bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Managerial Justice
Authors: Kohler-Hausmann Issa
Published: May 2020

This chapter starts by reviewing what we might expect to happen in response to a flood of cases. Given the received wisdom that lower criminal courts deliver “assembly-line justice,” it would be logical to assume that the increase of misdemeanor cases would result in lots of convictions and jail sentences. The chapter presents descriptive data that show what happened instead: a decline in the rate of criminal conviction and an increase in the rate of dismissal. The chapter proposes that a good way to make sense of the disposition trends of the past twenty-five years is to understand that misdemeanor justice in New York City has largely abandoned the adjudicative model of criminal law administration. Instead, it hews more closely to the “managerial model,” where the criminal process is deployed to figure out the rule-abiding propensities of people and to calibrate formal regulation accordingly.
Marking
Authors: Kohler-Hausmann Issa
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses the technique of marking—the generation, maintenance, and regular use of official records for critical decisions about a person's criminal justice contacts and status determinations about the individual. In the subfelony world, marking is a dynamic practice that sorts and classifies the people moving through misdemeanorland, often into provisional or conditional statuses. Marks document a range of behaviors and accomplishments. These marks are consulted by court actors to determine what level of social control response is warranted and what other sorts of testing or punishments ought to be imposed if a person cycles back through the system. Marking—independent of it signaling the state's authority to lawfully impose a formal punishment—is itself a penal technique, even when the mark is temporary and its accessibility limited. Here, the chapter explains precisely how marks are created and stored in misdemeanorland and discusses how the practices there differ from those in felonyland. It also presents quantitative evidence about the import of marks in misdemeanor case processing.
Performance
Authors: Kohler-Hausmann Issa
Published: May 2020

This chapter analyzes the technique of performance. “Performance” refers to a set of activities the defendant is instructed by the court or prosecution to undertake and later to present as a successful achievement demonstrating responsibility and governability. It explores a wide range of such tasks—from in-patient drug treatment to community service—and shows how these duties are assigned and evaluated as performances revealing the defendant's character or capacity to be directed by official rules. The unifying logic behind disparate performance activities is evaluating how a defendant has executed the act. The technique of performance seeks normalization but does not involve constant engagement and supervision: it entails a command and a sanction-backed compliance check.
Conclusion
Authors: Kohler-Hausmann Issa
Published: May 2020

This concluding chapter revisits the various types of insights that the study of justice in misdemeanorland offers to our sociological understanding about legal organizations. It also addresses how meso- and macro-level trends are produced from micro-level conditions. The chapter starts the discussion from the perspective of a lawyer and ends with that of a citizen. That is, the chapter first highlights what this study can tell us about the possibilities and limitations of legal reform and transition to emphasizing what this study exposes about the way most social problems are addressed in the United States. It concludes by arguing that the study of mass misdemeanors—like that of mass incarceration—ultimately points out larger political questions about what role we, as a democratic society, will countenance for criminal justice in establishing social order.
Introduction
Authors: Neeley Tsedal
Published: May 2020

This introductory chapter shows how workers in the global organization Rakuten can be conceived of as expatriates in their own countries. Expatriates (often shortened to “expats”) are people temporarily or permanently residing as immigrants in a country other than that of their citizenship. This chapter repurposes the word “expat” to mean people who are temporarily or permanently detached from their mother tongue or home culture while still operating in their own country. Here, the change to a lingua franca is the catalyst for all employees to become an expat of one sort or another in their daily organizational work while still living in their native country. Furthermore, the expat perspective that this chapter conceptualizes rests on the assumption that everyone is at least slightly uncomfortable detaching from a native language or culture.
The Lingua Franca Mandate
Authors: Neeley Tsedal
Published: May 2020

This chapter sets the stage with the dramatic announcement by Hiroshi Mikitani, CEO of Rakuten, informing his 10,000 employees, of which over 7,100 are Japanese nationals, that from that day forward they would need to speak English in the workplace. In two years, they would be required to clear a proficiency test or risk demotion. This chapter introduces three employees who represent the categories that make up the core of the book. The first is Kenji, a Japanese engineer gripped by shock and fear that his years of hard work with the company will count for naught, who then receives the technical and emotional support to practice new English language skills. Next is Robert, a native English-speaking marketing manager from the United States, thrilled that the company is switching to his native language and who anticipates an easy career advance only to have his sense of privilege curtailed by new, daily work requirements, followed by a trip to Japan where his cultural blinders begin to loosen. Finally, there is the German IT technician, Inga, who is pleased by the announcement, who hopes it will streamline her work process—and learns that it does once she climbs the steep and often frustrating learning curve.
Cultural Expats and the Trojan Horse of Language
Authors: Neeley Tsedal
Published: May 2020

