which had highly qualified engineers—mostly successfully reached out to foreign partners to jointly found six new cellular companies. These are the types of stories that Gorbachev promised but too rarely delivered. This chapter confirms the basic message of the previous chapter that “market formation” in post-Communist Russia was not the spontaneous invisible hand of Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek but instead was the visible-hand emergence of business alliances and groups.
Social Sequence Analysis
Authors: Stark David , Vedres Balázs
Published: November 2017

This chapter poses a new agenda for the field of economic development, asking whether and how foreign investment is integrated into the local networks of host economies. It first presents the basic contours of this case: the Hungarian economy after the collapse of state socialism, the subsequent emergence of interenterprise networks, the demise of state ownership, and the rise of foreign investment. After describing the data collection involved, the chapter charts the changing proportions of the Hungarian economy that are foreign or domestic, and networked or isolated. To identify the microprocesses of interorganizational network formation that explain the macrostructural outcomes, the chapter turns to modeling that makes sequences of network positions the unit of analysis. Finally, this chapter explores the patterns of firms' personnel ties to political parties and then presents findings that demonstrate the relationship between the network sequence pathways, firms' political ties, and levels of foreign investment.
On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, and Other Essays in Political Philosophy
Authors: Cohen G. A.
Published: November 2017

G. A. Cohen was one of the most gifted, influential, and progressive voices in contemporary political philosophy. At the time of his death in 2009, he had plans to bring together a number of his most significant papers. This is the first of three volumes to realize those plans. Drawing on three decades of work, it contains previously uncollected articles that have shaped many of the central debates in political philosophy, as well as papers published here for the first time. In these pieces, Cohen asks what egalitarians have most reason to equalize, he considers the relationship between freedom and property, and he reflects upon ideal theory and political practice. Included here are classic essays such as “Equality of What?” and “Capitalism, Freedom, and the Proletariat,” along with more recent contributions such as “Fairness and Legitimacy in Justice,” “Freedom and Money,” and the previously unpublished “How to Do Political Philosophy.” On ample display throughout are the clarity, rigor, conviction, and wit for which Cohen was renowned. Together, these essays demonstrate how his work provides a powerful account of liberty and equality to the left of Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls, Amartya Sen, and Isaiah Berlin.
Fairness and Legitimacy in Justice, And: Does Option Luck Ever Preserve Justice?
Authors: Cohen G. A.
Published: November 2017

This chapter defends the claim that what recommends an outcome that was achieved by just steps from a just starting point is not, in the general case, itself (unqualified) justice, but the different virtue of legitimacy, or, more precisely, the property that no one can legitimately complain about it. David Miller has claimed that luck egalitarianism is inconsistent with the principal distinction that Cohen tries to draw in the chapter, because luck egalitarianism says: distribute equally, compensating appropriately for luck-induced deficits, and then whatever arises from people's choices is just. However, this suggests that luck egalitarians should not call whatever arises “just,” but merely “legitimate” (in the technical sense of being something that no one can complain about).
Beyond Comparison
Authors: Jollimore Troy
Published: November 2017

This chapter presents that the maximizing requirement requires a lover to constantly compare the object of her love with others and ask whether she really has managed to focus her love on the best possible object. It expresses a view of rational evaluative thought that places such thought in the context of an impartial, neutral point of view from which various values are assessed and objectively ranked against one another. The chapter attempts to undermine the assumption that all rational evaluation must take place from such a point of view. It argues that there are ways of responding to value that have little or nothing to do with this sort of neutral comparison, and they are not rationally deficient for that. Although there are contexts in which attempting to take the perspective of an objective evaluator by performing a comprehensive survey of the available options is reasonable, recommended, or even rationally mandatory, we make a mistake if we assume that all contexts are of this sort.
Extending the Ramsey Rule to an Uncertain Economic Growth
Authors: Gollier Christian
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers the prospect of uncertainty in planning for the future. In fact, it is commonly accepted that individuals are ready to sacrifice more in the present for the future when this future becomes more uncertain. Keynes was the first to mention this idea by pointing out the precautionary motive for saving. What is desirable at the individual level is also desirable at the collective one. Thus the chapter argues that a society that wants to reinforce the incentive to invest for the future because of its uncertain nature should select a smaller discount rate to evaluate the set of all possible investment projects.
Random Walk and Mean-Reversion
Authors: Gollier Christian
Published: November 2017

