What makes someone belong to an ethnic group? This article examines how individuals organize and prioritize ethnic attributes frequently used to denote membership and asks when simplified measurement strategies provide a reasonable approximation of ethnic identity in practice. Using original survey data from two online experiments fielded in 2024, I analyze respondents’ evaluations of eight common identity attributes among White, Black, and Latino Americans. Drawing on principal components analysis, multidimensional preference scaling, and circular-linear regression, I show that while some identities are well approximated by a single dominant dimension, others exhibit weaker alignment and greater heterogeneity in how attributes are prioritized. These differences have direct implications for measurement: reliance on any single attribute can meaningfully capture some identities while systematically misrepresenting others. More broadly, the findings underscore the need for group-sensitive measurement strategies when studying ethnic identity and its political and social consequences.

How does asset mobility affect the provision of property rights? Existing research anticipates that firm owners with mobile assets are effective at pressuring the government for property rights. In this research note, I examine not just the influence of firm owners but also their preferences. I develop a formal model to show that owners of mobile assets, who may move their assets out of the government’s reach, have less to gain from property rights enforcement than owners with less mobile assets. Moreover, once one considers heterogeneous firms competing with one another, firms with more mobile assets may gain a competitive advantage from policies that are disproportionately costly for their competitors (like violations of property rights). I evaluate the model propositions drawing on empirical analyses of survey data from business executives in Latin America and cross-national, time-series data on firm profits. The findings from Latin America show that business executives with less mobile assets report greater need for property rights improvements. Cross-nationally, property rights increase the profits of firms, but the effects are confined to firms with substantial immobile assets. These findings are consistent with the smaller benefits of property rights among firms with more mobile assets. The research note unites the literatures on heterogeneous firms and the development of property rights to challenge the conventional wisdom about how asset mobility affects property rights.

While much has been written about William Blackstone, the jurist, politician, and legal writer, this article provides a critical new understanding of Blackstone, the husband, friend, and investor. It considers Blackstone’s legal and economic actions as well as ideas, analyzing his strategies for managing family wealth and comparing them to the strategies employed by a member of his extended family who was a Jamaican planter. Here, the article contributes to recent scholarship on the global dimensions of English and British legal history. It offers a fuller account of Blackstone’s proximity to the colonial plantation economy by investigating how economic change and imperial controversies impacted his personal and professional life. It also exposes Blackstone’s conventionally masculine bias by detailing the different ways in which he privileged male interests when making personal investment choices and when coming to judicial decisions about women’s property claims. A gendered ideology, which positioned male authority as central to the success of the household, state, and empire, furnished the framework within which Blackstone justified the operation of law and directed his own actions as head of his family. Placing Blackstone’s jurisprudence and experience within the contexts of patriarchy and colonialism, the article sheds new light on this influential figure, showing how he embodied the core features of an eighteenth-century family man and shaped modern ideas about male authority, property, and power.

This article investigates how feminist praxis in Turkey incorporates refugee women into their advocacy practices, and uncovers the extent to which these interactions expose the boundaries of solidarity. Anchored in Gramscian political theory, it asks whether feminist activism continues to operate as an inclusive counter-hegemonic political sphere, and the degree to which refugee women are incorporated within it. Drawing on interviews with feminist- and migrant-led non-governmental organizations in Turkey, the analysis demonstrates that interactions with refugee women frequently unfold through short-term, humanitarian-oriented, project-funded initiatives rather than collective practices of solidarity. These dynamics highlight tensions between the emancipatory claims of feminist politics and the selective solidarities that take shape under conditions of intersecting inequalities and governance frameworks. Rather than offering a definitive critique of feminist politics, the article treats the question of refugee women as an analytical lens through which the constraints of solidarity within contemporary feminist politics in Turkey become visible.