This chapter follows the native English speakers through their first phase, when euphoria reigned because they (incorrectly, as it turned out) assumed that Englishnization was solely about language. It also follows them through the second phase, about two years into Englishnization. By this time, they found it nearly as difficult to accept the changes wrought in their day-to-day workplace as did the native Japanese speakers. While the Japanese employees had to change to adopt a foreign language, the American employees had to change to adopt the Rakuten organizational culture that had been mostly suppressed by the language barrier. Employees in both groups had to adjust their perception of themselves and their place in the company—in this respect, the groups were mirror images of one another.
Dual Expats’ Global Work Orientation
Authors: Neeley Tsedal
Published: May 2020

This chapter is about the linguistic-cultural expats. These refer to a third group of employees who worked at Rakuten's subsidiary offices in Asia, Europe, and South America. Like the Japanese employees, after the Englishnization mandate they too were required to communicate in a lingua franca that was different from their native tongue. Like the American employees, they too had to adapt to the many workplace changes that made up the Rakuten organizational culture. Because this group worked in both a language and a culture that was not their own, the chapter refers to them as the linguistic-cultural expats or, alternatively, dual expats. Here, the process of living in and learning a foreign culture, although challenging for many individuals in the first two groups, emerged as freeing for the dual expat employees and allowed them entry to more adaptive attitudes and behaviors.
Conclusion
Authors: Neeley Tsedal
Published: May 2020

This concluding chapter provides some reflections on the lessons attained through the study of Rakuten's employees. The study reveals that a global company integrates its diverse and disparate pieces not only by specifying and adopting technical and organizational policies but also through the dynamic and evolving experiences that employees encounter as they meet the demands of global work. At the organizational level, a lingua franca can be a decoupling force between language and culture, and has the capacity to redistribute influence through a company in unforeseen ways. Most notably, an English-speaking Western culture is not necessarily always dominant in globalized organizations. An e-commerce giant like Rakuten that hails from an island country can forcefully assert its cultural identity. Of course, Rakuten's journey is still in process and there is no telling where it might lead. This study represents only a portion of what we can expect longitudinally when a globalizing organization makes a fundamental change to its official language.
Location Cubed
Authors: Massey Douglas S. , Albright Len , Casciano Rebecca , Derickson Elizabeth , Kinsey David N.
Published: May 2020

This chapter talks about the importance of location in human affairs. Naturally the quality of a dwelling has direct implications for the health, comfort, security, and well-being of the people who inhabit it, and matching the attributes of housing with the needs and resources of families has long been a principal reason for residential mobility in the United States. When people purchase or rent a home, however, they not only buy into a particular dwelling and its amenities but also into a surrounding neighborhood and its qualities, for good or for ill. In contemporary urban society, opportunities and resources tend to be distributed unevenly in space, and in the United States spatial inequalities have widened substantially in recent decades. Where one lives is probably more important now than ever in determining one's life chances. In selecting a place to live, a family does much more than simply choose a dwelling to inhabit; it also selects a neighborhood to occupy.
Greener Pastures
Authors: Massey Douglas S. , Albright Len , Casciano Rebecca , Derickson Elizabeth , Kinsey David N.
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on a special survey conducted of the residents of Ethel Lawrence Homes (EHL) and nonresidents to assess how moving into the project affected the residential environment people experienced on a day-to-day basis. The design of the survey compares neighbourhood conditions experienced by EHL residents both before and after they moved into the project, as well as to compare them with a control group of people who had applied to EHL but had not yet been admitted. Both comparisons reveal a dramatic reduction in exposure to neighbourhood disorder and violence and a lower frequency of negative life events as a result of the move. By the time EHL finally opened in 2000, it was no longer a test case about the rights of longtime residents not to be forced out of their hometown. Instead, it became a test case for whether affordable housing developments could provide a path out of poverty for the urban poor, and what kinds of costs such programs might impose on suburban residents.
Tenant Transitions
Authors: Massey Douglas S. , Albright Len , Casciano Rebecca , Derickson Elizabeth , Kinsey David N.
Published: May 2020

