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We are living through a period of growing global disorder. There are various causes, but one is the declining unity and efficacy of the political ‘West’ – the coalition of countries, including the UK and led by the United States, that came together after the Second World War to defend and promote liberal democracy at home and open markets abroad. For countries like ours, in a changed and changing geopolitical landscape, the challenge is not to build a single new world order, but instead to contribute to what the historian Adam Tooze calls ‘world ordering’. This means coalitions of the willing, on a range of issues, to meet the challenges that people and nations need to face together. This imperative makes Britain’s relationship with other European countries, and the EU, more important, not less. These countries, and the EU, have shared values and interests with the UK. We face a common threat from an increasingly anarchic form of ‘might makes right’ globalisation. So we need to renew our cooperation that was sabotaged by Brexit.
Brexit was an act of gross economic vandalism. Many leavers understood that at the time. Most were indifferent. When push came to shove, an economic hit seemed, to those who thought about it at all, to be a price worth paying for autonomy. ‘Take Back Control’ proved to be a winning formula. Ten years on, we are in a better position to decide how much control we have really gained, and how much it has been worth to us. Control and autonomy are legal and constitutional concepts, but their value depends on political realities. In a world of huge nations like the United States and China, it is in the interest of smaller nations to join together in powerful multinational blocs like the European Union. Its members have more control and more global power collectively than they can ever hope to have individually. Britain’s own ability to exercise ‘control’ over its own fate is inevitably more limited outside the European Union.
Focusing on the 1961 UNESCO Conference of African States on the Development of Education, this chapter shows how and why public schooling became the defining development project of West African independence. At the highpoint of African decolonization, two radically new propositions intersected, each shaping the other: the rise of new economic tools, including human capital theory and manpower planning, and the triumph of anticolonial and antiracist demands that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights indeed be universally applicable.
Oil has seriously impacted the institutional development of the state in the Arabian Peninsula. More specifically, the sudden and unprecedented acquisition of massive oil revenues resulted in the freezing of the state’s formal and informal institutions, at the point at which petrodollars were injected into the state’s coffers. From then on, state leaders were able to deploy the state’s wealth to dictate the pace and direction of institutional change. Over time, any institutional change has been directed towards enhancing regime security, and the pace of change has been calculated and deliberately slow. Any political opening has been dictated by the logic of state power maximization (in relation to society). At the same time, partly to ensure its popular legitimacy and partly through the vision of its leaders, the state has deployed its massive wealth both to foster rapid economic and infrastructural development, and to enhance the living standards of its citizens. In other words, whereas oil may have stunted institutional development –– i.e., an institution’s curse –– it has been an economic blessing.
Scholars of the politics of consumption in the United States have argued that the early twentieth century marked the emergence of a new kind of “economic” or “consumer citizenship” which linked Americans’ political identity with their ability to access and afford mass-produced goods.1 A fuller examination of the participation of immigrants in these economistic visions of citizenship remains to be established. The years surrounding World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic, Max Ehrenfreund has recently suggested, constituted a critical moment when consumption and citizenship became more tightly linked not only through the choice to consume but also to refrain from consumption.2 In this piece, I explore “financial citizenship,” a term I used to describe an alternative form of civic belonging linking affinities for markets and politics.3 Financial citizenship—namely, the public outcry for a more responsive economic system that could provide cash for everyday transactions, efficient access to credit, and a variety of financial instruments for other purposes—was a vision raised by a broad range of demographic groups, from northeastern ironworkers to midwestern farmers to Black wage workers in the urban New South.4
The ecological paradigm in stormwater management mimics natural hydrology by diverting stormwater into well-designed green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) practices that also enhance biodiversity and community resilience. The challenge for municipalities is to devise institutions to encourage the adoption of GSI. Detroit, Michigan, imposed a drainage charge on all city property owners based on the extent of impervious areas. Property owners can reduce the drainage charge by using GSI. This analysis situates an economic model within the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework. The team evaluated fourteen properties where the owner installed GSI. Properties with positive net present values for their GSI tended to be less complicated and offered more cobenefits. Information gathered from broader conversations suggests that many property owners did not know how to reduce their drainage charges with GSI practices. Therefore, the drainage charge’s price signal may not work as intended. The GKC institutional analysis showed that noneconomic factors, such as prosocial values or corporate policy, also influence GSI adoption. Sharing information may encourage others to adopt GSI practices. Nongovernmental organizations can act as information brokers to share knowledge that might otherwise be proprietary or hard to find. Highly visible projects may educate property owners about GSI practices.
Addressing environmental problems like climate change urgently requires the acceleration of sustainability transitions. This Intelligence Briefing explains why this is starting to happen for technical innovations like renewable energy technologies and electric vehicles. Drawing on socio-technical transitions theory, it discusses five acceleration mechanisms that reduce cost, improve performance, change actor orientations, mobilise finance, and increase socio-political support. While not denying their potential relevance, the Briefing also shows that these acceleration mechanisms are not (yet) being activated for social innovations and deep lifestyle change. The Briefing, therefore, also criticises wishful thinking tendencies in some sustainability transformation research strands.
