bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
‘Primitive structures’, polysynthesis, and Peter Stephen du Ponceau
Authors: Solleveld Floris
Published: April 2023

Peter Stephen Du Ponceau’s 1838 treatise on American languages is not exactly forgotten: it is widely acknowledged as a foundational text and is discussed as such in histories of American linguistics. Du Ponceau’s work stands out as the first comparative and theoretical study of Native American languages based on substantial empirical material and grammatical analysis. Still, his Mémoire was excluded from the series Origins of American Linguistics and has never been translated into English. Du Ponceau’s treatise classifies most if not all Native American languages as ‘polysynthetic’ – a notion that is still subject to debate. In attributing a complex and particular type of grammatical structure to these largely unwritten languages, Du Ponceau revaluated their status as objects of research, paving the way for the synchronic description of language structures and thus indirectly for American structuralism. On top of that, he formulated novel ideas about how phonetic distinctions are made differently across languages and about the relation between language and thought. This introduction explores the proto-structuralist aspects of Du Ponceau’s work by putting them in historical context. It shows how important theoretical aspects of it were a response to and reformulation of mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth-century French debates, and how most of his data are a reformulation of seventeenth and eighteenth-century missionary linguistic work. Finally, it assesses Du Ponceau’s contribution to Americanist linguistics and the synchronic study of language in the light of later developments.
Roman Jakobson, language unions, and structuralism in Russia
Authors: Sériot Patrick
Published: April 2023

Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) is universally recognized as a key figure in the history of linguistic structuralism, who personally unites the world of Eastern and Central European structuralism with its American counterpart. A central aspect of Jakobson’s linguistic thought in the inter-war period in Czechoslovakia was the notion of ‘Eurasianist linguistics’, which he developed in collaboration with the fellow Russian émigré Nikolay Trubetzkoy (1890–1938). Eurasianist linguistics sought to prove that the USSR formed an organic, natural territorial unit defined by common linguistic features. Jakobson’s 1931 essay, translated here as ‘The Eurasian language union’, is the locus classicus of his thinking on this topic, in which he develops a series of detailed phonological arguments designed to demonstrate the unity of the Eurasian language area. The Goethean notion of ‘affinity’ is a central topic here, which helps to explain Jakobson’s anti-positivism and his replacement of causality by teleology. This chapter offers a critical examination of Jakobson’s essay in its historical context and shows how it can be seen as the missing link in the history of structuralism, bringing Eurasianism together with the development of structuralist phonological theory. The introduction to the chapter addresses such questions as why Jakobson, working in Prague around 1929 to 1931, decided to write this essay; where his ideas came from; and how the essay fits into the broader history of structuralism.
Episodic future thinking, memory, and decision-making
Authors: Bulley Adam , Schacter Daniel L.
Published: April 2023

Aside from its role in remembering the past, memory also contributes to the human capacity to think about what might happen in the future. Such prospective cognition is a foundation of adaptive behaviour and serves multiple functions in everyday life. This chapter focuses on one such function: flexible decision-making that takes delayed consequences into account. Intertemporal trade-offs between sooner and later consequences are pervasive in human affairs, arising in decisions about finances, health, relationships, politics, and the environment. Accordingly, intertemporal choice has emerged as a fulcrum in applying the cognitive science of prospection. Much of this applied work has focused on using future thinking to reduce delay discounting and encourage patience in the behavioural health domain, and this chapter reviews the promise of those efforts. However, it cautions that reducing delay discounting is not necessarily desirable given that excessive patience has its own costs, and it points towards cases where farsightedness paradoxically encourages less patience, not more. Attempts to improve decision-making will benefit from a fuller theoretical picture that captures the idiosyncrasies of deliberation.
Working memory and child development with its windfalls and pitfalls
Authors: Cowan Nelson
Published: April 2023

This chapter focuses on working memory in childhood and its developmental course. It is from the perspective of the embedded-processes theoretical model of working memory and information processing. A conception of typical child development leads to insights into practical issues that emerge in childhood and sometimes continue throughout the lifespan. Practical implications are integrated with cognitive and developmental theory of working memory. In the theoretical framework, several well-integrated items in the focus of attention are augmented by temporarily activated elements of long-term memory, which are susceptible to interference from other items with similar features. Each attended set rapidly lays down a new episodic memory that can be used even within a single trial. This framework leads to hypotheses about what develops that are consistent with a cognitivist framework. Conditions that can be discussed within this framework include autism and cognitive deficits, language and reading disorders, attention deficits, mental illness, drug and alcohol effects, motivational issues, stroke or brain damage, and brain diseases and dementias.
The Experience of Failure and the Architecture of Vision
Authors: Nievergelt Marco
Published: April 2023