This chapter considers whether the move to the Ethel Lawrence Homes (EHL)—and the improved neighborhood conditions it enabled—were sufficient to change the trajectory of people's lives. Systematic comparisons between project residents and members of the nonresident control group indicated significant improvements in mental health, economic independence, and children's educational outcomes as a result of moving into the project. It discusses whether residents have been able to use the safe setting of the EHL as a platform for broader success in life—whether inhabiting a secure, nonthreatening environment indeed provided residents with a springboard to move onward and upward on the socioeconomic ladder. By moving into the EHL in Mount Laurel, Jersey, low- and moderate-income families from throughout the region were able to trade inferior housing in high-poverty, predominantly minority, city neighborhoods for well-appointed town houses located in an affluent white suburb. In doing so, they dramatically lowered their exposure to social disorder and violence and reduced the frequency with which they experienced negative life events; and these benefits did not come at the cost of social interactions with family members or access to essential services. As a bonus, evidence suggests that residents may even have experienced an increase in interaction with neighbors as a result of the move.
Affordable Housing
Authors: Massey Douglas S. , Albright Len , Casciano Rebecca , Derickson Elizabeth , Kinsey David N.
Published: May 2020

This chapter reviews the foregoing results and traces out their implications for public policy and for social theory. It argues that neighborhood circumstances do indeed have profound consequences for individual and family well-being and that housing mobility programs constitute an efficacious way both to reduce poverty and to lower levels of racial and class segregation in metropolitan America. Whatever the precise reason for its success, the Ethel Lawrence Homes (EHL) offers a proof of concept for the further development of affordable family housing, both as a social policy for promoting racial and class integration in metropolitan America and as a practical program for achieving poverty alleviation and economic mobility in society at large. Results very clearly show that affordable housing for low- and moderate-income minority families can be built within an affluent white suburban environment without imposing significant costs on the host community or its residents, while simultaneously increasing the economic independence of project residents and improving educational achievement among their children, all with little or no cost to taxpayers in general. It is a win-win prospect for all concerned.
The Contentious Public Sphere
Authors: Lei Ya-Wen
Published: May 2020

Since the mid-2000s, public opinion and debate in China have become increasingly common and consequential, despite the ongoing censorship of speech and regulation of civil society. How did this happen? This book shows how the Chinese state drew on law, the media, and the Internet to further an authoritarian project of modernization, but in so doing, inadvertently created a nationwide public sphere in China—one the state must now endeavor to control. The book examines the influence this unruly sphere has had on Chinese politics and the ways that the state has responded. It shows that the development of the public sphere in China has provided an unprecedented forum for citizens to influence the public agenda, demand accountability from the government, and organize around the concepts of law and rights. It demonstrates how citizens came to understand themselves as legal subjects, how legal and media professionals began to collaborate in unexpected ways, and how existing conditions of political and economic fragmentation created unintended opportunities for political critique, particularly with the rise of the Internet. The emergence of this public sphere—and its uncertain future—is a pressing issue with important implications for the political prospects of the Chinese people. The book offers new possibilities for thinking about the transformation of state–society relations.
The Rise of a Nationwide Contentious Public Sphere
Authors: Lei Ya-Wen
Published: May 2020

This chapter establishes the starting point: the rise of a nationwide contentious public sphere in China, a development which can be traced to the mid-2000s. Here, the chapter aim to address challenges and questions regarding the rise of public opinion in the Internet age. It also seeks to gauge how public opinion has been affected by the Chinese state's sweeping attacks on the Internet and various actors, such as lawyers and journalists, since 2013. Tracing the historical patterns of public opinion in the People's Republic of China (PRC) is a formidable task given the compounded difficulty of finding direct measurement and longitudinal data. Examining reports regarding public opinion in the People's Daily as well as interview data related to that coverage provides one way to access and assess historical patterns of this otherwise elusive phenomenon.
The Chinese State’s Turn to Law and Rights
Authors: Lei Ya-Wen
Published: May 2020

