bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Complex Ball Quotients and Line Arrangements in the Projective Plane (MN-51)
Authors: Tretkoff Paula , Im Hof Hans-Christoph
Published: November 2017

This book introduces the theory of complex surfaces through a comprehensive look at finite covers of the projective plane branched along line arrangements. It emphasizes those finite coverings that are free quotients of the complex 2-ball. The book also includes a background on the classical Gauss hypergeometric function of one variable, and a chapter on the Appell two-variable F1 hypergeometric function. The book began as a set of lecture notes, taken by the author, of a course given by Friedrich Hirzebruch at ETH Zürich in 1996. The lecture notes were then considerably expanded over a number of years. In this book, the author has expanded those notes even further, still stressing examples offered by finite covers of line arrangements. The book is largely self-contained and foundational material is introduced and explained as needed, but not treated in full detail. References to omitted material are provided for interested readers. Aimed at graduate students and researchers, this is an accessible account of a highly informative area of complex geometry.
The New Global Rulers
Authors: Büthe Tim , Mattli Walter
Published: November 2017

Over the past two decades, governments have delegated extensive regulatory authority to international private-sector organizations. This internationalization and privatization of rule-making has been motivated not only by the economic benefits of common rules for global markets, but also by the realization that government regulators often lack the expertise and resources to deal with increasingly complex and urgent regulatory tasks. This book examines who writes the rules in international private organizations, as well as who wins, who loses—and why. It examines three powerful global private regulators: the International Accounting Standards Board, which develops financial reporting rules used by corporations in more than a hundred countries; and the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission, which account for 85 percent of all international product standards. The book offers both a new framework for understanding global private regulation and detailed empirical analyses of such regulation based on multi-country, multi-industry business surveys. It finds that global rule-making by technical experts is highly political, and that even though rule making has shifted to the international level, domestic institutions remain crucial. Influence in this form of global private governance is not a function of the economic power of states, but of the ability of domestic standard-setters to provide timely information and speak with a single voice. The book shows how domestic institutions' abilities differ, particularly between the two main standardization players, the United States and Europe.
Distant Tyranny
Authors: Grafe Regina
Published: November 2017

Spain's development from a premodern society into a modern unified nation-state with an integrated economy was painfully slow and varied widely by region. Economic historians have long argued that high internal transportation costs limited domestic market integration, while at the same time the Castilian capital city of Madrid drew resources from surrounding Spanish regions as it pursued its quest for centralization. According to this view, powerful Madrid thwarted trade over large geographic distances by destroying an integrated network of manufacturing towns in the Spanish interior. Challenging this long-held view, this book argues that decentralization, not a strong and powerful Madrid, is to blame for Spain's slow march to modernity. Through a groundbreaking analysis of the market for bacalao—dried and salted codfish that was a transatlantic commodity and staple food during this period—the book shows how peripheral historic territories and powerful interior towns obstructed Spain's economic development through jurisdictional obstacles to trade, which exacerbated already high transport costs. The book reveals how the early phases of globalization made these regions much more externally focused, and how coastal elites that were engaged in trade outside Spain sought to sustain their positions of power in relation to Madrid. The book offers a needed reassessment of the haphazard and regionally diverse process of state formation and market integration in early modern Spain, showing how local and regional agency paradoxically led to legitimate governance but economic backwardness.
Markets and States
Authors: Grafe Regina
Published: November 2017

This chapter focuses on the dominant political economy models that try to explain the relation between markets and states in Europe's early modern economies. Placed into the context of Spanish history, some of the main assumptions of the model turn out to be highly problematic and in urgent need of revision. A lopsided focus on the state as predator has distracted economists and economic historians from trying to understand better how states became jurisdictionally and economically integrated units in the first place. The void has been filled by a number of poorly historicized references to concepts borrowed from historians and historical sociologists such as “absolutism” and “patrimonialism.” These concepts were supposed to delineate the development of European states from fragmented sovereignty to unified nation-states.
The Intergalactic Medium
Authors: Loeb Abraham , Furlanetto Steven R.
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the intergalactic medium (IGM). Although much of astronomy focuses on the luminous material inside galaxies, the majority of matter today—and the vast majority at z > 6—actually lies outside these structures, in the IGM. This material ultimately provides the fuel for galaxy and cluster formation and—because it is much less affected by the complex physics of galaxies—offers a cleaner view of the underlying physical processes of structure formation and of fundamental cosmology. The chapter thus takes up the study on the properties of the IGM, especially during the era of the first galaxies (when the IGM underwent major changes).
Introduction
Authors: Yablo Stephen
Published: November 2017