The renewed departure of Conscience at the end of passus XIV confirms and reiterates Langland’s commitment to Will’s quest in the secular world and the active life, despite the disheartening encounter with Haukyn, whose weeping at the end of passus XIV concludes the deep moment of spiritual and cognitive crisis opened up by Will’s own weeping at the start of passus XI. The encounter with Haukyn is then discussed as being underpinned by an ongoing reflection on the legitimacy of poetic work on Langland’s part—a topic first raised by Ymaginatif’s attack on the poem’s dreamer/protagonist/narrator, Will, in passus XII. The chapter then proposes a new account of Langland’s tentative and provisional answer to the problem of the legitimacy of poetic ‘makynges’, by emphasizing the poetically and spiritually productive role played by multiple, reiterated experiences of intellectual failure and insufficiency—an answer that Langland appears to have arrived at through his own, reiterated engagement with the failures, aporias, indirections, and pitfalls of Deguileville’s allegorical poetry. The chapter ends with a reconsideration of the affinities and differences between the reiterative and ‘re-visionary’ poetics of Deguileville and Langland: the latter redeploys, but considerably modifies the narrative structure as well as the thematic and spiritual remit of Deguileville’s trilogy, seeking to develop a more complex, evolving poetic project out of Deguileville’s internally conflicted poetic vision. The pitfalls of Deguileville’s pilgrim—and of his allegorical poetics—thus become crucial enabling moments of crisis and reorientation in Langland’s more dynamic and capacious poem.
Setting the stage
Authors: Nadathur Prerna
Published: April 2023

This chapter introduces basic semantic machinery for interpreting modal and aspectually-marked declarative claims. It demonstrates that a straightforward (standard) composition of possibility and perfective aspect does not predict actuality entailments, and discusses the shortcomings of a prominent scope-based proposal from Hacquard (2006). The chapter proposes that the ability/actuality alternation should be understood as rooted in the semantics of ability ascriptions, and examines arguments from the philosophical literature which suggest that ability modals are structurally distinct from simple possibility. It concludes by adopting a hypothetical guarantee structure for (pure) ability, and discussing the consequences of this proposal for the three framing questions in Chapter 1.
The Liberal Promise of Contract
Authors: Dagan Hanoch
Published: April 2023

Chapter 18 studies Gardner’s reflections on contract and contractualization in order to evaluate the transfer theory of contract on which he implicitly relied. Gardner’s elaboration of the implications of transfer theory is convincing. But unlike Gardner, the chapter refuses to take transfer theory for granted. Transfer theory may nicely fit contracts that follow the model of an extended barter, but this is a particular and not particularly happy view of contract. Transfer theory is particular because it ill-fits a significant subset of contract law and the practice of contracting. Transfer theory is also not a particularly happy view of contract, and not only because its implementation would curtail law’s support of many human endeavors. Gardner’s critical insights are particularly significant here. The contrast to the alternative, autonomy-enhancing view of contract—referred to here as “liberal contract”—could not be sharper. Indeed, understanding contract as a joint plan, rather than transfer, and recognizing its reliance on reciprocal respect for self-determination, rather than for independence, radically transforms the role of “the contract part.” The implications of substituting the security-based view of contract with its autonomy-based counterpart suggest that while liberalism is indeed historically contingent, liberal values are indispensable for a just private law.
Combat Logistics in the Twenty-first Century
Authors: Kinsey Christopher , Ti Ronald
Published: April 2023

This chapter reinforces the ongoing importance of combat logistics in NATO, discusses both new and old challenges as the Alliance prepares for Large Scale Combat Operations, and comments on potential effects on combat logistics of emerging, disruptive technologies. The chapter first sets the scene by outlining the character and scope of combat logistics and placing it within the context of conflict between NATO and a peer–near-peer adversary. Critical theatre-wide challenges facing NATO, particularly in sustainment and mobility are then highlighted, before the chapter focuses on the so-called ‘last tactical mile’, which is a metaphor for the operational area in closest proximity to the encountered threat. Finally, the chapter concludes with a summary and brief notes on how deficiencies may be addressed through technology.
The Operational Cultures of American Ground Forces
Authors: Gudmundsson Bruce I.
Published: April 2023

The chapter explores the common origin and subsequent interplay of the two very different ways of thinking, teaching, and fighting in use in the US Army and Marine Corps of the twentieth century. In particular, it looks at the introduction, from Germany, of the ‘applicatory method’ and the subsequent evolution of its various components, some of which became rigid formats and others of which inspired an approach to the art of war that was rich in creativity, innovation, and self-directed action. The chapter also describes the two very different views of ‘doctrine’ at work in American ground forces, as well as the effect, not merely of the experience of four very different wars, but also of the phenomenon of the ‘futuristic fad’ that played such a big role in American military culture in the second half of the twentieth century.
Towards a Versatile Edge
Authors: Weissmann Mikael , Nilsson Niklas
Published: April 2023

