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POVERTY Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2024-02-05 David Schmidtz
Poverty can be an ephemeral life stage of a young person whose skill sets will become more valuable with training and experience, a personal setback such as losing a job, or a systemic affliction that puts a whole community in danger of widespread famine. A common theme of this volume’s essays is that we cannot understand poverty and famine unless we acknowledge that poor people are not mouths to be
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POVERTY, AGENCY, AND DEVELOPMENT Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2024-02-05 Tauhidur Rahman
This essay provides an account of four interrelated ideas. First, a person who is not poor by the standard conception of poverty can still be functionally poor. Second, poverty is a relationship between the poor and their environment (community, local markets, and local institutions). Third, poverty is a determinant of agency and impedes its exercise. Fourth, promoting agency promotes development.
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EXPERIMENTAL ECONOMICS, POVERTY, AND ECONOMIC GROWTH Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2024-02-05 Charles N. Noussair
As in other sciences, an economic experiment is an artificial situation created by a researcher for the purpose of answering one or more scientific questions. Experiments of various types are used in economics to understand the causes of poverty and how it might be alleviated. The methods can identify causal relationships between variables and thereby isolate factors that can lead to poverty as well
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FOREIGN AID AND FREEDOM Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2024-02-05 Fernando R. Tesón
This essay examines the many problems with public and private development aid and argues that global liberalization of trade and immigration would have a greater direct effect in reducing global poverty. It also examines and rejects the view that people in rich countries have a strong moral obligation to give to the global poor. Such an obligation is in tension with an ethic that prizes personal projects
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GROUP RIGHTS, GENDER JUSTICE, AND WOMEN’S SELF-HELP GROUPS: EXIT, VOICE, AND LOYALTY IN AN INDIGENOUS COMMUNITY IN INDIA Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2024-02-05 Naila Kabeer, Nivedita Narain, Varnica Arora, Vinitika Lal
This essay addresses tensions within political philosophy between group rights, which allow historically marginalized communities some self-governance in determining its own rules and norms, and the rights of marginalized subgroups, such as women, within these communities. Community norms frequently uphold patriarchal structures that define women as inferior to men, assign them a subordinate status
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POVERTY, TRUST, AND SOCIAL DISTANCE: A SELF-REINFORCING “POVERTY TRAP”? Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2024-02-05 Almudena Fernández, Luis F. López-Calva, Santiago Rodríguez
We consider the concept of poverty from the asset-accumulation approach and propose an integrated framework, building upon existing theories, to describe how the interconnected factors of trust (or lack thereof) and social distance can reinforce poverty traps. Social distance is influenced by choice, while trust is the symptom that defines the strength of social ties on a group. We look at how an absence
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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POVERTY: WHERE DO WE STAND? Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2024-02-05 Johannes Haushofer, Daniel Salicath
In recent years, the psychological causes and consequences of poverty have received renewed attention from scientists and policymakers. In this essay, we summarize new developments in this literature. First, we discuss advances in our understanding of the relationship between income and psychological well-being. There is a robust positive relationship between the two, both within and across countries
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USING BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS TO REDUCE POVERTY AND OPPRESSION Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2024-02-05 Karla Hoff, Allison Demeritt
Until recently, economics conceived of poverty solely as a lack of material resources. This view likely captures the reality of poverty experienced by many people around the globe. However, two waves of behavioral economics demonstrate that the narrowing of people’s external environments may change people themselves: poverty lowers the quality of decision-making and poverty and oppression may depress
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FREEDOM, POVERTY, AND IMPACT REWARDS Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2024-02-05 Thomas Pogge
A free world is one in which human beings can live free, self-directed lives. A great obstacle to such a world is severe poverty, still blighting the lives of half of humankind. We have the resources, technologies, and administrative capacities to eradicate severe poverty, but doing so requires some restructuring of existing social arrangements. We might begin with the current regime governing innovation
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SOCIAL CAPITAL AND THE ROLE OF THE STATE: NURTURING COLLECTIVES FOR POVERTY ALLEVIATION Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2024-02-05 Arvind Kumar Chaudhary
For eradication of acute poverty, it is vital to factor in the human experience of it. Building social capital and networks that nurture, empower, and consistently reinforce a new shared economic identity can provide rich socioeconomic dividends. For states tackling extreme poverty at scale, building and strengthening social capital are essential public goods investments.
