A characterization of strategy-proof voting rules for separable weak orderings

We consider the problem of choosing a subset of a finite set of indivisible objects (public projects, facilities, laws, etc.) studied by Barberà et al. (1991). Here we assume that agents preferences are separable weak orderings. Given such a preference, objects are partitioned into three types, goods, bads, and nulls. We focus on voting rules, which rely only on this partition rather than the full information of preferences. We characterize voting rules satisfying strategy-proofness (no one can ever be better off by lying about his preference) and null-independence (the decision on each object should not be dependent on the preference of an agent for whom the object is a null). We also show that serially dictatorial rules are the only voting rules satisfying efficiency as well as the above two axioms. We show that the separable domain is the unique maximal domain over which each rule in the first characterization, satisfying a certain fairness property, is strategy-proof. I am grateful to Professor William Thomson for helpful comments and suggestions. I also thank Professor John Duggan, Christopher Chambers, and seminar participants in Department of Economics, University of Rochester. I thank anonymous referees for their detailed comments and suggestions that helped me a great deal to develop the earlier version of this paper. All remaining errors are mine.     

The probability of inconsistencies in complex collective decisions

Many groups make decisions over multiple interconnected propositions. The doctrinal paradox or discursive dilemma shows that propositionwise majority voting can generate inconsistent collective sets of judgments, even when individual sets of judgments are all consistent. I develop a simple model for determining the probability of the paradox, given various assumptions about the probability distribution of individual sets of judgments, including impartial culture and impartial anonymous culture assumptions. I prove several convergence results, identifying when the probability of the paradox converges to 1, and when it converges to 0, as the number of individuals increases. Drawing on the Condorcet jury theorem and work by Bovens and Rabinowicz (2001, 2003), I use the model to assess the truth-tracking performance of two decision procedures, the premise- and conclusion-based procedures. I compare the present results with existing results on the probability of Condorcets paradox. I suggest that the doctrinal paradox is likely to occur under plausible conditions.The author wishes to express his gratitude to Luc Bovens, Matthew Braham, Steven Brams, Bruce Chapman, Philip Pettit, Wlodek Rabinowicz and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments or discussion. A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2002 Annual Meeting of the European Public Choice Society, Belgirate, Lago Maggiore, Italy, April 2002, and at the Sixth International Meeting of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare, held at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, July 2002.     

“FOB” and “Whitewashed”: Identity and Internalized Racism Among Second Generation Asian Americans

An analysis of 184 in-depth interviews with grown children of Korean and Vietnamese immigrants finds that the racial beliefs, meanings, and stereotypes of the mainstream society shape how they think about coethnics, generate local identities, and deflect stigma from themselves. We examine the terms FOB (Fresh Off the Boat) and whitewashed that were commonly deployed to denigrate coethnic others as too ethnic or too assimilated while casting those at the bicultural middle as the normals. We describe how this system of intraethnic othering serves as a basis for sub-ethnic identities, intraethnic social boundaries, and the monitoring and control of social behavior. We draw on the concept of internalized racial oppression in framing our findings.     

The equity-efficiency trade-off reconsidered

Envy-free and Pareto optimal allocations never exist in large economies with production, if there is enough variation with respect to preferences and innate abilities of the agents. If distributional equity is given priority only second best envy-free allocations may be considered. Those allocations are characterised in finite and continuum economies. In continuum economies envy-free allocations are type-egalitarian, i.e. agents with the same preferences but different abilities obtain the same consumption-labour bundle. Regarding implementation envy-free allocations can only be implemented by a tax depending on labour and income.I would like to thank two anonymous referees and the editor in charge of this paper for very helpful comments.     

Implementation of the Walrasian correspondence without continuous,convex, and ordered preferences

This paper consideres the problem of designing better mechanisms whose Nash allocations coincide with constrained Walrasian allocations for non-neoclassical economies under the minimal possible assumptions. We show that no assumprions on preferences are needed for feasible and continuous implementation of the constrained Walraisan correspondence. Further, under the monotonicity assumption, we present a mechanism that is completely feasible and continuous. Hence, no continuity and convexity assumptions on preferences are required, and preferences may be nontotal or nontransitive. Thus, this paper gives a somewhat positive answer to the question raised in the literature by showing that, even for non-neoclassical economies, there are incentive-compatible, privacy preserving, and well-behaved mechanisms which yield Pareto-efficient and individually rational allocations at Nash equilibria.I wish to thank J. S. Chipman, J. Jordan, M. Richter, H. Weinberger, the editor, and two anonymous referees for useful comments and suggestions. I am particularly thankful to L. Hurwicz who stimulated my interest in this problem and provided detailed comments and suggestions.     