The chapter first sums up and discusses the volume’s findings on the dynamics of twenty-first-century land warfare. It then describes a continuum of land operations, an expression of the heterogeneity of potential conflict environments in which land forces must be capable of operating. This operational complexity is visualized in a schematic model that takes account of how different levels of conflict intensity translate into demands and constraints on the utilization of land forces. The chapter then moves on to locating land operations in the broader operational environment before synthesizing the findings in what we label the integrated versatility model, outlining the preconditions for securing land warfare capability and the requirements for achieving a versatile edge in the future operational environment. Finally, we discuss ways forward for land warfare and outline an agenda for future research.
Edwin and Willa Muir
Authors: McCulloch Margery Palmer
Published: April 2023

This is the story of a literary marriage forged in the political and cultural turmoil of the first half of the twentieth century. Edwin Muir met Willa Anderson at a party in Glasgow in 1918 and their adventurous journey together took them to Europe in the 1920s, where they met many of the writers, artists, dancers, dramatists, and thinkers of the day. Committed to a life in letters, they moved between Britain and the Continent as they struggled to make a living in the years between and after two World Wars. Willa was to reflect on ‘how European we were’ and indeed their translations of modern German literature introduced the works of Hermann Broch and Franz Kafka, among many others, for the first time to English-speaking audiences around the world. Dr Margery McCulloch’s study draws on personal travel and a wealth of new sources from private correspondence, publishers’ archives, the recollections of friends, and the diaries, unpublished journals, and autobiographical memoirs of Edwin and Willa themselves. This is the fullest account of the couple’s life and times together in Europe, Britain, and North America during a long and loving marriage. It was not without difficulties, as Willa sought to find proper acknowledgement of her translation skills, and space for her own creativity as a novelist in the shadow of her own ill health and Edwin’s growing status as a major modern poet.
Edinburgh and a New Poetry 1942–1945
Authors: McCulloch Margery Palmer
Published: April 2023

1942–1945. ‘Scottish Allied Houses’ or ‘International Houses’, are established in Edinburgh for Polish, Czech, and French servicemen. Edwin and Willa favour the Czech house, which his friend Lumir Soukup helped to establish. Their social and intellectual life is hugely improved in Edinburgh, compared to relative isolation in St Andrews. Visiting speakers included Stephen Spender and T. S. Eliot, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, and Max-Pol Fouchet, while the Muirs’ home in Blantyre Terrace hosts many new and old Scottish friends, including fellow Orcadians Stanley Cursiter, Robert Kemp, and Eric Linklater, as well as Prof Herbert Grierson (now retired), Neil Gunn, Douglas Young, and Sorley MacLean, who was recovering from injuries suffered at El Alamein. The young writer Morley Jamieson and his wife Flora, rent rooms with the Muirs and help them cope. February 1943 sees the publication of The Narrow Place, poems mostly written in St Andrews. With references to refugees and the destructive cycles of history, this book is marked by the onset and experience of war. Edwin’s next collection The Voyage (1946) invokes myth, dream, and a historical perspective in a rather more positive spirit. With the end of the war in sight, Edwin wonders if there might be a post for him with the British Council in Czechoslovakia. He is appointed director of the British Institute in Prague.
Roman Interlude 1948–1950
Authors: McCulloch Margery Palmer
Published: April 2023

1948–1950. Back in Britain again, Edwin suffers a deep depression after the stress and the lost hopes of their time in Prague. His spirits recover when the British Council place him as director of the Rome Institute. Edwin is moved by what he calls a sense of ‘incarnation’, what he feels to be the physical presence of the human spirit in the old city, its streets, its art, and it people. This theme is discussed, along with the dangers of interpreting poems along exclusively biographical lines, with reference to Edwin’s later collection One Foot in Eden (1956). The Muirs greatly enjoy their time in Italy and do much to increase the popular standing of the institute among ordinary Romans. Budget cuts, however, and the British Council’s historical reservations about the centre in Rome, lead them to close the operation, despite the success of the Muirs’ tenure. With this in mind, Edwin accepts an invitation to be the director of an adult education college at Newbattle Abbey outside Edinburgh.
Test of Comparative Advantage and Measuring GFT
Authors: Acharyya Rajat
Published: April 2023

Alternative measures of gains from trade in terms of compensating variations and equivalent variations to a price change have been discussed in this Chapter 3. The duality approach underlying these measures of gains from trade forms the basis of empirical estimates of the gains from trade in the literature. The empirical testing of the doctrine of comparative advantage drawing from evidences from Japan during 1850s is also presented. These concepts and measurement issues can be treated as advanced topics intended for advanced under-graduate students.
Digressions on Factor Endowment Theory and Trade Empirics
Authors: Acharyya Rajat
Published: April 2023

