bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
How Ancient Europeans Saw the World
Authors: Wells Peter S.
Published: November 2017

The peoples who inhabited Europe during the two millennia before the Roman conquests had established urban centers, large-scale production of goods such as pottery and iron tools, a money economy, and elaborate rituals and ceremonies. Yet as this book argues, the visual world of these late prehistoric communities was profoundly different from those of ancient Rome's literate civilization and today's industrialized societies. Drawing on startling new research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology, the book reconstructs how the peoples of pre-Roman Europe saw the world and their place in it. It sheds new light on how they communicated their thoughts, feelings, and visual perceptions through the everyday tools they shaped, the pottery and metal ornaments they decorated, and the arrangements of objects they made in their ritual places—and how these forms and patterns in turn shaped their experience. The book offers a completely new approach to the study of Bronze Age and Iron Age Europe, and represents a major challenge to existing views about prehistoric cultures. It demonstrates why we cannot interpret the structures that Europe's pre-Roman inhabitants built in the landscape, the ways they arranged their settlements and burial sites, or the complex patterning of their art on the basis of what these things look like to us. Rather, we must view these objects and visual patterns as they were meant to be seen by the ancient peoples who fashioned them.
Eternal Love
Authors: Michalski Krzysztof
Published: November 2017

This chapter addresses the meaning of “eternal love.” This love is a trace of eternity. It is the presence of eternity in time. It is the revelation of a certain kind of “now”—the discovery of that “now” which signifies “always.” It is the suspension of time. If “now” means as much as “always,” the difference between “now” and “yesterday,” as well as “now” and “tomorrow”—and thus time itself—loses its meaning. Perhaps, the chapter speculates, in this way the human is connected to the divine. Maybe in this love, something more comes to the fore: a deep dimension of life as it is.
Introduction
Authors: Oliver J. Eric , Ha Shang E. , Callen Zachary
Published: November 2017

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to provide an answer to the question: “Who governs” America when Americans live in so many types of places and under so many types of government? It argues for the need to look beyond the forces that shape national politics and consider the factors that influence local politics, particularly local elections. By reexamining local government in terms of their size, scope, and bias, we can restate the question of “who governs” as a question of how does changing the size, scope, or bias of a small-scale democracy affect the ability of its citizens to govern themselves? Or, more importantly, to what extent does changing the size, scope, and bias of a municipality fundamentally alter the distribution of power and resources within a locality?
Who Runs for Local Office?
Authors: Oliver J. Eric , Ha Shang E. , Callen Zachary
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers the types of people who run for office and the types of campaigns they run. It examines the impact of factors such as personal ambition, civic responsibility, mobilizing issues, personal gain, and political indignation by looking at a large sample of local politicians (i.e., unsuccessful candidates and elected officials) from the greater Chicago metropolitan area. The small size, limited scope, and low bias of most Chicago-area municipal governments mean that these local politicians, like local voters, tend to be stakeholders in their communities. They are very concerned with issues of economic development and quality of life, yet are drawn into public affairs primarily from a sense of civic duty and an attachment to their towns. They are motivated less by ideology, partisanship, or even personal ambition, than by a public-spirited commitment to sustaining the quality of their communities.
Introduction
Authors: Paolo Malanima , Kander Astrid , Warde Paul
Published: November 2017

This book explores the role that energy has played in the economic history of Europe, highlighting the link between energy consumption and economic development. Using three industrial revolutions as the organizing principle, it shows that the path of the modern economy has not been a straightforward story of a constant rate of increase in the use of energy. Instead, the overall trajectory of energy use within Europe follows a logistic S-shaped curve. Three phases can be identified: the first phase, 1500–1800, was marked by little growth in overall energy consumption; the second phase, 1800–1970, is the Industrial Age, which saw explosive expansion in energy use, except during the World Wars and interwar period; the third period, 1970–2008, was marked by stabilization in energy consumption per capita. Based on these developments, the book considers the drivers of energy transitions as well as the economic efficiency of energy use.
Definitions and Concepts
Authors: Paolo Malanima , Kander Astrid , Warde Paul
Published: November 2017

This chapter defines some important concepts that are used in the book and which are relevant to energy in the economic context. It first considers energy consumption in the economic sense; here energy is defined as the capacity to perform work, useful for human beings, thanks to changes in the structure of matter or its position in space. The use of energy by humans has an opportunity cost, meaning that the time and resources allocated to using this energy could have been used differently. In the economic sense, energy consumption entails both private and social costs. The chapter proceeds by discussing primary sources of energy as opposed to secondary energy carriers; power; thermodynamic efficiency and energy productivity; the determinants of energy productivity; energy intensity; macro-, meso-, and micro-innovations; development blocks; market widening and market suction; energy expansion and energy saving; and dematerialization of growth.
Traditional Sources
Authors: Paolo Malanima , Kander Astrid , Warde Paul
Published: November 2017

