Transnational youth transitions: becoming adults between Vancouver and Hong Kong

In the context of the academic interest shown in the enduring transnationalism of contemporary migrants and in the modes of transitions to adulthood in different global settings, in this article we examine the transnational lives of adolescents moving between Vancouver (Canada) and Hong Kong. While there is a lot of literature on the parents' political and economic calculations, there is very little on how adolescents in these situations articulate their geographical sensibilities. We draw on three periods of fieldwork undertaken in 2002, 2008 and 2010 during which we employed a transnational methodology to interview young people in Vancouver and Hong Kong. We argue that becoming an adult involves a process in which, in their discussions about the geographical and emotional distance between themselves and their families, young people articulate their own complex emotions towards specific places in their transnational social field. Their families sporadically interrupt the adolescents' otherwise independent lives with fragmented modes of supervision. By examining the complex intentions and emotions behind circular migration from the perspective of transnational youth in a community of split families, we advance the discussion on transnational geographies, particularly of the family in the context of a flexible global economy.     

CIGARETTE TAXES AND THE MASTER SETTLEMENT AGREEMENT

In 1998, 46 states and the four major tobacco companies entered into the Master Settlement Agreement (MSA), which stipulated that the tobacco companies pay the states $206 billion over the next several years. Mean cigarette excise taxes rose substantially, nearly 90%, between 1998 and 2002. The goal of our empirical analysis is to assess whether the changes in cigarette excise taxes can be attributed to litigation brought by the states and the resulting settlements. Using a panel data difference-in-difference approach, the evidence suggests that litigation increased excise taxes: state cigarette excise taxes were approximately $0.10 higher post-MSA. (JEL H2, I1 )     

Retirement migration and transnational grandparental support: a Spanish case study

People who migrate in retirement often do so to join younger generations who have already migrated, and to help with grandchildren. But what about those retirees who migrate away from their families? Do they still provide grandparental support? To address this question, we examine retirement migrants who reside permanently in their new country, Spain. We find that they are aware of grandparental support expectations, and that their migration decision sometimes creates conflict with their offspring. At the same time, these retirement migrants reshape the meaning of grandparental support. Care considerations influence their destination and housing choices, and they continue to provide care. They feel that their familial relationships are now of a higher quality, despite the distance. At the same time, gender still emerges as a key dimension of grandparental support. The grandparenting of these retirement migrants challenges facile depictions of their motivations and of the equation of quantity and quality of contacts.     

Descartes: The Smear and Related Misconstruals

In part because he is known through his Meditations, a short pamphlet he wrote, rightly in fear, to conciliate (unsuccessfully) with the church, and because his rationalism is misconstrued when interpreted empirically, Descartes is subject to a variety of misunderstandings. It does not help that he is dogged by a canard invented in the late 1600s and revived by the animal rights movement, a canard that was designed to denigrate the then burgeoning mechanistic new science, discovered cruelly cutting up living animals, while laughingly insisting the writhing animals feel no pain. Descartes maintained that, physically speaking, humans as well as animals are machines, but he also clearly maintained that animals feel pain and hunger, have sensory experiences, etc. As a more abstract level, 20^th Century analytic empiricism revivified the attack on rationalist views. But the last half century has seen strong support (though largely unacknowledged) for Descartes’ views about cognition and perception.     

Women and the illness role: rethinking feminist theory

Une femme adopte le rôle de malade. Comment analyser ce phénomène? Je propose dans les pages qui suivent une théorie féministe de L'adoption du rôle de malade qui met L'accent sur des formes culturelles et phénoménologiques d'investigation. Diverses auteures féministes ont récemment traité ce problème en soulignant comment le contrôle social patriarcal sur les femmes peut s'exercer par la définition même des maladies. Mais les études produites dans ce cadre ont tendance à négliger la façon dont les femmes vivent les maladies ainsi définies. Ces études sont alors incapables de comprendre pourquoi certains types de maladies - le syndrome pré-menstruel, par exemple - acquièrent une crédibilité certaine, alors que d'autres dont 1'étiologie et la symptomatologie sont similaires demeurent dans I'ombre. Un paradigme plus étoffé du comportement de malade, comme celui proposé ici, examinerait de plus près la relation entre structure sociale et expérience sociale de la maladie, ainsi qu'entre idéologie et biographie. En dernière analyse, je propose un paradigme qui explore la désignation des maladies à trois niveaux d'analyse: 1/les activités productrices des groupes dominants qui ont un intérêt politique ou commercial dans la désignation médicale; 2/ les activités productrices de celles et ceux qui adoptent la désignation; et 3/ les trajets ou déterminants culturels qui prédisposent L'adoption collective de certains types de maladies à L'exclusion de certaines autres. This paper advances a feminist theory of women and illness behaviour which places a stronger emphasis on cultural and phenomenological forms of investigation. Current theoretical treatments of this topic by feminist scholars focus on how definitions of illness may be viewed as patriarchal forms of social control of women. Rarely do such studies investigate the personal experience of women adopting the illness role. As a result, such approaches fail to articulate how it is that some categories of illness, such as the premenstrual syndrome, come to be credited with plausibility, while others similar in aetiology and symptomatology, are ignored. A more comprehensive paradigm of illness behaviour as suggested by this paper would explore, more fully, the relationship between social structure and the social experience of illness; between ideology and personal biography. Ultimately, the paradigm suggested here explores illness labelling at three levels of investigation: 1/ the productional activities of dominant groups with commercial and/or political self-interests in medical labelling; 2/ the productional activities of those adopting the label; and 3/ the cultural pathways or determinants which predispose the collective adoption of some illness categories, and not others.     

Instinctive Incest Avoidance: A Paradigm Case for Evolutionary Psychology Evaporates

Westermarck proposed that humans have an incest avoidance instinct, triggered by frequent intimate contact with family members during the first several years of life. Westermarck reasons that (1) familial incest will tend to produce less fit offspring, (2) those humans without instinctive incest avoidance would hence have tended to die off and those with the avoidance instinct would have produced more viable offspring, and hence (3) familial incest would be, as indeed it is, universally and instinctively avoided (the desire simply does arise given early continuous intimate contact; the "potty principle" as some psychologists have succinctly termed it). Victorian Westermarck claimed this as a human adaptation. Evolutionary psychologists have generalized these claims to Pleistocene humans and their ancestors, to primates, and indeed to animals generally. Yet there is surprisingly little evidence for these claims of universal instinctive avoidance. Considerable inbreeding appears among large, territorial primates and may have been so with early humans and with their ancestors. While there is little reliable non-anecdotal evidence about incestuous behavior or the lack of it among humans, what little there is does not fit well with the Westermarck thesis.     

SPENDING WISELY? HOW RESOURCES AFFECT KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION IN UNIVERSITIES

Every year billions of dollars are spent on research grants to produce new knowledge in universities. However, as grants may also affect other research funding, the effects of financial resources on knowledge production remain unclear. To uncover how financial resources affect knowledge production, we study the effects of research spending itself. Utilizing the legal constraints on university spending from an endowment we develop an instrumental variables approach. Our approach instruments for university research spending with time‐series variation in stock prices interacted with cross‐sectional variation in initial endowment market values for research universities in the United States. Our analysis reveals that research spending has a substantial positive effect on the number of papers produced, but not their impact. We also demonstrate that research spending effects are quite similar at private and public universities. (JEL H5, I2, O3)