The empirical issues and extensions of the basic HOS model to reconcile its theoretical predictions and the empirical observations are discussed in this chapter. These issues and extensions are discussed in two particular contexts. First is the empirical test of the HO theorem by Leontief who found the predicted and actual pattern of trade being at odds with each other—known as the Leontief paradox—and subsequent refinements of the test in terms of factor content of trade and a generalized theorem known as the Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek (HOV) theorem. Plausible theoretical explanations for the Leontief paradox are briefly discussed. Second, the chapter elaborates upon two variations of the HOS model in terms of non-traded good and immobility of factors across sector (or sector specificity of factors) and their implications for the price magnification effect and the FPE theorem. These cases have far-reaching implications for the observed global rise in wage inequality since the mid-1980s, which is in sharp contrast with the prediction of the HOS model. Finally, higher dimension issues in HOS model—such as many goods and many factors of production in an economy—are discussed as an advanced topic.
Theories of Intra-industry Trade
Authors: Acharyya Rajat
Published: April 2023

As observed and documented by Grubel and Lloyd in 1975, trade among similar countries—amongst advanced industrialized nations in particular, or the North-North trade—is much larger in magnitude and in proportion of world trade than trade among dissimilar countries, i.e., between rich and the poor countries or the North-South trade. Comparative advantages of nations that reflect cross-country differences in either technologies or factor endowments, and create the scope of arbitrage, thus do not seem to be a major driver of world trade since its scope is rather limited among similar or Northern countries. Moreover, a large proportion of world trade has been in similar products, i.e., intra-industry rather than inter-industry in character. These observations by Grubel and Lloyd have laid a foundation to the development of new trade theories beginning in the late 1970s with Paul Krugman’s explanation of intra-industry trade (IIT) under monopolistic competition, James Brander’s theorization of IIT under oligopolistic competition, which later came to be known as the strategic trade theory, and Elhanan Helpman’s characteristic approach. These pioneering works and their subsequent generalizations and extensions offered explanations of trade in similar products among similar countries in terms of economies of scale, imperfect competition, and product differentiation. Soon there were other theories explaining IIT in quality-differentiated goods. This chapter introduces to the students these pioneering models of IIT.
Market Imperfection and Trade Policy
Authors: Acharyya Rajat
Published: April 2023

This chapter discusses trade policies with imperfectly competitive domestic firms. When the import competing good is produced by a domestic monopoly—a single domestic firm that is small though in the world market—protectionist trade policies by themselves may determine the extent to which such a firm may exert its monopoly power in the domestic market. The nature of trade policy is also an important factor here. For example, the single firm exerts its full monopoly power under an import quota, but turns out to be a price-taker under an import tariff. Alternatively put, an import tariff breaks up the monopoly and thereby generates a higher welfare by its pro-competitive effect than an import quota. A very high tariff or an import quota, however, may allow a domestic monopoly to sell goods in the world market at a much cheaper price than the price at which it sells in the domestic market. This is known as the dumping. On the other hand, when the domestic firm of a country is a large conglomerate and its market power is not confined just to the domestic market, it adds an altogether different dimension to the trade policies. The trade policies can in such cases be used by the national governments to influence the international market share rivalry between its own large monopoly and other countries’ large monopoly firms. This strategic trade policy in the context of international market-share rivalry is also discussed in this chapter.
Financial Crises in the Developing World
Authors: Acharyya Rajat
Published: April 2023

Financial crises have three different dimensions, which though may be intertwined and causing each other: external debt, balance-of-payments (or currency), and banking crises. While a few of the crises in the developing world have single dimensions, most crises have been a combination of these three dimensions: either, debt and balance-of-payments crises combining together (‘dual’ crises), or all three combining together (‘triple’ crises) as occurring mostly after the 1980s. This chapter studies about the 1980 Debt Crisis focusing on Latin America that led to a lost decade of development for these countries, and the policy issues involved in and management of the crises; and the financial (or dual banking and balance-of-payments) crisis in Asia during 1997–98, which spilled over to other parts of the globe as well, particularly Latin America and East Europe. There have been other crises in the world, the most notable being the Global financial crisis during 2007–08—a combination of international banking crisis and housing bubble in the United States. But, this chapter confines its discussion on crises originating in the developing world, and most significantly, occurring under overvalued pegged (or crawling peg) exchange rate regimes with or without capital and exchange controls.
Eggs
Authors: Milburn Josh
Published: April 2023