The decision-making role of collegial bodies in politics, business, and civic associations is widely noted. However, extant work is fragmented by discipline and organizational type. In this study, we set forth a unified research agenda. We begin by defining the subject as a body that (a) is small, (b) meets regularly over an extended period, and (c) is tasked with a nontrivial governance role. Next, we offer a preliminary canvass of collegial bodies across the world and through history. We argue that most enduring organizations in the modern era, regardless of their location, size, function, or sector, delegate important decision-making tasks to collegial bodies. Then, we tackle the problem of explanation. We propose a functionalist account in which collegial bodies provide an optimal choice in settings where decision-making tasks are especially complex. We then discuss the special role of collegial bodies in complex decision-making settings such as those associated with governance. After providing methodological guidance for how the subject might be studied, we conclude with reflections on the relevance of collegial bodies to democratic theory.

African cities are sites of intense contrast and contradiction. For urban residents, they are defined by opportunity and desperation, mobility and immobility, poverty and wealth, history and innovation, organization and disorder. For those who navigate these complexities on a daily basis the contradiction is often the rule. It doesn’t necessarily exclude or separate; it often enables in ways that defy the planning logics, development models, and academic theories of Western observers, international organizations, or bilateral donors. For those who live at the extremes, it seems like these contradictions represent “two worlds”—a physical manifestation of the extreme income inequality in which residents at different ends of the socioeconomic spectrum operate in spheres completely distinct from one another. If the poorest urban residents cannot afford to or don’t feel comfortable in elite spaces, the wealthiest can easily find themselves insulated from the realities of the streets, separated by a pane of glass, the comfort of air conditioning, and the sound of a radio or TV.

David Benatar’s Better Never to Have Been (2006) presents a view that came to be known as antinatalism: the claim that it is always wrong to have children, because life is bad, death is bad, and the only way to avoid both is never to be brought into existence. Benatar argues that his two-barreled—or “bipolar”—pessimism is not limited to humans but applies equally to all sentient beings. This extension, however, is prone to producing theoretical confusion. The anti-reproductive view laid out in the book is coherent as a form of human antinatalism, but Benatar’s own caveats prevent it from developing into the radical sentiocentrism it seems to promise.

We describe standard forms for elements of the higher-dimensional Thompson groups nV arising from gridding subdivision processes. These processes lead to standard normal form descriptions for elements in these groups, and sizes of these standard forms estimate the word length with respect to finite generating sets. These gridded forms lead to standard algebraic descriptions as well, with respect to the both infinite and finite generating sets for these groups.

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a very popular collection of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. One explanation for the popularity of HMC algorithms is their excellent performance as the dimension d of the target becomes large: theoretical analyses show that popular versions of HMC can have a running time that scales as well as $d^{0.25}$ in good conditions, while even an optimally tuned random-walk metropolis (RWM) algorithm will not do better than d. In this paper, we investigate a different scaling question: does HMC beat RWM for targets with well-separated modes? We find that the answer is often no. Our main tool for answering this question is a novel and simple formula for the conductance of HMC based on Liouville’s theorem, and we also show how this new formula can be used to give very short proofs of results that seem tedious to show with the usual formula. We also use this result to compute the spectral gap of HMC algorithms, for both the classical HMC with isotropic momentum and the recent Riemannian HMC, for multimodal targets. While we focus on the concrete comparison of RWM and HMC, we expect qualitatively similar conclusions to hold for other gradient-based algorithms.

Chile’s 1860 Banking Law established a system of free banking that seems similar to the Scottish one. It may not be a coincidence. The drafter of the law was Jean Gustave Courcelle-Seneuil, an admirer of Adam Smith on money and banking and of the Scottish free banking system, thus making Adam Smith’s banking ideas a contributing influence (so far, unrecognized) on Chilean free banking.

Unrequited love is the largest of the many disappointments in Great Expectations. The revised ending may or may not relieve readers of the burden of imagining a permanently thwarted Pip; the centrality of unrequited love is more than thematic, and goes far beyond the protagonist’s desperate love and its fate at the novel’s end. As the most salutary effect of unrequited love may be its securing of perception from an omnipotence that would reduce it to hallucination, disappointment paradoxically “grounds” the subject of Bildung by thwarting the unification of character and first-person narrator toward which the development ostensibly aims. The question of unrequited love thus brings into focus that literally exorbitant constitution of the subject—and the particular canniness of Dickens’s novel in rendering a structure common to the narration of development.