This chapter illuminates the contentious culture and practices based on the law and rights, discussing why and how law and rights became a critical part of China's political culture and a central theme in China's contentious public sphere. First, the chapter briefly situates the PRC government's turn to law and rights, as well as the rise of legal and rights consciousness, in a longer historical context. Then it traces how a series of problems that emerged following the Cultural Revolution motivated the government's turn to law and rights, as well as its campaign to transform Chinese people into legal subjects. Finally, the chapter describes law dissemination on the ground and its consequences. Because the chapter serves to explain the rise of China's contentious public sphere in the post-2005 period, the focus is primarily on developments in China's legal system before the mid-2000s.
An Emerging Online Public
Authors: Lei Ya-Wen
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on the emergence of an online public in China and delves into its relationship with the party-state and various intermediary actors, as well as its interaction with legal and media institutions. It argues that netizens' everyday practices and participation in public opinion incidents facilitated the rise of contentious culture and China's contentious public sphere. Because the late 2000s were critical to the rise of an online public and the contentious public sphere, the analysis focuses mostly on this period. To depict a more comprehensive picture of Chinese netizens, the chapter first draws on statistical data to describe their demographic background, social networks, political attitudes, and political behavior. Next, it describes their everyday practices and participation in public opinion incidents. It then examines the case study of a public opinion incident involving food safety, and shows how netizens interacted with the Chinese party-state and various intermediary actors to make what happened a “public opinion incident.” Finally, the chapter draws on in-depth interviews with ordinary citizens to understand how netizens' everyday practices and participation in public opinion incidents contribute to politicization.
The Chinese State Strikes Back
Authors: Lei Ya-Wen
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses how the Chinese state has strategically responded to a rising contentious public sphere in China. Throughout, the chapter highlights the novelty and significance of these developments. The emergence of a contentious public sphere in China is a remarkable event—one that warrants further investigation precisely because its future remains so unclear. The chapter focuses on the Xi Jinping's leadership techniques and their consequences. It also compares the rationalities of rule underpinning his and the previous administration as it helps to make sense of why the Xi regime has been so aggressive in its attempt to curb the contentious public sphere.
Introduction
Authors: Miller-Idriss Cynthia
Published: May 2020

This introductory chapter discusses the emergence of the extremist commercial market and how it has coincided with one of the most significant waves of far right popularity in Europe in recent memory. The past several years have witnessed a steady increase in far right wing politics and social movements across Europe. Such protests and violent episodes exist in a context in which far right, nationalist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, and racist rhetoric and discourse has risen across Europe. These developments pose significant challenges for countries that have spent decades rebuilding democratic societies in the post-World War II era and have firmly committed to policies and practices that protect pluralistic communities. Academics and policy makers have struggled to understand the diverse causes and dynamics that have made the far right so appealing for so many people—that appear, in other words, to have made the extreme more mainstream.
Global Symbols, Local Bans
Authors: Miller-Idriss Cynthia
Published: May 2020

This chapter analyzes symbols borrowed from non-German movements and global or pan-Aryan extremists. Here, the chapter also includes the appropriation of nonextremist products that have been assigned new meaning as well as symbols and codes that are in languages other than German. The chapter highlights the multivocality of far right symbols that are simultaneously nationalist and global. It suggests that this multivocality is further amplified by the ironies of far right youth deployment of non-German symbols, while simultaneously adhering to anti-immigrant sentiments or enacting violence against ethnic and racial minorities in the name of the German nation. The chapter draws both on an analysis of images and of young people's interpretation of “global” symbols deployed in the commercialized products to argue that far right ideologies have broadened, in the global era, beyond (mere) national borders. It suggests that there are parallels for how other geographically dispersed extremist ideologies—from Islamist extremism to ecoterrorism—might mobilize followers across national and linguistic boundaries. The chapter also analyzes legal disputes about the bans and examine youth reactions to school bans of particular symbols and codes as well as teachers' discussions of the enforcement of those bans. Ultimately, it argues that banning policies tend to backfire, further contributing to the game-playing aspect of code modification that make the symbols appealing in the first place.
Soldier, Sailor, Rebel, Rule Breaker
Authors: Miller-Idriss Cynthia
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on how youth fashion and style serve as markers and expressions of belonging and resistance in ways that mutually reinforce masculinity and nationalism. The chapter shows that style is deeply personal and intentional for young people. While research on young women has long discussed issues of body image, the interview data discussed here shows that clothing choices are also embedded in body image and in conceptions of masculinity for young men. The chapter focuses in particular on two emotional articulations of masculinity that are heavily marketed through the products: the desire for male comradeship and belonging, and the urge to express resistance, frustration, and anger at mainstream society. It also shows how the products idealize male strength and physicality, drawing on muscular, tattooed Viking warriors with inflated biceps and hypermasculine models that may appeal to adolescent males who feel pressured to conform to scripted ideals about appropriate masculine behavior and physique. Hypermasculine symbols like Viking gods thus become intertwined with youth fantasies of a romantic, pure, and untroubled past in ways that may help them navigate the transition to adult life and uncertain labor markets.
Introduction
Authors: Vogel David
Published: May 2020

