En este artículo se examina la complejidad y los desafíos de la práctica del tequio y su representación en la novela bilingüe Laxdao yelazeralle/El corazón de los deseos del escritor zapoteco Javier Castellanos. Siguiendo de cerca la práctica y pensamiento de la comunalidad, en el artículo se analiza cómo Castellanos explora temas generalmente obviados, sin embargo, fundamentales para la literatura indígena, como la carga afectiva, física y económica que requiere el servicio y trabajo colectivo en comunidades comunales frente crecientes patrones de migración internacional. Como tal, el artículo inaugura un debate conexo al ya estudiado tema de la migración —el trabajo—, proponiendo que Castellanos advierte que la recuperación de la lengua, filosofía y protección del territorio no se limita a procesos de autonomía, emancipación epistémica y descoloniales. El artículo demuestra que Castellanos propone repensar cómo el deterioro de la ética de reciprocidad imbuida en las prácticas de tequio es, en gran medida, un síntoma del desequilibrio causado por dinámicas de trabajo asalariado que desembocan en la individualización de los comuneros y la desintegración del tejido comunitario. De este modo, el autor del artículo propone que la literatura indígena es también una literatura de trabajo: la recuperación y reivindicación de la dignidad del trabajo físico colectivo y no solo un proceso creativo, intelectual y epistémico.

This article examines the introduction of Jamaica’s central bank digital currency (CBDC), Jamaica Digital Exchange (JAM-DEX), to show how monetary innovation is embedded in questions of sovereignty, class, race, and religion. Drawing on 23 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Kingston (2022–2024), it adopts a pragmatist anthropology of money and mobilizes three cultural lenses – institutional, infrastructural, and affective – to analyze how CBDCs are lived, interpreted, and contested in everyday life. The institutional lens reveals a struggle over monetary sovereignty that is continually undermined by the CBDC’s dependence on private, largely foreign-owned financial intermediaries for its circulation. The infrastructural lens shows how financial innovation can reproduce the racialized and classed hierarchies rooted in Jamaica’s colonial banking history. The affective lens shows how moral imaginaries, ranging from eschatological fears of the ‘Mark of the Beast’ to crypto-libertarian critiques of surveillance, shape public engagement with the CBDC. The article employs the metaphor of haunting to show how unresolved histories of racial capitalism re-emerge through JAM-DEX, producing a disjointed temporality in which digital futures arrive prematurely. The persistence of these financial ghosts reinforces the claim that CBDCs should be studied within their social, historical, and affective contexts.

To what extent do strike threats prompt firms to adopt capital-intensive methods to deter strikes or labor-intensive strategies to maintain flexibility during work stoppages? We introduce a theoretical model that demonstrates how threats of industrial action influence capital investments through relative factor prices and the power dynamics between workers and employers. Using newly digitized data from 3,141 industrial conflicts and collective agreements in Norway during the interwar period, our findings indicate that strikes generally drive firms toward less capital-intensive technologies. This trend is particularly pronounced in conflicts resolved at the branch or national level, where strike threats may appear more exogenous to firms.

This paper examines how choice architecture shapes retirement planning decisions in India’s National Pension System (NPS) — “All Citizens Model”. The study investigates whether enrolment decisions are driven by rational economic calculations or by the system’s behavioural design. Using a qualitative approach, in-depth interviews with 15 NPS subscribers were analysed through reflexive thematic analysis via MAXQDA software. Tax incentives emerged as the dominant enrolment factor, followed by government backing, peer influence, expert management, simplified registration, and protected returns. NPS structural features operating through financial utility and trust-building mechanisms exert the strongest influence on participation. The findings confirm the effectiveness of socially oriented, expertise-based, and risk-calibrated approaches grounded in prospect theory and bounded rationality. Policymakers should integrate behavioural insights alongside traditional economic incentives in pension scheme design. This study contributes to behavioural pension economics by empirically evaluating retirement choice architecture within a major emerging market context.

This paper provides a new theoretical framework and a criterion to model the choice between democratic, hybrid, and epistocratic modes of political governance. From a normative perspective, we claim that the specificity of information should guide the choice between these modes of political governance because of its impact on costs of political governance. Any issue has a degree of information specificity that determines costs of political governance, which are combined in a Social Costs Function. Therefore, the model helps to assess the relative efficiency between democratic, hybrid, and epistocratic decision-making procedures to reach collective choices. The last section proposes extensions of the model by discussing how political, cultural, and epistemic institutions as well as polycentric governance modify the parameters of the model.

We provide empirical evidence that central banks can mitigate economic crises more efficiently when they extend eligibility for their discount facility to any safe asset or solvent agent. Nineteenth-century France serves as a case study to circumvent endogeneity. Following 1863, an agricultural pandemic increased defaults outside agriculture. We exploit specificities of the discount window to create exogenous variation in central bank access. Regressions show that while the demand shock brought about by the pandemic led to an increase in defaults outside agriculture by 20 percent, this effect was significantly reduced whenever a branch office of the central bank was present.

This paper develops and defends a non-utilitarian interpretation of John Harsanyi’s social aggregation theorem and sum of vNM utilities approach. On this interpretation, vNM utilities transform an independently available cardinal measure of fully comparable individual well-being. The resulting proposal for ranking well-being distributions – the Risk-Priority View – is not welfare-anonymous and can favour a smaller increase in well-being for one individual rather than a larger increase in well-being for another, equally well-off individual. I argue here that such counterintuitive implications can be defended, and that impartiality can still be secured through the imposition of an alternative, interprofile anonymity axiom.