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book makes subject matter an independent factor in meaning, constrained but not determined by truth-conditions. A sentence's meaning is to do with its truth-value in various possible scenarios, and the factors responsible for that truth-value. No new machinery is required to accommodate this. The proposition that S is made up of the scenarios where S is true; S's reasons for, or ways of, being true are just additional propositions. When Frost writes, The world will end in fire or in ice, the truth-conditional meaning of his statement is an undifferentiated set of scenarios. Its “enhanced” meaning is the same set, subdivided into fiery-end worlds and icy-end worlds.
I Wasn’t Talking about That
Authors: Yablo Stephen
Published: November 2017

This chapter argues that partial truth is apt to strike us as sneaky, unclean, the last refuge of a scoundrel. But, whether a statement is partly true, or true in what it says about BLAH, may be all that we want to know. A statement S is partly true insofar as it has wholly true parts: wholly true implications whose subject matter is included in that of S. An account of subject matter will thus be needed, and of the relation (“aboutness”) that sentences bear to their subject matters, if we want to understand partial truth. Aboutness has been somewhat neglected in philosophy. But not entirely; think of Frege on identity, Kripke on counterparts, van Fraassen on empirical adequacy, Yalcin on epistemic modals, and Hempel on confirmation. Subject matter will be treated here as an independent factor in meaning, over and above truth-conditional content. Not completely independent, though, for what a sentence is about is tied up with its ways of being true and false.
Knowing That and Knowing About
Authors: Yablo Stephen
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses how seeming closure violations have been met with three main responses: counterfactualism (Nozick), contextualism (Cohen, DeRose, Lewis), and Carnap's idea that There are numbers is harder to know because it addresses a trickier sort of question. Our picture has some contextualism in it, since the subject matter of I am sitting changes in skeptical contexts, thereby “destroying our knowledge.” It has some counterfactualism in it, insofar as being on top a counterpossibility is being such that one would have noticed, had that counterpossibility obtained. It has some Carnap in it, too, for when the doubters come round, one takes refuge in the ordinary, “internal,” part of I am sitting, the part that concerns its old, nonskeptical, subject matter.
Extrapolation and Its Limits
Authors: Yablo Stephen
Published: November 2017

If A implies B, then is there always something that we can point to as what A adds to B? The logician, or logical engineer, says yes. The mysterian says no. To get a bead on the issue, this chapter distinguished four types of extrapolation: inductive, as in Hume, projective, as in Goodman, alethic, as in Kripkenstein, and type 4, as in Wittgenstein's “conceptual problem of other minds” and his example of 5 o'clock on the sun. Logical subtraction is understood, to begin with, as type 4 extrapolation. A–B is the result of extrapolating A beyond the bounds imposed by B. The question is whether this can always be done.
The Missing Premise
Authors: Yablo Stephen
Published: November 2017

This chapter proposes a situation wherein we are trying to win acceptance of A from an interlocutor who admits only B. A is not implied by B, so there are B-worlds where A is false. Who is to say that our world is not among them? This is where R comes in. A ought to inherit whatever plausibility attaches to R, for A is implied by R and B, and B is common ground. More carefully, A inherits whatever independent plausibility attaches to R. R makes a case for A only insofar as it is plausible in its own right. Our preferences can to some extent be explained on this basis.
What Is Said
Authors: Yablo Stephen
Published: November 2017

This chapter begins with the notions of piggybacking and pivoting, suggeting that metaphorical contents—contents obtainable by piggybacking on a game—cannot always be reconstrued as incremental contents—contents obtained by pivoting on a suitably related presupposition. Pivoting is a limited operation, compared to piggybacking. However, the argument for this applies just when A is closed to its metaphorical content. It could be that piggybacking on a game G can always be simulated by pivoting on a corresponding presupposition, provided that every A is open to its G-induced metaphorical content. It is uncertain whether this is really so, but we can adopt it as a working hypothesis. The chapter then makes the following conjecture: most, if not all, of the philosophically controversial games—the games invoked by fictionalists about numbers, sets, properties, mereological sums, other times and worlds, and so on—are hyperbolic. The facts that make A pretendable are included in the facts that would make it true. This is illustrated with number fictionalism.
Titan, Moons, and Small Planets
Authors: Ingersoll Andrew P.
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the hydrologic cycle on Saturn's moon Titan, which has an atmosphere of nitrogen and methane. Titan is an evolving atmosphere, close to the lower size limit of objects that can retain a sizeable atmosphere over geologic time. Below this limit, the atmospheres are tenuous and transient. The chapter first provides an overview of Titan's atmospheric evolution before discussing its hydrologic cycle and lakes. It then considers Titan's energetic weather in a low-energy environment, focusing on temperature and winds, and the difficulty of retaining an atmosphere on Titan due to its small gravity and proximity to the Sun. It also explains the anti-greenhouse effect and production of higher hydrocarbons on Titan.
Jupiter the Gas Giant
Authors: Ingersoll Andrew P.
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines Jupiter's climate and what it reveals about the solar system. During its first 105 years, the solar system was a melting pot in which material from stars with different chemical compositions was blended together. The high temperatures resulting from the release of enormous amounts of gravitational potential energy aided the melting process. Aside from being the largest planet, Jupiter is also the one whose composition most resembles that of the Sun. The chapter begins with a discussion of solar composition, focusing on the abundances of elements in Jupiter's atmosphere compared with those on the Sun. It then considers the origin and evolution of Jupiter and the solar system more generally, along with the vertical structure of clouds and temperature. It also explains the presence of lightning in Jupiter's atmosphere, the Great Red Spot, enrichment relative to solar composition, horizontal temperature structure, and hot air ballooning.
Balancing the Banks
Authors: Dewatripont Mathias , Rochet Jean-Charles , Tirole Jean
Published: November 2017