In the zoopolis, we could respectfully keep chickens for eggs. This possibility offers an illustration of the way that we could utilize ‘animal workers’ to respectfully create animal products. The chapter begins with a defence of backyard chickens, including a defence of eating eggs. It subsequently turns to the more institutional question of egg farming. Invoking animal workers’ rights, it sketches a picture of a rights-respecting egg farm. It then responds to several objections. First, how do we distinguish a farm and backyard chickens—which chickens are workers, and which are not? Second, how do we justify destroying male-foetus-containing eggs? Third, does a broody chicken’s desire to keep eggs undermine the prospect of humans taking them? Fourth, given that chickens’ selective breeding mean they lay body-destroying numbers of eggs, would respectful co-living with chickens not necessitate providing them with contraceptives, undermining the prospect of producing eggs for consumption?
Overview of Statistics
Authors: Zhu Mu
Published: April 2023

This chapter presents an overview of statistics. While in probability we try to describe the behaviour of random variables based on their distribution, in statistics we try to “say something about” the underlying distributions-specifically, their parameters-based on the random variables they generate. Exactly what we say depends on whether we treat the unknown parameters as fixed (the frequentist approach) or as random (the Bayesian approach). Two more distributions are introduced: Poisson and gamma; together, they will drive all examples in Chapters 5 and 6.
Beyond Coping
Authors: Olawoye-Mann Salewa
Published: April 2023

This chapter approaches the theme of building a community economy through the use of the ancient communal credit system of Ajo. It assesses money as credit and how these communal credit systems are used in mobilizing savings in rural and urban parts of Nigeria for poverty-alleviating projects. We address the roles of trust, reputation, community, and a gentleman’s agreement in the sustenance of this system of savings. Also, we address a growing system of rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) in different social and economic sectors, and how these have helped people perform tasks from as little as buying foodstuffs and clothes to big projects such as starting businesses and building houses. This chapter finds that this communal banking system is a great tool for poverty alleviation.
Routes out of Racial Capitalism
Authors: Bing-Pappoe Adotey , Mama Amina
Published: April 2023

This chapter presents three examples of cooperative organizations within the tradition of the Black radical resistance to racial capitalism. African-descended communities have historically relied on collectivist or cooperative economic activities in the informal arenas in the face of structural exclusion. We investigate the existential-political and material aspects of different types of Black collective economic organizing in the American context, drawing on key concepts from Marx–‘alienation’, and Vanek–‘self-determination’. We argue that there are shifting discourses of Black liberation undergird the praxis of the cooperatives we encountered, involving common procurement and marketing through to democratic ownership. In the process of forming equitable labor relations this cooperative focused work is an antidote to the alienation that characterizes the U.S. capital–labor model. Black led cooperatives, especially those which are worker owned, provide members with a unique means of altering production, social relations, and creating possibilities for mutual support, cooperation, and ownership that offer freedom from alienation as well as democratized livelhoods, and political and economic self-determination.
Reproductive Autonomy and Genomic Medicine
Authors: Knight Amber , Miller Joshua
Published: April 2023

This chapter applies theories of relational autonomy and perfectionist liberalism discussed in Chapter 1 to concerns about reproductive decision-making in the age of reprogenetics. We complicate the assumption that prenatal genetic testing automatically increases women’s reproductive autonomy since it gives them more information with which to make pregnancy decisions, arguing that the particular context within which such decisions are made affects the degree to which prenatal genetic testing enhances or limits reproductive decision-making for specific women. Drawing from feminist legal theory and reproductive justice scholarship, we argue that the liberal commitment to privacy is vital yet insufficient for reproductive autonomy in practice. Rather than think of the state exclusively as a repressive force, we suggest the state can be a resource that effectively shifts resources to individuals who lack the information and means to achieve self-determination in reproduction. Hence, restraint and active support work together to expand women’s reproductive options.
Afterword
Authors: Knight Amber , Miller Joshua
Published: April 2023

This afterword reflects on the implications of the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) for our argument. In ending constitutional protections for abortion, Dobbs allows states to set their own abortion laws. Noninvasive prenatal genetic testing (NIPT) delivers information about fetal health early in pregnancy, so we expect it to be even more popular in a post-Dobbs landscape—especially in states with abortion bans and low gestational limits—since pregnant women from privileged backgrounds can receive results in a timeframe to order abortifacient medications or travel across state lines should they desire to terminate. Pregnant women from lower-income backgrounds in states that ban abortion will likely find their options based on the results of genetic screening to be more severely curtailed. We close by discussing how social justice coalitions can effectively counter the assault on women’s bodily autonomy in the wake of Roe’s reversal.
The OBR, Fiscal Forecasting, and the Politics of Economic Method
Authors: Clift Ben
Published: April 2023