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THE IMPORTANCE OF CHOICE: CATFISH MAN OF THE WOODS THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2024-02-05 Claudia Williamson Kramer
The importance of economic freedom for economic development can no longer be denied. What is often denied, however, is respect for individuals’ rights and personal choices. The role of individual choice is often dismissed or set aside by the development community. In this essay, I argue that inherent to economic freedom’s economic success is the promotion and acceptance of individual choice. Development
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WHAT DOES EGALITARIANISM REQUIRE? Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2023-12-01 David Schmidtz
Rawlsian theory notoriously claims that basic principles of justice apply to the design of a society’s basic structure. G. A. Cohen found it disturbingly convenient to treat fundamental principles as merely political rather than personal—that is, as applying exclusively to questions of institutional design and saying nothing about how to live. Instead, to Cohen, a sincere champion of egalitarian principles
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IF YOU’RE AN EGALITARIAN … SO WHAT? Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Nigel Pleasants
G. A. Cohen is justly acclaimed for his penetrating and searching critique of the commanding Rawlsian liberal paradigm in contemporary political philosophy. He is also well known for his fervent advocacy of a radical view of economic equality, namely, that “justice requires (virtually) unqualified equality itself.” This essay focuses on two issues at the heart of Cohen’s critique, namely, his argument
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EQUALITY’S DEMANDS ARE REASONABLE Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Richard Arneson
There are various egalitarian moral doctrines. They differ in the requirements they impose on institutions and social practices and on individual conduct. This essay sketches two versions of egalitarian social justice and claims that the requirements they impose should strike us as reasonable, all things considered. One is welfarist egalitarianism, a cousin of classical utilitarianism. This version
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WORKER PARTICIPATION AND THE EGALITARIAN CONCEPTION OF FAIR MARKET EXCHANGE Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Thomas Christiano
I argue for an egalitarian conception of market exchange that places the idea of equal power at the center of a procedural evaluation of markets. I explain the fundamental concept of equal power in markets and show that the egalitarian conception gives us a remedial basis for society shaping markets so that they allow a significant place for worker participation in firms. I use the phrase “worker participation”
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THREE SOURCES OF ECONOMIC INEQUALITY Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Joseph Heath
There are three distinct forces that conspire to produce a great deal of economic misery. We can refer to them, for convenience, as misfortune, unfairness, and improvidence. Political philosophers have often shown an interest in one or another of these, but seldom all three. Furthermore, those who do acknowledge all three have often felt driven to collapse them into one root cause of inequality. My
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MAKING INEQUALITY VISIBLE WITHOUT MAKING IT WORSE Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Clare Chambers
Egalitarian commitments have often been thought compatible with practices that are later identified as inegalitarian. Thus, a fundamental task of egalitarianism is to make inequality visible. Making inequality visible requires including marginalized people, questioning what equality requires, and naming inequality. At the same time, egalitarianism is a movement for change: egalitarians want to make
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MUST EGALITARIANS RELY ON THE STATE TO ATTAIN DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE? Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Kaveh Pourvand
It is widely accepted among political philosophers that distributive justice should be promoted by the state. This essay challenges this presumption by making two key claims. First, the state is not the only possible mechanism for attaining distributive justice. We could rely alternatively on the voluntary efforts and interactions of individuals and associations in civil society. The question of what
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BEYOND HAYEKIAN EQUALITY Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Stefanie Haeffele, Virgil Henry Storr
Friedrich A. Hayek argues that “equality of the general rules of law and conduct” is the only kind of equality compatible with liberty and, moreover, that attempting to pursue equality along any other dimension is likely to destroy liberty. For Hayek, then, as a social philosopher and political economist who was principally concerned with understanding and promoting liberal order, the question “What
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THE DEMANDS OF EQUALITY Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Christine Sypnowich
Ever since the publication of G. A. Cohen’s essay “If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?” the matter of personal responsibility for the amelioration of economic disadvantage has become a question for egalitarian political philosophers to wrestle with both theoretically and personally. This essay examines “the demands of equality” in light of an egalitarian philosophy that focuses on human
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TWO DEMANDS UPON LUCK EGALITARIANS Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Eric Mack