The financial crisis that began in 2007 in the United States swept the world, producing substantial bank failures and forcing unprecedented state aid for the crippled global financial system. Providing an international perspective, this book draws critical lessons from the causes of the crisis and proposes important regulatory reforms, including sound guidelines for the ways in which distressed banks might be dealt with in the future. While some recent policy moves go in the right direction, others, the book argues, are not sufficient to prevent another crisis. The book shows the necessity of an adaptive prudential regulatory system that can better address financial innovation. Stressing the numerous and complex challenges faced by politicians, finance professionals, and regulators, and calling for reinforced international coordination (for example, in the treatment of distressed banks), the book puts forth a number of principles to deal with issues regarding the economic incentives of financial institutions, the impact of economic shocks, and the role of political constraints.
Introduction
Authors: Dewatripont Mathias , Rochet Jean-Charles , Tirole Jean
Published: November 2017

This introductory chapter begins by briefly setting out the book's purpose, which is to offer a perspective on what happened during the recent financial crisis and especially on the lessons to be learned in order to avoid a repetition of this large-scale meltdown of financial markets, industrial recession, and public deficits. It then provides a historical perspective on the regulation of the banking sector, followed by discussions of the challenges facing prudential regulation and the development of an adaptive regulatory system in a global world. It argues that the previous trend toward decreasing capital requirements and increasing delegation of oversight to banks and credit-rating agencies clearly requires a correction, namely a strengthening of regulation. In the recent crisis, the pendulum can be expected to swing in this direction.
Remembering Islamization, 1300–1750
Authors: Laffan Michael
Published: November 2017

This introductory chapter documents what is known of the process of Islamization across Indonesia and argues that the present knowledge is informed in large part by the acceptance of the retrospective framings and validations of seventeenth-century Sufi teachings that emphasized a mystical connection between the Prophet and a learned elite patronized by regal authorities. Numerous difficulties beset any attempt at plotting a straightforward history of the conversion and Islamization of Indonesia's many diverse peoples up to the middle of the eighteenth century. What does emerge is a sense that certain key courts took on the mantle of defenders of Islam and regularly sought validation from beyond their shores, most preferably from the person of the Prophet's lineal descendants in Mecca and the scholars associated with them. Regardless of how it was achieved or subsequently justified, Islamization brought the power of international connections that linked the Indian Ocean and China Sea ever more closely together.
Reform and the Widening Muslim Sphere, 1800–1890
Authors: Laffan Michael
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses the rise, largely in the nineteenth century, of a new form of populist authority that expanded the scope of Islamic activity beyond the reach of ever more marginalized courts. Indonesian Islam, supported in some instances by a growing native economy, moves away from court-mandated orthodoxy towards a closer connection with Mecca and the Middle East mediated by independent teachers. In some instances, these independent religious masters were able to prosper and to adapt to new modes of Sufi organization that saw the adoption of the tariqas in favor in the Ottoman Empire. By the century's end, the Naqshbandis in particular were exploring new ways of broadening their constituencies. These included somewhat controversial short-courses of instruction and the dissemination of printed materials that were increasingly available to a pesantren-schooled section of the public.
Distant Musings on a Crucial Colony, 1882–1888
Authors: Laffan Michael
Published: November 2017

