Neighborhood naming as an index of attachment to place

One aspect of attachment to place may relate to neighborhood naming. That is, recent investigations have found that in many communities large numbers of residents can supply locality labels. The most recent studies, however, have failed to confirm the importance of local social involvement as a predictor of naming. Following the earlier suggestion of Shumaker and Taylor (1983) that attachment dynamics can operate at the group level, we focus on small, local groups by analyzing street blocks. Results support our hypothesis that groups with more shared local ties are more able to supply a neighborhood name. This relationship was also obtained when we examined purely individual-level covariation. Results underscore the multilevel nature of attachment processes and how they are both social and psychological in nature. Links between cognitive and affective components of attachment and practical outcomes such as local problem solving are discussed.     

Does the Vertical Mosaic Still Exist? Ethnicity and Income in Canada, 1991*

Cet article met à jour nos connaissances sur les liens entre appartenance ethnique et classe sociale au Canada en s'appuyant sur le document The Public Use Microdata File for Individuals, qui se fonde sur le recensement du Canada de 1991. L'analyse se fait en trois temps: on examine d'abord les liens entre l'appartenance ethnique et le niveau d'etudes par groupe ethnique; on considère ensuite les revenus en fonction du niveau d'études chez différents groupes ethniques; enfin, à l'aide de l'analyse de régression log-linéaire, on étudie les liens entre appartenance ethnique, niveau d'études et revenu en neutralisant les effets de nombreuses autres variables sociales. On constate que, dans la plupart des catégories de niveau d'études, les Canadiens-Français ont des revenus beaucoup plus élevés que les Canadiens-Anglais, lorsqu'on neutralise les effets d'autres variables. À cette exception près, il n'y a presque aucune différence de revenus entre les différentes ethnies d'origine européenne possédant le même niveau d'études lorsqu'on neutralise les effets d'autres variables sociales. Toutefois, ceux qui appartiennent à des minorités visibles ont des revenus beaucoup plus modestes que les autres Canadiens, quel que soit leur niveau d'études. L'origine raciale est done devenue la principale cause d'inégalités de revenus au Canada. This paper updates our knowledge about the relationship between ethnicity and social class in Canada using The Public Use Microdata File for Individuals drawn from the 1991 Census of Canada. We provide three levels of analysis. First, we examine the relationship between ethnicity and education by ethnic group. Second, we examine the “return to education” in terms of income for those of various ethnic groups. Third, we use log-linear regression to examine the relationship between ethnicity, education and income while controlling for the effects of a variety of other social variables. We find that, at most educational levels, Canadians of French ethnicity now earn significantly more than those of British ethnicity when other variables are controlled. With this exception, for those of European ethnic backgrounds there are now virtually no significant differences in income within educational levels when other social variables are controlled. However, those who belong to visible minorities have significantly lower incomes than other Canadians at all educational levels. Race is now the fundamental basis of income inequality in Canada.     