This chapter focuses on traditional energy sources in Europe. It first provides an overview of energy sources and energy consumption in premodern Europe before discussing organic energy sources and agricultures, looking in particular at food demand, a global perspective on the European agriculture, intensification and population, working animals, animal power, forests, firewood consumption, and coal and peat as fuels. The chapter proceeds by considering three non-organic energy sources, namely: gunpowder, water, and wind. Finally, it describes seven long-run propositions regarding Europe's energy system in an economic context: predominance of reproducible sources; energy supply and demand are closely related to climate; transport costs are a major barrier to growth; the economy is limited by low power; high energy intensity and low energy productivity; a diffuse geography of energy; and higher European than non-European consumption of energy.
The Role of Energy in Twentieth-Century Economic Growth
Authors: Paolo Malanima , Kander Astrid , Warde Paul
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the role of energy in the economic growth of twentieth-century Europe. It considers the interrelationships of factors of production in order to identify the general features of a shared experience of growth, rather than to illuminate the local differences. The chapter first explains how development blocks contributed to GDP growth before discussing seven long-run propositions, including the strong growth of capital stock and catch-up with the leader of capital–GDP ratios; machinery increased more than GDP, labor, and other capital; and falling and converging energy intensity in the twentieth century. The chapter concludes with an overview of the link between energy intensity and economic structure. It argues that it was the third industrial revolution that was behind most of the increasing economic efficiency of energy consumption after the 1970s.
Epistemic Agency
Authors: Sosa Ernest
Published: November 2017

This chapter takes up ways in which the epistemic realm admits a kind of agency and how this bears on the performance normativity proper to that realm. It argues that epistemic normativity is just the special case of AAA (accurate, adroit, apt) normativity where the performances are epistemic performances, mainly beliefs. Performances with an aim fall under this AAA structure, according to which a performance will be accurate or successful only if it attains its aim. There must hence be such a thing as the aim of a performance. Performances of interest will then be restricted to those with an essential aim—the aim that defines a given performance as a particular endeavoring.
Contextualism
Authors: Sosa Ernest
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers the extent to which contextualism constitutes a further rival view in epistemology proper, and offers reasons to doubt that it is. Contextualism has gained center stage in epistemology mainly through its way with the skeptic, from the early days of “relevant alternatives” to more recent incarnations. Contextualism in epistemology concerns mainly threshold-setting mechanisms. The words involved, mainly the verb “to know” and its cognates, mark whether the subject lies above a threshold along one or more dimensions. While this chapter proceeds with an acceptance of the elements of contextualism, the chapter also enters some doubts about its implications for epistemology proper.
Propositional Experience
Authors: Sosa Ernest
Published: November 2017

This chapter presents an account of experiential states to which the AAA (accurate, adroit, apt) structure is applicable. It refers to four different ways in which our experience (apprehension) of sensa (sense data) might be direct. The directness could be causal, justificatory, inferential, or referential; the chapter dwells on each one with more detail. The crucial problem for the theory of sensa is how to defend its move beyond the first to the second stage. The chapter introduces a fourfold distinction among forms of awareness to approach the question of whether sensory experience can ever fail to be self-intimating, whether we can ever fail to be aware of some sensory experience that we are then anyhow undergoing.
The Fanciful World of Clio
Authors: Boldizzoni Francesco
Published: November 2017

Cliometrics has evolved into a literary genre having little to do with numbers in the sense of econometric testing, though a lot to do with the deductive stance of the new institutional economics and of rational choice theory. At times these two approaches, which are not completely compatible, coexist even in the same author's work, giving rise to a sort of analytic schizophrenia. This chapter analyzes the recent developments in economic history. From the standpoint of methodology, it shows the confusion between history and path dependence or presence of “multiple equilibria” in a predetermined deductive schema. It argues that underlying these trends is an ideological slant, whether conscious or unconscious, aimed at exalting values such as individualism and materialism, which are typical of certain segments of contemporary Western society, and at projecting them unduly onto the past.
The World we Have Lost
Authors: Boldizzoni Francesco
Published: November 2017