The coming revolution of biotechnology: A critique of Buttel

Frederick Buttel was one of the pioneers in studying the social impacts of biotechnology, claiming originally that it will involve profound changes in social structure. Recently Buttel turned around his argument proposing that, rather than revolutionary, biotechnology is more a substitutionist technological form to be applied to declining sectors of the economy than an epoch-making technology. This paper provides both external and internal critiques of Buttel's new position based on the concept of the third technological revolution, looking at the impact of new technologies as a global and interrelated phenomenon, and not on an individual case-by-case basis. The concluding section suggests the necessity of bringing into the analysis those living in the Third World: 60% of this population lives from agriculture and will be affected by the deployment of agricultural biotechnologies, whether through substitutionism or through totally new products.     

Predatory,developmental, and other apparatuses: A comparative political economy perspective on the Third World state

Disappointment over the contributions of Third World state apparatuses to industrial transformation and the increasing intellectual dominance of neoutiliarian paradigms in the social science has made if fashionable to castigate the Third World state as predatory and rent seeking. This paper argues for a more differentiated view, one that connects differences in performance to differences in state structure. The incoherent absolutist domination of the klepto-patrimonial Zairian state are contrasted to the embedded autonomy of the East Asian developmental state. Then the internal structure and external ties of an intermediate state — Brazil — are analyzed in relation to both polar types. The comparative evidence suggests that the efficacy of the developmental state depends on a meritocratic bureaucracy with a strong sense of corporate identity and a dense set of institutionalized links to private elites.     

The context of correctness: A comment on rushton

According to Philippe Rushton, the equalitarian fiction, a scientific hoax that races are genetically equal in cognitive ability, underlies the politically correct objections to his research on racial differences. He maintains that there is a taboo against race unequaled by the Inquisition. I show that while Rushton has been publicly harassed, he has had continuous opportunities to present his findings in diverse, widely available, respectable journals, and no general suppression within academic psychology is evident. Similarly, Henry Garrett and his associates in the LAAEE, dedicated to preserving segregation and preventing race suicide, disseminated their ideas widely, although Garrett complained of the equalitarian fiction in 1961. Examination of the intertwined history ofMankind Quarterly, German Rassenhygiene, far right politics, and the work of Roger Pearson suggests that some cries of political correctness must be viewed with great caution.Preparation of this paper was not supported by any grant, foundation, political, or religious organization.specializing in the history of psychology and psychological aesthetics.     

Competitive envy-free division

We are concerned with a fair division problem in which the indivisible goods to be distributed among a finite number of individuals have divisible bads associated with them. The problem is formulated and analyzed in terms of the housemates problem. We present an efficient procedure that decides whether an envy-free solution exists, and if so, finds one of them; otherwise finds a solution such that each envious housemate is assigned a room whose rent is zero.     

Gentleman bountiful: Repairing the patriarch

Illustrating a patient's use of the transference as a play-ground... an intermediate region between illness and real life through which the transition from one to the other is made (Freud, 1914), the author presents the case of a man in his late fifties attempting to transcend former male role stereotypes. Using the therapist as a transitional object, this patient experimented, both in therapy and in his social activities, with various patterns in relationships with women, becoming increasingly aware of his dominating benevolence and his concommitant denial of dependency needs. Several new ways for viewing both masochistic and acting-out behaviors are proposed, ways that lead to therapeutic responses tending to convert both to reparative regressions.     

The Paradoxes of Modernity: Scientific Advances,Environmental Problems,and Risks to the Social Fabric?

Recent reviews have contrasted U.S. sociologists' empirical work on technological risks with the theoretical risk work of Giddens and Beck, but the reality is more complex. Most U.S. sociologists are less likely than Giddens or Beck to see risks as transcending socioeconomic and other divisions, but the United States–based work tends to interpret the trustworthiness of scientific–technical expertise in ways that lie between the arguments of Beck and Giddens. An examination of early nuclear technologies indicates that the United States–based perspectives provide a better fit, for theoretical as well as empirical reasons. The development of nuclear technologies was mixed, rather than high or low, in its competence and trustworthiness, and it created social and environmental risks that did not so much transcend social divisions as to reinforce them.     

