Identity Economics: How Our Identities Shape Our Work, Wages, and Well-Being
Author: George A. Akerlof Identity Economics provides an important and compelling new way to understand human behavior, revealing how our identities--and not just economic incentives--influence our decisions. In 1995, economist Rachel Kranton wrote future Nobel Prize-winner George Akerlof a letter insisting that his most recent paper was wrong. Identity, she argued, was the missing element that would help to explain why people--facing the same economic circumstances--would make different choices. This was the beginning of a fourteen-year collaboration--and of Identity Economics. The authors explain how our conception of who we are and who we want to be may shape our economic lives more than any other factor, affecting how hard we work, and how we learn, spend, and save. Identity economics is a new way to understand people's decisions--at work, at school, and at home. With it, we can better appreciate why incentives like stock options work or don't; why some schools succeed and others don't; why some cities and towns don't invest in their futures--and much, much more. Identity Economics bridges a critical gap in the social sciences. It brings identity and norms to economics. People's notions of what is proper, and what is forbidden, and for whom, are fundamental to how hard they work, and how they learn, spend, and save. Thus people's identity--their conception of who they are, and of who they choose to be--may be the most important factor affecting their economic lives. And the limits placed by society on people's identity can also be crucial determinants of their economic well-being.
Author: Benjamin C. Waterhouse
Lobbying America tells the story of the political mobilization of American business in the 1970s and 1980s. Benjamin Waterhouse traces the rise and ultimate fragmentation of a broad-based effort to unify the business community and promote a fiscally conservative, antiregulatory, and market-oriented policy agenda to Congress and the country at large. Arguing that business's political involvement was historically distinctive during this period, Waterhouse illustrates the changing power and goals of America's top corporate leaders. Examining the rise of the Business Roundtable and the revitalization of older business associations such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Waterhouse takes readers inside the mind-set of the powerful CEOs who responded to the crises of inflation, recession, and declining industrial productivity by organizing an effective and disciplined lobbying force. By the mid-1970s, that coalition transformed the economic power of the capitalist class into a broad-reaching political movement with real policy consequences. Ironically, the cohesion that characterized organized business failed to survive the ascent of conservative politics during the 1980s, and many of the coalition's top goals on regulatory and fiscal policies remained unfulfilled. The industrial CEOs who fancied themselves the voice of business found themselves one voice among many vying for influence in an increasingly turbulent and unsettled economic landscape. Complicating assumptions that wealthy business leaders naturally get their way in Washington, Lobbying America shows how economic and political powers interact in the American democratic system.
Author: Scott Soames
The tradition descending from Frege and Russell has typically treated theories of meaning either as theories of meanings (propositions expressed), or as theories of truth conditions. However, propositions of the classical sort don't exist, and truth conditions can't provide all the information required by a theory of meaning. In this book, one of the world's leading philosophers of language offers a way out of this dilemma. Traditionally conceived, propositions are denizens of a third realm beyond mind and matter, grasped by mysterious Platonic intuition. As conceived here, they are cognitive-event types in which agents predicate properties and relations of things--in using language, in perception, and in nonlinguistic thought. Because of this, one's acquaintance with, and knowledge of, propositions is acquaintance with, and knowledge of, events of one's cognitive life. This view also solves the problem of the unity of the proposition by explaining how propositions can be genuinely representational, and therefore bearers of truth. The problem, in the traditional conception, is that sentences, utterances, and mental states are representational because of the relations they bear to inherently representational Platonic complexes of universals and particulars. Since we have no way of understanding how such structures can be representational, independent of interpretations placed on them by agents, the problem is unsolvable when so conceived. However, when propositions are taken to be cognitive-event types, the order of explanation is reversed and a natural solution emerges. Propositions are representational because they are constitutively related to inherently representational cognitive acts. Strikingly original, What Is Meaning? is a major advance.
Author: Marie Carrière
Le mythe de linfanticide Medee a toujours connu une fortune litteraire et la litterature feminine contemporaine ne fait pas exception. Lanalyse comparee de huit textes de femmes de divers horizons tente de cerner les enjeux de cette figure irreductible pour une pensee feministe actuelle sur la maternite, le sujet et lecriture mythique. En sinterrogeant sur la pertinence particuliere de la tragedie dEuripide aux reprises medeennes, explicites ou sous-entendues, des femmes, cette etude comparee se penche sur des textes du theatre de Marie Cardinal, de Deborah Porter, de Franca Rame et de Cherrie Moraga, et des romans de Monique Bosco, de Christa Wolf, de Bessora et de Marie-Celie Agnant. A travers ses incarnations transculturelles, le mythe de Medee eclaire les affres de lexil et de lexclusion, ainsi que certaines visions du maternel qui prefereraient peut-etre rester dans lombre de nos presuppositions et de nos regles sociales. Bien quil ny ait pas plus monstrueux ou fou que lacte infanticide, Medee, elle, nest pas monstre, pas folle, mais lucide, humaine a part entiere, comme la voulait Euripide, alors quelle sen prend a ses enfants, a la culture defectueuse, a lhistoire des hommes. La reecriture au feminin de Medee force aussi une conception du sujet qui ne revet pas facilement sa coherence. Mais la poetique meme de cette Medee retranscrite au feminin fait preuve de sa flexibilite, son indetermination, son pouvoir de transcender la simple repetition de son mythe, vu ici autrement et differemment.