This chapter covers macroeconomic issues, including economic cycles, money, price levels, the nature of growth, and the historical roots of underdevelopment. It shows how the micro level is logically linked to the macro level. It also argues that the crisis of the French-style economic history in the past twenty years is due more to French historians transferring their interest to cultural history. However, abandoning quantitative history in favor of the histoire des mentalités does not imply there is no room for economic history alongside the new political history and other aspects such as the history of the body and the history of death that were once considered eccentric.
Beautiful Game Theory
Authors: Palacios-Huerta Ignacio
Published: November 2017

A wealth of research in recent decades has seen the economic approach to human behavior extended over many areas previously considered to belong to sociology, political science, law, and other fields. Research has also shown that economics can provide insight into many aspects of sports, including soccer. This book uses soccer to test economic theories and document novel human behavior, thus illuminating economics through the world's most popular sport. The book offers unique and often startling insights into game theory and microeconomics, covering topics such as mixed strategies, discrimination, incentives, and human preferences. It also looks at finance, experimental economics, behavioral economics, and neuroeconomics. The book provides rich data sets and environments that shed light on universal economic principles in interesting and useful ways. It is essential reading for students, researchers, and sports enthusiasts as it shows what soccer can do for economics.
Vernon Smith Meets Messi in the Laboratory
Authors: Palacios-Huerta Ignacio
Published: November 2017

This chapter focuses on zero-sum experimental games where players are predicted to choose probability mixtures. Whereas perfectively competitive games do not represent the entire universe of strategic games involving mixed strategies, they are considered a “vital cornerstone”and can be regarded as the branch of game theory with the most solid theoretical foundation. Soccer has three unique features that make it especially suitable for this purpose: (1) professional soccer players face a simple strategic interaction that is governed by very detailed rules: a penalty kick; (2) the formal structure of this interaction can be reproduced in the laboratory; and (3) when professional soccer players from European leagues play this game in the field, their behavior is consistent with the equilibrium predictions of the theory. These three distinct characteristics allow us to study whether the skills and heuristics that players may have developed in the field can be transferred to the laboratory, and hence whether laboratory findings are reliable for predicting field behavior in these strategic situations.
Lessons for Experimental Design
Authors: Palacios-Huerta Ignacio
Published: November 2017

Chapter 2 showed that when the exact question being asked is mirrored in a laboratory experiment and the population being studied is the same as in the field, the outcomes from the experiment can be just as clear and informative. This result suggests that when either the exact question being asked is not mirrored or the population being studied differs, the outcomes from the experiment probably do not parallel those observed in the field. This chapter uses this insight to draw four lessons for experimental design using the games, methods, and results from the previous chapters. Among these lessons are that Major League Soccer players would not be an appropriate pool of subjects to conduct the type of study implemented in Chapter 2, and that a zero-sum situation played among friends does not represent the way subjects interact in the field.
Mapping Minimax in the Brain
Authors: Palacios-Huerta Ignacio
Published: November 2017

This chapter is concerned with mixed strategies. Using fMRI techniques, it peers inside the brain when experimental subjects play the penalty kick game. As we have noted already, minimax is considered a cornerstone of interactive decision-making analysis. More importantly, the minimax strategies have not been mapped in the brain previously by studying simultaneously the two testable implications of equilibrium. The results show increased activity in various bilateral prefrontal regions during the decision period. Two inferior prefrontal nodes appear to jointly contribute to the ability to optimally play the study's asymmetric zero-sum penalty kick game by ensuring the appropriate equating of payoffs across strategies and the generating of random choices within the game, respectively. This evidence contributes to the neurophysiological literature studying competitive games.
The Emancipation of Europe's Muslims
Authors: Laurence Jonathan
Published: November 2017

This book traces how governments across Western Europe have responded to the growing presence of Muslim immigrants in their countries over the past fifty years. Drawing on hundreds of in-depth interviews with government officials and religious leaders in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Morocco, and Turkey, the book challenges the widespread notion that Europe's Muslim minorities represent a threat to liberal democracy. The book documents how European governments in the 1970s and 1980s excluded Islam from domestic institutions, instead inviting foreign powers like Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and Turkey to oversee the practice of Islam among immigrants in European host societies. But since the 1990s, amid rising integration problems and fears about terrorism, governments have aggressively stepped up efforts to reach out to their Muslim communities and incorporate them into the institutional, political, and cultural fabrics of European democracy. The book places these efforts—particularly the government-led creation of Islamic councils—within a broader theoretical context and gleans insights from government interactions with groups such as trade unions and Jewish communities at previous critical junctures in European state-building. By examining how state–mosque relations in Europe are linked to the ongoing struggle for religious and political authority in the Muslim-majority world, the book sheds light on the geopolitical implications of a religious minority's transition from outsiders to citizens. This book offers a much-needed reassessment that foresees the continuing integration of Muslims into European civil society and politics in the coming decades.
Conclusion
Authors: Tomasi John
Published: November 2017