I offer two objections to luck egalitarianism. The no-adequate-account objection takes note of the egalitarian insistence that the disvalue of inequality is only one of a plurality of values or disvalues that needs to be considered in arriving at a judgment about the ranking of alternative distributions of welfare. This turn to pluralism places a reasonable demand upon luck egalitarianism to provide
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REALIZATION AND RECOGNITION UNDER THE INTERNAL REVENUE CODE Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2023-08-14 Richard A. Epstein
Over its entire life, the Internal Revenue Code (like other tax systems) has never tried to tax economic income as such, because of the administrative and liquidity problems that arise from taxing any combination of values consumed and from appreciation (or depreciation) of capital stocks. Instead, the common practice limits tax occasions to a realization of income from sale or other disposition of
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WHY INCOME TAXATION? A MORAL AND HISTORICAL INQUIRY Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2023-08-14 Jeffrey Paul
The following essay analyzes the arguments made by the principal academic proponent of income taxation, Columbia University economist E. R. A Seligman, after it was found to be unconstitutional in 1894. Seligman thought that the prevalent theory of just taxation, that it should be based on a natural right to one’s person and property, was wrong. The principal American philosophical proponent of this
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NEOLIBERAL SOCIAL JUSTICE AND TAXATION Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2023-08-14 Nick Cowen
Liberal egalitarians argue that the state is justified in taxing members of a political community to achieve distributive justice and ensure political equality and regime stability. This involves an uneasy compromise between equality and efficiency, a compromise that many argue has recently been undermined by the growth of unchecked wealth and income inequality. This essay argues that there is also
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DEATH AND TAXES: A LIBERTARIAN REAPPRAISAL Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2023-08-14 Miranda Perry Fleischer
Imagine two friends. Anna inherits nothing and works for every penny she has, while Mary inherits millions. How should a world that respects individual autonomy and private property rights treat Anna’s earnings and Mary’s inheritance? Should it tax them the same, or tax one more heavily than the other? If the latter, which one? The conventional wisdom holds that although some “right” libertarian theories
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TAXATION AND THE MORAL AUTHORITY OF CONVENTIONS Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2023-08-14 Fabian Wendt
Lockeans regard taxation as a—perhaps sometimes permissible—infringement of moral property entitlements. This essay discusses whether, or in what form, this charge is defensible. In doing so, it will explore the truth and the limits of the conventionalist reply of Murphy and Nagel to Lockean challenges to taxation. It argues that there is a moral rationale for property conventions that is independent
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PREDISTRIBUTION AGAINST RENT-SEEKING: THE BENEFIT PRINCIPLE’S ALTERNATIVE TO REDISTRIBUTIVE TAXATION Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2023-08-14 Charles Delmotte
The distributive justice literature has recently formulated several tax proposals, with limitarians or property-owning democrats proposing new or higher taxes on wealth or capital income intended to decrease the growing wealth gap. This essay joins this debate on inequality and redistributive taxation through the lens of the “benefit principle for public policy.” This principle says that specific rules
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WHO SHOULD TAX MULTINATIONALS? Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2023-08-14 Allison Christians
Who should tax multinationals? National political figures sometimes signal their assumptions by making superior or even exclusive claims about who may tax “their” multinational companies, and it is common to hear such companies or their incomes referred to as “belonging” to one nation or another. The rhetoric reflects conventional wisdom about sovereign nations and their assumed entitlements, and is
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INTERPRETING AMBIGUOUS TAX STATUTES Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2023-08-14 Linda D. Jellum
In this essay, I explore the question of who should determine what an ambiguous tax statute means, the courts or the Department of Treasury. The answer to that question is based on two administrative law doctrines: Chevron and Brand X. Here, I explain why Chevron and Brand X violate the Administrative Procedure Act and are unworkable. Then, using a provision in the tax code, I propose that we return
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A LIMITED DEFENSE OF EFFICIENCY AGAINST CHARGES OF INCOHERENCY AND BIAS Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2023-08-14 Jonathan H. Choi
Scholars have long debated the appropriate balance between efficiency and redistribution. But recently, a wave of critics has argued not only that efficiency is less important, but that efficiency analysis itself is fundamentally flawed. Some say that efficiency is incoherent because there is no neutral baseline from which to judge inefficiency. Others say that efficiency is biased toward those best
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JUSTIFYING TAXATION Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2023-08-14 Mario J. Rizzo, Richard A. Epstein, David Schmidtz
Taxation is more than one thing. Taxes can be levied in various ways on various things, with varying effects on a culture and an economy, and raising different challenges of justification.
