THE RECOVERY OF MASADA: A STUDY IN COLLECTIVE MEMORY*

The battle of Masada in 73 A. D. was one of the least significant and least successful events in ancient Jewish history. Our concern is to understand why, after almost two thousand years of obscurity, this event was suddenly remembered and commemorated by Palestinian Jews. Precipitating the 1927 recovery of Masada was the appearance of a very popular poem which used the ancient battle as an allegory of the Jewish settlers' struggle. By restoring this poem to its social context, and by analyzing both in terms of George Herbert Mead's theory of symbolically reconstructed pasts, this article explains the modern appeal of Masada, then brings it to bear on our general knowledge of collective memory.     

与蝶为伴的一家

在辽宁抚顺,有这样一个满族镶蓝旗家庭,他们是努尔哈赤的后裔。11年来,父亲黎明带着女儿黎薇走遍了抚顺的山川河流,采集蝴蝶标本8科189种3万多号。他们筹资近20万元办起东北首家民间家庭蝴蝶博物馆,观众达30多万人次。他们创办的《华夏蛾蝶》通讯家庭小报已出版发行71期3方多份。2013年,父女俩双双获得全国林业科普最高奖—梁希科普奖。     

TRENDS IN RANKINGS OF ECONOMICS DEPARTMENTS IN THE U.S.: AN UPDATE

Economics departments in the U.S. are ranked based on (1) the number of pages published in thirty-six economics journals, (2) publications in five of the top journals, (3) output per faculty member, and (4) an index of the concentration of research in a department. Evidence shows that the top twenty departments have generally retained their positions since the 1970s, but rather large changes have occurred in departments ranked from 240 to 100. An "Economists Hall of Fame" is developed listing the top fifty individual producers of research in the thirty-six journal set and the top five journals.     

THE RISE AND FALL OF A LOCAL HERO: MEMORY,IDENTITY AND POWER IN RURAL AUSTRIA, 1945-1960

The article questions abstract concepts like lieux de mémoire, invented tradition and imagined communities linked to a concrete field of research. It reconstructs structures and practices of the cultural representation of mythical narrations in symbolic and social spaces. The case of a rural community in Austria after World War II shows that the encoding and decoding of a heroic saga is embedded both in the macro structures of the economic and political reconstruction of the Second Republic and the micro structures of the local festive culture. In the late 1940s, the supply of the narration, a variation of the German National myth of Herman the Cheruskian, met the demand of the majority of the villagers, above all the male inhabitants. In the 1950s, the market of cultural representations had changed: the hero of village memory became a relic of village history.     

ON THE REGISTERS OF CARIBBEAN MEMORY OF SLAVERY1

From discourses elicited by the presence of a slave cemetery in Guadeloupe, the author distinguishes various registers of memory that offer a framework for understanding Caribbean identities. The absence of a meta-discourse is not seen as a vacuum or as a lack which would indicate the weakness of the collective ethos. Rather, it is interpreted through the multiplicity of narratives which replaces the Grand Narrative. This interpretation leads to a more empirically-informed constructivism trying to approach ‘mutiplicity’ on the basis of an account of what could be a multiple textual matrix. In time, this capacity to create several narratives is analyzed in relationship to a particular experience of power relations that has produced an alert critical consciousness which refuses to grant a meta-narrative any centrality and tends to create a multiply-segmented collectivity.     

CHANGING ROLES OF ABILITY AND EDUCATION IN U.S. INTERGENERATIONAL MOBILITY

Using data on young adults from the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we investigate the changing roles of ability and education in the transmission of economic status across generations. We find that ability plays a substantially diminished role for the most recent cohort whereas education plays a much larger role. The first finding results primarily from a smaller effect of children's ability on status, the second from an increased correlation between parental status and educational attainment. A replication of the analysis by gender reveals that the changes in the role of ability are largely driven by men whereas the changes in education's role are largely driven by women. (JEL J62, I24)     

THE SHIFTS IN LEAD-LAG PROPERTIES OF THE U.S. BUSINESS CYCLE

We document shifts in the lead-lag properties of the U.S. business cycle since the mid-1980s. Specifically, (1) the well-known inverted leading indicator property of real interest rates has completely vanished; (2) labor productivity switched from positively leading to negatively lagging output and labor inputs over the cycle; and (3) the unemployment rate shifted from lagging productivity negatively to leading positively. Many contemporary business cycle models produce counterfactual cross-correlations revealing that popular frictions and shocks provide an incomplete account of business cycle comovement. Determining the underlying sources of these shifts in the lead-lag properties and their consequences for macroeconomic forecasts is therefore a promising direction for future research. (JEL E24, E32, E43)     