The development of a capacity for concern in antisocial children: Winnicott's concept of human relatedness

Winnicott's refreshing view of clinical practice includes the unique notion that delinquency is a sign of hope. Several of Winnicott's interpersonal concepts fit together to develop this thought: holding environment, capacity for concern, the use of the object, and hate in the counter transference. In this paper these four concepts are described and the case of a ten-year-old antisocial youngster is used to illustrate Winnicott's thinking and tie some of his illusive ideas into a difficult but familiar kind of practice situation. The therapeutic approach used was a mixture of case management and play therapy. What is different however is the way in which the therapist interpreted the youngster's behavior and stimulated his rich fantasy life.     

The making of race in colonial Malaya: Political economy and racial ideology

The conventional interpretation of the race problem in Peninsular Malaysia (Malaya) is founded upon the supposedly inevitable frictions between ethnic communities with sharply divergent cultural traditions. In this view, assimilation between the indigenous Malay population and the descendants of immigrants from China and India was always a remote possibility. In this paper I argue that modern race relations in Peninsular Malaysia, in the sense of impenetrable group boundaries, were a byproduct of British colonialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Prior to 1850, inter-ethnic relations among Asian populations were marked by cultural stereotypes and occasional hostility, but there were also possibilities for inter-ethnic alliances and acculturation. Direct colonial rule brought European racial theory and constructed a social and economic order structured by race. A review of the writing of observers of colonial society provides a crude test of this hypothesis.     

“Just a hunch”: Accuracy and awareness in person perception

Person perception tasks involving nonverbal communication have a mystified reputation. It is frequently argued that nonverbal cues are accurately, but only unconsciously, perceived. This may explain the frequent response of judges who, when asked to decode a sample of nonverbal behavior, reply that it was just a hunch—i.e., show little or no awareness of how they arrived at a judgment, even a correct one. Two alternative models, the Unconsciousness hypothesis and the Inarticulation hypothesis are posited to describe the possible relationship between accuracy and awareness. Two studies are reported on the relationship between accuracy and awareness, both using the Interpersonal Perception Task (IPT). In the first study, the IPT was given to a sample of 476 undergraduates. Accuracy was measured by how many of the 30 IPT questions these judges answered correctly. Global awareness was indexed by having each judge guess how many of the 30 scenes they had answered correctly. In this coarse analysis, the accuracy-awareness relationship was positive but weak. A second experiment was conducted to produce more fine-grained tests of the accuracy-awareness relationship. Different versions of the IPT were presented to 134 undergraduates. Judges given each version of the IPT were asked to indicate their degree of confidence in each one of their answers. This second experiment found a positive, substantial relationship between accuracy and awareness, and this relationship was particularly strong when analyzed across experimental conditions as a whole. These findings support the Inarticulation hypothesis, and cast doubt on the Unconsciousness hypothesis. Implications for an emerging understanding of how nonverbal communication is processed are discussed.We wish to thank Robin Akert and Bob Rosenthal for helpful advice and inspiration.     

Durkheim'sdivision of labor in society

The source of social life, according to Durkheim, is the similitude of consciousnesses and the division of labor. The former is best evident among primitive societies where a mechanical solidarity, evidenced by repressive law, prevails; the latter in advanced societies where populations evidence greater dynamic density, and juridical rules define the nature and relations of functions. In combating individualism and basing the existence of societies on a consensus of parts, Durkheim refutes his positivistic emphasis which denies the relevance of ends to a scientific study of society. In his discussion of social ends is a latent anti-mechanistic trend. The theory of unilinear development is established on deficient ethnographic data. It assumes the absence of division of labor among primitive societies and of any mechanical solidarity among modern societies. Repressive and restitutive law Durkheim seeks to use as indexes of mechanical and organic solidarity, but he does not establish with any precision the perfect associations which he assumes obtain between his types of solidarity and of law.Reproduced from theAmerican Journal of Sociology, Vol. 40 (1934), pp. 319–328. (© 1934 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved.)     

