Ethical living: relinking ethics and consumption through care in Chile and Brazil

Mainstream conceptualizations of ‘ethical consumption’ equate the notion with conscious, individual, market‐mediated choices motivated by ethical or political aims that transcend ordinary concerns. Drawing on recent sociology and anthropology of consumption literature on the links between ordinary ethics and ethical consumption, this article discusses some of the limitations of this conceptualization. Using data from 32 focus groups conducted in Chile and Brazil, we propose a conceptualization of ethical consumption that does not centre on individual, market‐mediated choices but understands it at the level of practical outcomes, which we refer to as different forms of ‘ethical living’. To do that, we argue, we need to depart from the deontological understanding of ethics that underpins mainstream approaches to ethical consumption and adopt a more consequentialist view focusing on ethical outcomes. We develop these points through describing one particular ordinary moral regime that seemed to be predominant in participants’ accounts of ethics and consumption in both Chile and Brazil: one that links consumption and ethics through care. We show that the moral regime of care leads to ‘ethical outcomes’, such as energy saving or limiting overconsumption, yet contrary to the mainstream view of ethical consumption emphasizing politicized choice expressed through markets, these result from following ordinary ethics, often through routines of practices.     

自我意识是一个伦理原则——马克思博士论文伦理思想探析

在博士论文中,马克思确立了自我意识哲学的主体地位。表面看是在阐释伊壁鸠鲁哲学,实际上＂已经显示出了马克思的创造的智慧＂。在他的理论视域内,自我意识是一个伦理原则,有着丰富的伦理内涵,展现了其在走向社会批判以前＂伦理批判＂的思想特质。     

Do people have accurate beliefs about the behavioral consequences of incidental emotions? Evidence from trust games

The present study examined people’s expectations of how incidental emotions could shape others’ reciprocity in trusting situations, whether these expectations affect people’s own behavior, and how accurate these expectations are. Study 1 explored people’s beliefs about the effects of different incidental emotions on another person’s trustworthiness in general. In Studies 2 and 3, senders in trust games faced angry, guilty, grateful, or emotionally neutral responders. Participants who were told about their counterpart’s emotional state acted consistently with their beliefs about how these emotions would affect the other’s trustworthiness. These beliefs were not always correct, however. There were significant deviations between the expected behavior of angry responders and such responders’ actual behavior. These findings raise the possibility that one player’s knowledge of the other’s emotional state may lead to action choices that yield poor outcomes for both players.     

The limitations of using school league tables to inform school choice

Summary. In England, so-called 'league tables' based on examination results and test scores are published annually, ostensibly to inform parental choice of secondary schools. A crucial limitation of these tables is that the most recent published information is based on the current performance of a cohort of pupils who entered secondary schools several years earlier, whereas for choosing a school it is the future performance of the current cohort that is of interest. We show that there is substantial uncertainty in predicting such future performance and that incorporating this uncertainty leads to a situation where only a handful of schools' future performances can be separated from both the overall mean and from one another with an acceptable degree of precision. This suggests that school league tables, including value-added tables, have very little to offer as guides to school choice.     

4万亿经济激励计划背后的经济学问题

凯恩斯的宏观经济理论既不涉及现实的政治维度，也不关注微观经济层面的资源配置效率问题，这样的理论应用于现实的结果很可能是弊大于利。作为应用凯恩斯理论的总需求管理思想的产物，中国4万亿的经济刺激计划在政治层面难以避免寻租和腐败、政治权力固化等问题，在经济层面有可能导致资源配置的扭曲。虽然政府出台了各种监管措施以预防这种可能出现的弊病，但经验和理论都告诉我们这些措施的有效性是有限的。     

Vocational education,self‐employment and burnout among Australian workers

We examine the relationship between vocational education and occupational burnout among workers in different forms of employment. Although the self‐employed enjoy higher levels of job autonomy and work‐related satisfaction, we do not know whether they experience lower rates of occupational burnout, and whether vocational education plays a role in this relationship. This latter consideration is important, given that vocational qualifications often lead to self‐employment and prior research demonstrated that formal training may reduce burnout. However, formal education was previously measured in years of schooling, without considering the distinction between academically‐oriented and vocational courses. Therefore, using data from a 2001 national survey of working Australians, we first establish that the self‐employed are significantly less likely to experience burnout. We then demonstrate that some resilience to burnout can be attributed to the attainment of skilled vocational training, net of employment characteristics which are also very important.     

论达尔文进化论的生态思想及其意义

达尔文进化论不仅确立了重要的生态原则,而且这些原则具有十分丰富的科学意义。深入阐发达尔文进化论生态意义,有助于我们深化对人与自然的关系、人类在自然进化中的位置、人类文明发展与生态建设的关系等问题的认识。     

加拿大原住民自治政府:联邦主义下制度构建与政治文化相背离的困境

本文指出 ,加拿大原住民自治政府虽然具有道德正义性而且其合法性与加拿大联邦主义的原则不冲突 ,但其作为一个在联邦制度内的制度构建与加拿大的主导政治文化和政治权力结构却有一种背离矛盾关系。这种主导共同体与亚集体认同矛盾的现象在多民族国家的政治制度构建中是带有普遍性的问题 ,如何在宪政建设中解决这个问题对加拿大联邦制的前景至关重要 ,而且对中国这样的多民族国家将来的宪政建设也有很大的启示作用     

Poverty and Self‐Control

We argue that poverty can perpetuate itself by undermining the capacity for self‐control. In line with a distinguished psychological literature, we consider modes of self‐control that involve the self‐imposed use of contingent punishments and rewards. We study settings in which consumers with quasi‐hyperbolic preferences confront an otherwise standard intertemporal allocation problem with credit constraints. Our main result demonstrates that low initial assets can limit self‐control, trapping people in poverty, while individuals with high initial assets can accumulate indefinitely. Thus, even temporary policies that initiate accumulation among the poor may be effective. We examine implications concerning the effect of access to credit on saving, the demand for commitment devices, the design of financial accounts to promote accumulation, and the variation of the marginal propensity to consume across income from different sources. We also explore the nature of optimal self‐control, demonstrating that it has a simple and behaviorally plausible structure that is immune to self‐renegotiation.     

Bounding Optimal Expected Revenues for Assortment Optimization under Mixtures of Multinomial Logits

We consider assortment problems under a mixture of multinomial logit models. There is a fixed revenue associated with each product. There are multiple customer types. Customers of different types choose according to different multinomial logit models whose parameters depend on the type of the customer. The goal is to find a set of products to offer so as to maximize the expected revenue obtained over all customer types. This assortment problem under the multinomial logit model with multiple customer types is NP‐complete. Although there are heuristics to find good assortments, it is difficult to verify the optimality gap of the heuristics. In this study, motivated by the difficulty of finding optimal solutions and verifying the optimality gap of heuristics, we develop an approach to construct an upper bound on the optimal expected revenue. Our approach can quickly provide upper bounds and these upper bounds can be quite tight. In our computational experiments, over a large set of randomly generated problem instances, the upper bounds provided by our approach deviate from the optimal expected revenues by 0.15% on average and by less than one percent in the worst case. By using our upper bounds, we are able to verify the optimality gaps of a greedy heuristic accurately, even when optimal solutions are not available.