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Libertarianism, Culture, and Personal Predispositions
Undergraduate Journal of Psychology 22 Libertarianism, Culture, and Personal Predispositions Ida Hepsø, Scarlet Hernandez, Shir Offsey, & Katherine White Kennesaw State University Abstract The United States has exhibited two potentially connected trends – increasing individualism and increasing interest in libertarian ideology. Previous research on libertarian ideology found higher levels of individualism among libertarians, and cross-cultural research has tied greater individualism to making dispositional attributions and lower altruistic tendencies. Given this, we expected to observe positive correlations between the following variables in the present research: individualism and endorsement of libertarianism, individualism and dispositional attributions, and endorsement of libertarianism and dispositional attributions. We also expected to observe negative correlations between libertarianism and altruism, dispositional attributions and altruism, and individualism and altruism. Survey results from 252 participants confirmed a positive correlation between individualism and libertarianism, a marginally significant positive correlation between libertarianism and dispositional attributions, and a negative correlation between individualism and altruism. These results confirm the connection between libertarianism and individualism observed in previous research and present several intriguing questions for future research on libertarian ideology. Key Words: Libertarianism, individualism, altruism, attributions individualistic, made apparent -
Reflections on Social Norms and Human Rights
The Psychology of Social Norms and the Promotion of Human Rights Deborah A. Prentice Princeton University Chapter to appear in R. Goodman, D. Jinks, & A. K. Woods (Eds.), Understanding social action, promoting human rights. New York: Oxford University Press. This chapter was written while I was Visiting Faculty in the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ. I would like to thank Jeremy Adelman, JoAnne Gowa, Bob Keohane, Eric Maskin, Dale Miller, Catherine Ross, Teemu Ruskola, Rick Shweder, and Eric Weitz for helpful discussions and comments on earlier drafts of the chapter. Please direct correspondence to: Deborah Prentice Department of Psychology Princeton University Green Hall Princeton, NJ 08540 [email protected] 1 Promoting human rights means changing behavior: Changing the behavior of governments that mistreat suspected criminals, opponents of their policies, supporters of their political rivals, and members of particular gender, ethnic, or religious groups; changing the behavior of corporations that mistreat their workers, damage the environment, and produce unsafe products; and changing the behavior of citizens who mistreat their spouses, children, and neighbors. In this chapter, I consider what an understanding of how social norms function psychologically has to contribute to this very worthy project. Social norms have proven to be an effective mechanism for changing health-related and environmental behaviors, so there is good reason to think that they might be helpful in the human-rights domain as well. In the social sciences, social norms are defined as socially shared and enforced attitudes specifying what to do and what not to do in a given situation (see Elster, 1990; Sunstein, 1997). -
The Conventional Wisdom of Globalisation Is, by Now, Well-Known
University of Warwick institutional repository This paper is made available online in accordance with publisher policies. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item and our policy information available from the repository home page for further information. To see the final version of this paper please visit the publisher’s website. Access to the published version may require a subscription. Author(s): Watson, Matthew Article Title: International Capital Mobility in an Era of Globalisation: Adding a Political Dimension to the 'Feldstein–Horioka Puzzle' Year of publication: 2002 Link to published version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-9256.00139 Publisher statement: The definitive version is available at www.blackwell-synergy.com “International Capital Mobility in an Era of Globalisation: Adding a Political Dimension to the ‘Feldstein-Horioka Puzzle’” Matthew Watson1 Published in Politics, 21 (2), 2001, 82-93. Description Matthew Watson reviews the literature on international capital mobility to conclude that ideas about global capital market integration have an independent causal impact on political outcomes which extends beyond that which can be attributed to the extent of their actual integration. Abstract The debate about the scope of feasible policy-making in an era of globalisation continues to be set within the context of an assumption that national capital markets are now perfectly integrated at the international level. However, the empirical evidence on international capital -
A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau
University of Kentucky UKnowledge Literature in English, North America English Language and Literature 6-11-2009 A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau Jack Turner University of Washington Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Turner, Jack, "A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau" (2009). Literature in English, North America. 70. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_north_america/70 A Political Companion to Henr y David Thoreau POLITIcaL COMpaNIONS TO GREat AMERIcaN AUthORS Series Editor: Patrick J. Deneen, Georgetown University The Political Companions to Great American Authors series illuminates the complex political thought of the nation’s most celebrated writers from the founding era to the present. The goals of the series are to demonstrate how American political thought is understood and represented by great Ameri- can writers and to describe how our polity’s understanding of fundamental principles such as democracy, equality, freedom, toleration, and fraternity has been influenced by these canonical authors. The series features a broad spectrum of political theorists, philoso- phers, and literary critics and scholars whose work examines classic authors and seeks to explain their continuing influence on American political, social, intellectual, and cultural life. This series reappraises esteemed American authors and evaluates their writings as lasting works of art that continue to inform and guide the American democratic experiment. -
Labor Scarcity, Finance, and Innovation: Evidence from Antebellum America∗
Labor Scarcity, Finance, and Innovation: Evidence from Antebellum America∗ Yifei Mao Jessie Jiaxu Wang SC Johnson College of Business W. P. Carey School of Business Cornell University Arizona State University March 9, 2018 Abstract This paper establishes labor scarcity as an important economic channel through which access to finance shapes technological innovation. We exploit antebellum America, a unique setting with (1) staggered passage of free banking laws across states and (2) sharp differences in labor scarcity between slave and free states. We find that greater access to finance spurred technological innovation as measured by patenting activities, especially in free states where labor was relatively scarce. Inter- estingly, in slave states where slave labor was prevalent, access to finance encouraged technological innovation that substituted for free labor, but discouraged technologi- cal innovation that substituted for slave labor. Keywords: antebellum America, free banking laws, finance and innovation, labor scarcity ∗We thank conference participants at WAPFIN@Stern, and brownbag participants at Arizona State Uni- versity and Cornell University for helpful comments. Contact information, Mao: [email protected]; Wang: [email protected]. 1 Introduction While technological innovation is important for economic growth (Solow, 1957) and firms’ competitive advantage (Porter, 1992), it is difficult to achieve. Pioneered by Schumpeter, a large literature has established a well-functioning financial market as a driver of technological innovation (King and Levine, 1993; Brown, Fazzari, and Petersen, 2009; Hall, 2010; Hsu, Tian, and Xu, 2014; Kerr and Nanda, 2015). However, the role of finance is rarely examined in connection with the fundamental incentive of innovation|reducing production costs. -
Eugene Volokh
VOLOKH_FINAL.DOCX (DO NOT DELETE) 12/21/2011 5:47 PM ARTICLE FREEDOM FOR THE PRESS AS AN INDUSTRY, OR FOR THE PRESS AS A TECHNOLOGY? FROM THE FRAMING TO TODAY † EUGENE VOLOKH INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................461 I. EVIDENCE FROM AROUND THE FRAMING: THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS AS A RIGHT OF “EVERY FREEMAN” ............................465 A. Cases, Treatises, and Constitutions ..................................... 465 B. The Structure of the Framing-Era Newspaper Industry ........... 468 C. The (Possibly) Dissenting Sources ....................................... 471 D. The Grammatical Structure of “the Freedom of Speech, or of the Press” ................................................................. 472 E. Responding to the Redundancy Objection ............................ 475 II. EVIDENCE FROM AROUND THE FRAMING: THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS COVERING AUTHORS OF BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS ...............477 A. The Non-Press-as-Industry Status of Many Book and Pamphlet Authors ...................................................... 477 † Gary T. Schwartz Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law ([email protected]). Thanks to Stuart Banner, Stuart Minor Benjamin, Michael Kent Curtis, David Forte, Philip Hamburger, David Lange, Edward Lee, Renée Lerner, Adam Liptak, Michael McConnell, Jason C. Miller, Scot Powe, Saikrishna Prakash, David Rabban, Clyde Spillenger, Vladimir Volokh, and Steve Yeazell for their help, as well as to Amy Atchison, Kapiljeet Dargan, June Kim, Ian Leong, Lynn McClelland, Stephanie Plotin, Michael Rappaport, Vicki Steiner, and John Wilson of the UCLA Law Library for their invaluable research assistance. When the article was in page proofs, the author was considering representing the defendant in Obsidian Finance Group, LLC v. Cox, No. 11-0057, 2011 WL 5999334 (D. Or. Nov. 30, 2011); but this did not affect any aspect of the article, which was substan- tively complete long before Obsidian Finance was decided. -
Regulation and Deregulation After 25 Years: Lessons Learned for Research in Industrial Organization
