Anonymous Single-profile Welfarism

This note reexamines the single-profile approach to social-choice theory. If an alternative is interpreted as a social state of affairs or a history of the world, it can be argued that a multi-profile approach is inappropriate because the information profile is determined by the set of alternatives. However, single-profile approaches are criticized because of the limitations they impose on the possibility of formulating properties such as anonymity. We suggest an alternative definition of anonymity that applies in a single-profile setting and characterize anonymous single-profile welfarism under a richness assumption.The paper was presented at the conference on welfarist and non-welfarist approaches to public economics in Ghent, March 2004. We thank John Broome, Campbell Brown, Marc Fleurbaey, Wlodek Rabinowicz, John Roemer, John Weymark and two referees for comments and discussions. Financial support through a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada is gratefully acknowledged.     

Economic growth, poverty, and the international agencies

During the past few years, the international agencies have been playing down economic growth as the main road to the elimination of poverty and emphasizing the role of asset and income redistribution. The latest reflection of this attitude is the so-called “basic needs” approach. This essay attempts to demonstrate that where economic growth has been sufficiently high and sustained, it has been a powerful means of alleviating poverty. Growth has not “failed”; there is simply not enough International agencies should be cautious in advocating redistribution, for the results .     

Silent Partners: Women in Farm Magazine Success Stories, 1934–19911

Abstract Women's contributions to the farm and farm household have historically been undervalued. An analysis of farm magazine “success” stories through six decades indicates that these stories may be a vehicle for reproducing and transmitting a traditional domestic ideology that separates farm production from the rest of the farm household and that rarely portrays women as significant contributors to the economic well-being of either. Magazine stories depict women as spouses or farm helpers, but not as producers or decision-makers. Farm magazines thus offer few models of realistic gender relations for either farm women or farm men.     

A comment on Scott's “Black Polygamous Family Formation”

This brief article takes a critical look at Joseph W. Scott's article Black Polygamous Family Formation. While Scott's research is seen as helpful, several problems in his treatment of plural mating and marriage arrangements among Black Americans are discussed. Major conceptual problems are created by Scott's use (or misuse) of the concept polygyny. Significant methodological problems are also posed by his sampling approach, operationalization of concepts, and analytic strategies. Studies such as Scott's are of optimal value when their exploratory nature, and consequent limitation, are clearly acknowledged. Authors' Note: Please address inquiries or requests for reprints to: Walter R. Allen, Department of Sociology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109     

Large-scale multiple testing under dependence

Summary.  The paper considers the problem of multiple testing under dependence in a compound decision theoretic framework. The observed data are assumed to be generated from an underlying two-state hidden Markov model. We propose oracle and asymptotically optimal data-driven procedures that aim to minimize the false non-discovery rate FNR subject to a constraint on the false discovery rate FDR. It is shown that the performance of a multiple-testing procedure can be substantially improved by adaptively exploiting the dependence structure among hypotheses, and hence conventional FDR procedures that ignore this structural information are inefficient. Both theoretical properties and numerical performances of the procedures proposed are investigated. It is shown that the procedures proposed control FDR at the desired level, enjoy certain optimality properties and are especially powerful in identifying clustered non-null cases. The new procedure is applied to an influenza-like illness surveillance study for detecting the timing of epidemic periods.