This book has discussed market democracy as a liberal research program and free market fairness as a morally superior account of liberal justice. It has explained the market democratic regime's deliberative approach to the questions of political life and its support for a thick conception of economic liberty that is on par with the other basic liberal rights and freedoms. It has shown how free market fairness advances capitalistic policies under the banner of social justice and how market democracy highlights the moral attractions of the market-based approach to social order. The book has also explored market democracy's differences from classical liberalism, high liberalism, and libertarianism with respect to interpretations of issues such as economic liberty and social or distributive justice. In this conclusion, the book reflects on free market fairness and its relation to traditional American values.
External Validity Reconsidered
Authors: Mutz Diana C.
Published: November 2017

This chapter talks about the significance of generalizability. Experimentalists often go to great lengths to argue that student or other convenience samples are not problematic in terms of external validity. Likewise, a convincing case for causality is often elusive with observational research, no matter how stridently one might argue to the contrary. The conventional wisdom is that experiments are widely valued for their internal validity, and experiments lack external validity. These assumptions are so widespread as to go without question in most disciplines, particularly those emphasizing external validity, such as political science and sociology. But observational studies, such as surveys, are still supposed to be better for purposes of maximizing external validity because this method allows studying people in real world settings.
Introduction
Authors: Berger Ben
Published: November 2017

This book examines what it calls democracy's political attention deficit and the paradox of civic engagement. It calls for an end to the umbrella term “civic engagement,” arguing that it confuses more than it illuminates. More specifically, it contends that we should put civic to rest while coming to grips with engagement. Civic simply means that a subject pertains to citizenship or a city, so it can easily be subsumed under the rubric of political without any loss of conceptual clarity. Engagement entails a combination of attention and energy (or activity), the two primary components of political governance. While seeking to consign the phrase “civic engagement” to exile or obsolescence, the book stresses the value of political engagement by drawing on the views of Hannah Arendt and Alexis de Tocqueville. Prescriptions for pragmatic democratic reform are given; for example, reforming our political institutions so that they channel existing political attention and energy more efficiently.
Conclusion
Authors: Berger Ben
Published: November 2017

This book has argued that civic engagement is a hopelessly confusing term and therefore should give way to political, social, and moral engagement. It has also critiqued idealistic conceptions of participatory democracy for aiming for the Full Monty: high and widespread political engagement among all citizens, all (or much) of the time, in spite of citizens' long-standing inclinations toward the opposite. Some idealistic theories of democracy, the Full Monty versions, have asked too much of citizens' tastes, attention, and energy. This concluding chapter proposes three approaches to improving democracy that conform to Alexis de Tocqueville's premises and insights: changing our approach to politics and political mobilization, changing ourselves, and changing our institutions.
Unsettling Judgment
Authors: Casson Douglas John
Published: November 2017

This chapter traces the breakdown of the medieval vocabulary of justification that was characterized by certain knowledge on one hand (scientia) and probable belief on the other (opinio). Terms associated with scientia such as “certainty” and “demonstration” came under intense attack by nominalists such as William of Ockham in the fourteenth century, and these nominalist suspicions were reinforced by the discovery and dissemination of ancient skeptical writings a century later. Whereas terms associated with opinio such as “probability” and “authority” were battered by the forces of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. In the place of a shared language of cognitive appraisal, Europeans encountered multiple and contending methods of justification.
Authorizing Judgment
Authors: Casson Douglas John
Published: November 2017

This chapter illustrates how Locke's Second Treatise can be read as a revolutionary call for subjects to employ this new notion of probable judgment. In order to teach his readers to be active, critical, and even revolutionary members of the polity, Locke sets out to convince them not only that they are capable of making crucial determinations concerning the limits of political power, but also that they are obligated to do so. His account of the state of nature is not simply a heuristic device illustrating an abstract theory of government, but an attempt to provide tangible support to his contention that individuals have a natural right of judgment. Along the way he seeks to guide his readers in the proper exercise of this capacity by showing them the reasonableness of limiting their judgment to the concrete, visceral experiences of neediness and injury.
Riemann Surfaces, Coverings, and Hypergeometric Functions
Authors: Tretkoff Paula
Published: November 2017