This chapter illustrates that the shape of the term structure of discount rates is determined by the way the wealth effect and the precautionary effects evolve with the time horizon. When the growth rate of consumption is constant, then consumption increases exponentially, and the intertemporal rate of substitution, which is the discount factor, decreases exponentially. This requires that the discount rate is constant. The simplest extension of this to uncertainty is to assume that the growth rate of the economy follows a random walk. In that case, the variance of log consumption increases linearly, which yields an exponentially increasing precautionary effect for the discount factor. This justifies a constant precautionary effect on the discount rate, yielding a crucial result for the theory of efficient discount rates.
Markov Switches and Extreme Events
Authors: Gollier Christian
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the effects of a dramatic switch in the dynamics of economic growth for the term structure of the discount rate over the longer term. Economies undergo radical transformations. One such radical transformation was called the “industrial revolution” which has had a long-lasting effect on economic growth. The chapter considers the possibility of a reversion to the pre-industrial age, at least in terms of an absence of growth, in the distant future, or any other effects on the current economic growth rate. Other less persistent—but more frequent—transformations observed in the past were wars or great economic depressions. It is thus important to include the possibility of such changes in the dynamics of growth in the analysis of the term structure of the discount rate.
Evaluation of Non-marginal Projects
Authors: Gollier Christian
Published: November 2017

This chapter shows that the cost-benefit analysis can be used only if the actions under scrutiny are marginal, that is, if implementing them has no macroeconomic effects. Otherwise, one needs to go back to the basics of public economics to evaluate these actions. The chapter examines the error that one makes by following the classical discounting approach when evaluating non-marginal projects. The evaluation of non-marginal projects must be done by measuring their impact on the social welfare function. A non-marginal investment project with positive future cash flows will have an impact on welfare that is smaller than when estimated by using the standard discounting method.
Two Weeks in India
Authors: Cohen G. A.
Published: November 2017

This chapter chronicles Cohen's two-week trip to India (from January 1 to 15, 1993), and touches upon some themes and experiences which had had a profound impact on him during his stay there. It first describes his experiences on board an Air India flight and his meditations on and encounters with poverty upon landing in Delhi and throughout the rest of his stay in the country. The chapter contains the author's personal accounts of his many encounters with people—both native and otherwise—in India, and frequently returns to his meetings with the poor and how he (and the Indian poor) deal with poverty in the nation. Despite his more unpleasant experiences, Cohen writes, that “India gripped me, and I don't want it to let go. As long as I write, it stays with me, I don't have to say goodbye.”
Complete Bullshit
Authors: Cohen G. A.
Published: November 2017

This chapter focuses on Harry Frankfurt's essay, “On Bullshit,” which the author considers to be a pioneering and brilliant discussion of a widespread but largely unexamined cultural phenomenon. It offers the author's own perspectives on the topic as well as his criticisms on certain aspects of Frankfurt's essay. Frankfurt, as this chapter shows, had taken for granted that the bull wears the semantic trousers: he therefore focused on one kind of bullshit only, and he did not address another, equally interesting, and academically more significant, kind. The chapter goes on to examine why a certain kind of bullshit flourishes in Francophone philosophical culture.
Casting the First Stone: Who can, and Who can’t, Condemn the Terrorists?
Authors: Cohen G. A.
Published: November 2017

This chapter offers a response to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, though it makes no conclusions about it. At the same time the chapter asks who and who cannot have the right to criticize terrorist actions. It first lays out the various aspects of the act of criticism as well as the deflections thereof. It focuses in particular on two forms of deflections—the Tu quoque (“You, too”) argument and the “You're involved in it yourself” challenge. The central claim here is that one consequence of the difference between an expression of moral opinion and a condemnation is that it might be true both that terrorism is to be condemned (moral opinion) and that some particular person is not in a position to condemn it.
Ways of Silencing Critics
Authors: Cohen G. A.
Published: November 2017

This chapter addresses a few questions: What, exactly, is the scope of tu quoque? When does it have force? In addition, the chapter considers what explains that force and how exactly does tu quoque disable moral condemnation, in the general case. The chapter first looks at two ways of narrowing the scope of tu quoque, each of which modifies and moderates the “strong Jesus view:” “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” It then explains the force of tu quoque as a certain form of inconsistency, whereby the force of tu quoque locates that force in a certain form of hypocrisy. The chapter concludes with additional insights on the nature of tu quoque and discusses the terrorist threat in liberal democracies.