This introductory chapter provides a background of California's geography. California's nickname “The Golden State” evokes a distinctive and unusually beautiful natural environment. Throughout its history, California's natural resources have been an important economic asset, with the state benefiting from its mountains of gold and silver, rapidly flowing rivers, thick forests, deposits of oil, and fertile agricultural lands. While its economy has since diversified, California remains the nation's largest agricultural producer and its third-largest oil producer. Compared to all other states as well as the federal government, California has been a national leader in regulatory policymaking on issues ranging from forestry management, scenic land protection, air pollution, and coastal zone management to energy efficiency and global climate change. Its distinctive geography, high degree of citizen mobilization, business support for many environmental measures, and steadily growing administrative capacity have produced a continuous stream of environmental policy innovations in multiple areas over a long period of time. This book draws upon these policies to explain why this particular state has consistently led the United States in adopting new environmental regulations and why being “greener” has become a central part of California's political identity.
Protecting the Land
Authors: Vogel David
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses the efforts to protect Yosemite and the sequoias in the Sierras in the nineteenth century and then turns to the more heated conflicts over the fate of the coastal redwoods. The roots of California's tradition of civic mobilization lie in nature protection. This tradition began with the efforts of a few prominent individuals—including John Muir, Horace Greeley, and Frederick Olmsted—and then became institutionalized in the upper-middle-class Sierra and Sempervirens clubs and the predominantly upper-class Save-the-Redwoods League. Broader grassroots citizen mobilization played a critical role in campaigns to return control of Yosemite to the federal government, expand the size of and increase the funding for state parks, and protect endangered sequoias in the Sierras. The state's administrative capacity to protect California's scenic environment was initially limited, paralleling its inability to regulate hydraulic mining during the mid-nineteenth century. However, this capacity subsequently expanded through the establishment of institutions such as the State Board of Agriculture, the State Forestry Commission, and the State Parks Commission.
Protecting California’s Coast
Authors: Vogel David
Published: May 2020

This chapter begins by exploring the conflicts over Southern California's beaches and coastal areas and then turns to efforts to protect the San Francisco Bay and the entire Pacific coast. In addition to its aesthetic value and opportunities for recreation, the coast is a major economic resource. It enhances the value of property located on or near it, and the coastal area also contains substantial deposits of oil. Precisely because the coast is a scarce and valuable resource with so many competing uses, protecting it, like the coastal redwoods, has been highly contentious. On one important dimension, the dynamics of two of the important cases described in this chapter depart from the book's explanatory framework. The campaigns to establish the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, the world's first coastal protection agency, as well as the more sweeping California Coastal Commission, received no business support. In both cases, the interests of business were not divided. Rather, their creation was made possible by extensive citizen mobilization, an outcome that reveals the important role played by public support for environmental protection in California beginning in the middle of the twentieth century.
Managing Water Resources
Authors: Vogel David
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines California's water management projects, which represent an important exception to its leadership in the area of environmental protection. California's approach to water management is distinctive from its other environmental policies in three important respects. First, the threats to the state's aquatic environment came from government, not business. Second, with the notable exception of the battle over the damming and flooding of Hetch Hetchy around the turn of the century, until recently neither conservationists nor environmentalists challenged California's wide-ranging water management initiatives, despite the fact that many had deleterious environmental consequences. Third, historically, business interests were not divided with regard to what to do (or not do) with California's water. Both agricultural and urban commercial interests were united in their strong support for the continued expansion of the state's hydraulic infrastructure. Thus, in this case, the public and business were on the same side. As was the case with the protection of forests and scenic areas, the federal government has also played an important role in shaping California's approach to water management. The federal government's initial legal backing of and subsequent financial support for the state's water management system has been critical in promoting the exploitation of not only the state's but the region's water resources.
Protecting Air Quality
Authors: Vogel David
Published: May 2020

This chapter looks at the efforts to protect California's air quality. Public and business demands for automobile control in the United States originated in Los Angeles, and pollution controls for motor vehicles were essentially initiated by the state of California. Following a successful national political campaign that pitted the interests of California against the nation's automotive manufacturers, in 1967, Congress allowed California—and initially only California—to issue its own vehicle emissions standards. Thanks to the unique pollution problems of Los Angeles, the United States became and remains the only country to have two distinctive mobile-source pollution control standards. Many of the themes described throughout this book are illustrated in this chapter. These include the importance of both citizen mobilization and business support for stronger environmental regulations and the progressive development of the state's regulatory capacity, from the creation of the Smoke and Fumes Commission in Los Angeles in 1945 to the organization of air pollution control districts in 1947 and finally the establishment in 1968 of the California Air Resources Board.
Energy Efficiency and Climate Change
Authors: Vogel David
Published: May 2020

