Charitable conservatism, poverty radicalism and inequality aversion

In his Presidential Address to the European Economic Association, Tony Atkinson introduced the idea of a “charitable conservatism” position in public policy, which “exhibits a degree of concern for the poor, but this is the limit of the redistributional concern and there is indifference with respect to transfers above the poverty line.” This contrasts with the perspective of poverty indices, which give zero weight to those above the poverty line, which we call “poverty radicalism,” and with standard “inequality aversion” where the weights decline smoothly as we move up the income scale. The object of this paper is, first, to clarify the interrelationships between charitable conservatism, poverty radicalism and inequality aversion. We do this by showing how the patterns of welfare weights to which each of these gives rise are related to each other. Secondly, we are concerned to demonstrate the implications of these different views for optimal income taxation. In terms of levels and patterns of marginal tax rates, we show that charitable conservatism and poverty radicalism are on a continuum, and by choice of low or high inequality aversion one can approximate either outcome fairly well.     

Characterizations of two power indices for voting games with r alternatives

In the first three sections of this paper we present a set of axioms which provide a characterization of an extension of the Banzhaf index to voting games with r alternatives, such as the United Nations Security Council where a nation can vote “yes”, “no”, or “abstain”. The fourth section presents a set of axioms which characterizes a power index based on winning sets instead of pivot sets. Received: 4 April 2000/Accepted: 30 April 2001     

Strategy-proofness versus efficiency on the Cobb-Douglas domain of exchange economies

We study the optimal design of an organization in which a team of fallible individuals with heterogeneous abilities collectively decides whether to accept or reject projects. Conventional wisdom tells us that the opinion of those individuals with better decision-making abilities should be given a “larger” weight in the decision. We formalize this intuition in a sequential evaluation process and provide specific ways to characterize the optimal decision weights, as well as demonstrate that the magnitude of the weights depends on the relative abilities of the decision-makers, as well as where the decision-makers are placed in the project evaluation sequence.     

Characterizing multidimensional inequality measures which fulfil the Pigou–Dalton bundle principle

The Pigou–Dalton bundle dominance introduced by Fleurbaey and Trannoy (Social Choice and Welfare, 2003) captures the basic idea of the Pigou–Dalton transfer principle, demanding that, in the multidimensional context also, “a transfer from a richer person to a poorer one decreases inequality”. However, up to now, this principle has not been incorporated to derive multidimensional inequality measures. The aim of this article is to characterize measures which fulfil this property, and to identify sub-families of indices from a normative approach. The families we derive share their functional forms with others having already been obtained in the literature, the major difference being the restrictions upon the parameters.     

Altruistic Individualists: Motivations for International Volunteering Among Young Adults in Switzerland

Modernization theory posits a change from traditional or “collective” forms to modern or “reflective” forms of volunteering. In a research project using a combined qualitative–quantitative approach, the motivation of 118 young Swiss adults who showed an interest in international volunteering was investigated. Qualitative analysis revealed 12 different motives which could be categorized into three different groups: A first group called “Achieving something positive for others,” a second group named “Quest for the new,” and a third group of motives labeled “Quest for oneself.” Motivations of young Swiss adults for international volunteering clearly show the characteristics of “reflexive” volunteers. Most respondents displayed a combination of motives while for only 11% of them altruism (“Achieving something positive for others”) was the one and only driving force behind their interest in international volunteering. The inductively constructed typology of motives can be a useful planning device for organizations that run or intend to set up an international volunteering program for young adults.     

Consistent judgement aggregation: the truth-functional case

Generalizing the celebrated “discursive dilemma”, we analyze judgement aggregation problems in which a group of agents independently votes on a set of complex propositions (the “conclusions”) and on a set of “premises” by which the conclusions are truth-functionally determined. We show that for conclusion- and premise-based aggregation rules to be mutually consistent, the aggregation must always be “oligarchic”, that is: unanimous within a subset of agents, and typically even be dictatorial. We characterize exactly when consistent non-dictatorial (or anonymous) aggregation rules exist, allowing for arbitrary conclusions and arbitrary interdependencies among premises.     

Correction to: Divorce among European and Mexican immigrants in the U.S.

The original version of this article unfortunately contained few errors in tables. In Tables 2a, 2b, 3a and 3b, the “Percent of sample” and “Percent spouse absent” should be in decimal in order to be consistent. In Tables 4 and 5, the first row should read as “Age at marriage” instead of “Percent of sample” and the “Sample size” was incorrect.     