This chapter deals with Riemann surfaces, coverings, and hypergeometric functions. It first considers the genus and Euler number of a Riemann surface before discussing Möbius transformations and notes that an automorphism of a Riemann surface is a biholomorphic map of the Riemann surface onto itself. It then describes a Riemannian metric and the Gauss-Bonnet theorem, which can be interpreted as a relation between the Gaussian curvature of a compact Riemann surface X and its Euler characteristic. It also examines the behavior of the Euler number under finite covering, along with finite subgroups of the group of fractional linear transformations PSL(2, C). Finally, it presents some basic facts about the classical Gauss hypergeometric functions of one complex variable, triangle groups acting discontinuously on one of the simply connected Riemann surfaces, and the hypergeometric monodromy group.
The Rise of Private Regulation in the World Economy
Authors: Büthe Tim , Mattli Walter
Published: November 2017

This book examines the delegation of regulatory authority from governments to a single international private-sector body by focusing on three powerful global private regulators, or focal rule-making institutions: the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). The book shows how the simultaneous privatization and internationalization of governance is driven, in part, by governments' lack of requisite technical expertise, financial resources, or flexibility to deal expeditiously with ever more complex and urgent regulatory tasks. Its main argument is that technical expertise and financial resources are necessary but not sufficient conditions for successful involvement in global private-sector standardization. To make its case, the book explores global private regulation in global financial and product markets.
Institutional Complementarity Theory
Authors: Büthe Tim , Mattli Walter
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the distributional consequences of shifting rule-making to the international private and nonmarket sphere. In particular, it asks who wins, who loses, and why when international standard-setting takes place in private focal rule-making institutions. It considers what is distinctive about the politics of rule-making in these transnational institutions, what defines power in these organizations, and how it operates. The chapter answers these questions using institutional complementarity theory. It first provides an overview of the institutional setting of nonmarket private governance, focusing on actors and sources of power, before discussing institutional complementarity, effective representation of domestic interests at the international level, and timeliness of involvement and information. It shows that domestic standardization systems characterized by institutional hierarchy facilitate the accommodation of the new institutional layers of standardization activity above the national level.
The Politics of Setting Standards for Financial Reporting
Authors: Büthe Tim , Mattli Walter
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the political dimensions of setting standards for global financial reporting. Drawing on the results of an international business survey, conducted among hundreds of chief financial officers and other senior financial managers of companies listed on the main stock exchanges in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the chapter asks whether institutional fragmentation of accounting governance in Europe impedes the effective aggregation of European interests and their projection onto the international stage, while the close institutional fit between the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) and the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) significantly facilitates the representation of American interests. It shows that U.S. firms are considerably more successful than their European counterparts when they try to influence international financial reporting standards.
Private Regulators in Global Product Markets
Authors: Büthe Tim , Mattli Walter
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the role of private regulators in global product markets, with particular emphasis on institutional structure and institutional complementarity in product regulation. It first provides an overview of how the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) became, for most industries, the focal rule-making institutions for setting international product standards. It then considers the global institutional structure and decision-making procedures before describing the domestic structures in Europe and the United States. It shows that the institutional structure for setting product standards in the United States is characterized by institutional fragmentation and contestation among competing standard-setters. In Europe, by contrast, the domestic standard-setting institutions are characterized by a high degree of coordination and organizational hierarchy.
Tracing the Market
Authors: Grafe Regina
Published: November 2017

This chapter talks about how historians and economists have distinct working definitions of market integration. On the one hand, historians of the early modern period tend to think about market integration as a process in which agriculture and manufacturing directed largely at guaranteeing subsistence were increasingly replaced by specialized production that had to be sold on the market in return for other goods. Hence, market integration was intimately linked to changes not only in the commercialization of agricultural and manufacturing goods but also in their production and consumption patterns. On the other hand, economists tend to define market integration more narrowly through the “law of one price”: if markets are fully integrated between two locations then the price of tradable goods should be identical in both places.
The Tyranny of Distance
Authors: Grafe Regina
Published: November 2017

This chapter describes how Spain suffers from a particularly unforgiving geography by European standards. In terms of landmass it is smaller than France, but it has only two navigable rivers, the Ebro and the Guadalquivir, and even these become unnavigable barely 100 kilometers from the sea. To complicate things further, the central high plateau is separated from the coastlines in every direction by mountain ranges. It is thus hardly surprising that market integration in Spain was haphazard, slow, and regionally diverse in the early modern period. The chapter argues that Spain was just unlucky; its geography did not lend itself easily to the technologically available means of improving transport either on water or land. However, the extent to which unfavorable transport conditions contributed to Spain's overall predicament and restricted market integration is poorly understood.
Market Growth and Governance in Early Modern Spain
Authors: Grafe Regina
Published: November 2017

