4.1 Motivations and Objectives

Taxation is the principal mechanism through which redistribution of income from the rich to the poor takes place. The analysis of taxation is one of the major pieces of tasks of economists who analyze public sector economics. Taxes can be distinguished with respect to the effects they generate on the distribution of income. While raising revenue for some specific welfare purposes, it is ethically desirable that a tax scheme should exert an equalizing effect on the distribution of income; the rich should bear a greater share of the tax burden than the poor. This makes the after-tax income distribution more equal than its before-tax twin. In the process, the tax burdens come to be more unequally distributed than the pre-tax incomes. These two effects of a tax system are referred to as the “redistributive” effect and the “disproportionality” (or “departure from proportionality”) effect of a tax system. (For a recent discussion on these features of a tax system, see Chakravarty and Sarkar, 2025.)

Now, the basic definition of progression of an income tax system is that the local measure “average rate progression,” the tax liability as a proportion of the income, should rise with income (Pigou, 1928). A local or structural indicator looks at the extent of progression along the income scale; it focuses on income-by-income progression.

Within a half century the Pereires had gone from poverty in the Jewish quarter of Bordeaux to enormous wealth and luxury among the grande bourgeoisie of Paris. The experience of the Pereire family, privileged and wealthy, inconsistent in its religious devotion or affiliation, sheds light on the rapid changes in Jewish community life which occurred in nineteenth-century Western Europe. As leaders of industry, the Jewish Saint-Simonians had attracted anti-Semitic vitriol from an early time and the Pereires' prominence reinforced and invigorated prejudice. Modesty and simplicity were said to have characterised their private lives and manners, but the Pereires' public face was impressive. The private sphere they built around them thus sustained Emile and Isaac Pereire, the family providing them with the social and emotional space and support necessary to maintain their considerable enterprises.

This chapter begins the analysis of how American society prepared a space for someone like Trump to dominate public life. The major symptom was that citizens failed to not elect Trump and therefore twice elevated to be president a man who had no qualifications to administer the Executive Branch of a democratic government consisting of more than 4,000,000 employees and multiple responsibilities. He was, however, a “populist,” who promised to act on behalf of “the people” as if the people were entitled to throw off rule by “elites.” And together, he and his associates admired what scholars call “neoliberalism,” whereby many traditional, and democratic, political practices are overridden in favor of unleashing “private innovators” – such as Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg – to acquire enormous wealth and influence. Assuming that Trump is a populist, we should observe that America’s crisis is not so much a failure of democratic “institutions” – agencies, procedures, etc. – as it is that “citizens” have failed to vote to support those institutions. Thus Defending Democracy is about how citizens must do their job – their “vocation” – more and better.

The film, 21 Grams, is made by the core team of Alejandro González Iñárritu, Guillermo Arriaga, Rodrigo Prieto, and Brigitte Broch. The score for the film is provided by Gustavo Santoalalla and is taken by the critical community, both popular and academic, as an American independent film, with the Mexican identities of the central filmmakers glossed over. The complexities involved in ascribing national identity to a film such as 21 Grams point to the inability of simplistic categories of national cinema to adequately explain shifting cinematic landscapes. The film's themes also speak to a contemporary North American cultural landscape. The chapter explores the following three areas with specific reference to 21 Grams: the relationship between the filmmakers, the film text, and the studios; the status of the director/auteur; and the cinematic languages used.

Drawing on wartime press articles and photographs, post-war memoirs and oral history interviews, Krisztina Robert identifies two main strategies, both actual and discursive, through which the women constructed the meaning of their work in the British Women’s Corps. The first one, militarisation, entailed working under martial discipline at military sites, wearing service uniforms of khaki (controversial for some) and performing duties previously done by soldiers, sailors and airmen. The second strategy included a strong emphasis on occupational training and/or previous experience as an entry condition into the Corps, with emphasis on the mental and physical difficulty of the jobs and the use of modern technology in the work processes

There are many ways to define the “hip-hop novel,” each with its limitations. This omnibus review-essay considers titles from the past half-century of American fiction in which hip-hop intervenes as plot device, as character affinity, as author affiliation, as compositional logic, or as a way of limning the targeted readership. It investigates the culture’s representation in literary fiction, from its undigested appearance in the work of authors like Tom Wolfe, Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, and Percival Everett, to its deeper integration into novels by Adam Mansbach, Paul Beatty, and Sean Thor Conroe. It also examines the street lit genre initiated by Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, with books that count hip-hop artists as authors (C-Murder, Sister Souljah) or publishers (G-Unit Books). Finally, it looks to young-adult novels by Angie Thomas and Tiffany D. Jackson as a space where a reconciliation of these threads might be possible.

The book opens with an overview of the tensions that increasingly define hip-hop’s role in contemporary culture, namely the way that the music continually shifts between complicity and critique in its assessment of capitalism and racialized inequality. This ambivalence is related back to the currents of pleasure and pain that run through the work of such rappers as Nicki Minaj and Megan Thee Stallion, and to the usage of hip-hop in a recent film soundtrack. After briefly discussing the editor’s own position in relation to the culture, the introduction moves on to an overview of the collection’s general aims. These include the attempt to reflect both the diverse styles and regions of contemporary hip-hop, and the political commitments of the contributors. A short discussion of editorial conventions follows, as well as an account of the book’s approach to hate speech. The section ends with a brief overview of each of the nineteen chapters.

In mid-1915 many civilian men began to notice that the conflict was intruding in their lives in new and often unexpected ways. By the second year of war, most civilians could claim a newly personal interest in the fortunes of the armed forces. Most people had at least a friend, colleague, acquaintance or relative on active service; diaries and letters were peppered with references to such individuals. By 1915, men in uniform had become a ubiquitous presence in most public spaces on the home front. For many civilians, the noise of bomb and gun practice, of aeroplanes flying overhead, even of explosions on the Western Front, had by 1916 become part of everyday life. Middle-class men did not remain unaffected by wartime restrictions for long: a variety of regulations soon began to impinge on their lives too.

This is a discussion of the relationships between roads and their links to notions of culture and material culture in anthropology and other social sciences today. Theoretically, departing from Boas’ spatially fixed cultural areas and reaching Auge’s ‘non-places’; passing through Lefebvre’s, Situationists’ and Virilio’s critiques of motorways to Baudrillard’s fascination for freeways; going through Latour’s and Castells’ analyses of culture as networks and arriving to recent questions about the ontology of culture, this chapter examines the significance of roads for the anthropological study of cultural formations. Fusing this discussion with road ethnographies including Evans-Pritchard’s and Levi-Strauss’ ‘road-less anthropology’ and the histories of motorways, available in the history of technology literature, this chapter aims to open up a new discussion among anthropologists.

Chapter 6 discusses the distinction between sense and reference. The sense of a term is its general meaning as captured in the semantic properties of its dictionary definitions. This is what underlies generic and descriptive terms in trademark law. Unique identification of one particular entity requires some special and different “mapping” between language and the world: an “arbitrary” or “fanciful” link between e.g. APPLE and KODAK and their respective companies; a “suggestive” extension of ROACH MOTEL to its producer; or a “secondary meaning” for an otherwise descriptive term. The chapter argues, on the basis of grammatical and corpus evidence, that POST OFFICE is a generic term and not a source identifier for the US Postal Service. It analyses a set of trademarks involving ELASTIC, which are shown to make a clear and unique identification of the source company in question. Finally the difference between “referential” and “attributive” uses of definite descriptions is exemplified for THE POLICE in a dispute over who exactly was being accused of a certain crime.