At the Eve of Convergence? Transformations of Social Service Provision in Denmark, Germany, and the United States

Increasing societal heterogeneity, changing demographics, and increasing public debt and fiscal constraints have recently challenged traditional “regime” approaches to welfare state development. Some scholars argue, against this background, that welfare states might plausibly move out of their “regime container” by opting in favor of similar solutions and responses. This potential trend toward “convergence” might, furthermore, be facilitated by the widespread use of new public management ideas and techniques for “reinventing government” by adopting market solutions to public problems. This article investigates whether such trends of convergence can be identified by comparing three different countries each traditionally looked upon as belonging to different welfare state regimes: Denmark, Germany, and the United States. More specifically the article looks at one important segment of welfare state activity, namely social services and related health care. To further focus the analysis, special attention is devoted to the changing role played by the third sector in delivering services. The research design, thus, differs from most comparative welfare state research. Instead of analyzing a broad set of quantitative indicators in a large number of countries, it is scrutinized how some of the same problem pressures and policy ideas are being interpreted and implemented in a small number of countries within one policy area. The analysis reveals that trends of convergence—conceptualized along four dimensions: ideas, regulation, mix of providers, and revenue mix—can be identified across the three cases, though this does not mean that the market share of nonprofit providers becomes the same. The study also reveals that fundamental aspects of state–nonprofit relations persist despite trends of convergence.     

Interpretation of electoral mixed strategies

In this paper is remarked that “mixed” strategies in games of electoral competition do not need to be interpreted as random moves. There are two a priori symmetric parties, and a finite (non spatial) set of alternatives. Parties are allowed to take unclear positions, by campaining on a “platform” that is a mix of several alternatives. Each individual nevertheless identifies a party with a single alternative, the number of individuals who identify a party with a given alternative being proportional to the importance of that alternative in the party’s platform. Received: 24 March 1998/Accepted: 3 March 1999     

The face and mask of unionism

Richard Freeman and James Medoff have asserted that labor unions have two “faces,” a “good” face and a “bad” face. This contribution critically examines their arguments to expose serious flaws in their conceptual analysis.     

Pairwise Strategy-Proofness and Self-Enforcing Manipulation

“Strategy-proofness” is one of the axioms that are most frequently used in the recent literature on social choice theory. It requires that by misrepresenting his preferences, no agent can manipulate the outcome of the social choice rule in his favor. The stronger requirement of “group strategy-proofness” is also often employed to obtain clear characterization results of social choice rules. Group strategy-proofness requires that no group of agents can manipulate the outcome in their favors. In this paper, we advocate “effective pairwise strategy-proofness.” It is the requirement that the social choice rule should be immune to unilateral manipulation and “self-enforcing” pairwise manipulation in the sense that no agent of a pair has the incentive to betray his partner. We apply the axiom of effective pairwise strategy-proofness to three types of economies: public good economy, pure exchange economy, and allotment economy. Although effective pairwise strategy-proofness is seemingly a much weaker axiom than group strategy-proofness, effective pairwise strategy-proofness characterizes social choice rules that are analyzed by using different axioms in the literature.     

What is a problem?

Among others, the term “problem” plays a major role in the various attempts to characterize interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity, as used synonymously in this paper. Interdisciplinarity (ID) is regarded as “problem solving among science, technology and society” and as “problem orientation beyond disciplinary constraints” (cf. Frodeman et al.: The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010). The point of departure of this paper is that the discourse and practice of ID have problems with the “problem”. The objective here is to shed some light on the vague notion of “problem” in order to advocate a specific type of interdisciplinarity: problem-oriented interdisciplinarity. The outline is as follows: Taking an ex negativo approach, I will show what problem-oriented ID does not mean. Using references to well-established distinctions in philosophy of science, I will show three other types of ID that should not be placed under the umbrella term “problem-oriented ID”: object-oriented ID (“ontology”), theory-oriented ID (epistemology), and method-oriented ID (methodology). Different philosophical thought traditions can be related to these distinguishable meanings. I will then clarify the notion of “problem” by looking at three systematic elements: an undesired (initial) state, a desired (goal) state, and the barriers in getting from the one to the other. These three elements include three related kinds of knowledge: systems, target, and transformation knowledge. This paper elaborates further methodological and epistemological elements of problem-oriented ID. It concludes by stressing that problem-oriented ID is the most needed as well as the most challenging type of ID.     

The power of a collectivity to act in weighted voting games with many small voters

We analyze the propensity to approve a random proposal of a large committee that makes decisions by weighted voting. The approach is a generalized version of James Coleman’s “power of a collectivity to act”. Throughout the paper it is assumed that the voters are of two kinds: a fixed (possibly empty) set of “major” (big) voters with fixed weights, and an ever-increasing number of “minor” (small) voters, whose total weight is also fixed, but where each individual’s weight becomes negligible. As our main result, we obtain that asymptotically many minor voters act like a modification of the quota for the vote among major voters. The paper estimates the rate of convergence which turns out to be very high if the weight distribution among the small voters is not too skewed. The results obtained are illustrated by evaluating the decision rules for the Council of Ministers of the EU for various scenarios of EU enlargement. I wish to thank Matthew Braham, Sidartha Gordon, Maurice Koster, Moshé Machover, Guillermo Owen and two anonymous referees for helpful comments.     

Sophisticated voting and equilibrium refinements under plurality rule

In this paper we show in the context of voting games with plurality rule that the “perfect” equilibrium concept does not appear restrictive enough, since, independently of preferences, it can exclude at most the election of only one candidate. Furthermore, some examples show that there are “perfect” equilibria that are not “proper”. However, also some “proper” outcome is eliminated by sophisticated voting, while Mertens' stable set fully satisfies such criterium, for generic plurality games. Moreover, we highlight a weakness of the simple sophisticated voting principle. Finally, we find that, for some games, sophisticated voting (and strategic stability) does not elect the Condorcet winner, neither it respects Duverger's law, even with a large number of voters. Received: 16 March 1999/Accepted: 25 September 1999     

What’s so special about Euclidean distance?