This chapter looks at how descriptions of Spain in the eighteenth century are intriguing for their accounts of perceived indolence, or more generally of a people who failed to take advantage “of their Climate and Situation.” Taken at face value, these observations convinced contemporaries and historians that Spain was simply producing less than it could have. Alleged idleness was a well-rehearsed theme in Europe's Protestant north whenever the mores of southern European papists (or non-Europeans, for that matter) were described. Travel writer Henry Swinburne argued that Spaniards worked fewer hours and days than he thought they ought to, and intuitively provided one possible explanation for such behavior: Spaniards simply did not believe they could benefit from higher levels of “industry,” that is, effort.
Center and Peripheries
Authors: Grafe Regina
Published: November 2017

This chapter illustrates how the empirical analysis of market and state has gone a long way to explain where the stumbling blocks in Spanish economic and political development were and why they stifled growth so significantly. There was path dependence in fragmented authority in Spain as elsewhere in Europe, but this was only part of the problem. Between roughly the late Middle Ages and the nineteenth century, overcoming divided authority was the essence of the process of European state-building. However, in Spain, the complex combination of institutional heritage and ideological underpinnings of rule made the process of eliminating at least some degree of divided authority especially slow and cumbersome, and a strong tradition of local autonomy remained part of what the compact between rulers and ruled was understood to be.
Introduction
Authors: Botticini Maristella , Eckstein Zvi
Published: November 2017

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Jews' transition into urban and skilled occupations. This transition was the outcome of a profound transformation of the Jewish religion after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, which shifted the religious leadership within the Jewish community and transformed Judaism from a cult based on ritual sacrifices in the temple to a religion whose main norm required every Jewish man to read and to study the Torah in Hebrew and to send his sons from the age of six or seven to primary school or synagogue to learn to do so. The implementation of this new religious norm during the Talmud era determined three major patterns in Jewish history: the growth and spread of literacy among the predominantly rural Jewish population, a comparative advantage in urban skilled occupations, and the voluntary diaspora of the Jews in search of worldwide opportunities in crafts, trade, commerce, moneylending, banking, finance, and medicine.
Were the Jews a Persecuted Minority?
Authors: Botticini Maristella , Eckstein Zvi
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the arguments set forth to explain why the Jews became a population of skilled craftsmen, traders, bankers, and physicians and why they created a worldwide urban diaspora. These arguments are grouped into two main categories: ones that highlight exogenous factors (discrimination, restrictions, persecutions, massacres) and ones that emphasize endogenous choices (voluntary self-segregation in order to maintain religious rites, voluntary migration to cities to preserve group identity). The chapter then presents the thesis that in a world populated by illiterate people, the ability to read and write contracts, business letters, and account books using a common alphabet gave the Jews a comparative advantage over other people. The Jews also developed a uniform code of law (the Talmud) and a set of institutions (rabbinic courts, the responsa) that fostered contract enforcement, networking, and arbitrage across distant locations. Thus, high levels of literacy and the existence of contract-enforcement institutions became the levers of the Jewish people.
Jews in the Talmud Era, 200–650
Authors: Botticini Maristella , Eckstein Zvi
Published: November 2017

This chapter shows that the implications of the economic theory in the previous chapter are consistent with what happened to the Jewish people during the five centuries following the destruction of the Second Temple. An impressive body of evidence from both the Talmud and archaeological discoveries indicates that during the Talmudic period, Jews in the Land of Israel and Mesopotamia began obeying the religious obligation to educate their sons. Indeed, a larger and larger proportion of Jewish farmers sent their sons to the primary schools located in or near synagogues. As for conversions, many Jewish farmers converted to Christianity during the Talmud era. By embracing Christianity, Jews who converted still maintained their core belief in the existence of one God and the pillar of the Written Torah but were no longer obliged to obey the religious laws and tenets of Judaism, including the costly norm requiring fathers to educate their sons.
From Farmers to Merchants, 750–1150
Authors: Botticini Maristella , Eckstein Zvi
Published: November 2017

This chapter studies how literate Jewish farmers abandoned farming and became small, urban populations of skilled craftsmen, shopkeepers, traders, money changers, moneylenders, scholars, and physicians. The literacy of the Jewish people, coupled with a set of contract-enforcement institutions developed during the five centuries after the destruction of the Second Temple, gave the Jews a comparative advantage in occupations such as crafts, trade, and moneylending—occupations that benefited from literacy, contract-enforcement mechanisms, and networking. Once the Jews were engaged in these occupations, they rarely converted, which is consistent with the fact that the Jewish population grew slightly from the seventh to the twelfth century. Subsequently, the establishment of the Muslim caliphates during the seventh and eighth centuries, and the concomitant vast urbanization and growth of manufacture and trade in the Middle East, acted as a catalyst for the massive transition of the Jews from farming to crafts and trade.
Educated Wandering Jews, 800–1250
Authors: Botticini Maristella , Eckstein Zvi
Published: November 2017