This chapter describes how, for four decades, California has been at the forefront of national efforts to improve energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. These initiatives began with policies to reduce energy use in order to avoid the construction of additional power plants and went on to include progressively more stringent energy efficiency standards and renewable energy mandates, additional curbs on automotive emissions, and a cap-and-trade program designed to reduce statewide greenhouse gas emissions. The emergence and expansion of these efforts demonstrates the importance of the factors that have shaped environmental policy innovations in other areas. At the same time, these policies are also distinct from those described in the previous chapters. First, they developed more incrementally, with some backsliding, much conflict, and frequent compromises. Second, some of their policy triggers—most notably, the 1973 energy crisis and California's 2000–2001 energy deregulation fiasco—were unrelated to environmental risks or threats. Third, their scope, diversity, and economic impact have been more substantial than those of the state's regulations protecting land use, coastal areas, and automotive emissions. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, in marked contrast to the state's other environmental policy threats, California cannot protect itself from the risks of global climate change. This means that the state has a critical stake in promoting a “California effect” that will encourage other political jurisdictions both in and outside the United States to also restrict their greenhouse gas emissions.
California’s Regulatory Leadership: Broader Implications
Authors: Vogel David
Published: May 2020

This concluding chapter reviews the key themes of the book and explores some of the broader implications of this analysis of California's regulatory leadership. Three points are particularly critical: the importance of the local dimension of environmental policies, the role of business in environmental politics, and the limits of environmental regulation. The chapter then discusses the increasingly important role states are playing in environmental protection in the United States and shows how California has economically benefited from its environmental policy leadership. One important reason why California has been able to consistently adopt more stringent regulations than those of the federal government and other states is that many of its improvements in local and state environmental quality have been a source of competitive advantage. The improvements it has made in air quality—most notably in Los Angeles—its protection of the trees in the Sierras and along the Pacific, and its land use controls along the coast and around the San Francisco Bay have all made California a more attractive place to move to, invest in, and visit.
Introduction
Authors: Offer Avner , Söderberg Gabriel
Published: May 2020

This introductory chapter considers the historical trend in the field of economics. Economists are among the few who aspire to tell society how it should manage. They rarely speak with a single voice, but that does not diminish their confidence. Society treats them with bafflement and respect. As such, the chapter examines the extent of their expertise and how they have come about it. It asks where their authority comes from and how far it is justified. After all, economic theorizing may be speculative, but its impact is powerful and real. Since the 1970s, it has been associated with a large historical trend, the ‘market turn’ associated with the rising ascendancy of market liberalism, a political and social movement that (like economics) holds up buying and selling as the norm for human relations and for social organization. In this light, the chapter considers how much influence the field of economics exerted over this ‘market turn’ and whether or not it was an improvement from previous models.
Bitter Roots: Finance and Social Democracy between the Wars
Authors: Offer Avner , Söderberg Gabriel
Published: May 2020

This chapter explains the history and context behind the origins of the Nobel Prize in economics. When founded in 1968, the Nobel Prize in economics was a delayed artefact of the quest to understand and control financial and business cycles in the twentieth century. Like the original Nobel Prizes, it was endowed from the bounty of a single benefactor, in this case the governor of the Riksbank, Sweden's central bank. While Alfred Nobel's motivation was sublime, and the money came out of his will, the chain of causes for the economics prize was something of a farce, and was paid for by Swedish taxpayers. How it came about cannot be separated from what it is about, and the context is more telling than the prize itself. It was a belated incident in one of the central plots of modern history — the distributional struggle between the owners of wealth and the rest of society. In an ironic twist, this late-coming Nobel was authorized by Swedish Social Democracy in the course of its long stand-off with Swedish capitalism, in the belief that it did not matter. But it did.
The Riksbank Endows a Nobel Prize
Authors: Offer Avner , Söderberg Gabriel
Published: May 2020

This chapter shows how the Swedish economy during the mid-twentieth century aided in the formation of a Nobel Prize in economics. During the 1950s, the forces of sound money in Sweden had become restive. When inflation began to rise, the choice appeared to be between full employment and housebuilding on the one side, or price stability on the other. The Nobel Prize was an indirect and unintended outcome of this dilemma. Unlike most central banks between the wars, the Riksbank was the bank of Parliament and belonged to the nation. After the war, low interest rates were imposed by government on the bank (as in the United States and Britain). In Sweden, the main reason was to keep housing credit cheap. The central bank was made to purchase government and mortgage bonds.
Does Economics have a Political Bias?
Authors: Offer Avner , Söderberg Gabriel
Published: May 2020