State making and state terror

Conclusion The interesting question, therefore, is this: why have we seldom heard about the destabilizing consequences of Central government policy in the pre-1949 Chinese countryside? Surely one reason has to do with the fact that the well-known models put forth by Western historians to comprehend modern Chinese history and politics by and large left out the interest of the Central government. Up until the time Theda Skocpol published States and Social Revolutions there were, generally speaking, three such models. In the first of these models, the Central government was said to have been a state blown apart by military separatism. Advocates of a second model acknowledged that Chiang Kai-shek led the Central government to defeat most of the aristocratic warlord armies of the 1927–30 period, but nonetheless portrayed the center as lacking the bureaucratic machinery necessary to penetrate the vast rural interior and halt the devolution of state power. According to Philip Kuhn, William Wei, and Philip C. C. Huang, this devolutionary process played into the hands of entrenched local elites who were against state building, or who, as Prasenjit Duara has brilliantly shown, acted as brokers to alter Central government claims in order to serve their own interests. Yet a third model was sketched out in the insightful historical studies of Lloyd E. Eastman. According to Eastman, the Republican center was real enough, but the plans of its policymakers to create economic wealth and expand their controls over rural society were confounded by factional infighting and cut short by the Japanese invasion of China in 1937.To be sure, each of the preceding models has enriched our understanding of the relation of the Republican polity to rural society within a given time frame and in a given place. William Wei's study, which shows that Chiang Kai-shek's Central government was more or less compelled to compromise with local strongmen in order to pacify Jiangxi province in the mid-1930s, is but one convincing example of the warlord devolution of state power thesis. Thus Wei strikes a familiar Skocpolian note — that of a Republican state permeated by rival social interests — when he concludes that the inescapable irony of it all was that by restoring the rural elite to power, the Guomindang had actually undermined its long-sought goal of placing the countryside fully under Central government control.By way of contrast, the formation of collective protest among the peasant salt producers of North China cannot be explained by merely evoking one of the well-established models of the Republican polity. That the Central government and its political interest is missing in most scholarly accounts of the coming of the Chinese Revolution is not surprising, for as Bruce Cumings wisely has pointed out, scholars of agrarian political systems have not developed a sufficient understanding of what prompts rural people to rebel largely because they seldom know what the politics of particular state structures are. I suspect that the precepts of the past, in combination with the current preoccupations with social history, have blinded us to the larger questions about the Republican state and its role in inciting rural disorder. Yet by following Tilly, and by exploring the macrohistory of the Republican state, we can see that there was a Central government, and that Chiang Kai-shek, T. V. Song, H. H. Kong, and other state makers made up the core of a ruling national clique bent on developing a political economy that would serve its own political interest. Having grasped this piece of the puzzle, we are in a better position to comprehend the political origins of collective protest in the countryside. Clearly, the Chiang Kai-shek center did have a major interest in salt revenue, and just as clearly the grievances and gatherings of the country people were linked to the revenue demands of the reconditioned gabelle. The emergence of popular collective action thus can be explained by the fact that China's country people could not adapt their lives to the Central government attempt to establish a political economy based on state monopoly and state-organized violence.Clearly, also, the Central government under Chiang Kai-shek did attempt to build its own state apparatus - its army, police forces, and bureaucracy — by developing new sources of revenue. By detailing the Republican state interest in taxing, or taking over, trade in rural products such as timber, salt, and coal we can begin to explore the process whereby the center reached deep into the countryside, and thereby advance our understanding of the progress made by the state in imposing its claims in the face of competition from provincial warlord regimes, county level actors, and village society. Few if any of the authors of the well-established models of the Republican polity have in fact looked systematically at the Central government quest for one specific type of revenue, or traced the development and extension of state revenue machinery within a given region, province, or county - let alone a village - over the long duree of modern Chinese history. My challenge to Skocpol, and the literature upon which her thesis is based, rests on just such a research strategy, that is, on evidence that the Central government was expanding its control over salt trade and over revenue from salt taxes in the North China interior during the Nationalist decade, 1927–37. By surveying the politics of salt, we have seen that the Central government Ministry of Finance was making some measure of progress in overcoming warlord controls, overriding the objections of local elites, and obliterating the structures of everyday peasant resistance.What does all of this suggest about the weakness of the Nanjing Central government? When Central government fiscal policy is placed firmly in the context of evolving state power, the Chiang Kai-shek center appears less anemic than is usually assumed - at least in this one issue area. To make this case, we need not deny that a condition of multiple sovereignty persisted in Republican China, or that Chiang Kaishek's Republic was not fully effective in its attempted expansion. But neither should we neglect the fact that the Chiang Kai-shek center was attempting to build a state in China, and that its state strengthening policies misfired and triggered collective protest. Such ill-conceived policies, along with the popular resistance to police efforts to enforce them, combined to place a major constraint on the state-building experiment.Thus, the fiscal claims of the Republican Central government itself combined with microlevel factors to produce this particular episode of collective protest. Gabelle-based income was one of the main pillars of Central government revenue from Yuan Shikai to Chiang Kai-shek. The center's attempt to transform China's long-established system of salt tax collection into a big profitable business was of course undertaken to pay off war indemnities and foreign debts and to underwrite state development. The problem was that progress in this sphere came at the expense of thousands upon thousands of village dwellers who shared an interest in the old earth salt economies of inland China. Understandably, the revved-up revenue collection machinery of the Central government's Salt Bureau - specifically the efforts of its tax police to seize the earth salt produced in peasant villages, which historically had been opposed to the official monopoly - drew the country people into confrontations and clashes with the agents of the state. Hence at the heart of this little known story is the resistance of China's salt land villages to a system of bureaucratic police controls supportive of the expansion of central state power. Of course for a more searchingly nuanced and complex explanation, we could factor in warlord politics, local elite inputs, and the factional intrigues of the Chiang Kaishek clique, but the important point is that the problem facing the country people was systemic, that is, the state-making process itself.Finally, the spirit of this episode of collective protest was not anti-capitalist. Rather, China's country people turned to collective action in order to preserve their longstanding rights to produce for the free market. The struggles of the peasant salt makers thus underscore the prevalence of the deeply structured market forces of which G. William Skinner has written, and remind us that rural protest sometimes took the form of a broad popular statement against state market controls. At the lower rungs of the rural marketing hierarchy, the peasant salt producers joined other pro-market groups, including local merchants and lower gentry, to prevent the Central government police from subordinating their communities to the state drive for revenue. Whether the Republican state was on the verge of winning this war on the popular market before World War II remains to be seen. But one point is clear: Central government interference in the popular market prerogatives produced a cast of angry characters who gained experience in organizing collective actions that transcended village politics, and their actions attracted the attention of Chinese Communist Party cadres who also were suffering from the repression of the protostate.     