This chapter shows that once the Jews became literate, urban, and engaged in skilled occupations, they began migrating within the vast territory under Muslim rule—stretching from the Iberian Peninsula to India during the eighth through the twelfth centuries, and from the Byzantine Empire to western Europe via Italy and within western Europe in the ninth through the thirteenth centuries. In early medieval Europe, the revival of trade concomitant with the Commercial Revolution and the growth of an urban and commercial economy paralleled the vast urbanization and the growth of trade that had occurred in the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates four to five centuries earlier. The Jewish diaspora during the early Middle Ages was mainly the outcome of literate Jewish craftsmen, shopkeepers, traders, scholars, teachers, physicians, and moneylenders migrating in search of business opportunities to reap returns on their investment in literacy and education.
The Mongol Shock
Authors: Botticini Maristella , Eckstein Zvi
Published: November 2017

This chapter looks at the Mongol invasion of Persia and Mesopotamia, beginning in 1219 and culminating in the razing of Baghdad in 1258. The Mongol invasion of Persia and Mesopotamia contributed to the demise of the urban and commercial economy of the Abbasid Empire and brought the economies of Mesopotamia and Persia back to an agrarian and pastoral stage for a long period. As a consequence, a certain proportion of Persian, Mesopotamian, and then Egyptian, and Syrian Jewry abandoned Judaism—whose religious norms, especially the one requiring fathers to educate their sons, had once again become a heavy burden with no economic return—and converted to Islam. This process of conversions of Jews in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as episodes of persecutions, massacres, and plagues in these regions and in western Europe, explain why world Jewry reached its lowest level by the end of the fifteenth century.
1492 to Today
Authors: Botticini Maristella , Eckstein Zvi
Published: November 2017

This concluding chapter highlights some puzzles that punctuate Jewish history, from the mass expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492–97 to today. A growing number of scholars have been studying the long-term impact of institutions by illustrating that some contemporary economic patterns have been influenced by institutions that emerged centuries ago. This book contributes to this literature by showing that the transition of the Jews from farming into high-skill occupations has also been the outcome of the availability of contract-enforcement institutions shaped by the unique features of the Jewish religion. Meanwhile, social scientists have always been fascinated by the study of religion and by the influence religious values and norms may have on human behavior. Ultimately, the cultural values and social norms that Judaism fostered two millennia ago shaped the demographic and economic history of the Jewish people through today.
Introduction and Cosmological Background
Authors: Loeb Abraham , Furlanetto Steven R.
Published: November 2017

This chapter describes the essential aspects of the modern cosmological paradigm for understanding the formation of the first galaxies in the Universe. The basic question that cosmology attempts to answer is: What is the composition of the Universe and what initial conditions generated the observed structures in it? The first galaxies were shaped, more than any other class of astrophysical objects, by the pristine initial conditions and basic constituents of the Universe. This chapter shows how studying the formation process of the first galaxies could reveal unique evidence for new physics that has so far remained veiled in older galaxies by complex astrophysical processes.
Linear Growth of Cosmological Perturbations
Authors: Loeb Abraham , Furlanetto Steven R.
Published: November 2017

This chapter shows that, after cosmological recombination, the Universe had entered the “dark ages,” during which the relic cosmic microwave background (CMB) light from the Big Bang gradually faded away. During this “pregnancy” period (which lasted hundreds of millions of years), the seeds of small density fluctuations planted by inflation in the matter distribution grew until they eventually collapsed to make the first galaxies. In addition to the density evolution, the second key “initial condition” for galaxy formation is the temperature of the hydrogen and helium gas that had likewise collapsed into the first galaxies. Here, the chapter describes the first stages of these processes and introduces the methods conventionally used to describe the fluctuations. It follows the evolution of structure in the linear regime, when the perturbations are small.
Stellar Feedback and Galaxy Formation
Authors: Loeb Abraham , Furlanetto Steven R.
Published: November 2017