This chapter looks at Snouck Hurgronje's interventions in the field in Holland, his criticisms of the juridical and missiological attacks on the orthopraxy of Islam in the Indies, and his alliance with those whom he deemed to have a more scholarly interpretation of Islam, and whose views he therefore promoted as beneficial to public well-being within a still Netherlandic Indies. In particular, the chapter will consider the distaste of Snouck and his allies for the varieties of populist mysticism that rival—and rather less juridically concerned—Muslim teachers could turn to their own purposes. Trained in the field of religious studies, Snouck had a decided aversion to legalistic scholarship that prioritized text over context. He urged instead that the observations of his academic and churchmen forebears should be twinned to a more professionally developed Orientalism, such as would more effectively service an empire contending with Islam as its primary threat.
Shadow Muftis, Christian Modern, 1892–1906
Authors: Laffan Michael
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses the position of those who opposed Snouck's authority, seeing his “ethical” policies for the modernization of the Muslim Indies as a part of a longer-term project of Christianization. In his role as unofficial mufti of the undeniably Muslim Netherlands Indies, Snouck was perceived as servant to state and Islam alike. Such services would irritate the missionaries who had originally provided the scholar with his ethnographic data and a warm welcome. They also angered those Muslims who were not the direct beneficiaries of his policies, most especially those with an interest in connecting with the Ottoman Empire and its periodicals. To that end, it is ironic that their globally oriented attacks on the Dutchman were framed in terms of policing the boundaries of Sufi practice supposedly transgressed by Hasan Mustafa. Moreover, while the missionaries thought Snouck was Islamizing Java, some Arabs feared that his projects were geared to easing a path for Christianity.
Advisors to Indonesië, 1906–1919
Authors: Laffan Michael
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines how Snouck's successors, trained in the history of Islam through the use of manuscripts he had collected, favored a particular strand of Muslim activism in what people were now increasingly calling “Indonesia.” Snouck may have been physically absent from Indonesia in the second decade of the twentieth century, but the advisors he had trained were very much on hand. Their mission was to further Snouck's work by overseeing the transition of Indonesia into the modern world. They thought that they would guide a movement of Indonesians into the orthodox public sphere and away from the otherworldly personal control of mystical teachers. They still cultivated links with elite scholars, but they would have been pleased by the independent yet collaborative voices of Sarekat Islam and the egalitarian tone of the Irshadi movement that was allied with it.
Conclusion
Authors: Laffan Michael
Published: November 2017

This concluding chapter recounts the overall arc of this book to show how colonial scholarship interpreted the precolonial, and then inflected particular strands of reformist Sufi self-critique into modernist discourse. The introduction of formalized techniques of Sufi learning was often tied to scholarly intolerance of popular variance that perhaps began as emulation of regal prerogatives. By the eighteenth century, increasingly intense connections between Asian courts and Middle Eastern centers of learning engendered appeals to the principle that normative legal practices should define the standard of Islam for most believers. Such appeals were accompanied by the embrace or rejection of foreigners and attempts to restrict Sufi knowledge to a learned elite who could sit in judgement over them.
Remembering Inflation
Authors: Granville Brigitte
Published: November 2017

Today's global economy, with most developed nations experiencing very low inflation, seems a world apart from the “Great Inflation” that spanned the late 1960s to early 1980s. Yet, this book makes the case that monetary economists and policymakers need to keep the lessons learned during that period very much in mind, lest we return to them by making the same mistakes we made in the past. The book details the advances in macroeconomic thinking that gave rise to the “Great Moderation”—a period of stable inflation and economic growth, which lasted from the mid-1980s through the most recent financial crisis. The book makes the case that the central banks' management of monetary policy—hinging on expectations and credibility—brought about this period of stability, and traces the roots of this success back to the eighteenth-century foundations of modern monetary thought. Tackling fundamental questions such as the causes of inflation and its relation to unemployment and growth, the natural rate of inflation hypothesis, the fiscal theory of the price level, and the proper goals of central banks, the book aims above all to demonstrate the dangers of forgetting the role of credibility in establishing sound monetary policy. With the lessons of the past firmly in mind, the book presents stimulating ideas and proposals about inflation-targeting principles, which provide tools for present-day monetary authorities dealing with the forces of globalization, mercantilism, and reserve accumulation.
Origins of Inflation
Authors: Granville Brigitte
Published: November 2017

This chapter begins with a review of historical examples that shaped the thinking of economists about the importance for effective monetary policy of understanding the link between inflation and public debt. The threat to monetary policy from high levels of government indebtedness stems from the temptation to use monetary policy to erode or eliminate public debt. The chapter examines this area of thinking with particular reference to the episode of very high inflation in Russia in the 1990s, since that episode clearly demonstrates the links between fiscal and financial conditions and monetary factors in bringing about high inflation. It concludes by considering the question of whether the Sargent and Wallace analysis is well validated by the experience of mature economies.
Introduction
Authors: Bloom Joshua S.
Published: November 2017