This chapter considers whether or not the economics prize has a political bias. Counting journal citations illuminates the main clusters of economic authority, the pulse of economic opinion and thought, the reputations of particular individuals, and Nobel selection strategy. The Nobel selectors sought a middle ground between the ideological left and right, but veered rightwards towards the end of Assar Lindbeck's long chairmanship (1980–1994), in line with his strident interventions in Swedish politics. They moved back to the centre shortly after his departure. In contrast, surveys of economists' opinions taken over the same years show a two-thirds majority among American and European economists in favour of Social Democratic norms, and a third strongly opposed.
Nobel Economics and Social Democracy
Authors: Offer Avner , Söderberg Gabriel
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses two approaches to the economic balancing act of ‘satisfaction now’ and ‘satisfaction later’. How to manage this trade-off is what largely divides neoclassical economics from Social Democracy. In both approaches, people are ‘forward looking’. In economics, the future has a value in the present. The individual makes a choice that will maximize this present value. But in order to do this, the future needs to be known, and general equilibrium economics assumes that it is known: preferences, products, quantities, prices, everything. In contrast, Social Democracy has worked to secure the future by means of collective action, initially through trade unions, and then by means of parliamentary democracy. Social Democracy acts for those whose prior endowments are modest, with no boost from inheritance, ability, or luck. Their future is uncertain and they are always at risk.
Swedosclerosis or Pseudosclerosis? Sweden in the 1980s
Authors: Offer Avner , Söderberg Gabriel
Published: May 2020

This chapter considers the state of Swedish economics in the 1980s. Between 1976 and 1982, Sweden suffered a sequence of economic buffetings. Government expenditure rose to more than 60 percent of GDP, and public employment embraced one-third of the workforce. In response, business flung itself into massive protest, setting up think tanks which published massively, agitating in parliament, the press, and even in the streets. The discipline of economics mobilized too. Assar Lindbeck cranked up criticism of his old party, and finally resigned from it in 1982 over the wage-fund issue, a few weeks before the election. But in defiance of his forebodings, the eight years of Social Democratic government after 1982 were economically more successful than the previous six under centre-right (‘bourgeois’) governments: inflation fell most of the time, output increased, and unemployment stayed low.
Assessing Uncertainty
Authors: Origgi Gloria
Published: May 2020

This chapter introduces a set of tools from the social sciences, including social capital theory, the theory of networks, and the sociology of hierarchies. It explains how the mechanisms designed to evaluate reputations function and what makes them reliable. It also focuses on the assessment and reliability of reputations. People emit signals meant to convince others of the genuineness of their reputations. Similarly, all things, objects, ideas, and indeed everything that points beyond appearances to hidden qualities, emit signals that inform people more or less credibly that certain qualities really exist. The chapter also explains that reputation is the result not only of strategic positioning but also of the way in which such positioning is perceived by others.
The Paradox of the “Top Specialist” and the Heuristics of Reputation
Authors: Origgi Gloria
Published: May 2020

This chapter contains a critical analysis of people's faith in experts. It presents many biases that influence and distort people's perception of the reputation of others. It also examines the heuristics that influence people's perceptions and lead them to classify accurately or inaccurately a person or object within a social network. Reputation can never be taken for granted and always creates uncertainty and anxiety. This is because social position is always precarious and can never be objectively determined. The chapter also distinguishes the “good” from the “bad” uses of reputation in order to develop a proper epistemology of reputation. The objective is to identify a set of normative and descriptive instruments that can be used to classify the heuristics and establish some sort of criteria, along the lines of the classical epistemological tradition in order to distinguish between the rules of inference that place too much or too little trust in the reputations of others.
Information and Reputation
Authors: Origgi Gloria
Published: May 2020

This chapter contains case studies of the epistemology of reputation and its implications through the Web. It talks about how people use the reputation of both humans and things to extract information from the world around them. This chapter provides a “cognitive” approach to reputation, focusing on how it is used to understand surroundings. It explores the epistemological role of reputation in three pivotal areas of cognitive life: the circulation of information, the training of taste, and the construction of knowledge. When people first come into contact with a new domain of learning, their access to facts is inevitably determined by the opinions, values, and preferences of others.
Experts and Connoisseurs
Authors: Origgi Gloria
Published: May 2020

This chapter includes case studies of the way reputations are built in the wine market. It explains that wine provides a paradigm for the role played by reputation in introducing novices to a new domain of taste. It observes adult novices in encountering for the first time a new cultural sphere that requires them to make value judgments. By restricting the discussion of newcomers to adults, the chapter avoids the kind of biases associated with deference to intellectual authority in the education of children. Adults being schooled for the first time in the world of wines find themselves facing a cultural domain strongly structured by landmarks about which they initially know nothing.
Academic Reputation, or Voluntary Epistemic Servitude
Authors: Origgi Gloria
Published: May 2020