This chapter explores how the Office for Budget Responsibility conducts its forecasting work in practice, highlighting the intellectual and methodological choices that go into building a narrative of Britain’s medium-term economic trajectory. The politics of economic method thus shapes fiscal forecasting, with different models and assumptions reflecting differing the principles of political economy. While the OBR’s founding legislation forbids it from providing explicit political commentary on the British government’s economic policies, the agency’s mandated tasks of fiscal forecasting and oversight are essentially political. These duties necessarily entail the OBR taking a normative position on the principles of political economy and the UK economy. Asking what lies behind OBR judgements, the chapter outlines the OBR’s default New Keynesianism. Such normative stances are implied in the particular assumptions, techniques, and methods that the OBR employs in its economic forecasting, and in how it chooses to frame its narrative of the economy in light of the limitations of available data. These are all potential sites of contestation in a battle of economic ideas. Focusing on these sites therefore reveals the hidden politics of the technical realms in which economic ideas are implemented. The chapter charts OBR thinking about the cyclical fluctuation of the economy and ‘shocks’, and its re-evaluation of fiscal policy efficacy and fiscal multipliers, drawing on Keynesian insights. In delineating the relationships between economic theory, empirical evidence, and OBR modelling assumptions, the chapter exposes the myth of neutral, technocratic truth.
The Great Coronavirus Pandemic
Authors: Gostin Larry
Published: April 2023

The COVID-19 pandemic precipitated an unparalleled collapse in global solidarity at a crucial moment in human history when international cooperation was most needed. A novel coronavirus exposed the world’s shared vulnerability and deep interconnectedness. By virtually every measure, global solidarity failed—from nationalist leaders fuelling distrust in science to a weakened World Health Organization (WHO) and shockingly inequitable global distribution of life-saving medical resources. Even the most basic global health functions failed, including timely reporting of the initial Wuhan outbreak, sharing scientific information, and complying with WHO guidance and binding legal norms. Stepping back, the only constant was the gravitation to a “my nation first” mentality—the exact opposite of the global cooperation and coordination needed for an effective response. This chapter describes important areas in which global health solidarity failed, the reasons for those failures, and reforms to advance global cooperation and equitable responses for when the next novel outbreak, which we call Pandemic X, occurs.
How to Balance Lives and Livelihoods in a Pandemic
Authors: Adler Matthew , Bradley Richard , Ferranna Maddalena , Fleurbaey Marc , Hammitt James , Turquier Remi , Voorhoeve Alex
Published: April 2023

The COVID-19 crisis and the policy responses to it have impacted many different areas of common concern including public health and the economy. This raises difficult questions about how to balance these concerns in making policy decisions. In this chapter, we review a number of tools that welfare economics offers for conceptualizing and studying such trade-offs. We argue that social welfare analysis is the most useful method for doing so. We show how concerns for the distributive and other effects of a policy on individual wellbeing can be evaluated using a Social Welfare Function (SWF) and survey some of the main features of such functions. As an illustration, we then use this approach to model and evaluate the implications for social welfare of the adoption of pandemic policies that vary in terms of the stringency of the controls that they impose on individual behaviour. Our model reveals how such evaluations not only are determined by empirical facts but may also depend on key judgments about the relative importance of the different determinants of individual wellbeing (health, income, longevity, and so on) and about the extent to which special concern should be given to the worse-off. In doing so, it illustrates how critical transparent modelling of these concerns is in developing responses to pandemics of this kind.
Objectives
Authors: Ndulu Benno , Stuart Elizabeth , Dercon Stefan , Knaack Peter
Published: April 2023

This chapter is about demand for the Digital Economy Kit. It opens with an exegesis of why policymakers need economy-wide digital transformation, why (after some encouragement) they wanted it, and why they (and the Oxford team) thought the Kit responded to that need. En route it discusses the drivers of such a transformation: bringing down the costs of providing goods and services, of exchanging goods and services, and of networking and organization. It also presents the five pathways developed by the Pathways Commission by which digital transformation can be realized in emerging and developing countries: raising value from agriculture; new GVCs in manufacturing; creating new global trade in services; linking the informal sector to the formal economy; and creating diverse, connected domestic economies. Finally, it goes on to discuss how the Pathways Commission and its Oxford secretariat took these frameworks and turned them into a toolkit.
A critical view on implementation
Authors: Ndulu Benno , Stuart Elizabeth , Dercon Stefan , Knaack Peter
Published: April 2023

This chapter critically assesses implementation. Although it is too early to say what worked and causal pathways are undoubtedly too unclear to claim anything with certainty, this chapter offers an attempt to link back any failures—and apparent initial successes—to the three perspectives on the political economy of reform. Some are due to not getting bureaucratic politics right, such as turf wars and inter-ministerial siloes. Others are due to a lack of special interest groups. Still others have failed—at least so far—to take off because there never was an elite bargain in place that was willing to gamble on digital transformation in the first place. Similarly apparent success can also be associated with these three perspectives. The chapter states that the Kit has in some countries fostered a loose alliance of people with a shared interest in seeing the strategy primers converted into policy implementation, which helped achieve their goals.
The Eucharist, Poetics, and Secularization from the Middle Ages to Milton
Authors: Ross Shaun
Published: April 2023