This introductory chapter presents the background story on the discovery and research on gamma-ray bursts (GRB). In 1963, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and U.S. President John F. Kennedy agreed to the Partial Test Ban Treaty. Ratifying nations agreed that all nuclear weapons testing would be conducted underground from then on: no longer would tests be conducted in oceans, in the atmosphere, or in space. The United States, led by a team at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, promptly began the ambitious Vela Satellite Program to test for “non-compliance” with the Treaty. Not long after Los Alamos employee Ray Klebesadel began detecting GRBs. In 1973, Klebesadel and his colleagues Ian Strong and Roy Olson published a paper entitled “Observations of Gamma-Ray Bursts of Cosmic Origin” the Astrophysical Journal, which marked the beginning of the GRB enigma that to this day captivates the imagination and keeps astronomers scratching their heads.
Into the Belly of the Beast
Authors: Bloom Joshua S.
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses the definition, emission, and central engine of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). Before the afterglow era, GRBs were essentially defined by observations of their high-energy emission. The landscape of such observations—the light curves and spectra of the events—exhibits at once great diversity and elements of commonality that bind different events together. GRBs are like fingerprints: no two are alike, but they share common properties. Those common elements provide strong constraints both on the nature of the “engine” that supplies the energy to the event and the physical processes that drive the emission we see. Since the 1990s, GRB monitors in space have observed more than one hundred GRBs. Since 2004, the NASA GRB satellite called Swift has been discovering GRBs at a rate of about two per week.
The Geometry of Nutrition
Authors: Simpson Stephen J. , Raubenheimer David
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses the Geometric Framework (GF) for nutrition. GF satisfies the multiple-food-components requirement using a simple device known as a nutrient space. A nutrient space is a geometric space built of two or more axes, where each axis represents a food component that is suspected to play a role in influencing the animal's responses to its environment. In most cases, these food components will be nutrients but this is not invariably the case. The nutrient space provides the common context in which to describe the pertinent aspects of the animal, its environment, the interactions between animal and environment, and the consequences of these interactions.
Beyond Nutrients
Authors: Simpson Stephen J. , Raubenheimer David
Published: November 2017

This chapter demonstrates that the conventional categorization of food components into “macronutrient,” “micronutrient,” “toxin,” “medicine,” and so on works well from a distance, but on greater magnification, the boundaries between these categories blur. When viewed through a geometric lens, however, a new structure falls into focus, which emphasizes not the chemical identity of the food component but the target-like perspective of optimal intakes. The chapter structures its argument around three interlinked themes: (1) the distinction between “nutrient” and “toxin” is fuzzy and sometimes imaginary; (2) the phenomenon of “self-medication” in nonhuman animals can involve compounds that are conventionally classified either as nutrients or natural “medicines”; and (3) even when a compelling case can be made for distinguishing a “toxin” from a “nutrient,” the biological impacts of the toxin depend on the levels of nutrients in the food relative to the intake target for those nutrients.
From Individuals to Populations and Societies
Authors: Simpson Stephen J. , Raubenheimer David
Published: November 2017

This chapter analyzes how an individual's nutritional state influences how a group behaves. Mormon crickets, ants, and slime molds illustrate how local nutritional interactions can fashion cohesive, group-level behavioral patterns. In Mormon crickets and locusts, order emerges from a base nutritional response: the attempt to eat your neighbor. While it is true that one consequence of being driven on a cannibalistic forced march is an increased probability of finding better conditions elsewhere, it seems vanishingly unlikely that this has been selected as an emergent property at the level of the migratory band. In contrast, the emergent outcomes arising from nutritional interactions within ant nests and slime mold plasmodia clearly do enhance the evolutionary fitness of the collective entities and their component parts. It is therefore valid to use the term “superorganism” for such systems.
People and Places
Authors: Barfield Thomas
Published: November 2017

This chapter provides a basic outline of Afghanistan's land and peoples. It describes how the various tribal and ethnic groups of Afghanistan work, because they have all played key roles in Afghanistan's history and remain vital in understanding current events there. Furthermore, this chapter introduces what Afghans themselves take for granted: their geography, religion, subsistence economy, and architecture, along with the persistent aspects of social organization in which they ground their lives. Finally, the chapter applies ibn Khaldun's classic model of Middle Eastern political organization to Afghanistan, arguing that, far from participating in a single political sphere, Afghanistan has always been two worlds, interacting but unintegrated. Its contrasting patterns of subsistence, social organization, and regional political structures underlie long-standing ethnic and tribal divisions, constituting elements of material life and social organization that have persisted for centuries, even millennia, and setting the framework for daily life as it is ordinarily lived.
Conquering and Ruling Premodern Afghanistan
Authors: Barfield Thomas
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines Afghanistan's premodern patterns of political authority and the groups that wielded it. During this period nation-states did not exist and regions found themselves as parts of various empires. During its premodern history, the territory of today's Afghanistan was conquered and ruled by foreign invaders. Located on a fracture zone linking Iran in the west, central Asia in the north, and south Asia in the east, it was the route of choice for armies moving across the Hindu Kush (or south of it) toward the plains of India. For the same reason, empires based in India saw the domination of this region as their first line of defense. This chapter focuses on how (and what kinds of) territory was conquered, how conquerors legitimated their rule, and the relationship of such states with peoples at their margins.
Afghanistan Enters the Twenty-first Century
Authors: Barfield Thomas
Published: November 2017