STABILITY AND CHANGE IN THE U.S. PUBLIC'S KNOWLEDGE OF POLITICS

The U.S. public's current knowledge about politics is comparedwith levels of knowlege in the 1940s and 1950s. Fourteen questionsasked by Gallup on various surveys from 1945 to 1957 were includedon a larger survey of political knowledge conducted by telephonein 1989 with a randomly selected sample of 610 adult U.S. residents.On 8 of the 14 items, the percentage answering correctly in1989 was higher than in the earlier surveys (by 4–15 points).One item showed an increase of 1 percent, two were down 1 percent,and three others declined by 5 percent, 9 percent, and 10 percent.When level of education is controlled, however, levels of knowledgeappear to have declined for most of the items. A reanalysisof some of the original Gallup data is used to estimate theeffectiveness of schools in transmitting political informationin 1989 compared with the earlier years.     

Interview with Susie Orbach,Ph.D., C.S.W.

An interview with Susie Orbach highlights the trajectory of her career and current thinking on body image issues and eating disorders. Dr. Orbach’s work in this area as a clinical social worker, psychoanalyst, best-selling author and social activist has spanned three decades. In this interview she reflects on her earlier books, Fat is a Feminist Issue and Hunger Strike: An Anorectic’s Struggle as a Metaphor for Our Age, and discusses her current work and perspectives within the context of contemporary culture.     

PRODUCTIVITY PERFORMANCE OF U.S. TRUNK AND LOCAL SERVCE AIRLINES IN THE ERA OF DEREGULATION

The transition to deregulation of the U.S. air transport industry began in 1976. In this paper we measure total factor productivity growth of the airlines for the first five years of the transition (1976–1980) and compare the performance with that of the preceding years. We find that productivity growth accelerated from 2.8% per year to 5.1% per year. An analysis of covariance model with individual airlines as observations leads to the conclusion that for the trunk airlines nearly all of the acceleration can be explained by increases in output and load factor and decreases in the growth of capacity. For the local service airlines, however, less than half of the acceleration may be so-explained.     

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CONTINUOUS CASTING IN THE U. S. STEEL INDUSTRY: COMMENT

In a recent article, Professor Ault has stated that:
studies of the steel industry during the fifties and early sixties have indicated that the major cause of the deterioration of the ability of the U.S. industry to compete was the failure of increases in the productivity of US. steel workers to keep pace with increases in the wages and benefits paid to those workers. One of the principal causes for this lag in productivity was the failure of major U.S. producers to adopt the Basic Oxygen Furnace as rapidly as major foreign producers…despite the fact that the Oxygen converter proved to be capable of producing basic steel products at lower unit cost than any other production technique.     

WOMEN CANDIDATES IN THE NEWS: AN EXAMINATION OF GENDER DIFFERENCES IN U.S. SENATE CAMPAIGN COVERAGE

By covering male and female candidates differently, the newsmedia may influence the success of female candidates for publicoffice. A content analysis was conducted to assess potentiallyimportant differences in the newspaper coverage of a sampleof male and female U.S. Senate candidates in the elections of1982–86. The results of the study show that female candidates for the U.S. Senate are treated differently by the press.Female candidates receive less news coverage and the coveragethey do receive concentrates more on their viability and lesson their issue positions. Furthermore, female candidates' viabilitycoverage is more negative than that of their male counterparts.Given these gender differences in press treatment, we wouldexpect voters' recognition of male candidates to exceed thatof female candidates and we would also expect evaluations offemale candidates to be tied more closely to their perceivedviabil ity. Because female candidates are often considered noncompetitiveby the press, this attention to the horserace may lead votersto develop more negative evaluations of female candidates. Theseresults suggest that current patterns of press coverage mayserve as a critical obstacle for women running for the U.S.Senate.     

THE IMPACT OF A PUBLIC OPTION IN THE U.S. HEALTH INSURANCE MARKET

We develop a game‐theoretical framework to examine the implications of the introduction of a nonprofit “public option” in the U.S. health insurance market. In this model, heterogeneous consumers have to choose between two competing insurance plans. One plan is offered by a profit‐maximizing private insurer; the other by social‐welfare‐maximizing public option. In equilibrium, the distinct objectives of the two insurers induce adverse selection in consumer choice: the public option covers the less healthy consumers, yielding the more profitable segment of market to the private insurer. However, our empirical results suggest that both insurers will capture significant parts of the health insurance market. (JEL I11, L10, L21, L32)