The Eucharist, Poetics, and Secularization from the Middle Ages to Milton explains the astonishing centrality of the eucharist to poets with a variety of denominational affiliations, writing on a range of subjects, across an extended period in literary history. Whether they are praying, thinking about politics, lamenting unrequited love, or telling fart jokes, late medieval and early modern English poets return again and again to the eucharist as a way of working out literary problems. Tracing this connection from the fourteenth through the seventeenth century, this book shows how controversies surrounding the nature of signification in the sacrament informed poetry. Connecting medieval to early modern England, it presents a history of ‘eucharistic poetics’ in the work of seven key poets: the Pearl-poet, Chaucer, Robert Southwell, John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, and John Milton. Reassessing this range of poetic voices, The Eucharist, Poetics, and Secularization overturns an oft-repeated argument that early modern poetry’s fascination with the eucharist resulted from the Protestant rejection of transubstantiation and its supposedly enchanted worldview. Instead of this tired secularization story, it fleshes out a more capacious conception of eucharistic presence, showing that what interested poets about the eucharist was its insistence that the mechanics of representation are always entangled with the self’s relation to the body and to others. The book thus forwards a new historical account of eucharistic poetics, placing this literary phenomenon within a longstanding negotiation between embodiment and disembodiment in Western religious and cultural history.
Horatian Dulce et Utile as Poisonous Reading
Authors: Little Katherine C.
Published: April 2023

By the end of the sixteenth century, humanism had successfully shaped English authors and readers to view classical texts as unquestionably useful. As authors were inspired to invent their own writings, they began to struggle with that certainty, and the Elizabethan period is marked by a backlash to humanism, a dissipation of confidence. This shift is, in part, a return to the medieval, to the model of Geoffrey Chaucer. Such a trajectory from humanist confidence to Elizabethan doubt—via Chaucer—is charted in two treatises, Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry and Robert Greene’s A Vision Written at the Instant of his Death. Sidney’s famous defense repeats the Horatian, and humanist, belief in the twinned goodness of poetry, its delightfulness and usefulness, and it uses Chaucer to make those claims. Greene’s lesser-known treatise invokes the medieval authors, Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower, to reject humanist claims and to rethink the value of poetry.
Worldly Vanity and George Gascoigne
Authors: Little Katherine C.
Published: April 2023

The prolific author George Gascoigne offers a bleak perspective on the legacy of humanism in the late sixteenth century. Gascoigne uses the moral coordinates of Chaucer’s Retraction and Troilus and Criseyde to imagine turning away from humanist confidence and rejecting the world, a contemptus mundi, in which most writing is a waste of time, another worldly vanity. In his morality play, The Glasse of Governement, he re-imagines the influential Christian Terence tradition, which he has inherited from the play Acolastus, emptying out its confident claims for the moral value of classical texts. He then turns to the contemptus mundi tradition, translating the medieval text, Lotario de Segni’s De Miseria Condicionis Humane, as “The View of Worldly Vanities” in The Droome of Doomesday, countering the humanist emphasis on virtue with a medieval focus on sin.
Social Expectations and Norms Confer Advantage
Authors: Goodin Robert E.
Published: April 2023

When exercising your own agency in a temporally extended manner, it is useful to know what to expect others to do. Some of those expectations are purely descriptive, based either on what you expect to happen or on what you believe (perhaps falsely) that others expect (perhaps wrongly). Other of those expectations are more prescriptive in form, based on norms (moral, social, role or legal) about what people should do. The descriptive and the prescriptive interact in various ways, some fallacious and others not. But underwriting stable expectations in either of those ways has conservative distributional consequences, cementing in advantages and disadvantages that are thus made to persist over time.
Section introduction: estimating the cost of immunization services
Authors: Brenzel Logan
Published: April 2023

This section provides an overview of the rationale and uses of immunization cost information for policy and programmatic decision-making, as well as practical approaches for collecting, classifying, and analyzing costs. The reader is also provided resources and guides on methods and applications in addition to practical examples. The aim of this section is not to replicate existing methodologies but to highlight key aspects and decision-points that must be made in the design and implementation of an immunization costing study. Evaluation of total and unit costs as well as the use of cost information in cost-effectiveness analysis is discussed. Findings from previous costing studies are summarized.
Reporting and interpreting results of economic evaluation
Authors: Edoka Ijeoma , Krubiner Carleigh , Mirelman Andrew , Brett McQueen R. , Sculpher Mark , Slejko Julia F. , Wilkinson Tommy
Published: April 2023