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SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND VALUE Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2022-06-15 David Schmidtz
Technological innovations and scientific discoveries do not occur in a vacuum but instead leave us needing to reimagine what we thought we knew about the human condition.
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PICKING OUR POISON: A CONDITIONAL DEFENSE OF GEOENGINEERING Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2022-06-15 Christopher Freiman
Geoengineering involves intentionally modifying the environment on a massive scale and is typically proposed as a last resort to prevent catastrophic harms caused by climate change. Critics argue that there are powerful moral reasons against researching, let alone undertaking, geoengineering. Perhaps most notably, Stephen Gardiner argues that even if we are forced to choose between allowing a climate
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PUBLIC TRUST AND BIOTECH INNOVATION: A THEORY OF TRUSTWORTHY REGULATION OF (SCARY!) TECHNOLOGY Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2022-06-15 Clark Wolf
Regulatory agencies aim to protect the public by moderating risks associated with innovation, but a good regulatory regime should also promote justified public trust. After introducing the USDA 2020 SECURE Rule for regulation of biotech innovation as a case study, this essay develops a theory of justified public trust in regulation. On the theory advanced here, to be trustworthy, a regulatory regime
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TWO MODELS OF INFORMED CONSENT Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2022-06-15 Lynn A. Jansen
Informed consent is a central concept in the literature on the ethics of clinical care and human subjects research. There is a broad consensus that ethical practice in these domains requires the informed consent of patients and subjects. The requirements of informed consent in these domains, however, are matters of considerable controversy. Some argue that the requirements of informed consent have
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WHAT DO EXPERTS KNOW? Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2022-06-15 Iskra Fileva
Reasonable people agree that whenever possible, we ought to rely on experts to tell us what is true or what the best course of action is. But which experts should we rely on and with regard to what issues? Here, I discuss several dangers that accompany reliance on experts, the most important one of which is this: positions that are offered as expert opinion frequently contain elements outside an expert’s
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THE FOG OF DEBATE Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2022-06-15 Nathan Ballantyne
The fog of war—poor intelligence about the enemy—can frustrate even a well-prepared military force. Something similar can happen in intellectual debate. What I call the fog of debate is a useful metaphor for grappling with failures and dysfunctions of argumentative persuasion that stem from poor information about our opponents. It is distressingly easy to make mistakes about our opponents’ thinking
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ALGORITHMIC ACCOUNTABILITY IN THE MAKING Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2022-06-15 Deborah G. Johnson
Algorithms are now routinely used in decision-making; they are potent components in decisions that affect the lives of individuals and the activities of public and private institutions. Although use of algorithms has many benefits, a number of problems have been identified with their use in certain domains, most notably in domains where safety and fairness are important. Awareness of these problems
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THE TECHNOLOGY OF PUBLIC SHAMING Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2022-06-15 Harrison Frye
This essay argues that online public shaming can be productively understood as a problem of technology. In particular, the technology of public shaming is ambiguous between two senses. On the one hand, public shaming depends on various technologies, such as social media posts or, more historically, pillories. These are the artifacts of shame. On the other hand, public shaming itself is a social technology
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THE VALUE OF JUSTICE-INVOLVED YOUTH: ACCOUNTABILITY THROUGH TECHNOLOGY-DRIVEN POLICIES AND PRACTICES Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2022-06-15 Sally Stevens
The United States juvenile justice system has primary oversight of youth who come into contact with legal authorities. This system is purposefully distinct from the adult system given the presumption of youths’ reduced culpability for delinquent behavior and increased potential for rehabilitation. Some juvenile court policies and practices are supportive of youth while others may drive youth further
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TECHNOLOGY AND TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2022-06-15 Colleen Murphy
Transitional justice refers to the process of dealing with widespread wrongdoing characteristically committed during the course of conflict and/or repression. Examples of such processes include criminal trials, truth commissions, reparations, and memorials. Technology is altering the forms that widespread wrongdoing takes. Technology is also altering the form of processes of transitional justice themselves