Technical summary
Sustainability transitions should accelerate to address environmental problems like climate change and biodiversity loss. This Intelligence Briefing aims to explain the empirical phenomenon that rapid transitions are starting to happen with regard to several low-carbon technologies (like solar-PV, wind, and electric vehicles), but not with regard to transformative social innovations or lifestyle changes. It identifies and discusses five reasons that help explain this difference: increasing-returns-to-adoption mechanisms; socio-technical feedbacks between technology, actors, and institutions; financial reorientation; issue linkage to wider political goals; and societal acceptance. It further suggests that technical innovations can act as a flywheel or catalyst for subsequent social innovations. And it makes critical comparisons between the socio-technical transitions literature and some approaches in the transformations literature, finding the former more theoretically developed, empirically validated, and policy relevant than the latter for the topic of acceleration.
Social media summary
Low-carbon technologies are starting to accelerate sustainability transitions, while purely social innovations linger.
Why Gothic sensibility and aesthetics matters for Ruskin as he prevails against the broken world warranted by laissez-faire economics. Ruskin, in his concept of ‘plague clouds’, is one of the first to locate what has become known as the Anthropocene. The chapter details the characteristics of Gothic, which will then frame the inquiry into craft work.
In the winter of 2021, the Swedish Nobel Foundation organized a Nobel symposium 'One Hundred Years of Game Theory' to commemorate the publication of famous mathematician Emile Borel's 'La théorie du jeu et les équations intégrales à noyau symétrique'. The symposium gathered roughly forty of the world's most prominent scholars ranging from mathematical foundations to applications in economics, political science, computer science, biology, sociology, and other fields. One Hundred Years of Game Theory brings together their writings to summarize and put in perspective the main achievements of game theory in the last one hundred years. They address past achievements, taking stock of what has been accomplished and contemplating potential future developments and challenges. Offering cross-disciplinary discussions between eminent researchers including five Nobel laureates, one Fields medalist and two Gödel prize winners, the contributors provide a fascinating landscape of game theory and its wide range of applications.
Ensuring easy access to clean and safe drinking water using low-cost technology is essential to mitigate the rising water scarcity in emerging economies. Commercial large-scale desalination technologies need significant investment, making them unsuitable for off-grid and small-scale applications. However, this operation can be carried out using a low-cost desalination technology based on renewable energy, known as the solar still. In this research work, a modified basin solar still (basin solar still + internal mirrors + 8 kg gravel + black ink (400 ppm per litre)) was developed and experimentally tested in Visakhapatnam (17.68°N, 83.22°E), India, to determine its appropriateness for sustainable seawater desalination. It produced 14% to 23% more desalinated water than a conventional basin solar still. In addition, its thermal efficiency was between 41% and 42%, which was significantly greater than other basin solar stills reported in literature. In addition, high-quality desalinated water was generated at a cost that was around three times less than the drinking water offered at Indian Railways kiosks. Moreover, the ability to mitigate significant CO2 emissions while also addressing water scarcity demonstrated that the modified basin solar still continues to contribute effectively to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation).
One relatively recent development related to the growth of practical market design is the need to deal with big strategy sets that may involve parts of the economic environment beyond the boundaries of the individual marketplaces. A related matter is that in naturally occurring environments, strategies may be discovered in the course of play. Discovering new strategies is very much like inventing new technology, or new game theory: all of these things can change the game in important ways. These issues blur the borders of what historically were regarded as separate domains of game theory, namely the theories of cooperative and non-cooperative games.
The literature on learning in games interprets equilibrium strategy profiles as the long-run average behavior of agents who are selected at random to play the game. As suggested by Nash, in normal-form games we expect that as the agents accumulate evidence about play of the game they will develop accurate beliefs, so that the stationary points of the process correspond to the Nash equilibria. The definition of Nash equilibrium applies unchanged to games in extensive form, but the learning foundation for it does change, because in games with a nontrivial extensive form simply playing the game repeatedly may not lead agents to know how their opponents would respond to deviations that the agents have not tried. Thus there is no reason to expect learning by myopic agents to lead to Nash equilibrium in general games, as agents may not experiment enough to learn the consequences of deviating from the equilibrium path. Instead, learning is consistent with self-confirming equilibrium, introduced by Fudenberg and Levine in the early 1990s. The focus here is on settings where the agents are patient, so they do have an incentive to experiment. In this case, Nash’s mass action interpretation of equilibrium is again valid. But extensive-form games typically have many equilibria, and not all of them seem equally plausible. An advantage of the learning approach is that some actions that are off-path according to the limiting equilibrium distribution are not counterfactual, but will actually be played by young agents as “experiments,” so that equilibrium refinements can be derived from properties of optimal experimentation.