This chapter explains some of the important considerations for reporting and interpreting the results of economic evaluations. Once a model has been developed, and populated with parameter information, an investigator should be prepared to understand what the results are telling them about value from the perspective of the key stakeholders. Incremental cost-effectiveness ratios, budget impacts, and return on investment results are all key statistics that one should be able to know and interpret to make recommendations about vaccine value. Furthermore, there are several data visualization techniques that can go along with these statistics to make the results clearer to decision makers about value.
Static and dynamic modeling
Authors: Levin Ann , Burgess Colleen
Published: April 2023

This chapter introduces the reader to static and dynamic modeling such as disease transmission models, with examples from both high- and low-income settings. Readers will become familiar with when to use each type of model, different types of static and dynamic models that are commonly used to model the impact of vaccination in populations, and to consider common examples of when each approach has been used previously by public health bodies such as the World Health Organization. The important of validation of models is also discussed, i.e. the comparison of model results with real-world data, and methods of conducting validation are discussed.
Probabilistic sensitivity analysis and value of information analysis
Authors: Kohli-Lynch Ciaran N.
Published: April 2023

This chapter focuses on the assessment of economic model uncertainty using Bayesian methods. Different sources of uncertainty in economic modelling are introduced. Approaches to deal with these sources of uncertainty are described. In particular, it is shown that probabilistic sensitivity analysis can help quantify parametric uncertainty in an economic model. Value of information analysis can then be employed to estimate the potential benefits associated with reducing parametric uncertainty. The practical steps required to conduct probabilistic and value of information analysis with an existing model are discussed. These methods can be useful to researchers who seek to gather more generalizable data to inform future iterations of economic models.
Introduction to immunization financing and expenditure
Authors: Brenzel Logan , Malaviya Shreena
Published: April 2023

Trends in immunization spending highlight the resources that have been mobilized to achieve a particular level of coverage, as well as future financing needs for a sustainable program. This chapter provides an overview of immunization expenditures by source, including development assistance, private financing, and national governments. By 2017, $10.2 billion dollars were spent per year on immunization globally, with government spending accounting for the largest share overall However, donor financing plays a larger role in lower income countries. The role of vaccine prices and variation across regions is discussed. The levels of support from Gavi, the vaccine alliance and how that support changes with country income up to transition from Gavi support is explored. The benefits of tracking national immunization spending as well as the various methods and data sources are presented.
Financing of immunization programs
Authors: Brenzel Logan
Published: April 2023

Ensuring adequate funding to immunize all newborn children every year with the vaccines in the national schedule and new vaccines to be introduced requires considerable resources. This chapter provides an overview of the ways in which countries are currently financing both the vaccine and delivery components of their immunization programs from various sources including national and subnational government funding. The incorporation of vaccines and immunization within the basic benefits package of national health insurance is explored and country experiences discussed. Health taxes, the challenges of earmarking spending, and private, household, out-of-pocket spending for immunization are reviewed. The chapter concludes with a discussion on how budgetary space for immunization can be increased and the role of utilizing resources more efficiently particularly in countries with fiscal constraints.
Explaining the use of coalition agreements as control devices
Authors: Klüver Heike , Bäck Hanna , Krauss Svenja
Published: April 2023

Chapter 2 presents the theoretical framework. This chapter lays out the theoretical assumptions that we make about the central actors and the motivations that drive their behavior. Afterwards, the chain of delegation in coalition governments is explained to understand how multiparty cabinets work and what challenges they are facing. This will be followed by illustrating how coalition agreements can be used as control devices to deal with the problems of delegation that occur in coalition cabinets. Most importantly, the conditions under which coalition parties use coalition agreements to control their partners are discussed. Since writing extensive coalition agreements is costly, coalition governments carefully weigh the costs and benefits of negotiating detailed agreements. The major argument of this chapter is that coalition agreements are important control devices, but that their use varies with the preference configuration and the allocation of ministerial portfolios in coalition governments.
Ban and Bother
Authors: Jensen Helle Strandgaard
Published: April 2023

This chapter deals with the Children’s Television Workshop’s efforts to sell Sesame Street to Britain. It shows that the Workshop was extremely interested in selling to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) due to its important position in the European broadcasting landscape. However, this failed because the BBC already had a long and very different tradition of producing children’s television. Importantly, the BBC’s views of childhood, education, and television production culture differed greatly from the Workshop’s. The chapter also explains how and why Sesame Street ended up being broadcast on the commercial Independent Television network. Based on an analysis of meetings, production of preschool television, personal networks, and British broadcasting culture, the chapter shows why the question of Sesame Street in Britain turned into a massive cultural conflict in 1971 that became a complex issue to resolve.