Brexit: Be Careful What You Wish For?

In this paper, I focus on the British future from Brexit. The institutional form this will take is not yet fixed. However, one can consider likely outcomes based on dominant economic frameworks. From this perspective, it seems unlikely that Brexit will address the actual grievances that resulted in Brexit. These transcend European Union membership.     

Societal Inequality and individual subjective well-being: Results from 68 societies and over 200,000 individuals, 1981–2008

Income inequality has been contentious for millennia, a source of political conflict for centuries, and is now widely feared as a pernicious “side effect” of economic progress. But equality is only a means to an end and so must be evaluated by its consequences. The fundamental question is: What effect does a country's level of income inequality have on its citizens' quality of life, their subjective well-being? We show that in developing nations inequality is certainly not harmful but probably beneficial, increasing well-being by about 8 points out of 100. This may well be Kuznets's inverted “U”: In the earliest stages of development some are able to move out of the (poorly paying) subsistence economy into the (better paying) modern economy; their higher pay increases their well-being while simultaneously increasing inequality. In advanced nations, income inequality on average neither helps nor harms. Estimates are from random-intercept fixed-effects multi-level models, confirmed by over four dozen sensitivity tests. Data are from the pooled World Values/European Values Surveys, Waves 1 to 5 with 169 representative national samples in 68 nations, 1981 to 2009, and over 200,000 respondents, replicated and extended in the European Quality of Life Surveys.     

Gender in academic STEM: A focus on men faculty

In this study, we explore how men faculty understand the role of gender in shaping faculty experiences in academic science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and how they position themselves in relation to inequalities disfavouring women. Our data reveal diversity among men in their understandings regarding challenges facing women in STEM. The majority of our participants revealed gender‐blind perspectives and argued that the egalitarian structure of academia does not allow gender to impact attainments in STEM in any significant way. However, a considerable number of them felt privileged compared to women and described subtle ways in which gender shapes opportunities. Our findings show the important implications of men's sensitivity to gender in the ways they perform their professional roles as, for example, mentors, colleagues and teachers in relation to women in STEM. They further call for attention to men's perceptions of gender issues when designing institutional interventions for improving women's conditions in STEM.     

Response‐adaptive designs for binary responses: How to offer patient benefit while being robust to time trends?

Response‐adaptive randomisation (RAR) can considerably improve the chances of a successful treatment outcome for patients in a clinical trial by skewing the allocation probability towards better performing treatments as data accumulates. There is considerable interest in using RAR designs in drug development for rare diseases, where traditional designs are not either feasible or ethically questionable. In this paper, we discuss and address a major criticism levelled at RAR: namely, type I error inflation due to an unknown time trend over the course of the trial. The most common cause of this phenomenon is changes in the characteristics of recruited patients—referred to as patient drift. This is a realistic concern for clinical trials in rare diseases due to their lengthly accrual rate. We compute the type I error inflation as a function of the time trend magnitude to determine in which contexts the problem is most exacerbated. We then assess the ability of different correction methods to preserve type I error in these contexts and their performance in terms of other operating characteristics, including patient benefit and power. We make recommendations as to which correction methods are most suitable in the rare disease context for several RAR rules, differentiating between the 2‐armed and the multi‐armed case. We further propose a RAR design for multi‐armed clinical trials, which is computationally efficient and robust to several time trends considered.     

‘Here and There’: Children and Youth’s Perspectives of Borders in Mexico–United States Migration

This article explores children’s perspectives regarding migration and family separation on both sides of the Mexico‐U.S. border. ‘Transnational care constellations’¹ that connect separated siblings allow children to imagine the other side of the border and to explore their thoughts and perspectives through the lenses of inequality, as well as through a sense of belonging and family. This article presents ethnographic data of families that capture the dynamism of families that are both ‘here and there’ as children assemble their ideas and narratives of how transnational lives exist.     

Informality,emotion and gendered career paths: The hidden toll of maternity leave on female academics and researchers

While the negative impact of child‐raising and caring on women's career progression in academia is well‐established, less is known about the role of academic women's lived experiences of maternity leave as an institutional practice. This article presents the findings of a qualitative study of the lived experiences of female academics and researchers in an Irish university. The analysis intrinsically links organizational structures and problems with the lived and felt dimensions of work. The findings point to the need for better structural accommodations for maternity leave which address the relationship between caring and career disadvantage within academia. The article adds to existing literature on the intersection of motherhood and academia by unpicking the specific role of maternity leave as both a lived experience and an institutional practice that can reinforce gender inequalities in academia.     

Strong law of large numbers and complete convergence for non-identically distributed WOD random variables

In this paper, we establish the strong law of large numbers and complete convergence for non-identically distributed WOD random variables. We derive some new inequalities of Fuk–Nagaev type for the sums of non-identically distributed WD random variables. All these results further extend and refine previous ones.     

Ethiopia's developmental state: A building stability framework assessment

Ethiopia has been lauded for its economic growth and progress in human development indicators. For some, that success is rooted in the developmental state approach advocated by the government. For others, the theory of the developmental state and the practice in Ethiopia were often at odds. Up until 2018, ideas that challenged the state and its approaches were not welcome, and politicians, academics and journalists were jailed for expressing alternative views. However, this appears to have changed, and in June 2018 the Deputy Prime Minister called for debate on the developmental state model. This article explores Ethiopia's developmental state model using the building stability framework, analysing its ability to establish fair power structures, foster inclusive economic growth, develop conflict‐resolution mechanisms, create effective and legitimate institutions, and enable a supportive regional environment. We find the developmental state was effective in a number of ways, but that this modality of governance appears to have passed its peak of securing advantage in Ethiopia. A shift from the developmental state to developmental democracy appears to be underway. Decision‐making and economic policies need to align with this change.     

Is there a global super-bourgeoisie?

In recent decades, accelerating processes of globalization and an increase in economic inequality in most of the world's countries have raised the question of the emergence of a new bourgeoisie integrated at the global level, sometimes described as a global super-bourgeoisie. This group would be distinguished by its unequaled level of wealth and global interconnectedness, its transnational ubiquity and concentration in the planet's major global cities, its specific culture, consumption habits, sites of sociability and shared references, and even by class consciousness and capacity to act collectively. This article successively discusses how the social sciences have examined these various dimensions of the question and begun to provide systematic empirical answers.     

现代社会隐私权和知情权的边界

现代社会是权利的社会,也是权利冲突频发的社会。权利之间的冲突缘起于法律规则的模糊性、权利的滥用和权利的交互性。其实质是一种客观存在的事实而非理论预设和逻辑分析的结果。权利冲突可以大致界分为主体间的权利冲突、价值冲突、利益冲突三种类型;权利间的冲突需要借助社会控制模式(个人控制、组织控制、法律控制)并通过价值平衡方法来解决。