Regulation and Deregulation After 25 Years: Lessons Learned for Research in Industrial Organization PAUL L. JOSKOW Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139 USA. E-mail: [email protected] Abstract. This paper is based on a keynote address given at the 2004 International Industrial Organization Conference in Chicago, April 2004. I draw selectively on the literature from the past 25 years on regulation/deregulation to provide important lessons about the attributes of good research in empirical industrial organization. I. Introduction When I first began doing research on issues related to government regulation of industry in the early 1970s, a significant slice of the economy was subject to some form of government price and/or entry regulation. The affected industries included (a) airlines, (b) trucking, (c) railroads, (d) electric power, (e) natural gas production, (f) pipeline transportation and distribution of natural gas, (g) crude oil and refined petroleum products, (h) cable television, (i) automobile insurance, (j) hospital services, and others. The share of these industries in GDP, while substantial, understates their potential impact on overall economic performance of the economy since they generally supplied important intermediate goods and services to downstream commercial and industrial users. Beginning about 25 years ago legislative and regulatory actions began a process of deregulation, vertical and horizontal industry restructuring and regulatory reform that has now affected, to varying degrees, all of these industries. Many of these industries have been completely transformed during this period of time (e.g. airlines, trucking, and telecommunications). Others are in the midst of more lengthy transitions that involve 2 restructuring and deregulation of major industry segments and the application of new regulatory mechanisms to those segments that continue to be regulated (e.g. -
De Re and De Dicto: Against the Conventional Wisdom1
Philosophical Perspectives, 16, Language and Mind, 2002 DE RE AND DE DICTO: AGAINST THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM1 Kenneth A. Taylor Stanford University 1. Preliminaries Conventional wisdom has it that there is a class of attitude ascriptions such that in making an ascription of that sort, the ascriber undertakes a com- mitment to specify the contents of the ascribee’s head in what might be called a notionally sensitive, ascribee-centered way. In making such an ascription, the ascriber is supposed to undertake a commitment to specify the modes of presentation, concepts or notions under which the ascribee cognizes the ob- jects (and properties) that her beliefs are about. Consequently, it is widely sup- posed that an ascription of the relevant sort will be true just in case it specifies either directly or indirectly both what the ascribee believes and how she be- lieves it. The class of “notionally sensitive” ascriptions has been variously char- acterized. Quine (1956) calls the class I have in mind the class of notional ascriptions and distinguishes it from the class of relational ascriptions. Others call the relevant class the class of de dicto ascriptions and distinguish it from the class of de re ascriptions. More recently, it has been called the class of notionally loaded ascriptions (Crimmins 1992, 1995). So understood, the class can be contrasted with the class of notionally neutral ascriptions. Just as the class of notional/de dicto/notionally loaded ascriptions is supposed to put at semantic issue the ascribee’s notions/conceptions/modes of presentation, so ascriptions in the relational/de re/notionally neutral class are supposed not to do so. -
The Federal Cyberstalking Statute, Content Discrimination and the First Amendment
The Federal Cyberstalking Statute, Content Discrimination and the First Amendment James Weinstein* TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ................................................................................. 2555 I. THE CONTESTED SCOPE OF THE RULE AGAINST CONTENT DISCRIMINATION .................................................................... 2559 A. The All-Inclusive Approach v. The Democratic Self- Governance Model ........................................................... 2560 B. Criticism of the All-Inclusive Approach............................ 2566 II. THE FEDERAL CYBERSTALKING STATUTE AND THE ALL- INCLUSIVE APPROACH ............................................................. 2569 III. THE FEDERAL CYBERSTALKING STATUTE AND THE DEMOCRATIC SELF-GOVERNANCE MODEL .............................. 2577 A. An Elaboration and Defense of the Democratic Self- Governance Model ........................................................... 2577 B. The Democratic Self-Governance Model and § 2261A(2)(B) ................................................................ 2580 C. Section 2261A(2)(B) Caselaw ......................................... 2584 * Copyright © 2021 James Weinstein. Dan Cracchiolo Chair in Constitutional Law, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University. I am grateful to Arthur Hellman, Robert Post, and the participants in the online symposium on “Cheap Speech Twenty-Five Years Later: Democracy & Public Discourse in the Digital Age” for their helpful comments and suggestions, and to law students Emiley Pagrabs -
Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Self-Expression, and Kant's Public