Improving Risk Communication

This paper explores reasons for difficulties in communicating risks among analysts, the laypublic, media, and regulators. Formulating risk communication problems as decisions involving objectives and alternatives helps to identify strategies for overcoming these difficulties. Several strategies are suggested to achieve risk communication objectives like improving public knowledge about risks and risk management, encouraging risk reduction behavior, understanding public values and concerns, and increasing trust and credibility.     

Radon Risk Information and Voluntary Protection: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

This study examines the perceived risks and mitigating behavior of Maine households who received new information on their exposures to significant health risks from indoor radon. The observed responses of these households illustrate conceptual issues related to designing an effective risk information program. Despite the involvement of generally well-motivated homeowners and well-intentioned researchers and government officials, we conclude that the risk information approach used in Maine failed to induce appropriate, cost-effective voluntary protection. The results indicate that, after receiving radon test results, information on associated health risks, and suggestions on how to reduce exposures: perceived risks tended to understate objective risks by orders of magnitude, and there was no statistically significant relationship between mitigating behavior and objective risks. These results suggest that the formation of risk perceptions and subsequent behavioral adjustments involve complex interactions among information, contextual, socioeconomic, and psychological variables. Therefore, government programs that seek to reduce health and safety risks with information programs, instead of using more conventional enforced standards, must be crafted very carefully to accommodate this complex process.     

Percentiles of the Product of Uncertainty Factors for Establishing Probabilistic Reference Doses

Exposure guidelines for potentially toxic substances are often based on a reference dose (RfD) that is determined by dividing a no-observed-adverse-effect-level (NOAEL), lowest-observed-adverse-effect-level (LOAEL), or benchmark dose (BD) corresponding to a low level of risk, by a product of uncertainty factors. The uncertainty factors for animal to human extrapolation, variable sensitivities among humans, extrapolation from measured subchronic effects to unknown results for chronic exposures, and extrapolation from a LOAEL to a NOAEL can be thought of as random variables that vary from chemical to chemical. Selected databases are examined that provide distributions across chemicals of inter- and intraspecies effects, ratios of LOAELs to NOAELs, and differences in acute and chronic effects, to illustrate the determination of percentiles for uncertainty factors. The distributions of uncertainty factors tend to be approximately lognormally distributed. The logarithm of the product of independent uncertainty factors is approximately distributed as the sum of normally distributed variables, making it possible to estimate percentiles for the product. Hence, the size of the products of uncertainty factors can be selected to provide adequate safety for a large percentage (e.g., approximately 95%) of RfDs. For the databases used to describe the distributions of uncertainty factors, using values of 10 appear to be reasonable and conservative. For the databases examined the following simple "Rule of 3s" is suggested that exceeds the estimated 95th percentile of the product of uncertainty factors: If only a single uncertainty factor is required use 33, for any two uncertainty factors use 3 x 33 approximately 100, for any three uncertainty factors use a combined factor of 3 x 100 = 300, and if all four uncertainty factors are needed use a total factor of 3 x 300 = 900. If near the 99th percentile is desired use another factor of 3. An additional factor may be needed for inadequate data or a modifying factor for other uncertainties (e.g., different routes of exposure) not covered above.     

TIME‐USE AND ACADEMIC PEER EFFECTS IN COLLEGE

This paper examines academic peer effects in college. Unique new data from the Berea Panel Study allow us to focus on a mechanism wherein a student's peers affect her achievement by changing her study effort. Although the potential relevance of this mechanism has been recognized, data limitations have made it difficult to provide direct evidence about its importance. We find that a student's freshman grade point average is affected by the amount her peers studied in high school, suggesting the importance of this mechanism. Using time diary information, we confirm that college study time is actually being affected. (JEL I20, F21, J01)