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URBAN PLANNING AND URBAN VALUES: A JACOBSIAN ANALYSIS Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2022-06-15 Sanford Ikeda
The great urbanist Jane Jacobs details how urban planning impacts the social interactions and social networks responsible for the economic death or life of a city. How might urban planning impinge on the moral values that underlie that development? I draw on Jacobs’s work on the moral foundations of commercial society to identify two “urban values” (tolerance and innovation). I then examine how these
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CULTURAL VALUE AND EVOLVING TECHNOLOGIES: INSTANCES FROM MUSIC AND VISUAL ART Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2022-06-15 Daniel Asia, Robert Edward Gordon
Scientific advancement is inextricably linked to cultural advancement, and historically the arts have worked hand in hand with technological change. This essay explores some of the connections that exist between science, technology, and the arts, privileging instances where technological change resulted in new forms of artistic creation. Although the role of the arts in contemporary society has ebbed
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THE PERPETUAL STRUGGLE: HOW THE COEVOLUTION OF HIERARCHY AND RESISTANCE DRIVES THE EVOLUTION OF MORALITY AND INSTITUTIONS Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2022-06-15 Allen Buchanan
Since the earliest human societies, there has been an ongoing struggle between hierarchy and resistance to hierarchy, and this struggle is a major driver of the evolution of moralities and of institutions. Attempts to initiate or sustain hierarchies are often met with resistance; hierarchs then adopt new strategies, which in turn prompt new strategies of resistance; and so on. The key point is that
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THE PREHISTORIC ORIGINS OF EUROPEAN ECONOMIC INTEGRATION Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2022-06-15 George Grantham
It appears likely that at its peak the classical economy was almost as large as that of Western Europe during the Industrial Revolution. The following review of the archeological and document evidence indicates that three events occurring in the first half of the first millennium BC trigger the emergence of a specialized and integrated classical economy after 500 BC: (i) growth in demand for silver
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THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2021-10-11 Mario I. Juarez-Garcia, David Schmidtz
There has always been a tension, in theory, between the public accountability and the professional efficiency of the agencies of the administrative state. How has that tension been handled? What would it be like for it to be well handled?
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CONSTITUTIONAL AND LEGAL CHALLENGES IN THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2021-10-11 Ronald J. Pestritto
Following the Roosevelt administration’s implementation of New Deal programs in the 1930s, the federal courts began to interpret the Constitution in a way that accommodated the rise of the “administrative state,” and bureaucratic policymaking continues to persist as a central feature of American government today. This essay submits, however, that the three pillars supporting the administrative state—the
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THE FIDUCIARY SOCIAL CONTRACT Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2021-10-11 Gary Lawson
The United States Constitution is, in form and fact, a kind of fiduciary instrument, and government officials acting pursuant to that document are subject to the background rules of fiduciary obligation that underlie all such documents. One of the most basic eighteenth-century fiduciary rules was the presumptive rule against subdelegation of discretionary authority. The rule was presumptive only; there
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RICHARD T. ELY, THE GERMAN HISTORICAL SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS, AND THE “SOCIO-TELEOLOGICAL” ASPIRATION OF THE NEW DEAL PLANNERS Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2021-10-11 Tiffany Jones Miller
Richard T. Ely was one of the most important architects of the administrative welfare state in the United States. His astonishingly influential career was the product of a fundamental re-thinking of the origin and nature of the state. Repudiating the social compact theory of the American founding in favor of a self-consciously “new,” “German,” and frankly “social” conception of the state ordered toward
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THE AMBIGUITY OF EXPERTISE IN THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2021-10-11 Joseph Postell
When the modern administrative state emerged in America during the Progressive Era, at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was typically grounded on the premise that administrative officials are experts who should be insulated from politics. This theory, combined with emerging ideas of scientific management, contributed to the intellectual justification for the administrative state. However
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“ADMINISTRATIVE CONSTITUTIONALISM”: CONSIDERING THE ROLE OF AGENCY DECISION-MAKING IN AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2021-10-11 David E. Bernstein