In this paper, we provide an application-oriented characterization of a class of distance functions monotonically related to the Euclidean distance in terms of some general properties of distance functions between real-valued vectors. Our analysis hinges upon two fundamental properties of distance functions that we call “value-sensitivity” and “order-sensitivity”. We show how these two general properties, combined with natural monotonicity considerations, lead to characterization results that single out several versions of Euclidean distance from the wide class of separable distance functions. We then discuss and motivate our results in two different and apparently unrelated application areas—mobility measurement and spatial voting theory—and propose our characterization as a test for deciding whether Euclidean distance (or some suitable variant) should be used in your favourite application context. We would like to thank an editor and especially two anonymous referees for very useful comments which helped us to improve the paper substantially.     

Ellen Swallow Richards: “Humanistic Oekologist,” “Applied Sociologist,” and the founding of sociology

Best known as the first woman graduate from MIT, and the founder of Home Economics, Ellen Swallow Richards was a Progressive Era reformer who applied social science research techniques to problems of concern to early sociologists. As a mentor to many women who joined the “Cultural” and “Pragmatic” feminists of Hull House, her secular theories of “Oekology” and “Euthenics” challenged many of the models of social change prevalent in the Cambridge and Chicago academic communities. Her most radical contribution as a feminist was her assertion that women’s unpaid labor in the home played a vital economic role in maintaining capitalism and was the ultimate source of their second-class citizenship. She shared a belief in democracy and education as a feminist “Pragmatist,” and laid the groundwork for the contemporary “Ecofeminist” movement. Although she was a biochemist by training, she engaged several genera-tions of women in the application of scientific methods to the solution of contemporary social problems. As a political organizer, much of her legacy is reflected in the accomplishments of the reform organizations she was instrumental in founding.     

On Past and Future of Community: A Pragmatic Analysis

Charles Sanders Peirce proposed a semiotic that directed attention to the person or people who are providing interpretation, making place for the social and cultural. Following Peirce, we consider the meanings and consequences the term “community” has in an international context. We argue that English affords a richer set of meanings to community, which was not paralleled in the languages of Southeast Asia. The encounter between English and Southeast Asian languages has lexical consequences, but more momentous are the cultural changes they index. In Southeast Asian cultures, there is less need for “community” to take on broader meanings, since those cultures assume social relationality. Thus, the spread of English “community” could be associated with a rise of individualism in these other cultures, but it could also impoverish the Anglophone West, which would be denied alternative frameworks in which associational and affective meanings of community are unnecessary.     

A feminist revisiting of the insider/outsider debate: The “outsider phenomenon” in rural Iowa

This article draws upon findings from an ethnographic study of two towns in rural Iowa to examine the adequacy of the insider/outsider distinction as a guideline for evaluating and conducting ethnographic research. Utilizing feminist standpoint and materialist feminist theories, I start with the assumption that, rather than one “insider” or “outsider” position, we all begin our work with different relationships to shifting aspects of social life and to particular knowers in the community and this contributes to numerous dimensions through which we can relate to residents in various communities. “Outsiderness” and “insiderness” are not fixed or static positions, rather they are ever-shifting and permeable social locations illustrated in this case study by the “outsider phenomenon.” Community processes that reorganize and resituate race-ethnicity, gender and class relations form some of the most salient aspects of the “outsider phenomenon.” These dynamic processes shaped our relationships with residents as ethnographic identities were repositioned by shifts in constructions of “community” that accompanied ongoing social, demographic, and political changes.     

Inequality, new directions: full ethical foundation and consequences

Deriving comparisons and measures of inequality from full ethical foundations was a main innovation of the 1960s and pursuing it is still a most fruitful direction. This implies using “equal equivalents” and some principles particularly rich in meanings. Multidimensional inequalities can be measured and compared thanks to the “equal-equivalent manifolds”. The “equal-equivalent utility function” defines individual “welfare” cleaned of differences in sui generis individual tastes and hedonic capacities deemed irrelevant for “macrojustice”. Then, equal allocation is a deeper end-value than equal welfare but has to be complemented by free choice for freedom, Pareto efficiency and a demanded partial self-ownership. The result is the richly multi-meaning “equal-labour income equalization”.     

Argumentation in Multi-issue Debates

An axiomatic modeling approach to multi-issue debates is proposed. A debate is viewed as a decision procedure consisting of two stages: (1) an “argumentation rule” determines what arguments are admissible for each party, given the “raw data”, depending on the issue or set of issues under discussion; (2) a “persuasion rule” determines the strength of the admissible arguments and selects the winning party. Persuasion rules are characterized for various alternative specifications of the argumentation rule. These characterizations capture rhetorical effects that we sometimes encounter in real-life multi-issue debates.