This chapter presents case studies of the way reputations are built at the university. If there is an institution that feeds on reputation, it is the academy. Prestige, notoriety, standing, and reputation reign supreme within its halls. Professors and scholars are not only more motivated by symbolic rewards than by economic interest. They also spend a great deal of time designing institutions whose primary purpose is the creation, maintenance, and evaluation of each other's reputation and eminence. Such rankings are sometimes even treated as if they were the most dependable hallmarks of the truth itself. The chapter shows how the very idea of an academic reputation changed radically after new systems for calibrating reputations came into their own.
Reputation in Democracies
Authors: Origgi Gloria
Published: May 2020

This chapter contains an attempt to understand the implications of reputation for epistemic life and public decisions. It explains the way people think about themselves and their role as informed citizens must adapt to a certain transformation. People need to develop new tools to govern their actions and the circulation of their opinions. The chapter connects the theme of the movie “Birdman” with reputation, which implies that what people say about others and about everything that exists provides the only available window through which we people come to know themselves and recognize the world. Most political and institutional decisions today are made in an irresponsible manner because based on the uncritical acceptance of potentially spurious indicators announcing that the reputation of a certain person or organization, for instance, is merited, even when no one has bothered to examine how such a conclusion was reached. The chapter ends by examining the impact of specific reputational signals and their power of seduction.
Building a Family
Authors: Clark Andrew E. , Flèche Sarah , Layard Richard , Powdthavee Nattavudh , Ward George
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines the sense of satisfaction and fulfillment most people gain from close personal relationships. Life-course data provide important evidence on this, although the chapter notes that for children, the question of close personal relationships is more nuanced. And as the chapter shows, human relationships at the most intimate level make a huge difference to a person's happiness. However, family history, in so far as it can be measured, contributes little toward explaining who becomes and remains partnered. This suggests that later interventions to help people's social skills may have as much a role to play as childhood interventions.
Schooling
Authors: Clark Andrew E. , Flèche Sarah , Layard Richard , Powdthavee Nattavudh , Ward George
Published: May 2020

This chapter investigates the impact of the different schools and teachers in the Avon area on the outcomes of the children they taught. It begins by investigating the role of the whole school in considering what difference it makes which school a child goes to. Here, primary and secondary schools have major effects on the emotional well-being of their children. The variation across schools in this regard is as large as the variation in their impact on academic performance. There is also a huge variation in the impact of individual primary school teachers on the emotional well-being and academic performance of their children. These effects of primary schools and teachers persist throughout the following five years and longer.
The Origins of Happiness
Authors: Clark Andrew E. , Flèche Sarah , Layard Richard , Powdthavee Nattavudh , Ward George
Published: May 2020

This chapter summarizes the main findings on what determines happiness. These are expressed in numerical form, because there is no way to compare the importance of different things except by using numbers. The chapter's measure of happiness throughout is life-satisfaction, measured on a scale of 0 to 10. That is, like all other estimates in this book, an average effect across many people, some of whom will suffer more and others less. But from a policy point of view the average is a good place to start. The chapter describes how these findings have been reached. It also illustrates the massive range of issues covered, with a few key findings about what determines happiness.
Our Thanks
Authors: Clark Andrew E. , Flèche Sarah , Layard Richard , Powdthavee Nattavudh , Ward George
Published: May 2020

This has been a long project involving many members of the Wellbeing Programme at the Centre for Economic Performance in the London School of Economics. We are extremely grateful to Nele Warrinnier and Warn Nuarpear Lekfuangfu, who were key members in its earlier phase. We are also grateful to Stephen Machin, Andrew Steptoe, and Camille Lassale for the chapters they have contributed, and to the Centre for Economic Performance, which continues to provide the perfect environment for purposeful research....
Reverse Mathematics
Authors: Stillwell John
Published: May 2020

Reverse mathematics is a new field that seeks to find the axioms needed to prove given theorems. Reverse mathematics began as a technical field of mathematical logic, but its main ideas have precedents in the ancient field of geometry and the early twentieth-century field of set theory. This book offers a historical and representative view, emphasizing basic analysis and giving a novel approach to logic. It concludes that mathematics is an arena where theorems cannot always be proved outright, but in which all of their logical equivalents can be found. This creates the possibility of reverse mathematics, where one seeks equivalents that are suitable as axioms. By using a minimum of mathematical logic in a well-motivated way, the book will engage advanced undergraduates and all mathematicians interested in the foundations of mathematics.