The last decade or so has seen an explosion of scholarship by American law professors on what has become known as administrative constitutionalism. Administrative constitutionalism is a catchphrase for the role of administrative agencies in influencing, creating, and establishing constitutional rules and norms, and governing based on those rules and norms. Though courts traditionally get far more attention
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LIBERAL FREEDOM, THE SEPARATION OF POWERS, AND THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2021-10-11 Eric MacGilvray
Contemporary critiques of the administrative state are closely bound up with the distinctively American doctrine that republican freedom requires that the legislative, executive, and judicial powers be exercised by separate and distinct branches of government. The burden of this essay is to argue that legislative delegation and judicial deference to the administrative state are necessary, or at least
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ECONOMISTS ON PRIVATE INCENTIVES, ECONOMIC MODELS, AND THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE: THE CLASH BETWEEN HAPPINESS AND THE SO-CALLED PUBLIC GOOD Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2021-10-11 Sandra J. Peart
This essay examines the administrative state as a ubiquitous phenomenon that results in part from the mismatch of incentives. Using two dramatic episodes in the history of economics, the essay considers two types of mismatch. It then examines how economists increasingly endorsed the “general good” as a unitary goal for society, even at the expense of private hopes and desires. More than this, their
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SELF-GOVERNANCE, ROBUST POLITICAL ECONOMY, AND THE REFORM OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2021-10-11 Vlad Tarko
This essay explains how to use the calculus of consent framework to think more rigorously about self-governance, and applies this framework to the issue of evaluating federal regulatory agencies. Robust political economy is the idea that institutions should be designed to work well even under weak assumptions about decision-makers’ knowledge and benevolence. I show how the calculus of consent can be
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EFFICIENCY, LEGITIMACY, AND THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2021-10-11 Samuel DeCanio
This essay examines certain epistemic problems facing administrative states’ efforts to draft efficient regulations for their societies. I argue that a basic feature of the administrative state’s authority, namely its monopoly over the production of legally binding rules for all members of a geographically defined society, creates epistemic problems that impede efficient rule-making. Specifically,
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FIGHTING POWER WITH POWER: THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE AS A WEAPON AGAINST CONCENTRATED PRIVATE POWER Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2021-10-11 Samuel Bagg
Contemporary critics of the administrative state are right to highlight the dangers of vesting too much power in a centralized bureaucracy removed from popular oversight and accountability. Too often neglected in this literature, however, are the dangers of vesting too little power in a centralized state, which enables dominant groups to further expand their social and economic advantages through decentralized
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FISCAL EQUIVALENCE: PRINCIPLE AND PREDATION IN THE PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2021-10-11 Emily C. Skarbek
Fiscal equivalence in the public administration of justice requires local police and courts to be financed exclusively by the populations that benefit from their services. Within a polycentric framework, broad based taxation to achieve fiscal equivalence is a desirable principle of public finance because it conceptually allows for the provision of justice to be determined by constituent’s preferences
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SNAP EXCLUSIONS AND THE ROLE OF CITIZEN PARTICIPATION IN POLICY-MAKING Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2021-10-11 Brian Hutler, Anne Barnhill
This essay uses a specific example—proposals to exclude sugary drinks from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—to explore some features of the contemporary U.S. administrative state. Dating back to the Wilsonian origins of the U.S. administrative state there has been uncertainty about whether we can and should separate politics and administration. On the traditional view, the agencies
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ADMINISTERED ENTITLEMENTS: COLLECTIVE BARGAINING TO AFFIRMATIVE ACTION Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2021-10-11 Paul Moreno
This essay tells the story of the development of two of the most significant and controversial entitlement programs in twentieth-century U.S. history—collective bargaining and affirmative action. It focuses on the nexus between them—how New Deal empowerment of labor unions contributed to racial discrimination, and thus fed the Great Society race-based programs of affirmative action. The evolving relationship
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FREEDOM OF THOUGHT Social Philosophy and Policy (IF 0.264) Pub Date : 2021-05-04 David Schmidtz
This essay introduces basic issues that make up the topic of freedom of thought, including newly emerging issues raised by the current proliferation of Internet search algorithms.