This chapter looks at the first decade of the twenty-first century in Afghanistan. As the twentieth century ended, ever-larger numbers of Afghans had become caught up in political and military struggles from which they had been previously isolated. Whether as fighters, refugees, or just victims of war and disorder, few escaped the turmoil that roiled the country. Ethnic and regional groups in Afghanistan had become politically and militarily empowered, reversing the process of centralization that had been imposed by Amir Abdur Rahman. Yet when the international community set about creating the new Afghan constitution, it did not start afresh but attempted to restore the institutions of old. This brought to the surface long-simmering disputes about the relationship of the national government to local communities, the legitimacy of governments and rulers, and the relationship that Afghanistan should have with the outside world.
Remaking the Heartland
Authors: Wuthnow Robert
Published: November 2017

For many Americans, the Middle West is a vast unknown. This book sets out to rectify this. It shows how the region has undergone extraordinary social transformations over the past half-century and proven itself surprisingly resilient in the face of such hardships as the Great Depression and the movement of residents to other parts of the country. It examines the heartland's reinvention throughout the decades and traces the social and economic factors that have helped it to survive and prosper. The book points to the critical strength of the region's social institutions established between 1870 and 1950—the market towns, farmsteads, one-room schoolhouses, townships, rural cooperatives, and manufacturing centers that have adapted with the changing times. It focuses on farmers' struggles to recover from the Great Depression well into the 1950s, the cultural redefinition and modernization of the region's image that occurred during the 1950s and 1960s, the growth of secondary and higher education, the decline of small towns, the redeployment of agribusiness, and the rapid expansion of edge cities. Drawing arguments from extensive interviews and evidence from the towns and counties of the Midwest, the book provides a unique perspective as both an objective observer and someone who grew up there. It offers an accessible look at the humble yet strong foundations that have allowed the region to endure undiminished.
Introduction
Authors: Wuthnow Robert
Published: November 2017

This book examines the resilience shown by the American Middle West—Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, Missouri, North and South Dakota, Arkansas, and Oklahoma—despite going through profound social upheavals during the half century that began in the 1950s. It shows that the Middle West has undergone a strong, positive transformation since the 1950s—a time when many families were still recovering from the Great Depression. The transformation is surprising because it took place in the nation's heartland. The region's economy fared surprisingly well; agribusiness was flourishing; elementary and secondary education was among the best in the nation; the region was known for innovative medical research and biotechnology. The chapter suggests that one precondition for the social change that has happened in the Middle West is the fact that the region largely comprised rich land with vast potential for crops and livestock as well as mineral wealth.
Here in the Middle
Authors: Wuthnow Robert
Published: November 2017

This chapter reflects on the idea of an American heartland now beset with problems and how it intertwines with nostalgic visions of a better past. Both perceptions play well to the insiders who live in declining rural communities and to audiences who have long since pursued more glamorous lifestyles elsewhere. The chapter considers the case of Smith County, situated at the exact geographic middle of the United States: the heart of America's heartland. That America's heartland is a thing of the past is a long-standing refrain in treatments of the region. The reigning motif is nostalgia for a pastoral village-based America. The other common perspective on middle America sees the region as a social problem. The chapter argues that neither nostalgia nor an emphasis on social problems adequately captures the complexity of the social transformations that took place in America's heartland.
The Changing Face of Agribusiness
Authors: Wuthnow Robert
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the changing face of agribusiness in the Middle West. It explains how agribusiness transformed large sections of the Middle West during the last third of the twentieth century and was reshaped as it became part of a global food production and marketing system. The transformation was particularly evident in the region's increasing emphasis on packaged-food production, ranging from frozen dinners for wholesale and retail markets to boxed beef and poultry for fast-food franchises. Commercial feedlots, animal-slaughtering facilities, and poultry-processing and meatpacking plants appeared with increasing frequency in southwest Kansas, western Oklahoma, central and eastern Nebraska, western Iowa, parts of Minnesota and South Dakota, and northwestern Arkansas. The chapter considers why small towns provided an attractive venue for large agriculture-related businesses in the Middle West. It looks at the case of Garden City, Kansas, to illustrate the long-term as well as recent developments in heartland agribusiness.
Moderation, “the silken string running through the pearl-chain of all virtues”
Authors: Craiutu Aurelian
Published: November 2017