This chapter studies radiative, mechanical, and chemical feedback in the earliest gaseous clouds, taking up the thread of discussion in the previous chapter to consider the influences placed on the formation of second-generation stars. While the feedback effects are sufficiently complex that a complete description of them is well beyond the capabilities of present-day computer simulations, the general principles that underlie them are well known. Therefore, the chapter focuses on these principles and then briefly sketches the global picture. Feedback is important in all galaxies, and many of the principles that are discussed in this chapter apply on a much wider scale than just the first stars and galaxies.
The Reionization of Intergalactic Hydrogen
Authors: Loeb Abraham , Furlanetto Steven R.
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers how primordial gas was transformed to an ionized state by the first galaxies within merely hundreds of millions of years. It addresses this question by first describing the formation and evolution of galaxies during the cosmic dawn. The course of reionization—the process of transition from an atomic state back to constituent protons and electrons—of hydrogen gas can be determined by counting photons from all galaxies as a function of time. Both stars and black holes contribute ionizing photons, but the early Universe was dominated by small galaxies that, in the local Universe, had disproportionately small central black holes.
Other Probes of the First Galaxies
Authors: Loeb Abraham , Furlanetto Steven R.
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses several other ways to probe structures during the cosmic dawn. It first turns to secondary anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background, which are generated as the photons passed through gas during the cosmic dawn. Next, the chapter turns to diffuse backgrounds from the cosmic dawn, which typically include galactic emission lines, ranging from CO lines in the radio to the Lyman-α‎ line itself. Finally, the chapter observes that fossil structure from early galaxies remains in (or can be deduced from) the Milky Way or other nearby entities in the Local Group. This fossil structure includes the residual effects of feedback on the small satellite galaxies or globular clusters of the Milky Way, old low-mass stars that may have formed during the cosmic dawn and survive inside the Milky Way (or its halo), and remnant signatures of the early merger history of the Milky Way.
The Truth and Something But the Truth
Authors: Yablo Stephen
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers the question of why we should bother with partial truth now that we know, more or less, what partial truth is. Why make false statements with true bits in them, rather than asserting just the true bits? It suggests that there could be a Jamesian justification, or excuse, for speaking “the truth and something but the truth”—for what might be thought of as a kind of generalized hyperbole. The chapter then presents some possible examples, which may or may not turn out on closer consideration to work. They are meant to illustrate a kind of approach that is not on the standard menu of options.
Going On in the Same Way
Authors: Yablo Stephen
Published: November 2017

This chapter raises the following question: Who is right, the logician or the mysterian? Not the logician, it seems, for her recipe does not work; B→A is a terrible candidate for the role of A–B. No recipe could work, one might think, for we know of cases where B cannot be cleanly excised from A. What is the remainder supposed to be when Tom is red is subtracted from Tom is crimson, or Tom is red or green is subtracted from Tom is red? Not the mysterian either, for she thinks that a recipe is impossible, and we have attempted to give one. That being said, the logician is right, insofar as a remainder always exists. And the mysterian is right, insofar as A–B may not extend very far out of the Bregion. Possible applications include analysis from above, metaontology, and epistemic modality.
Pretense and Presupposition
Authors: Yablo Stephen
Published: November 2017

A great puzzle of twentieth-century philosophy of language was, how are finite beings able to understand a potential infinity of sentences? The answer is supposed to be that understanding is recursive: infinitely many sentences can be constructed out of finitely many words combined according to finitely many rules; we understand a sentence by understanding the words in it and knowing the relevant rules. A great puzzle of twenty-first-century philosophy of language is shaping up to be this: how do we reconcile the solution to the previous puzzle with what sentences actually strike us as saying? It's a puzzle because S's compositionally determined meaning is not always a very good guide to what S intuitively says, or to its contribution to what is said by sentences in which S is embedded. This chapter focuses on the more radical case where a sentence says something its meaning positively disallows, such as the case where a sentence's real content is not a possible semantic content.
What Controls Atmospheric Oxygen Concentrations?
Authors: Canfield Donald Eugene
Published: November 2017

This chapter deals with the fundamental question of why there is oxygen in the atmosphere at all. It seeks to identify the main processes controlling the oxygen concentration. Plants and cyanobacteria produce the oxygen, but it accumulates only because some of the original photosynthetically produced organic matter is buried and preserved in sediments. Another oxygen source is an anaerobic microbial process called sulfate reduction that respires organic matter using sulfate and produces sulfide. This process is quite common in nature but are most prominent in relatively isolated basins like the Black Sea, and in most marine sediments at depths where oxygen has been consumed by respiration. If there is iron around, the sulfide reacts with the iron, forming a mineral called pyrite. While organic carbon burial has been the main oxygen source to the atmosphere over the past several hundred million years, for some intervals further back in time, pyrite burial may well have dominated as an oxygen source.