Author: Susan Cotts Watkins
After Ellis Island is an unprecedented study of America's foreign-born population at a critical juncture in immigration history.The new century had witnessed a tremendous surge in European immigration, and by 1910 immigrants and their children numbered nearly one third of the U.S. population. The census of that year drew from these newcomers a particularly rich trove of descriptive information, one from which the contributors to After Ellis Island draw to create an unmatched profile of American society in transition.Chapters written especially for this volume explore many aspects of the immigrants' lives, such as where they settled, the jobs they held, how long they remained in school, and whether or not they learned to speak English. More than a demographic catalog, After Ellis Island employs a wide range of comparisons among ethnic groups to probe whether differences in childbirth, child mortality, and education could be traced to cultural or environmental causes. Did differences in schooling levels diminish among groups in the same social and economic circumstances, or did they persist along ethnic lines? Did absorption into mainstream Americameasured through duration of U.S. residence, neighborhood mingling, and ability to speak Englishblur ethnic differences and increase chances for success? After Ellis Island also shows how immigrants eased the nation's transition from agriculture to manufacturing by providing essential industrial laborers.After Ellis Island offers a major assessment of ethnic diversity in early twentieth century American society. The questions it addresses about assimilation and employment among immigrants in 1910 acquire even greater significance as we observe a renewed surge of foreign arrivals. This volume will be valuable to sociologists and historians of immigration, to demographers and economists, and to all those interested in the relationship of ethnicity to opportunity.
Author: edited by Andrew T. Smith, Charlotte H. Johnston, Paulo C. Alves, and Klaus Hackländer
Numbering 92 species worldwide, the order Lagomorpha is a focal point of conservation efforts. Approximately one-quarter of all lagomorphs are under conservation concern, and a few are quite literally on the brink of extinction. Here, leading conservation biologist Andrew T. Smith and his colleagues bring together the worlds lagomorph experts in the most comprehensive reference on the order ever produced. With detailed species accountsillustrated with stunning color photos and up-to-date range mapscontributors highlight key ecological roles that lagomorphs play and explain in depth how scientists around the globe are working to save vulnerable populations.Thematic introductory chapters cover a broad spectrum of information about pikas, rabbits, and hares, from evolution, systematics, and diseases to lagomorph conservation status and management. Each animal account begins with the complete scientific and common names for each species. A description of the appearance and unique morphological characteristics is accompanied by a range of standard measurements of adult specimens. Subsequent sections discuss known paleontological data concerning the species, the current state of its taxonomy and geographic variation, and various aspects of the animals biology. Aimed at naturalists, professional biologists, and students, this book will also serve as a valuable reference for those conducting biodiversity surveys and conservation throughout the world.
Author: Carlton Cosmo Rice
This collection of essays is a memorial volume of Romance language etymological essays written by Prof. Carlton Cosmo Rice (18761945), a leading scholar of philology and linguistics at the time, and gathered by Urban T. Holmes.
Author: Byron Adams
Edward Elgar (1857-1934) is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating, important, and influential figures in the history of British music. He rose from humble beginnings and achieved fame with music that to this day is beloved by audiences in England, and his work has secured an enduring legacy worldwide. Leading scholars examine the composer's life in Edward Elgar and His World, presenting a comprehensive portrait of both the man and the age in which he lived. Elgar's achievement is remarkably varied and wide-ranging, from immensely popular works like the famous Pomp and Circumstance March no. 1--a standard feature of American graduations--to sweeping masterpieces like his great oratorio The Dream of Gerontius. The contributors explore Elgar's Catholicism, which put him at odds with the prejudices of Protestant Britain; his glorification of British colonialism; his populist tendencies; his inner life as an inspired autodidact; the aristocratic London drawing rooms where his reputation was made; the class prejudice with which he contended throughout his career; and his anguished reaction to World War I. Published in conjunction with the 2007 Bard Music Festival and the 150th anniversary of Elgar's birth, this elegant and thought-provoking volume illuminates the greatness of this accomplished English composer and brings vividly to life the rich panorama of Victorian and Edwardian Britain. The contributors are Byron Adams, Leon Botstein, Rachel Cowgill, Sophie Fuller, Daniel M. Grimley, Nalini Ghuman Gwynne, Deborah Heckert, Charles Edward McGuire, Matthew Riley, Alison I. Shiel, and Aidan J. Thomson.Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.
Author: Emily Davies. Edited by Ann B. Murphy and Deirdre Raftery
Sarah Emily Davies (18301921) lived and crusaded during a time of profound change for education and womens rights in England. At the time of her birth, womens suffrage was scarcely open to discussion, and not one of Englands universities (there were four) admitted women. By the time of her death, not only had the number of universities grown to twelve, all of which were open to women; women had also begun to get the vote. Daviess own activism in the womens movement and in the social and educational reform movements of the time culminated in her founding of Girton College, Cambridge University, the first residential college of higher education for women.