This epilogue argues that the authors studied in this book demonstrate that political moderation is neither a lukewarm middle between extremes, nor a synonym for indecisiveness or lukewarmness, but rather a bold virtue for courageous minds. With the exception of Montesquieu, these writers were caught in the orbit of the French Revolution. They acknowledged the complex nature of politics and the fragility of political liberty and the social order, and attempted “to disintoxicate minds and calm fanaticism.” This epilogue also uses the “animated moderation”—defined as that virtue which allows us to see things in the right proportions and makes us willing to refrain from using hyperbole and violence—to describe the ideas of these moderates. It concludes with a discussion of ten conclusions in the form of a “Decalogue” sui generis about the nature of political moderation.
General Equilibrium Theory of Value
Authors: Balasko Yves
Published: November 2017

The concept of general equilibrium, one of the central components of economic theory, explains the behavior of supply, demand, and prices by showing that supply and demand exist in balance through pricing mechanisms. The mathematical tools and properties for this theory have developed over time to accommodate and incorporate developments in economic theory, from multiple markets and economic agents to theories of production. This book offers an extensive, up-to-date look at the standard theory of general equilibrium, to which the author has been a major contributor. This book explains how the equilibrium manifold approach can be usefully applied to the general equilibrium model, from basic consumer theory and exchange economies to models with private ownership of production. The book examines properties of the standard general equilibrium model that are beyond traditional existence and optimality. It applies the theory of smooth manifolds and mappings to the multiplicity of equilibrium solutions and related discontinuities of market prices. The economic concepts and differential topology methods presented in this book are accessible, clear, and relevant, and no prior knowledge of economic theory is necessary. The book offers a comprehensive foundation for the most current models of economic theory and is ideally suited for graduate economics students, advanced undergraduates in mathematics, and researchers in the field.
Production with Decreasing Returns
Authors: Balasko Yves
Published: November 2017

This chapter is devoted to the theory of the firm. Production consists in the transformation of goods known as inputs into other goods, the outputs. The firm is the center of productive activity. Its activity is represented by a vector in the commodity space. The chapter starts with the definition of the firm's production set, which consists of the activities that are technologically feasible for the firm. It then examines the maximization of the firm's profit subject to the feasibility constraint. The properties of the solution of this maximization problem depend on the structure of the production set. For efficient boundaries of strictly convex sets, the problem of profit maximization has a unique solution. This solution is a function of the price vector and defines the firm's net supply function. Next, the chapter takes the firm's net supply function as a primitive concept and introduces a set of properties that are to be satisfied by these net supply functions.
Postscript
Authors: Balasko Yves
Published: November 2017

This chapter begins with a brief discussion of the topicality of the standard model. The general equilibrium model studied in this book, a model that we can call the standard model, offers us a description of modern economies with their competitive markets and firms that is sufficiently general to be economically relevant without being too complex to make its study intractable. Many simpler models exist, but their relevance is doubtful at best because those models are too simplistic. The chapter then discusses other ways to extract information from an equation system and the application of the standard model to second-generation general equilibrium models.
Extensions
Authors: Diebold Francis X. , Rudebusch Glenn D.
Published: November 2017

This chapter highlights aspects of the vibrant ongoing research program associated with the ideas developed in earlier chapters. It begins with a collage-style sketch of work involving Bayesian analysis, functional form for factor loadings, term structures of credit spreads, and nonlinearities. It then discusses in greater detail the incorporation of more than three yield factors. Next, it treats stochastic volatility in both dynamic Nelson–Siegel model (DNS) and arbitrage-free DNS (AFNS) environments, with some attention to the issue of unspanned stochastic volatility. Finally, it discusses the incorporation of macroeconomic fundamentals in their relation to bond yields. It also introduces aspects of modeling real versus nominal yields in DNS/AFNS environments, a theme treated in detail in Chapter 5.
Epilogue
Authors: Diebold Francis X. , Rudebusch Glenn D.
Published: November 2017

This chapter begins with a bit of history, as what has been done in this book blends the old and the new. In particular, it sketches and contrasts the so-called “traditional” and “modern” approaches to yield curve modeling, to heighten our understanding of where and how DNS/AFNS fits. Against this background, several questions emerge, all of which are presently incompletely resolved but very much evident in the evolving literature, related to the role of no-arbitrage constraints, empirical tractability of various approaches to arbitrage-free modeling, and whether and why the DNS/AFNS model is “special.” These questions are: Is imposition of no-arbitrage helpful? Is AFNS the only tractable A0(3) model? Is AFNS special?
Introduction
Authors: Chaves Mark
Published: November 2017