Recovering from Homelessness: Determining the “Quality of Sobriety” in a Transitional Housing Program

Recent years have seen fundamental shifts in the objectives and delivery of assistance to the homeless. An early emphasis on emergency shelter and monetary housing assistance has been replaced by a focus on programs designed to blend shelter with an array of social services. In most instances, however, programs combining shelter and social services are designed as transitional; that is, they are intended to help homeless individuals and families move from a position of dependence to one where they can live independently. The emphasis in transitional housing programs is on making homeless people housing ready. This paper concerns the process of assessing housing readiness as observed during eighteen months of fieldwork in a federally supported transitional housing program for formerly homeless single adults. The detailed case study that follows supports three important findings. First, there was virtual unanimity among staff and residents that substance abuse was the cause of their homelessness and the key to its solution. Second, success within the program was defined and operationalized along very specific but well understood normative dimensions that have little to do with the material circumstances in which residents find themselves and everything to do with recovery. Third, recovery—the key to housing readiness in this environment—was measured not by objective measures, i.e., number of months sober, but rather by what was widely referred to as one's quality of sobriety, a subjective and consequently often hotly debated measure of attitude and outlook only loosely related to demonstrable abstinence from alcohol. This last finding, that ultimately housing readiness is a subjective judgment, both increases the discretion of shelter staff and generates a systematic disattention to the individual economic issues that are fundamental to an exit from homelessness.     

Goffman revisited: Relatives vs. administrators in nursing homes

This case study applies Goffman's total institutions paradigm to a skilled nursing facility and shows that his characterization of relatives as collusive agents in a betrayal funnel is more accurate in the prepatient phase than after admission. When they encounter administrative resistance to their suggestions, some relatives become militant reformers. This paper describes ten gatekeeping tactics employed by administrators to neutralize such relatives, and four gatestorming tactics utilized by relatives to affect change. The author concludes that while Goffman's work is still relevant, his tendency to stereotype total institutions is misleading and his manner of reporting field work obscures the true role of the participant-observer.     

Braudel's ecological perspective

Fernand Braudel, a leading figure in theAnnales school of French historiography, employed principles and practices from several social science disciplines in his historical studies. Significant among these was sociology. Although he did not formally recognize that a major element in his sociological perspective was human ecology, an analysis of his work reveals how extensively he employed an ecological paradigm. His success in using this paradigm demonstrates the utility of the principles of human ecology in historical and comparative studies and suggests strongly that fresh insights into contemporary social systems can be gained by combining Braudel's total history and ecology's holistic approaches.     

When All That Is Solid Melts Into Language: Judith Butler and the Question of Matter

Judith Butler's analysis of corporeal matters offers an exemplary account of the hidden political agenda within the very grain of representation and discourse. This essay, however, argues that language and its political implications are even more complex and curious than Butler concedes. The author contests the conflation of writing with Culture, as if Culture is the constitutive and enclosed space of productivity and transformation. She argues that the question of Nature has not been provoked in Butler's analysis but answered and dismissed much too quickly. The author extends the problematic of writing to biology and suggests that Nature is literate.     

Touristic authenticity,touristic angst,and modern reality

The tourist has become the symbol of a peculiarly modern type of inauthenticity. This paper explores the criticisms that have been directed at the reality experiences of the tourist. In so doing, the following inexhaustive typology of touristic realities is developed: 1) the first-order or true tourist, 2) the second-order or Angst-ridden tourist, 3( the third-order or anthropological tourist, and 4) the fourth-order or spiritual tourist. Each of these types represents a progressively more intense search for reality through travel. Each is, however, criticized for participating in its own form of inauthenticity.After exploring the reality experiences and criticisms of each of these travellers, the paper turns the tables on the cultured despisers of tourism to argue that perhaps the lowly first-order tourist is not so inauthentic after all. True, this traveller may not be having a real heroic adventure, but such is not the goal. Rather, the reality experienced by the first-order tourist is a pleasurable liberation from the normal concerns of everyday life which simultaneously reaffirms commitment to that reality. Quite frequently the first-order tourist is less concerned about having a real experience in the visited place than in experiencing family and friendship relationships-relationships completely ignored by the anti-touristic tourists in their search for authenticity in someone else's reality.The author would like to thank Peter L. Berger, Harry C. Bredemeier, Warren I. Susman, and M. Kathy Kenyon for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper. This research was supported in part by NIMH grant no. 5 T32 NH14660.