Diametros 54 (2017): 118–137 doi: 10.13153/diam.54.2017.1136 FREEDOM OF SPEECH, FREEDOM OF SELF-EXPRESSION, AND KANT’S PUBLIC USE OF REASON – Geert Van Eekert – Abstract. This article turns to early modern and Enlightenment advocates of tolerance (Locke, Spi- noza, John Stuart Mill) to discover and lay bare the line of argument that has informed their com- mitment to free speech. This line of argument will subsequently be used to assess the shift from free speech to the contemporary ideal of free self-expression. In order to take this assessment one step further, this article will finally turn to Immanuel Kant’s famous defense of the public use of reason. In the wake of Katerina Deligiorgi’s readings of Kant, it will show that the idea of free speech requires a specific disposition on behalf of speakers and writers that is in danger of being neglected in the contemporary prevailing conception of free speech as freedom of self-expression. Keywords: John Locke, Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, freedom of speech, free- dom of self-expression, public use of reason, Enlightenment. Contemporary debates about free speech or freedom of speech primarily deal with the question how free speech should be (in the sense of both “How free should speech be?” and “How should free speech be?”), and not (or at least not mainly) with the question why speech should be free.1 Admittedly, there seems to be no reason to urge the latter question: it is rather generally agreed upon today (at least in liberal democratic societies) that freedom of speech should be both es- teemed and categorically defended because it is both a fundamental human right and a key pillar of democracy and of the (scientific) quest for knowledge. -
Individual and Collective Information Acquisition: an Experimental Study
Individual and Collective Information Acquisition: An Experimental Study∗ P¨ellumb Reshidi† Alessandro Lizzeri‡ Leeat Yariv§ Jimmy Chan¶ Wing Suen‖ September 2020 Abstract Many committees|juries, political task forces, etc.|spend time gathering costly information before reaching a decision. We report results from lab experiments focused on such information- collection processes. We consider decisions governed by individuals and groups and compare how voting rules affect outcomes. We also contrast static information collection, as in classical hypothesis testing, with dynamic collection, as in sequential hypothesis testing. Generally, out- comes approximate the theoretical benchmark and sequential information collection is welfare enhancing relative to static collection. Nonetheless, several important departures emerge. Static information collection is excessive, and sequential information collection is non-stationary, pro- ducing declining decision accuracies over time. Furthermore, groups using majority rule yield especially hasty and inaccurate decisions. ∗We thank Roland Benabou, Stephen Morris, Salvo Nunnari, and Wolfgang Pesendorfer for very helpful discussions and feedback. We gratefully acknowledge the support of NSF grants SES-1629613 and SES-1949381. †Department of Economics, Princeton University [email protected] ‡Department of Economics, Princeton University [email protected] §Department of Economics, Princeton University [email protected] ¶Department of Economics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong [email protected] ‖Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Hong Kong [email protected] 1 1 Introduction 1.1 Overview Juries, boards of directors, congressional and university committees, government agencies such as the FDA or the EPA, and many other committees spend time deliberating issues before reaching a decision or issuing a recommendation. An important component of such collective decisions is the acquisition of information. -
Some Worries About the Coherence of Left-Libertarianism Mathias Risse
John F. Kennedy School of Government Harvard University Faculty Research Working Papers Series Can There be “Libertarianism without Inequality”? Some Worries About the Coherence of Left-Libertarianism Mathias Risse Nov 2003 RWP03-044 The views expressed in the KSG Faculty Research Working Paper Series are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the John F. Kennedy School of Government or Harvard University. All works posted here are owned and copyrighted by the author(s). Papers may be downloaded for personal use only. Can There be “Libertarianism without Inequality”? Some Worries About the Coherence of Left-Libertarianism1 Mathias Risse John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University October 25, 2003 1. Left-libertarianism is not a new star on the sky of political philosophy, but it was through the recent publication of Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner’s anthologies that it became clearly visible as a contemporary movement with distinct historical roots. “Left- libertarian theories of justice,” says Vallentyne, “hold that agents are full self-owners and that natural resources are owned in some egalitarian manner. Unlike most versions of egalitarianism, left-libertarianism endorses full self-ownership, and thus places specific limits on what others may do to one’s person without one’s permission. Unlike right- libertarianism, it holds that natural resources may be privately appropriated only with the permission of, or with a significant payment to, the members of society. Like right- libertarianism, left-libertarianism holds that the basic rights of individuals are ownership rights. Left-libertarianism is promising because it coherently underwrites both some demands of material equality and some limits on the permissible means of promoting this equality” (Vallentyne and Steiner (2000a), p 1; emphasis added).