Recent commentaries on Iran have stressed attacks on workers and wages by a neoliberal regime bent on slashing costs in response to sanctions, stagnation, and inflation. At the same time, Iranian political elites and government experts uniformly advocate for higher minimum pay. Underneath this paradox lies a complex shift of class inequality away from salary scales determined by firms and government agencies toward a single minimum wage set every year by the Supreme Labor Council, the central body responsible for employment policy. The result is not labor discipline or wage repression but an unruly wage containment state. Integrating archival sources, interviews, and statistical data, the article examines how elite conflicts, societal interests, and economic forces have structured the politics of pay in Iran. Framed comparatively, Iran’s wage containment state is a product of the way in which politics, development, and international relations have shaped Iranian capitalism.
Overseas large-scale combat operations (LSCOs) could require domestic hospitals to treat large numbers of combat casualties. Our goal was to evaluate the financial impact on hospitals of treating combat casualties during an LSCO.
Methods
Using a discrete event simulation model, we explored how 5 civilian hospitals in Omaha, Nebraska, would fare after accepting combat casualties during a National Disaster Medical System (NDMS) activation. We compared changes in financial measures (government payments, hospital revenues) and occupancy measures (civilian patient displacement) under different scenarios for combat casualty reimbursement rates as fractions (75%-125%) of Medicare rates.
Results
Combat casualties replaced 100% of civilian patients at 3 of 5 hospitals, displacing a total of 10,905 civilian patients [95% CI: 10551-11248]. Combat casualty reimbursement at 125% of Medicare rates resulted in government payments of $462 million and net income gains for civilian hospitals of approximately 23 times pre-activation baselines. Combat casualty reimbursement below 125% of Medicare rates led to net income losses.
Conclusions
Large influxes of combat casualties could result in rapid, profound displacement of civilian patients and revenue loss at NDMS-participating facilities, potentially affecting hospitals’ ability and willingness to treat them. Policymakers need to identify appropriate reimbursement rates for combat casualties.
Understanding the financial implications of intensive care unit (ICU) survivor care is critical to the success of ICU follow-up clinics. The model of value-based healthcare first suggested by Porter and Teisburg in their 2006 book, Redefining Health Care: Creating Value-Based Competition on Results, presents a perspective from which to argue for the importance of ICU follow-up clinics. A robust understanding of the financial implications of ICU follow-up clinics must go beyond billing and collections generated by these clinics and should focus on total value provided by these clinics to patients. A general equation to assess value is value = quality / cost. Cost should include not only cost to providers or payors but also to patients and their families. We present a series of practical financial considerations when developing a follow-up clinic that focus on the value attained relative to the costs of running the clinic. We also suggest areas that would benefit from further research, such as optimal staffing, alignment of time frame for resolution of post intensive care syndrome with time points at which the value of follow-up clinics is assessed, and application of behavioral economics to ICU survivor follow-up care process design.
Between 1860 and 1930, the Canada-United States border emerged as a crucial economic boundary. In creating the border, however, Canada and the United States prioritized revenue generation over coherence or uniformity. This priority created an unpredictable barrier for both businesses and individuals. Consuls often focused their attention on understanding the impacts of tariffs, trade volume, and smuggling on transnational commerce. The border’s practical impacts, however, went far deeper. For individuals, the border’s unpredictability shaped everything from how they gave gifts to the ways they supported their families. For businesses, the border impacted profit margins and intellectual property. But it also changed how businesses approached administrative tasks—everything from staff training to who they delegated to fill out paperwork. Although imagined as a federal project, the border’s tolerances for variation ensured that regional and local solutions proliferated. Federal mandates merged with local interests to create an inconsistent barrier of ever-changing heights.
The topic of “management” and nonprofit organizations (NPOs) continues to fascinate scholars. This paper draws on varying theoretical perspectives to explore their respective contributions to our knowledge of NPOs. The two longstanding and contrasting disciplines of economics and sociology have contributed most, traditionally, to the study of NPOs. However, neither of these disciplines has resolved all the dilemmas associated with NPOs. The standard economic model does not apply well to the distinctive nonmarket situation of NPOs. The sociological perspectives offer interesting insight, but fail to develop plans of action for NPOs. However, both of these traditional perspectives are starting to be eclipsed by the focus on marketing research.
Studying a sample of recently published papers in the main Economics journals, I find that these American journals mostly publish work on American data, written by members of American universities. I argue that this state of affairs is not essentially because of a language problem, but is explained by the domination of US universities on the international academic market in Economics. This domination has thus direct consequences for the topics of research, and thus for the accumulation of knowledge, in Economics.
Rational choice theories belong to the most important building blocks of 20th century economics. Their usefulness to model human behaviour has been extensively debated in modern social science and beyond. While some have argued that rational choice theories should be applied to a broad range of political and social phenomena, the rise of behavioural economics questions whether they are appropriate at all for understanding economic behaviour. Conversations on Rational Choice sheds light on what is actually at stake in these debates. In 23 conversations, some of the most prominent protagonists from economics, psychology, and philosophy discuss their individual perspectives on the nature, possible justifications, and epistemic limitations of rational choice theories. Offering a comprehensive assessment of the value of rational choice theories in producing knowledge in economics, these conversations lay the ground for a more nuanced appraisal of rational choice theories from a practical viewpoint.