This introductory chapter discusses the continuity in American religiosity between 1972 and 2008. Some might see American optimism reflected in the fact that more people believe in heaven than in hell. Others might see American individualism reflected in the fact that more people think that God is concerned about human beings personally than say that they know God exists, or in the fact that following one's conscience ranks higher than following the teachings of one's religion on the list of what it means to be a good Christian or Jew. The chapter emphasizes that these items all share the remarkable characteristic that none of them has changed much in recent decades. By world standards, Americans remain remarkably religious in both belief and practice.
Belief
Authors: Chaves Mark
Published: November 2017

This chapter focuses on one of the few traditional religious beliefs that truly declined in recent decades: believing that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. Generational turnover is an important part of this trend, with more recently born individuals much less likely to believe in an inerrant Bible than those born longer ago. The overall percentage of those who believe that the Bible is the literal word of God declined slowly but surely as younger generations replaced older generations who had stricter views about the Bible. Social change occurring in this way can be gradual, but still profound. The chapter also looks at the recent growth in diffuse spirituality, including the rising number of people—especially young people—who say that they are spiritual but not religious.
Leaders
Authors: Chaves Mark
Published: November 2017

This chapter looks at several important trends concerning religious leaders. Religious leadership is a less attractive career choice for young people than it used to be. The numbers of older clergy and of female clergy are higher than they were several decades ago. Moreover, public confidence in religious leaders has declined precipitously. Public confidence in other kinds of leaders has declined as well, but confidence in religious leaders has declined more than confidence in leaders of other institutions. All things considered, religious leaders have lost ground on several fronts in recent decades when it comes to its reputation and social prominence.
Polarization
Authors: Chaves Mark
Published: November 2017

This chapter describes another important trend involving religion, liberalism, and conservatism. Actively religious Americans are more politically and socially conservative than less religious Americans. Regular churchgoing, moreover, now correlates even more strongly with some types of political and social conservatism than it did several decades ago. Rather than being associated with a particular type of religion, certain kinds of political and social conservatism have become more tightly linked to religiosity itself. As such, the most and least religiously active people are further apart attitudinally than they were several decades ago, but this trend does not yet warrant a declaration of culture war.
The Social Inferiority of Religious Minorities
Authors: Tolan John , Veinstein Gilles , Laurens Henry
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the fate of the minority Christians in the Muslim countries of Europe and of minority Muslims in Christian countries in the aftermath of conquest. It shows that, once the conquest was achieved, the new subjects had to be integrated into the political and social order. These religious “minorities,” who in actuality were often in the numerical majority immediately after the conquest, were usually granted a protected but subordinate place in society. Theologians and jurists justified their subordination, defining their role with reference to the founding texts (Qur'an, Hadith, Bible, or Roman law). These minorities were sometimes the victims of persecutions, acts of violence, and expulsions, but in general they enjoyed a status where their theoretical inferiority (religious and legal) did not prevent some of them from achieving clear economic and social success.
On the Shoulders of Giants
Authors: Tolan John , Veinstein Gilles , Laurens Henry
Published: November 2017

This chapter deals with intellectual, cultural, and artistic exchanges, studying in particular the profound impact of Arab science and philosophy on the intellectual revival of Europe that began in the twelfth century. It shows that the mingling of people and goods traveling back and forth across the Mediterranean was accompanied by a mingling of ideas, technologies, and texts—of cultures, in short. All the various players adopted the technologies, institutions, and tools of the merchants and sailors modified them to fit their own needs and culture, and perfected them when necessary. Exchanges of ideas and technologies in the Mediterranean basin were not limited to commerce and navigation, however. They occurred in all areas: agricultural, hydraulic, architectural, and military technologies; the knowledge and practice of medicine and pharmacology; artistic, musical, and literary tastes and expertise; scientific and philosophical scholarship.
The Islamic-Christian Border in Europe
Authors: Tolan John , Veinstein Gilles , Laurens Henry
Published: November 2017

This chapter highlights another consequence of the schism between the two Europes (unequally represented in contemporary European memory): the existence of an Islamic–Christian border running through the middle of the continent. That border was the site of permanent confrontations, both physical and symbolic, but also of mutual exchanges and influences. A striking expression of these influences can be found in the twin sociomilitary organizations that, under various designations and with characteristics proper to each, were a constant on both sides, along the entire length of the land and sea border. On that demarcation line dividing Europe, alternative societies arising from the social and religious tensions of the interior faced off. This space between, this world apart, tended to play by its own rules when negotiating the relationship between states and, when necessary, came to disrupt the modus vivendi these states set in place.